[Speech of Professor John Tyndall at the annual banquet of the
Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1888. The toast to Science was
coupled with that to Literature, to the latter of which William E.
H. Lecky was called upon to respond. In introducing Professor
Tyndall, the President, Sir Frederic Leighton, said: "On behalf of
Science, on whom could I call more fitly than on my old friend
Professor Tyndall. ["Hear! Hear!"] Fervid in imagination, after the
manner of his race, clothing thoughts luminous and full of color in
a sharply chiselled form, he seems to me to be, in very deed, an
artist and our kin; and I, as an artist, rejoice to see that in
this priest within the temple of Science, Knowledge has not clipped
the wings of wonder, and that to him the tint of Heaven is not the
less lovely that he can reproduce its azure in a little phial, nor
does, because Science has been said to unweave it, the rainbow lift
its arc less triumphantly in the sky."]
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: Faraday, whose
standing in the science of the world needs not to be insisted on, used
to say to me that he knew of only two festivals that gave him real
pleasure. He loved to meet, on Tower Hill, the frank and genial
gentlemen-sailors of the Trinity House; but his crowning enjoyment was
the banquet of the Royal Academy. The feeling thus expressed by Faraday
is a representative feeling: for surely it is a high pleasure to men of
science to mingle annually in this illustrious throng, and it is an
honor and a pleasure to hear the toast of Science so cordially proposed
and so warmly responded to year after year.
Art and Science in their widest sense cover nearly the whole field of
man's intellectual action. They are the outward and visible expressions
of two distinct and supplementary portions of our complex human
nature--distinct, but not opposed, the one working by the dry light of
the intellect, the other in the warm glow of the emotions; the one ever
seeking to interpret and express the beauty of the universe, the other
ever searching for its truth. One vast personality in the course of
history, and one only, seems to have embraced them both. ["Hear! Hear!"]
That transcendent genius died three days ago plus three hundred and
sixty-nine years--Leonardo da Vinci.
Emerson describes an artist who could never paint a rock until he had
first understood its geological structure; and the late Lord Houghton
told me that an illustrious living poet once destroyed some exquisite
verses on a flower because on examination he found that his botany was
wrong. This is not saying that all the geology in the world, or all the
botany in the world, could create an artist.
In illustration of the subtle influences which here come into play, a
late member of this Academy once said to me--"Let Raphael take a crayon
in his hand and sweep a curve; let an engineer take tracing paper and
all other appliances necessary to accurate reproduction, and let him
copy that curve--his line will not be the line of Raphael." In these
matters, through lack of knowledge, I must speak, more or less, as a
fool, leaving it to you, as wise men, to judge what I say. Rules and
principles are profitable and necessary for the guidance of the growing
artist and for the artist full-grown; but rules and principles, I take
it, just as little as geology and botany, can create the artist.
Guidance and rule imply something to be guided and ruled. And that
indefinable something which baffles all analysis, and which when wisely
guided and ruled emerges in supreme excellence, is individual genius,
which, to use familiar language, is "the gift of God." [Cheers.]
In like manner all the precepts of Bacon, linked together and applied in
one great integration, would fail to produce a complete man of science.
In this respect Art and Science are identical--that to reach their
highest outcome and achievement they must pass beyond knowledge and
culture, which are understood by all, to inspiration and creative power,
which pass the understanding even of him who possesses them in the
highest degree. [Cheers.]