[Speech of William Winter at a banquet of the Lotos Club, given to
Lester Wallack, December 17, 1887. Whitelaw Reid, the President of
the Club, occupied the chair. Mr. Winter was called upon to speak
in behalf of the critics.]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--You have done me great honor in
asking me to be present on this occasion, and you have conferred upon me
a great privilege in permitting me to participate with you in this
tribute of affection and admiration for John Lester Wallack, your
distinguished and most deservedly honored guest and my personal friend
these many, many years. [Cheers.]
I thank you for your thoughtful courtesy and for this distinguished mark
of your favor. Being well aware of my defects both as a thinker and a
speaker, I shrink from such emergencies as this, but having known him so
long and having been in a professional way associated with so many of
his labors and his triumphs, I should fail in duty if I were not at
least to try to add my word of love, feeble and inadequate as it may be,
to the noble volume of your sympathy and homage. [Cheers.]
The presence of this brilliant assemblage, the eloquent words which have
fallen from the lips of your honored president and the speeches of your
orators, they signify some change--I will not say in regard to the
advancement of the stage--but they signify a wonderful advancement in
our times in sympathetic and thoughtful and just appreciation of the
theatre. This was not always so. It is not very long since so wise and
gentle a man as Charles Lamb expressed his mild astonishment that a
person capable of committing to memory and reciting the language of
Shakespeare could for that reason be supposed to possess a mind
congenial with that of the poet. The scorn of Carlyle and the scarcely
less injurious pity of Emerson for the actor are indications that in a
time not remote, thought and philosophy have made but little account of
the stage.
Something might be said about this by a voice more competent than mine,
for in our time there has been a change in the intelligent spirit of
the age, and I am sure that thought and philosophy now are of the
opinion that the actor is an intellectual and spiritual force; that he
is connected most intimately with the cause of public education; that he
brings something of his own, and that, although the part provides the
soul, it is the actor who must provide the body, and without the soul
and the body, you could not have dramatic representations for the
benefit of them. [Applause.]
I am not one of those writers who believe that it is the business of the
newspaper to manage the theatres. The question of what to do to please
the public taste, to provide mankind with what they like, or what they
want, or, which is the same thing, with what they think they want, opens
a very complex inquiry. Our dear friend has been puzzled by it himself
more than a little. I should not undertake to instruct him, but as the
observer of his course I have been struck by wonder and admiration of
the way he has carried his theatre through seasons of great competition
and great peril.
I call to mind one season, now seventeen years ago, I think, when in the
course of a very few months, he produced and presented upward of
thirty-two plays, showing the best points of these plays and showing his
great company to every possible advantage; so have I seen a juggler toss
fifty knives in the air and catch them without cutting his fingers.
[At the close of his speech Mr. Winter read the following poem.]--