THE Lotos Club is the Savage of America, as the Century is its Garrick;
each, however, with a difference. The Lotos admits to membership
gentlemen who are not necessarily journalists, authors, actors, and
painters, earning their subsistence out of the arts. They must be
clubable and good fellows, in the estimation of the committee; and
herein lies their best qualification. This combination of the arts
proper with trade and finance has made the club a success in the
broadest sense of the term. Their home is a palace compared with that
of the Savage in London. The general atmosphere of the Century is more
akin to that of the Garrick, and it is a far closer corporation than
the Lotos. Mr. Thackeray spent a good deal of his time there when he
was in New York; while Lord Houghton, it is said, preferred the more
jovial fireside of the Lotos. In those days the younger club was in
humbler, but not less comfortable, quarters than those it now occupies;
while the Century, conservative and conscious of its more aristocratic
record, is well content with the house which is associated with many
years of pleasant memories.
The Lotos honored Irving with a banquet; the Century welcomed him at
one of its famous monthly reunions. The Lotos dinner was the first
public recognition, outside the press, of Irving in America. He had
accepted its invitation before sailing for New York, and sat down with
the Lotos-eaters on the Saturday (October 27) prior to his Monday
night’s appearance at the Star Theatre. The club-rooms had never been
so crowded as on this occasion. Dishes were laid for a hundred and
forty members and guests in the dining-room and _salon_ of the club,
and fifty others consented to eat together in the restaurant and
reading-room upstairs, and fifty or sixty others had to be content to
come in after dinner. Mr. Irving sat on the right hand of the President
of the club, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, editor of the “Tribune.” At the same
table were Chauncey M. Depew, Dr. A. E. Macdonald, General Horace
Porter, E. Randolph Robinson, Algernon S. Sullivan, R. B. Roosevelt,
Thomas W. Knox, H. H. Gorringe, W. H. Smith, Rev. Robert Laird Collyer,
and F. R. Lawrence. Among others present were Lawrence Barrett, Joseph
Jefferson, William J. Florence, R. W. Gilder, Dr. Fordyce Barker, D. G.
Croly, General Winslow, and A. Oakey Hall. In a window alcove behind
the President’s chair stood an easel, holding a large portrait of
Irving as Shylock.
Coffee being served, Mr. Irving was conducted upstairs to be introduced
to the diners in his honor who were crowded out of the lower rooms.
They received him with a loud cheer, and then accompanied him to join
the other guests. The company broke up into groups, stood about the
door-ways, and thronged around the President, who thereupon arose and
addressed them as follows:—
“You must excuse the difficulty in procuring seats. You know the
venerable story which Oscar Wilde appropriated about the sign over the
piano in a far-western concert-hall: ‘Don’t shoot the performer; he’s
doing the best he can.’ (Laughter.) The committee beg me to repeat
in their behalf that touching old appeal. They’ve done the best they
could. There are five hundred members of this club, and only one
hundred and forty seats in this dining-room; they have done their
utmost to put the five hundred men into the one hundred and forty
seats. Don’t shoot! They’ll come down, apologize, retreat, resign,—do
anything to please you. They’ve thoroughly tried this thing of putting
two men in one seat and persuading the other three that standing room
is just as good; and to-night, as the perspiration rolls from their
troubled brows, their fervent hope and prayer is that the manager for
your distinguished guest may be haunted by that self-same trouble all
through his American tour! (Applause and laughter.)
“London appropriated our national anniversary, to do honor to its
favorite actor as he was about to visit us. On that occasion, on
the Fourth of July last, at a banquet without a parallel in the
history of the British stage, and to which there are actually none
to be compared, save the far less significant, but still famous,
entertainments to Kean and Macready,—at that banquet your guest
said: ‘This God-speed would alone insure me a hearty welcome in any
land. But I am not going among strangers. I am going among friends.’
(Applause.)
“Let us take him at his word. Once we were apt to get our opinions
from the other side. If that grows less and less a habit now, with the
spread among us, since we attained our national majority, of a way
of doing our own thinking, we are still all the more glad to welcome
friendships from the other side.
“We know our friendly guest as the man whom a great, kindred nation
has agreed to accept as its foremost living dramatic representative.
We know that his success has tended to elevate and purify the stage,
to dignify the actor’s calling, to widen and better its influence. We
know the scholarship he has brought to the representation of the great
dramatists, the minute and comprehensive attention he has given to
every detail alike of his own acting and of the general management.
His countrymen do not say that if he were not the foremost actor
in England he would be the first manager;—they declare that he is
already both. (Applause.)
“We bid him the heartiest of welcomes to a country where he may find
not unworthy brethren. Our greeting indeed takes a tone of special
cordiality not so much from what we know of his foreign repute, or
from our remembering the great assemblage of representative countrymen
gathered to give him their farewell and God-speed. It comes even
more from our knowing him as the friend of Edwin Booth (Applause),
and Joseph Jefferson (Applause), and Lawrence Barrett (Applause),
and John McCullough (Applause), and William Florence (Applause). And
if anything else were needed to make the grasp of every man’s hand
in this club yet warmer, it is furnished when we remember that his
conspicuous friend among English actors is our friend, John Toole.
(Applause.)
“It would not be fair to our distinguished but unsuspicious guest,
adventuring into these foreign parts, if, before sitting down, I did
not warn him that all this, and much more which he is likely to hear,
is said around the dinner-table. Let him not think that he wholly
knows us, and is fairly naturalized, until he has read the papers the
morning after his first performance. What they may contain no living
man knoweth (Laughter); but others have sometimes groaned that we
treat our guests with too much attention; that we accord them, in
fact, the same distinguished honor we give our national bird,—the
turkey,—which we first feed and afterwards carve up. (Great laughter.)
“But the prologue is an antiquated device, now pretty well banished
from the stage, because it merely detains you from what you came to
hear. I will detain you no longer. I give you, gentlemen, Our Guest,—
“O trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow!”
“Health to Henry Irving, and a hearty welcome.” (Great applause.)