[Speech of Frederic W. Farrar, D.D., at the banquet of the Royal
Academy, London, May 3, 1884. He was at that time Canon and Archdeacon
of Westminster, and in 1895 became Dean of Canterbury. The President,
Sir Frederic Leighton, in introducing the speaker said: "In literature
as in science a different side of our subject is each year brought
into prominence according to the guest who does us the honor to
respond to it. To-night I have the pleasure to call on an accomplished
and eloquent divine, a writer whose sentences are pictures and his
language rich with color and who is known to you not only by his books
on the most sacred subjects, but also by the valuable chapters which
he has contributed to the study of language, the venerable Archdeacon
Farrar."]
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I have no pretension to be regarded as
an adequate representative of English Literature, but the toast itself
is one which could never be omitted at any banquet of the Royal Academy.
The artist and the man of letters, though they differ in their gifts and
in their methods, are essentially united in feeling and in purpose. They
appeal to the same emotions; they enforce the same lessons; they
illustrate the same truths; they labor for the same objects. The common
aim of both is the emancipation and free development of our spiritual
nature. The humblest artist as he reads the great works written by men
of genius in all ages,--the humblest man of letters as year after year
he has the delight of gazing on these splendidly illuminated walls--may
claim that he belongs to one and the same great brotherhood--the
brotherhood of those who have consistently labored to cheer, to bless
and to elevate mankind. Turner called himself the "author" not the
artist of his pictures; and indeed, writing and painting are but
different forms of that one eternal language of which not even Babel
could confound the significance. There is hardly a single work in this
Exhibition which does not illustrate the close connection between
literature and art.
Landscape painting has always been the chief glory of our English
school, and what are the great poets of all ages but landscape painters,
and what are the best landscape painters but poets? Alike they reproduce
for us aspects of nature translated into human thoughts and tinged with
human emotion. When Homer shows us bees swarming out of the hollow rock
and hanging in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of spring; when
Æschylus flashes upon us the unnumbered laughter of the sea-waves; when
Virgil in a single line paints for us the silvery Galæsus flowing now
under dark boughs, and now through golden fields; when Dante bids us
gaze on a sky which is of the sweet color of the Eastern sapphire; when
Wordsworth points us to the daffodils tossing in the winds of March
beside the dancing waves of the lake; when Tennyson shows us "the gummy
chestnut buds that glisten in the April blue;" when even in prose Mr.
Ruskin produces scenes and sunsets as gorgeous as those of his own
Turner--what are they but landscape painters.
Again, how many memorable scenes of history are inseparable in our minds
alike, and almost equally, from the descriptions of the writer or the
conceptions of the artist? Shall we ever think of the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots without recalling Mr. Froude's description of her, as she
stood, a blood-red figure on the black-robed scaffold? Shall we ever
think of Monmouth pleading for his life with James II, without
remembering the picture which hung last year upon these walls? Is there
no affinity between novelist and our many painters of ordinary scenes,
with their kindred endeavor to shed light and beauty on the hopes and
fears, the duties and sorrows of human life? Nay, even if the preacher
and the divine may claim any part in the domain of letters, they, too,
look to the artist for the aid and inspiration which, in their turn,
they lend to him. Which of us can ever read the words, "These are the
wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends," or,
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," without being helped to realize
their meaning by the pathetic allegories of Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman
Hunt? And if, sir, you will pardon the allusion, the verse, "Oh! had I
the wings of a dove," is in my own mind henceforth inseparably
associated, not only with the melody of Mendelssohn, in which we seem to
see the dove hovering, as it were, in a cloud of golden music, but also
with the picture I saw many years ago in this room, of a weary king
sitting on his palace roof, his hair sable silvered, and his crown laid
humbly upon the parapet beside him, whose eyes wistfully follow the
flight of a flock of doves towards the twilight sky.
I am sure that I echo the sentiment of every painter, and of every
author here when I say we are brothers in the effort to make the happy
happier, and the sad less miserable, and in the poet's words, "to teach
the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, to feel, and
therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous."
"High is our calling, friends! creative art,
(Whether the instruments of words she use
Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues,)
Demands the service of a mind and heart
Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part
Heroically fashioned--to infuse
Faith in the whispers of the lonely muse,
While the whole world seems adverse to desert
Great is the glory, for the strife was hard."
[Cheers.]