[Speech of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, professor in the University of
Cambridge, in responding to the toast, "The Interests of Literature,"
coupled, according to custom, with "The Interests of Science," at the
banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 4, 1885. Sir Frederic
Leighton, President of the Academy, said in introducing him: "I invite
you to join me in a tribute, never wanting at this table, to science
and to letters. With literature I connect the name of a guest whom his
grateful country has brought from the far banks of the Clyde to our
table to-night--one among the very foremost and most elegant of our
scholars; and a speaker on whose lips we trace, though Latin has been
the chief vehicle of his oratory, a savor of those Attic orators with
whom his name is associated in our minds--Professor Jebb."]
MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, MY LORDS, AND
GENTLEMEN:--In responding for the second part of the toast, which
has been so eloquently proposed and so graciously received, I trust that
I shall have the indulgence of this distinguished company if the words
in which the response is tendered are simple and few. It is now just a
hundred years since the earliest occupant of the presidential chair
which Sir Frederic Leighton so brilliantly adorns, in addressing the
students of the Royal Academy, counseled them to practice "the
comparison of art with art, and of all arts with the nature of man."
Among the various fields in which literature works, there is none,
perhaps, in which the reciprocal influence of art and literature can be
more vividly apprehended than in the province of classical study, and
especially in the domain of those pursuits which are conversant with the
life and thought of ancient Greece. The inheritor of a shapeless
mythology and a rude tradition, Homer emerges as the first artist in
European poetry, giving clear outline and beautiful form to types of
godhead and heroism. The successor to schools which had rather combated
than conquered their material, Phidias, is recalled as the first poet in
European art, creating a visible embodiment for the Homeric vision of
those imperial brows which made Olympus to tremble at their nod.
England has no Academy of Letters. All the more, perhaps, is it
desirable that our literature should be penetrated by those regulative
lessons of form, those suggestions of a spiritual harmony, which emanate
from an Academy such as this ["Hear! Hear!"]--from a true and noble
Academy of arts. It has never been better with art, it has never been
better with literature than when each has been most willing to receive
the highest teachings of the other, acknowledging the bond of an eternal
sisterhood in that Hellenic message for which Keats has found an English
voice,--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." [Cheers.]