Speeches: Literary and Social

THE ROYAL ACADEMY DINNER. LONDON, MAY 2, 1870

[On the occasion of the Second Exhibition of the Royal Academy in
their new galleries in Piccadilly, the President, Sir F. Grant, and
the council gave their usual inaugurative banquet, and a very
distinguished company was present. The dinner took place in the
large central room, and covers were laid for 200 guests. The
Prince of Wales acknowledged the toast of his health and that of
the Princess, the Duke of Cambridge responded to the toast of the
army, Mr. Childers to the navy, Lord Elcho to the volunteers, Mr.
Motley to "The Prosperity of the United States," Mr. Gladstone to
"Her Majesty's Ministers," the Archbishop of York to, "The Guests,"
and Mr. Dickens to "Literature." The last toast having been
proposed in a highly eulogistic speech, Mr. Dickens responded.]

Mr. President, your Royal Highnesses, my Lords and Gentlemen,--I
beg to acknowledge the toast with which you have done me the great
honour of associating my name. I beg to acknowledge it on behalf
of the brotherhood of literature, present and absent, not
forgetting an illustrious wanderer from the fold, whose tardy
return to it we all hail with delight, and who now sits--or lately
did sit--within a few chairs of or on your left hand. I hope I may
also claim to acknowledge the toast on behalf of the sisterhood of
literature also, although that "better half of human nature," to
which Mr. Gladstone rendered his graceful tribute, is unworthily
represented here, in the present state of its rights and wrongs, by
the devouring monster, man.

All the arts, and many of the sciences, bear witness that women,
even in their present oppressed condition, can attain to quite as
great distinction, and can attain to quite as lofty names as men.
Their emancipation (as I am given to understand) drawing very near,
there is no saying how soon they may "push us from our stools" at
these tables, or how soon our better half of human nature, standing
in this place of mine, may eloquently depreciate mankind,
addressing another better half of human nature sitting in the
president's chair.

The literary visitors of the Royal Academy to-night desire me to
congratulate their hosts on a very interesting exhibition, in which
risen excellence supremely asserts itself, and from which promise
of a brilliant succession in time to come is not wanting. They
naturally see with especial interest the writings and persons of
great men--historians, philosophers, poets, and novelists, vividly
illustrated around them here. And they hope that they may modestly
claim to have rendered some little assistance towards the
production of many of the pictures in this magnificent gallery.
For without the patient labours of some among them unhistoric
history might have long survived in this place, and but for the
researches and wandering of others among them, the most
preposterous countries, the most impossible peoples, and the
absurdest superstitions, manners, and customs, might have usurped
the place of truth upon these walls. Nay, there is no knowing, Sir
Francis Grant, what unlike portraits you yourself might have
painted if you had been left, with your sitters, to idle pens,
unchecked reckless rumours, and undenounced lying malevolence.

I cannot forbear, before I resume my seat, adverting to a sad theme
(the recent death of Daniel Maclise) to which his Royal Highness
the Prince of Wales made allusion, and to which the president
referred with the eloquence of genuine feeling. Since I first
entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my
constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends
members of the Royal Academy who have been its grace and pride.
They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already, begin
to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who had grown
to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures
which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had
seen, was a shadow and a dream.

For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and most
constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his
chosen art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his
prodigious fertility of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I
may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had
been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter.
The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his
generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and
largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble
thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation,
without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last
as at the first, "in wit a man, simplicity a child," no artist, of
whatsoever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest
leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted
himself with a truer chivalry to the art goddess whom he
worshipped.