THE ACADEMY DINNER.
THE Royal Academy Dinner this year was comparatively a failure, and that is odd, because the conditions which make up an interesting occasion were present in profusion. There was a King present, there were Princes, there were picked men of all sorts, there were orators, and none of the orators can be said in any way to have failed, while Sir F. Leighton made a considerable success. The first of the conditions of a successful public dinner is a Chairman who can take ceremonial an grand serieux, propose conventional toasts in new phrases, and with an air as if he were not doing anything perfunctory, and dia. tribute his praises and expressions of affection without leaving an impression that he is smiling at himself. Lord Mayors of London, the usual hosts of the great, very rarely succeed in this task. They are apt to be either too brief and formal, or too unctuous, and occasionally commit the mistake of revealing
strong political party or even personal bias, which the toastee has either to overlook, or utilise as base for a genial but effective rebuke. The Chairman at the Academy Dinner is, however, passed master in this art. Sir Frederick Leighton knows exactly how to arrange his modulated sentences, how to impart colour to a ceremonial speech, how to say something which is not dull and yet is stately, and how to frame com- pliments so well that the audience lose the sense of their arti- ficiality, in the pleasure of listening to words so perfectly artistic of their kind. He is in oratory a fine decorative artist. His speeches in honour of the Queen, and of the great guest of the evening—the King of the Netherlands—were models of oratory of the ornate and laboured, yet not absurd, kind required for such occasions; and if the latter was, as is said, impromptu, it was most creditable, both to Sir Frederick's ingenuity and his memory. The list of eminent Dutchmen might have been expected, but there was genuine grace in the sentence which denied that Dutch genius was dead, and quoted Tadema, Mesdag, and Van Haanen in proof of its vitality. The next condition of a banquet is a lively speaker, who is also well known and eminent; and Lord Granville was present, who never fails to create the required impression of courtly pleasantness. He is in his way almost as good an after-dinner speaker as Lord Palmer- ston. Lord Palmerston gave to compliments a more jocnlaraspect, and, perhaps, told better stories than Lord Granville, putting more acid, and leas sugar, into his anecdotei ; but Lord Granville, on the other hand, possesses a fund of—what shall we call it ?—feli- eitons impudence, which, when supported by real capacity, is, for the lighter purposes of oratory, a most serviceable instrument. If tbere is nothing else to say, he talks about himself with a serene abandon which has the most conciliatory effect. He knows quite well that the English like personal details from aristocratic speakers; that they feel, when they hear such things, taken, as it were, into the household confidence of the great ; and so, when a speech flags a little, he talks in the Lords about his cousins, in the London University about his babies, and, at
the Royal Academy Dinner, about his early ill-success as an artist. There was really nothing in the story he told. on Satur- day, much less than there usually is in his stories. He was bitten at Rome with the ambition to succeed in Art, and asked an eminent artist to assist his efforts. His friend promised him lessons, but on Lord Granville submitting to him a drawing of " a cottage, a silver fir, and a bush," politely informed him that, on the whole, he would not advise him to take lessons. That is all ; but the little anecdote was pleasantly worded, it told against the speaker, it was an autobiographical detail ,which made every artist and amateur present feel that he could do something which the Foreign Secretary could not do,—and, of course, it was a success. Nobody of less position would have ventured to tell the story at all, to some of the foremost men in England ; but Lord Granville understands the world and its foibles, and in his gently humorous manner uses them. The speech was applauded, and deserved applause, like good honey, though we wish the speaker, in his desire to find a sentence which should be at once a compliment and a climax, had not gone quite so far as to say that "on the state of the Arts among us must depend our place among the civilised nations of the world." It is possible to widen the word " arts " until it covers civilisation ; but as Lord Granville used it, Vienna is hardly civilised, and Americans, Canadians, and Australians must be classed among the outer barbarians ; while half Europe would—we admit, in ignorance —deny the claim of Englishmen to be half-way up the hill. A nation may have other claims to rank as civilised than its success in the plastic arts. Then the foreign element, so needful to relieve the sameness of the native speeches, was present in Mr. Lowell ; and Mr. Lowell, though always burdened with a sense that the world wants him to be Hosea Bigelow, and that Hosea cannot represent the Great Republic, is usually light and often amusing, and on Saturday had a really felicitous sentence to say, " It is pleasant to glide out of the rough waters of every- day life into one of those placid pools where we see reflected only the images, and not the reality of things," a sentence in- stantly caught by those whose occupation it is to produce the images.
Nevertheless, the Dinner was comparatively a failure, and it is not difficult to see why. The sweetness palled a little, and there was not sufficient substance. The whole thing was too like a painting of the dinner. Everybody said exactly what he ought to have said, and everybody else felt how cleverly that
was done, without remembering for five minutes what had been
done that was so clever. In all that lengthy array of speeches, there is not a sentence which seems quite natural, which reads as if the speaker wanted to say it, or had any other idea than to get through a not unpleasant task as prettily as possible. Nobody was natural, except, perhaps, the King of the Netherlands, who was most natural in his embarrassment at his unaccustomed duty, and nobody was in earnest even to the degree of wishing to speak rather than to be silent. Even the eloges on Mr. Darwin, of which there were three, had a ring in them, not, indeed, of falsity, but of artificiality, as if the speakers, Mr. Spottiswoode in particular, wished to be even more impressive than on such an occasion they knew how to be. Mr. Spottiswoode caught that effect of his own speech, and apglogised for being "out of tune with the tone of a festive gathering." The dinner needed the presence of some one who was not quite given over to per- forming his part, who had something to say he wished said, and was considerable enough to take his own line in saying it, with- out thinking of effect. Everything, as we said, was excellent, but with that arranged and premeditated excellence which so soon palls, because it makes the absence of spontaneity and originality so conspicuous. There was plenty of "light," as Lord Granville said, about the President's pictures and speeches, but it was light arranged, not light pouring over the scene in unprovided-for profusion. A want of spontaneity was the de- fect this year, as it so often is at English ceremonial dinners ; but how an unhappy President is to provide against that, we confess we do not see. It is like asking him to arrange before- hand that in this year's Academy there shall be not only much good painting and many pretty scenes very well arranged, but also, somewhere or other, a flash of genius. Interestingness must be present or absent, in obedience to laws which the most skilful and competent of Presidents cannot control, and this year it was not there.
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