LITERATURE AND ART
[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.]