POET AND PAINTER
[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."