These trivial jokes will seem poor to the friends who have heard his later and more brilliant bon-mots and have listened to his longer orations; but, as I have said, I know little of those public speeches. The most notable of these at which I remember being present was at a dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, when he spoke long and with deep illumination on his beloved Charles Dickens; he always spoke at the various commemorative entertainments given in the great novelist’s honour, but never so brilliantly and so profoundly as that time.
When the occasion was more formal—as when he took the chair at the Actors’ Benevolent or the Dramatic and Musical Fund—he would sometimes recite to me beforehand part of the speech which he intended to deliver, but I believe he rarely stuck to his plan, and I have heard him say that he preferred merely to prepare the “joints” of his subject—i.e. each new departure—and to leave all the filling-in to the inspiration of the moment as influenced by the foregoing speaker or any unforeseen incident.
I recollect that the peroration of a speech for the Dramatic and Musical Fund ended: “I plead not so much for the deserving as for the undeserving,” and I believe that he added: “of whom I am one.”
I know that he told me next day—half in glee, but much also in pride—that the Toastmaster had told him that he had never stood behind a chair and seen so much money raked in.
It was certainly to his mastery of the impromptu that he owed the triumph of his oration before the U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, at a moment when war seemed suddenly possible with our great English-speaking neighbour; and I recollect that Ellen Terry, who was then in New York, told me later that when Joe’s speech appeared in the papers en résumé (it never could be wholly reported owing to his making no notes) there was a marked change in the tide of feeling.
He has related a part of this incident in his Eminent Victorians, but he has not mentioned this last particular, neither has he told how his triumph was won by his large appreciation of the love lavished upon the giants of our English literature by our “friends across the seas.”
CHAPTER X
HOLIDAYS