When the last addresses were given Leighton was getting very tired. The wheels were running down—vitality was waning. The great mental machine had begun to work more mechanically. We trace this in the manner in which he tackled his last discourse. While writing it at Perugia he wrote to his elder sister:—
Perugia, Thursday, October 12, 1893.
You have misconstrued my knee; I have no pain in it, at most occasionally a dull ache in the muscles and a slight soreness in the joint; but it is an incapacitating and depressing nuisance, and it won't move on. (I am writing near a window opening on to a clear, star-bright sky; far below, in the paese, I hear the tinkle of a wandering, nocturnal mandoline—how I like it!) You do me the honour to appreciate my having, during my recent precipitate odyssey, visited thirty towns in thirty days, noting things of which I had already accurate knowledge d'avance; but I can "go one better" than that: ten of the towns were absolutely new to me, and of the whole subject on which I am preaching, I knew as good as nothing when you last saw me. I suspect that, in spite of a lack of memory which baffles belief, I have a certain "uptaking" knack. My preachment will bore you, but you will (if you read it) detect an ensemble; but, for goodness' sake, zitti! They'll think, when they hear the P.R.A., that, Lor' bless him! he'd known it all his life. Nevertheless, enough for the day, &c. Best love to Gussy.—Affect. bro.,
Fred.
I remember—when my husband and I were sitting with him one afternoon after his return home that autumn—his saying, "I feel distinctly I have dropped one step down off of the ladder," and it was truly about that time that his doctor, Doctor Roberts, discerned the beginning of the disease which proved fatal. Already in 1888 he wrote:—
"The reasons which have now for a good many years impelled me to decline any 'public utterances' outside Burlington House have increased in weight and force as life and strength wanes, and as demands on me grow in every direction. I am sometimes asked to speak in public, not only in London, but all over the country, and in all cases the demand is grounded on strong claims in so far as I am an 'official' artist. Assent once is assent always—assent in half the cases would mean the gravest injury to my work, and I am a workman first and an official afterwards. Things have their humorous side, for those who press me most are sometimes those who on other occasions most earnestly assure me that I 'do too much.' How tired I am of hearing it."
The speeches at the yearly banquets of the Royal Academy were extraordinary tours de force. Wherever Leighton took the lead—and he was seldom anywhere when he did not take the lead,[64]—he raised the tone of the proceedings, and convinced the outside world, no less than those taking a part in them, that the matter in hand was important and essentially worth doing. Personally I have always felt that the finished form of Leighton's diction tended rather to hide than to explain the real nature of the power which had this vitalising, elevating influence. This influence emanated, I believe, from the greatness of his "magnificent intellect" (to use Watts' words) being united with extraordinary will-force invariably employed in the service of the principles in which he had a profound faith. It was his persistent loyalty to these principles—backed by this abnormal will-force, giving it extra weight—which lifted Leighton's work in all directions on to so distinguished a level—and not—in the case of his speeches—his rounded periods, or his power over words, or his gift of facility in grasping a subject, though the Banquet speeches are also remarkable on account of the versatility he displayed in grasping many subjects from the point of view of the expert. Whether it was the Army, the Navy, Politics, Music—whatever, in fact, was the affair of the moment, he proposed the toast from what might be called the inside of the question, not merely treating his text as a matter of form.[65]
On asking Gladstone to the Banquet of 1880, Leighton received the following characteristic answer:—
My dear President,—I have received your letter with mixed feelings. You do me great honour, and I must obey you. But I long for the return of the good old times, lying within the long range of my memory, when the dinners of the Academy did not suffer the contamination of political toasts, and kept us all for three precious hours in purer air. Can you tell me when the practice was changed? I am not, I think, under the dominion of a pleasant delusion.—Yours most faithfully,
W.E. Gladstone.