MENU CARD
Photogravure after a design by Thompson Willing
Through the courtesy of the Lotus Club, we are enabled to reproduce this typical dinner card, especially drawn and engraved for a complimentary banquet to Sir Henry Irving. The original card is about three times the size of this reproduction.
My Lord Chief Justice, My Lords and Gentlemen:—I cannot conceive a greater honor entering into the life of any man than the honor you have paid me by assembling here to-night. To look around this room and scan the faces of my distinguished hosts, would stir to its depths a colder nature than mine. It is not in my power, my lords and gentlemen, to thank you for the compliment you have to-night paid me.
"The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel."
Never before have I so strongly felt the magic of those words; but you will remember it is also said in the same sentence, "Give thy thoughts no tongue." [Laughter.] And gladly, had it been possible, would I have obeyed that wise injunction to-night. [Renewed laughter.]
The actor is profoundly influenced by precedent, and I cannot forget that many of my predecessors have been nerved by farewell banquets for the honor which awaited them on the other side of the Atlantic; but this occasion I regard as much more than a compliment to myself: I regard it as a tribute to the art which I am proud to serve and I believe that feeling will be shared by the profession to which you have assembled to do honor. [Cheers.] The time has long gone by when there was any need to apologize for the actor's calling. ["Hear! Hear!">[ The world can no more exist without the drama than it can without its sister art, music. The stage gives the readiest response to the demand of human nature to be transported out of itself into the realms of the ideal—not that all our ideals on the stage are realized—none but the artist knows how immeasurably he may fall short of his aim or his conception,—but to have an ideal in art and to strive through one's life to embody it, may be a passion to the actor as it may be to the poet.
Your lordship has spoken most eloquently of my career. Possessed of a generous mind and a high judicial faculty, your lordship has been to-night, I fear, more generous than judicial. But if I have in any way deserved commendation, I am proud that it was as an actor that I won it. As the director of a theatre my experience has been short, but as an actor I have been before the London public for seventeen years; and on one thing I am sure you will all agree—that no actor or manager has ever received from that public more generous and ungrudging encouragement and support. [Cheers.]