The sword, at any rate, settled the controversy. But that is behind us. We have now a great and glorious future in front of us, and it is Virginia's duty to do all that she can to promote the honor and glory of this country. We fought to the best of our ability for four years; and it would be a great mistake to assume that you could bring men from their cabins, from their ploughs, from their houses and from their families to make them fight as they fought in that contest unless they were fighting for a belief. Those men believed that they had the right construction of the Constitution, and that a State that voluntarily entered the Union could voluntarily withdraw from it. They did not fight for Confederate money. It was not worth ten cents a yard. They did not fight for Confederate rations—you would have had to curtail the demands of your appetite to make it correspond with the size and quality of those rations. They fought for what they thought was a proper construction of the Constitution. They were defeated. They acknowledged their defeat. They came back to their father's house, and there they are going to stay. But if we are to continue prosperous, if this country, stretching from the Gulf to the lakes and from ocean to ocean, is to be mindful of its own best interests, in the future, we will have to make concessions and compliances, we will have to bear with each other and to respect each other's opinions. Then we will find that that harmony will be secured which is as necessary for the welfare of States, as it is for the welfare of individuals. [Applause.]
I have become acquainted with Governor Beaver—I met him in Richmond. You could not make me fight him now. If I had known him before the war, perhaps we would not have got at it. If all the Governors had known each other, and if all the people of different sections had been known to each other, or had been thrown together in business or social communication, the fact would have been recognized at the outset, as it is to-day, that there are just as good men in Maine as there are in Texas, and just as good men in Texas as there are in Maine. Human nature is everywhere the same; and when intestine strifes occur, we will doubtless always be able by a conservative, pacific course to pass smoothly over the rugged, rocky edges, and the old Ship of State will be brought into a safe, commodious, Constitutional harbor with the flag of the Union flying over her, and there it will remain. [Applause.]
SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON
VARIETY IN BRITISH ART
[Speech of Sir Frederic Leighton, as President of the Royal Academy, at the banquet held by that society, May 5, 1894. This speech followed upon that of Dr. Mandell Creighton, Bishop of Peterborough, who had proposed the "Prosperity of the Royal Academy," and the health of the President.]
My Lord Bishop:—I thank you for the appreciative tone in which you have spoken of art in general and of English art in particular. The kind terms in which you have commended this institution and its work to this distinguished assembly must have gratified my colleagues as much as it has gratified me, and we thank you most warmly. I would also gratefully acknowledge the lenient words you have addressed to the occupant of this chair. More fortunate than last year at this season, I have to note to-day the loss of one only among the acting members of this body—that of a sculptor of much repute, whose first steps in art were taken under the stimulating guidance of a powerful artist, whose name is a just boast to the green island which gave him birth—John Henry Foley. Less vigorous, no doubt, than his eminent master, Charles Bell Birch, he yet imparted to his works great life and spirit, and the charm of a facile and picturesque execution, and, even in this day of renovation and growing strength in the practice of that stately art, sculpture in this country will miss him in its ranks. ["Hear! Hear!">[ From amongst the honorary retired Associates of this body another sculptor, W. F. Woodington, has been removed by death—an artist whom, for many years, age and infirmity had withdrawn altogether from public ken. The work of his vigorous prime may still be appreciated on the base of the Nelson column of Trafalgar Square.
But whilst our active ranks have suffered diminution by one death only within the year, two justly conspicuous men have fallen in the wider field of English art, both of them men of marked and distinctive personality—both painters, both, to me, deeply interesting. One of them, Albert Moore, an unbending upholder of the sufficiency in art of whatever is nobly decorative, was a devoted student of the severer graces of Hellenic art, and married in his works spontaneous and supple gesture with forms of chaste sobriety, clothing them in delicately harmonious tones, of which the studied arrangement announced to the first glance the refined idiosyncrasy of his artistic temper. ["Hear! Hear!">[
How great a psychological contrast is offered to the placid charm of these works by the fervor of those of the artist whom I have next to name, an artist of strong intellectual bent and steeped in human sympathies, the originator of the movement which startled humdrum people forty or more years ago, and produced a most interesting phase of English art! I speak of Ford Madox Brown, who recently passed away in the fulness of respected years and in the unabated intensity of his convictions. I am not here to defend in every point the nature of those convictions; I am not wholly at one with them. Ardently admired by many, stimulating and highly interesting to a still larger circle of the intelligent, who did not, perhaps, wholly follow his doctrine, he was not altogether acceptable to the wider and less cultured public, which so largely influences the creation of that empty and fickle thing called popularity; for there was that in his work which was apt to rouse the uneasy dread of the not usual, which mostly marks the middling mind. But this, I fearlessly affirm, apart from his technical endowments and rare vividness of dramatic vision, in the work of no English hand burns a more ardent sympathy with human emotion or is revealed a more subtle observation of the outward signs and gestures by which these emotions are conveyed. [Cheers.]
The artistic memories which associate themselves in our mind with Madox Brown and his concentrated energies, bring vividly before us, as we look upon the walls of this exhibition, or glance in thought over the wide area of contemporary production in England, the changes which two-score years have wrought in the character and tendencies of art in this country. As we wander through these—I rejoice to say, more than ever catholic and hospitable—galleries, within which the still young unfold, this year, so much vitality and promise—and, gentlemen, to us, the old, there is, believe me, no gladder sight or one more full of comfort—we are struck, not with a concentration of aim or purpose in the school, but rather with a radiation and scattering of effort in innumerable directions. No one, I think, can fail to observe the extraordinary differences of mood and manner shown in the works which have found equal shelter on these walls, and the wide multiplicity of individual personalities which they proclaim. In the range of figure painting, for instance, what variety of subject as well as of temper meets us! We see, not historic or domestic scenes alone; not alone scenes in which the rhythmic dream of beauty and of style is aimed at; but works also, not a few, of purely imaginative character—fanciful, mythological, allegorical, symbolic—amongst which latter, one especially, I think, is dominant in its powerful originality and the weird charm of its decorative pomp. In the region of landscape, no less, every mood is touched, and every association evoked, from the infinite solemnity of the silent Arctic solitudes to the infinite sweetness of a Surrey homestead nestling within its sheltered nook, or the laughter of the flower-fields of the Alps in June. What various temperament, too, we note in the expressional use of tone and color—here vivid and vibratory; there grave and soberly subdued.