Page:Modern Eloquence - Volume 1.djvu/62

Rh they reminded one another that they were once Greeks. [Cheers and laughter.]

How many of your guests to-night, sir, may remind one another of the same thing! The brilliant statesman at the head of Her Majesty's government [Gladstone], to whom we shall listen with so much admiration, by and by, may even boast that he was born in Arcadia.

To no people, probably, does it so often happen to have to break in great measure with their vocation and with the Muses as to the men of letters for whom you have summoned me to speak. But perhaps there is no one man here, however positive and prosaic, who has not, at some time or other of his life, and in some form or other, felt something of that desire for the truth and beauty of things which makes the Greek and the artist. The year goes around for us amid other preoccupations; then with the spring arrives your hour. You collect us at this festival; you surround us with enchantment, and call upon us to remember, and, in our stammering and imperfect language, to confess that we were once Greeks. If we have not forgotten it, the reminder is delightful; if we have forgotten it, it is salutary. [Cheers.]

In the common and practical life of this country, in its government, politics, commerce, law, medicine—even in its religion—some compliance with men's conventionality, vulgarity, folly, and ignobleness, and a certain dose of clap-trap, passes also for a thing of necessity. But in that world to which we have sometimes aspired, in your world of art, sir, in the Greek world—for so I will call it after the wonderful people who introduced mankind to it—in the Greek world of art and science, clap-trap and compliance with the conventional are simply fatal. Let us be grateful to you for recalling it to us; for reminding us that strength and success are possible to find by taking one's law, not from the form and pressure of the passing day, but from the living forces of our genuine nature. [Cheers.]