Royal General Theatrical Fund Anniversary Festival 1858

Gentlemen, In our theatrical experience as playgoers, we are all, I have no doubt, pretty equally accustomed to predict from certain little signs and tokens on the stage, what is going to happen there. For example, when the young lady, the admiral’s daughter, is left alone to relieve her feelings with certain general observations not particularly connected with the subject, and when a certain smart, spiritual rapping is heard to proceed from the depths of the earth immediately before her feet, we foretell that a song is intended. When two gentlemen enter for whom, by a happy coincidence, exactly two chairs, and neither fewer nor more, are waiting, we augur that a conversation will probably ensue, and that it is far from impossible that that conversation will assume a retrospectively biographical character. In like manner when two other gentlemen, particularly if they belong to the sea-faring, the marauding, or smuggling professions, are observed to have armed themselves since their last appearance with a very short sword with a very large hilt, we predict with some confidence that this cautious preparation will end in a combat. Now similarly, gentlemen, carrying out of the theatre those associations of ideas which we so often carry into it, it may possibly have occurred to you that when I just now asked permission of my old friend in the Chair to propose a toast, I had my old friend himself in my eye, and that I have him now on my lips.

Gentlemen, the duties of a Trustee of the General Theatrical Fund, which office I have the honour to hold, are not so numerous as are his privileges. He is, in short, a mere walking gentleman, with the melancholy difference that he has no one to love. If his part could be a little revised in that particular, I could answer that his character would be a much more agreeable one to stage, and his forlorn condition would be very considerably ameliorated. The duties of this strange character consist in a half-yearly call at the bank, when he signs his name in an extremely large and extremely inconvenient volume, when he receives two documents of which he knows nothing, which he immediately delivers up to the property man, and makes his exit.

His privileges, however, are great. He has the privilege of observing the steady growth and progress of the institution in which, from its infancy, he has been interested; he has the privilege of being invested with a kind of right on all proper occasions to bear his testimony to the providence, the goodness, the self-denial, and the self-respect of a class of people whom ignorance has a great deal too much depreciated, and to whom those virtues have long been denied out of the depths of a most mean, and ignorant, and stupid superstition. And lastly, he has the privilege of being sometimes called upon to propose the health of the chairman at the annual dinner; and when that chairman is a man for whose genius he has a warm admiration and the most earnest respect, when that chairman is a gentleman who is an honour to literature, and in whom literature is honoured [cheers], when that is the case he feels that last privilege to be a great and high one. Gentlemen, from the earliest days of the institution I have ventured to impress upon its managers my individual opinion that they would best consult its credit and success by choosing its chairman as often as possible within the circle of literature and the arts. I will venture to say that no similar establishment in existence can show itself to have been presided over by so many remarkable and distinguished men. I am sure that it never has had, and that it never will have, simply because it never can have, a gentleman in that position shedding a greater lustre upon it than the noble English writer who fills this Chair tonight.

Gentlemen, it is not for me at this time and place to take upon myself to flutter before you the well-thumbed pages of Mr. Thackeray’s books, and to take upon myself to call upon you to observe how full of wit they are, how full of wisdom they are, how full of outspoken meaning –  and yet, though out-speaking, how devoid of fear, and how devoid of favour. But I may take leave to remark, in paying my little due of homage and respect to them, that I think it is a most appropriate and fit thing to have such a writer as my friend, and such an art as the dramatic brought face to face, as we see them here tonight. Every good actor plays direct to every good author, and every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage. He may write novels always, and plays never, but the truth and wisdom that are in him must permeate the art of which truth and passion are the life, and must be more or less reflected in that great mirror which he holds up to nature. Now, gentlemen, actors and managers and authors are all represented in this present company. We may, without any great effort of imagination, suppose that all of them have studied the mighty deep secrets of the human heart in many theatres of many kinds, great and small, but I am sure that none of them can have studied those mysterious workings in any theatre from the stage wagon of Thespis downwards, to greater advantage, to greater profit, and to greater contentment than in the airy booths of Vanity Fair. To this skilful showman, who has so much delighted us, and whose words have so charmed us tonight, we are now to express our gratitude and to convey our welcome; and in wishing him God speed through the many years and the many fairs which we earnestly hope are in store for him in which to exercise his potent art, we will now, if you please, join in drinking a bumper toast to the chairman's health, and God bless him!