The banquet of the Royal Academy is always an important event, but tonight it is a memorable occasion. Many differences separate the times of the pre-war banquets from the present. Three notable circumstances distinguish the present banquet. The first is the speech of the Prince of Wales. I am sure everyone who was privileged to listen to it heard it with feelings of the very greatest pleasure and of the very highest hope, and with the feeling that a new personality has come upon the field of our British and imperial life to assist in the burden of all those forces which make for the welfare of the British people and nation. Another great contrast between that night and the past banquets is that there are no party politics. The President said that artists know no party politics. I am not so sure of that, but I remember in the days before the war ministers were scowled at by half their fellow countrymen and beamed on by the other half.
The task upon the ministers of the Crown at the present time is really a very heavy one indeed, but at any rate the difficulties we have to face are only the difficulties of circumstances, and the only opposition we have to encounter worth speaking of is the opposition of events. It is well that that should be so, because the tasks are so heavy and the formidable nature of events are such that it is all that men can do to carry safely through the precious burden entrusted to their care; and if we have anything like the faction and discord and partisan fury which we can afford to indulge in in the times of peace, I do not believe that the immense problems which rush upon us in continuous and unbroken succession can possibly be surmounted.
The third difference impresses itself very much upon me. I remember being at the Academy banquet six years ago, and I think it was five years since the last one. I took the trouble to look up the speeches which were made on the occasion of the last three banquets, and through them all was the presage of war. Every one had a feeling that something was coming; something formidable, something tremendous, something possibly fatal was moving towards us. There was a feeling of great oppression, the sense one has when a thunderstorm is gathering.
Well, the great struggle is over! The great wave has been surmounted, and the ship is sailing safely on the farther side, although the sea might be very rough and the sky very lowering. We have passed through the supreme culminating period in all our lives, perhaps the supreme culminating period even in the history of this country, and we have not failed as a generation answerable to posterity.
Round this table tonight we see the commanders of victorious armies, men who have won victories on a greater scale than Napoleon Bonaparte ever planned, and who have led our peaceful population to war against the great military empires of the world. We also see representatives of the Navy, which, after all is said and done, rendered the victory of Britain and of civilization a possibility. If we could wish for any event which could truly measure the greatness of our victory, the completeness and indisputability of our victory, what could compare with what so many of us have witnessed that afternoon in the march through the city of London of the united dominions of the British Empire, represented by soldiers of exceptional valour?
Even since the fighting stopped we have made good progress in the solution of all the different and varied problems which the transition from war to peace presents. I am not going into details, but I will say that no reasonable man, looking at the position which we occupy now and comparing it with the peacetime anxiety which we felt when the fighting came to an end, has any cause but tο congratulate himself and his country with all sincerity. So far as this country is concerned, it has every evidence that those strong forces, those strong, stubborn, deeply founded British forces which, acting together in every sphere of life, won this war and brought us safely through this peril, were going to be strong enough not only to win the war, but also to secure its fruits and carry the nation through the critical period of transition.
The Prince of Wales in his speech proposed to us the question what effect the war would have upon the spirit of the age in art. At any rate it will set art free. The cessation of this struggle will liberate once again all those cultured forces which are nourished in the bosom of our country, and which grow and develop and reach their fruition in the prosperous times of peace. The field has been harrowed, terribly harrowed! We have only to look at that tragic canvas [John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’], with all its brilliant genius and painful significance, to see how the field of national psychology must have been harrowed by the events which have taken place in this war. I will answer his Royal Highness’s question by saying that art in all its forms will emerge from this war, as soon as we get clear of all practical difficulties, not merely to the position in which it was when we entered the struggle, but revivified and beautified as it has always been by tragedy, trial, and tribulation.