第94章

association, which does not ask you for a health, which never did, and never will ask you for a health, which is self-supporting, and which is entirely maintained by the prudence and providence of its three hundred artist members.That fund, which is called the Artists' Annuity Fund, is, so to speak, a joint and mutual Assurance Company against infirmity, sickness, and age.To the benefits it affords every one of its members has an absolute right, a right, be it remembered, produced by timely thrift and self-denial, and not assisted by appeals to the charity or compassion of any human being.On that fund there are, if I remember a right, some seventeen annuitants who are in the receipt of eleven hundred a-year, the proceeds of their own self-supporting Institution.In recommending to you this benevolent fund, which is not self-supporting, they address you, in effect, in these words:- "We ask you to help these widows and orphans, because we show you we have first helped ourselves.These widows and orphans may be ours or they may not be ours; but in any case we will prove to you to a certainty that we are not so many wagoners calling upon Jupiter to do our work, because we do our own work; each has his shoulder to the wheel; each, from year to year, has had his shoulder set to the wheel, and the prayer we make to Jupiter and all the gods is simply this - that this fact may be remembered when the wagon has stopped for ever, and the spent and worn-out wagoner lies lifeless by the roadside.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I most particularly wish to impress on you the strength of this appeal.I am a painter, a sculptor, or an engraver, of average success.I study and work here for no immense return, while life and health, while hand and eye are mine.Iprudently belong to the Annuity Fund, which in sickness, old age, and infirmity, preserves me from want.I do my duty to those who are depending on me while life remains; but when the grass grows above my grave there is no provision for them any longer."This is the case with the Artists' Benevolent Fund, and in stating this I am only the mouthpiece of three hundred of the trade, who in truth stands as independent before you as if they were three hundred Cockers all regulated by the Gospel according to themselves.There are in existence three artists' funds, which ought never to be mentioned without respect.I am an officer of one of them, and can speak from knowledge; but on this occasion Iaddress myself to a case for which there is no provision.Iaddress you on behalf of those professors of the fine arts who have made provision during life, and in submitting to you their claims Iam only advocating principles which I myself have always maintained.

When I add that this Benevolent Fund makes no pretensions to gentility, squanders no treasure in keeping up appearances, that it considers that the money given for the widow and the orphan, should really be held for the widow and the orphan, I think I have exhausted the case, which I desire most strenuously to commend to you.

Perhaps you will allow me to say one last word.I will not consent to present to you the professors of Art as a set of helpless babies, who are to be held up by the chin; I present them as an energetic and persevering class of men, whose incomes depend on their own faculties and personal exertions; and I also make so bold as to present them as men who in their vocation render good service to the community.I am strongly disposed to believe there are very few debates in Parliament so important to the public welfare as a really good picture.I have also a notion that any number of bundles of the driest legal chaff that ever was chopped would be cheaply expended for one really meritorious engraving.At a highly interesting annual festival at which I have the honour to assist, and which takes place behind two fountains, I sometimes observe that great ministers of state and other such exalted characters have a strange delight in rather ostentatiously declaring that they have no knowledge whatever of art, and particularly of impressing on the company that they have passed their lives in severe studies.

It strikes me when I hear these things as if these great men looked upon the arts as a sort of dancing dogs, or Punch's show, to be turned to for amusement when one has nothing else to do.Now Ialways take the opportunity on these occasions of entertaining my humble opinion that all this is complete "bosh;" and of asserting to myself my strong belief that the neighbourhoods of Trafalgar Square, or Suffolk Street, rightly understood, are quite as important to the welfare of the empire as those of Downing Street, or Westminster Hall.Ladies and Gentlemen, on these grounds, and backed by the recommendation of three hundred artists in favour of the Benevolent Fund, I beg to propose its prosperity as a toast for your adoption.