Читать книгу Henry Irving's Impressions of America - Joseph Hatton - Страница 25

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The Lotos Club is the Savage of America, as the Century is its Garrick; each, however, with a difference. The Lotos admits to membership gentlemen who are not necessarily journalists, authors, actors, and painters, earning their subsistence out of the arts. They must be clubable and good fellows, in the estimation of the committee; and herein lies their best qualification. This combination of the arts proper with trade and finance has made the club a success in the broadest sense of the term. Their home is a palace compared with that of the Savage in London. The general atmosphere of the Century is more akin to that of the Garrick, and it is a far closer corporation than the Lotos. Mr. Thackeray spent a good deal of his time there when he was in New York; while Lord Houghton, it is said, preferred the more jovial fireside of the Lotos. In those days the younger club was in humbler, but not less comfortable, quarters than those it now occupies; while the Century, conservative and conscious of its more aristocratic record, is well content with the house which is associated with many years of pleasant memories.

The Lotos honored Irving with a banquet; the Century welcomed him at one of its famous monthly reunions. The Lotos dinner was the first public recognition, outside the press, of Irving in America. He had accepted its invitation before sailing for New York, and sat down with the Lotos-eaters on the Saturday (October 27) prior to his Monday night’s appearance at the Star Theatre. The club-rooms had never been so crowded as on this occasion. Dishes were laid for a hundred and forty members and guests in the dining-room and salon of the club, and fifty others consented to eat together in the restaurant and reading-room upstairs, and fifty or sixty others had to be content to come in after dinner. Mr. Irving sat on the right hand of the President of the club, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, editor of the “Tribune.” At the same table were Chauncey M. Depew, Dr. A. E. Macdonald, General Horace Porter, E. Randolph Robinson, Algernon S. Sullivan, R. B. Roosevelt, Thomas W. Knox, H. H. Gorringe, W. H. Smith, Rev. Robert Laird Collyer, and F. R. Lawrence. Among others present were Lawrence Barrett, Joseph Jefferson, William J. Florence, R. W. Gilder, Dr. Fordyce Barker, D. G. Croly, General Winslow, and A. Oakey Hall. In a window alcove behind the President’s chair stood an easel, holding a large portrait of Irving as Shylock.

Coffee being served, Mr. Irving was conducted upstairs to be introduced to the diners in his honor who were crowded out of the lower rooms. They received him with a loud cheer, and then accompanied him to join the other guests. The company broke up into groups, stood about the door-ways, and thronged around the President, who thereupon arose and addressed them as follows:—

“You must excuse the difficulty in procuring seats. You know the venerable story which Oscar Wilde appropriated about the sign over the piano in a far-western concert-hall: ‘Don’t shoot the performer; he’s doing the best he can.’ (Laughter.) The committee beg me to repeat in their behalf that touching old appeal. They’ve done the best they could. There are five hundred members of this club, and only one hundred and forty seats in this dining-room; they have done their utmost to put the five hundred men into the one hundred and forty seats. Don’t shoot! They’ll come down, apologize, retreat, resign—do anything to please you. They’ve thoroughly tried this thing of putting two men in one seat and persuading the other three that standing room is just as good; and to-night, as the perspiration rolls from their troubled brows, their fervent hope and prayer is that the manager for your distinguished guest may be haunted by that self-same trouble all through his American tour! (Applause and laughter.)

“London appropriated our national anniversary, to do honor to its favorite actor as he was about to visit us. On that occasion, on the Fourth of July last, at a banquet without a parallel in the history of the British stage, and to which there are actually none to be compared, save the far less significant, but still famous, entertainments to Kean and Macready—at that banquet your guest said: ‘This God-speed would alone insure me a hearty welcome in any land. But I am not going among strangers. I am going among friends.’ (Applause.)

“Let us take him at his word. Once we were apt to get our opinions from the other side. If that grows less and less a habit now, with the spread among us, since we attained our national majority, of a way of doing our own thinking, we are still all the more glad to welcome friendships from the other side.

“We know our friendly guest as the man whom a great, kindred nation has agreed to accept as its foremost living dramatic representative. We know that his success has tended to elevate and purify the stage, to dignify the actor’s calling, to widen and better its influence. We know the scholarship he has brought to the representation of the great dramatists, the minute and comprehensive attention he has given to every detail alike of his own acting and of the general management. His countrymen do not say that if he were not the foremost actor in England he would be the first manager;—they declare that he is already both. (Applause.)

“We bid him the heartiest of welcomes to a country where he may find not unworthy brethren. Our greeting indeed takes a tone of special cordiality not so much from what we know of his foreign repute, or from our remembering the great assemblage of representative countrymen gathered to give him their farewell and God-speed. It comes even more from our knowing him as the friend of Edwin Booth (Applause), and Joseph Jefferson (Applause), and Lawrence Barrett (Applause), and John McCullough (Applause), and William Florence (Applause). And if anything else were needed to make the grasp of every man’s hand in this club yet warmer, it is furnished when we remember that his conspicuous friend among English actors is our friend, John Toole. (Applause.)

“It would not be fair to our distinguished but unsuspicious guest, adventuring into these foreign parts, if, before sitting down, I did not warn him that all this, and much more which he is likely to hear, is said around the dinner-table. Let him not think that he wholly knows us, and is fairly naturalized, until he has read the papers the morning after his first performance. What they may contain no living man knoweth (Laughter); but others have sometimes groaned that we treat our guests with too much attention; that we accord them, in fact, the same distinguished honor we give our national bird—the turkey—which we first feed and afterwards carve up. (Great laughter.)

“But the prologue is an antiquated device, now pretty well banished from the stage, because it merely detains you from what you came to hear. I will detain you no longer. I give you, gentlemen, Our Guest—

“O trumpet set for Shakespeare’s lips to blow!”

“Health to Henry Irving, and a hearty welcome.” (Great applause.)