Thomas B. Reed

[Speech of Professor John Tyndall at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1888. The toast to Science was coupled with that to Literature, to the latter of which William E. H. Lecky was called upon to respond. In introducing Professor Tyndall, the President, Sir Frederic Leighton, said: "On behalf of Science, on whom could I call more fitly than on my old friend Professor Tyndall. ["Hear! Hear!"] Fervid in imagination, after the manner of his race, clothing thoughts luminous and full of color in a sharply chiselled form, he seems to me to be, in very deed, an artist and our kin; and I, as an artist, rejoice to see that in this priest within the temple of Science, Knowledge has not clipped the wings of wonder, and that to him the tint of Heaven is not the less lovely that he can reproduce its azure in a little phial, nor does, because Science has been said to unweave it, the rainbow lift its arc less triumphantly in the sky."]

Your Royal Highness, my Lords, and Gentlemen: Faraday, whose standing in the science of the world needs not to be insisted on, used to say to me that he knew of only two festivals that gave him real pleasure. He loved to meet, on Tower Hill, the frank and genial gentlemen-sailors of the Trinity House; but his crowning enjoyment was the banquet of the Royal Academy. The feeling thus expressed by Faraday is a representative feeling: for surely it is a high pleasure to men of science to mingle annually in this illustrious throng, and it is an honor and a pleasure to hear the toast of Science so cordially proposed and so warmly responded to year after year.

Art and Science in their widest sense cover nearly the whole field of man's intellectual action. They are the outward and visible expressions of two distinct and supplementary portions of our complex human nature—distinct, but not opposed, the one working by the dry light of the intellect, the other in the warm glow of the emotions; the one ever seeking to interpret and express the beauty of the universe, the other ever searching for its truth. One vast personality in the course of history, and one only, seems to have embraced them both. ["Hear! Hear!"] That transcendent genius died three days ago plus three hundred and sixty-nine years—Leonardo da Vinci.

Emerson describes an artist who could never paint a rock until he had first understood its geological structure; and the late Lord Houghton told me that an illustrious living poet once destroyed some exquisite verses on a flower because on examination he found that his botany was wrong. This is not saying that all the geology in the world, or all the botany in the world, could create an artist.

In illustration of the subtle influences which here come into play, a late member of this Academy once said to me—"Let Raphael take a crayon in his hand and sweep a curve; let an engineer take tracing paper and all other appliances necessary to accurate reproduction, and let him copy that curve—his line will not be the line of Raphael." In these matters, through lack of knowledge, I must speak, more or less, as a fool, leaving it to you, as wise men, to judge what I say. Rules and principles are profitable and necessary for the guidance of the growing artist and for the artist full-grown; but rules and principles, I take it, just as little as geology and botany, can create the artist. Guidance and rule imply something to be guided and ruled. And that indefinable something which baffles all analysis, and which when wisely guided and ruled emerges in supreme excellence, is individual genius, which, to use familiar language, is "the gift of God." [Cheers.]

In like manner all the precepts of Bacon, linked together and applied in one great integration, would fail to produce a complete man of science. In this respect Art and Science are identical—that to reach their highest outcome and achievement they must pass beyond knowledge and culture, which are understood by all, to inspiration and creative power, which pass the understanding even of him who possesses them in the highest degree. [Cheers.]