association which insists that no actor can share its bounty who
has not walked so many years on those boards where the English
tongue is never heard – between the little bars of music in an
aviary of singing birds, to which the unwieldy Swan of Avon is
never admitted – that bounty which was gathered in the name and for
the elevation of an all-embracing art.
No, if there be such things, this thing is not of that kind. This
is a theatrical association, expressly adapted to the wants and to
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
the means of the whole theatrical profession all over England. It
is a society in which the word exclusiveness is wholly unknown. It
is a society which includes every actor, whether he be Benedict or
Hamlet, or the Ghost, or the Bandit, or the court-physician, or, in
the one person, the whole King’s army. He may do the “light
business,” or the “heavy,” or the comic, or the eccentric. He may
be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still
unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred
years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady’s brother
in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family
appears to be to listen to the female members of it whenever they
sing, and to shake hands with everybody between all the verses. Or
he may be the baron who gives the fete, and who sits uneasily on
the sofa under a canopy with the baroness while the fete is going
on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to
swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always
turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it.
Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house
where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman
who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated
into the area. Or, to come to the actresses, she may be the fairy
who resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit
to a bower or a palace. Or the actor may be the armed head of the
witch’s cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom
I have observed in country places, that he is much less like the
notion formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or
Donalbain of the previous scenes. This society, in short, says,
“Be you what you may, be you actor or actress, be your path in your
profession never so high, or never so low, never so haughty, or
never so humble, we offer you the means of doing good to
yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.”
This society is essentially a provident institution, appealing to a
class of men to take care of their own interests, and giving a
continuous security only in return for a continuous sacrifice and
effort. The actor by the means of this society obtains his own
right, to no man’s wrong; and when, in old age, or in disastrous
times, he makes his claim on the institution, he is enabled to say,
“I am neither a beggar, nor a suppliant. I am but reaping what I
sowed long ago.” And therefore it is that I cannot hold out to you
that in assisting this fund you are doing an act of charity in the
common acceptation of that phrase. Of all the abuses of that much
abused term, none have more raised my indignation than what I have
heard in this room in past times, in reference to this institution.
I say, if you help this institution you will be helping the wagoner
who has resolutely put his own shoulder to the wheel, and who has
NOT stuck idle in the mud. In giving this aid you will be doing an
act of justice, and you will be performing an act of gratitude; and
this is what I solicit from you; but I will not so far wrong those
who are struggling manfully for their own independence as to