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Mark Twain's Speeches
An Undelivered Speech
The steamship St. Paul was to have been launched from Cramp’s shipyard in Philadelphia on March 25, 1895. After the launching a luncheon was to have been given, at which Mr. Clemens was to make a speech. Just before the final word was given a reporter asked Mr. Clemens for a copy of his speech to be delivered at the luncheon. To facilitate the work of the reporter he loaned him a typewritten copy of the speech. It happened, however, that when the blocks were knocked away the big ship refused to budge, and no amount of labor could move her an inch. She had stuck fast upon the ways. As a result, the launching was postponed for a week or two; but in the mean time Mr. Clemens had gone to Europe. Years after a reporter called on Mr. Clemens and submitted the manuscript of the speech, which was as follows:
Day after to-morrow I sail for England in a ship of this line, the Paris. It will be my fourteenth crossing in three years and a half. Therefore, my presence here, as you see, is quite natural, quite commercial. I am interested in ships. They interest me more now than hotels do. When a new ship is launched I feel a desire to go and see if she will be good quarters for me to live in, particularly if she belongs to this line, for it is by this line that I have done most of my ferrying.
People wonder why I go so much. Well, I go partly for my health, partly to familiarize myself with the road. I have gone over the same road so many times now that I know all the whales that belong along the route, and latterly it is an embarrassment to me to meet them, for they do not look glad to see me, but annoyed, and they seem to say: “Here is this old derelict again.”
Earlier in life this would have pained me and made me ashamed, but I am older now, and when I am behaving myself, and doing right, I do not care for a whale’s opinion about me. When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find that that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet’s opinion disturbs us more than an emperor’s.
I do not mean that I care nothing at all for a whale’s opinion, for that would be going to too great a length. Of course, it is better to have the good opinion of a whale than his disapproval; but my position is that if you cannot have a whale’s good opinion, except at some sacrifice of principle or personal dignity, it is better to try to live without it. That is my idea about whales.
Yes, I have gone over that same route so often that I know my way without a compass, just by the waves. I know all the large waves and a good many of the small ones. Also the sunsets. I know every sunset and where it belongs just by its color. Necessarily, then, I do not make the passage now for scenery. That is all gone by.
What I prize most is safety, and in, the second place swift transit and handiness. These are best furnished, by the American line, whose watertight compartments have no passage through them; no doors to be left open, and consequently no way for water to get from one of them to another in time of collision. If you nullify the peril which collisions threaten you with, you nullify the only very serious peril which attends voyages in the great liners of our day, and makes voyaging safer than staying at home.
When the Paris was half-torn to pieces some years ago, enough of the Atlantic ebbed and flowed through one end of her, during her long agony, to sink the fleets of the world if distributed among them; but she floated in perfect safety, and no life was lost. In time of collision the rock of Gibraltar is not safer than the Paris and other great ships of this line. This seems to be the only great line in the world that takes a passenger from metropolis to metropolis without the intervention of tugs and barges or bridges – takes him through without breaking bulk, so to speak.
On the English side he lands at a dock; on the dock a special train is waiting; in an hour and three-quarters he is in, London. Nothing could be handier. If your journey were from a sand-pit on our side to a lighthouse on the other, you could make it quicker by other lines, but that is not the case. The journey is from the city of New York to the city of London, and no line can do that journey quicker than this one, nor anywhere near as conveniently and handily. And when the passenger lands on our side he lands on the American side of the river, not in the provinces. As a very learned man said on the last voyage (he is head quartermaster of the New York land garboard streak of the middle watch):
“When we land a passenger on the American side there’s nothing betwix him and his hotel but hell and the hackman.”
I am glad, with you and the nation, to welcome the new ship. She is another pride, another consolation, for a great country whose mighty fleets have all vanished, and which has almost forgotten, what it is to fly its flag to sea. I am not sure as to which St. Paul she is named for. Some think it is the one that is on the upper Mississippi, but the head quartermaster told me it was the one that killed Goliath. But it is not important. No matter which it is, let us give her hearty welcome and godspeed.
Sixty-Seventh Birthday
At the Metropolitan club, New York, November 28, 1902.
Address at a dinner given in honor of Mr. Clemens by Colonel Harvey, President of Harper & Brothers.
I think I ought to be allowed to talk as long as I want to, for the reason that I have cancelled all my winter’s engagements of every kind, for good and sufficient reasons, and am making no new engagements for this winter, and, therefore, this is the only chance I shall have to disembowel my skull for a year – close the mouth in that portrait for a year. I want to offer thanks and homage to the chairman for this innovation which he has introduced here, which is an improvement, as I consider it, on the old-fashioned style of conducting occasions like this. That was bad that was a bad, bad, bad arrangement. Under that old custom the chairman got up and made a speech, he introduced the prisoner at the bar, and covered him all over with compliments, nothing but compliments, not a thing but compliments, never a slur, and sat down and left that man to get up and talk without a text. You cannot talk on compliments; that is not a text. No modest person, and I was born one, can talk on compliments. A man gets up and is filled to the eyes with happy emotions, but his tongue is tied; he has nothing to say; he is in the condition of Doctor Rice’s friend who came home drunk and explained it to his wife, and his wife said to him, “John, when you have drunk all the whiskey you want, you ought to ask for sarsaparilla.” He said, “Yes, but when I have drunk all the whiskey I want I can’t say sarsaparilla.” And so I think it is much better to leave a man unmolested until the testimony and pleadings are all in. Otherwise he is dumb – he is at the sarsaparilla stage.
Before I get to the higgledy-piggledy point, as Mr. Howells suggested I do, I want to thank you, gentlemen, for this very high honor you are doing me, and I am quite competent to estimate it at its value. I see around me captains of all the illustrious industries, most distinguished men; there are more than fifty here, and I believe I know thirty-nine of them well. I could probably borrow money from – from the others, anyway. It is a proud thing to me, indeed, to see such a distinguished company gather here on such an occasion as this, when there is no foreign prince to be feted – when you have come here not to do honor to hereditary privilege and ancient lineage, but to do reverence to mere moral excellence and elemental veracity-and, dear me, how old it seems to make me! I look around me and I see three or four persons I have known so many, many years. I have known Mr. Secretary Hay – John Hay, as the nation and the rest of his friends love to call him – I have known John Hay and Tom Reed and the Reverend Twichell close upon thirty-six years. Close upon thirty-six years I have known those venerable men. I have known Mr. Howells nearly thirty-four years, and I knew Chauncey Depew before he could walk straight, and before he learned to tell the truth. Twenty-seven years ago, I heard him make the most noble and eloquent and beautiful speech that has ever fallen from even his capable lips. Tom Reed said that my principal defect was inaccuracy of statement. Well, suppose that that is true. What’s the use of telling the truth all the time? I never tell the truth about Tom Reed – but that is his defect, truth; he speaks the truth always. Tom Reed has a good heart, and he has a good intellect, but he hasn’t any judgment. Why, when Tom Reed was invited to lecture to the Ladies’ Society for the Procreation or Procrastination, or something, of morals, I don’t know what it was – advancement, I suppose, of pure morals – he had the immortal indiscretion to begin by saying that some of us can’t be optimists, but by judiciously utilizing the opportunities that Providence puts in our way we can all be bigamists. You perceive his limitations. Anything he has in his mind he states, if he thinks it is true. Well, that was true, but that was no place to say it – so they fired him out.
A lot of accounts have been settled here tonight for me; I have held grudges against some of these people, but they have all been wiped out by the very handsome compliments that have been paid me. Even Wayne MacVeagh – I have had a grudge against him many years. The first time I saw Wayne MacVeagh was at a private dinner-party at Charles A. Dana’s, and when I got there he was clattering along, and I tried to get a word in here and there; but you know what Wayne MacVeagh is when he is started, and I could not get in five words to his one – or one word to his five. I struggled along and struggled along, and – well, I wanted to tell and I was trying to tell a dream I had had the night before, and it was a remarkable dream, a dream worth people’s while to listen to, a dream recounting Sam Jones the revivalist’s reception in heaven. I was on a train, and was approaching the celestial way-station – I had a through ticket – and I noticed a man sitting alongside of me asleep, and he had his ticket in his hat. He was the remains of the Archbishop of Canterbury; I recognized him by his photograph. I had nothing against him, so I took his ticket and let him have mine. He didn’t object – he wasn’t in a condition to object – and presently when the train stopped at the heavenly station – well, I got off, and he went on by request – but there they all were, the angels, you know, millions of them, every one with a torch; they had arranged for a torch-light procession; they were expecting the Archbishop, and when I got off they started to raise a shout, but it didn’t materialize. I don’t know whether they were disappointed. I suppose they had a lot of superstitious ideas about the Archbishop and what he should look like, and I didn’t fill the bill, and I was trying to explain to Saint Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn’t want to be too explicit. Well, I found it was no use, I couldn’t get along, for Wayne MacVeagh was occupying the whole place, and I said to Mr. Dana, “What is the matter with that man? Who is that man with the long tongue? What’s the trouble with him, that long, lank cadaver, old oil-derrick out of a job – who is that?” “Well, now,” Mr. Dana said, “you don’t want to meddle with him; you had better keep quiet; just keep quiet, because that’s a bad man. Talk! He was born to talk. Don’t let him get out with you; he’ll skin you.” I said, “I have been skinned, skinned, and skinned for years, there is nothing left.” He said, “Oh, you’ll find there is; that man is the very seed and inspiration of that proverb which says, ’No matter how close you skin an onion, a clever man can always peel it again.’” Well, I reflected and I quieted down. That would never occur to Tom Reed. He’s got no discretion. Well, MacVeagh is just the same man; he hasn’t changed a bit in all those years; he has been peeling Mr. Mitchell lately. That’s the kind of man he is.
Mr. Howells – that poem of his is admirable; that’s the way to treat a person. Howells has a peculiar gift for seeing the merits of people, and he has always exhibited them in my favor. Howells has never written anything about me that I couldn’t read six or seven times a day; he is always just and always fair; he has written more appreciatively of me than any one in this world, and published it in the North American Review. He did me the justice to say that my intentions – he italicized that – that my intentions were always good, that I wounded people’s conventions rather than their convictions. Now, I wouldn’t want anything handsomer than that said of me. I would rather wait, with anything harsh I might have to say, till the convictions become conventions. Bangs has traced me all the way down. He can’t find that honest man, but I will look for him in the looking-glass when I get home. It was intimated by the Colonel that it is New England that makes New York and builds up this country and makes it great, overlooking the fact that there’s a lot of people here who came from elsewhere, like John Hay from away out West, and Howells from Ohio, and St. Clair McKelway and me from Missouri, and we are doing what we can to build up New York a little-elevate it. Why, when I was living in that village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and Hay up in the town of Warsaw, also on the banks of the Mississippi River it is an emotional bit of the Mississippi, and when it is low water you have to climb up to it on a ladder, and when it floods you have to hunt for it; with a deep-sea lead – but it is a great and beautiful country. In that old time it was a paradise for simplicity – it was a simple, simple life, cheap but comfortable, and full of sweetness, and there was nothing of this rage of modern civilization there at all. It was a delectable land. I went out there last June, and I met in that town of Hannibal a schoolmate of mine, John Briggs, whom I had not seen for more than fifty years. I tell you, that was a meeting! That pal whom I had known as a little boy long ago, and knew now as a stately man three or four inches over six feet and browned by exposure to many climes, he was back there to see that old place again. We spent a whole afternoon going about here and there and yonder, and hunting up the scenes and talking of the crimes which we had committed so long ago. It was a heartbreaking delight, full of pathos, laughter, and tears, all mixed together; and we called the roll of the boys and girls that we picnicked and sweethearted with so many years ago, and there were hardly half a dozen of them left; the rest were in their graves; and we went up there on the summit of that hill, a treasured place in my memory, the summit of Holiday’s Hill, and looked out again over that magnificent panorama of the Mississippi River, sweeping along league after league, a level green paradise on one side, and retreating capes and promontories as far as you could see on the other, fading away in the soft, rich lights of the remote distance. I recognized then that I was seeing now the most enchanting river view the planet could furnish. I never knew it when I was a boy; it took an educated eye that had travelled over the globe to know and appreciate it; and John said, “Can you point out the place where Bear Creek used to be before the railroad came?” I said, “Yes, it ran along yonder.” “And can you point out the swimming-hole?” “Yes, out there.” And he said, “Can you point out the place where we stole the skiff?” Well, I didn’t know which one he meant. Such a wilderness of events had intervened since that day, more than fifty years ago, it took me more than five minutes to call back that little incident, and then I did call it back; it was a white skiff, and we painted it red to allay suspicion. And the saddest, saddest man came along – a stranger he was – and he looked that red skiff over so pathetically, and he said: “Well, if it weren’t for the complexion I’d know whose skiff that was.” He said it in that pleading way, you know, that appeals for sympathy and suggestion; we were full of sympathy for him, but we weren’t in any condition to offer suggestions. I can see him yet as he turned away with that same sad look on his face and vanished out of history forever. I wonder what became of that man. I know what became of the skiff. Well, it was a beautiful life, a lovely life. There was no crime. Merely little things like pillaging orchards and watermelon-patches and breaking the Sabbath – we didn’t break the Sabbath often enough to signify – once a week perhaps. But we were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, all Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold.
Look at John Hay and me. There we were in obscurity, and look where we are now. Consider the ladder which he has climbed, the illustrious vocations he has served – and vocations is the right word; he has in all those vocations acquitted himself with high credit and honor to his country and to the mother that bore him. Scholar, soldier, diplomat, poet, historian – now, see where we are. He is Secretary of State and I am a gentleman. It could not happen in any other country. Our institutions give men the positions that of right belong to them through merit; all you men have won your places, not by heredities, and not by family influence or extraneous help, but only by the natural gifts God gave you at your birth, made effective by your own energies; this is the country to live in.
Now, there is one invisible guest here. A part of me is present; the larger part, the better part, is yonder at her home; that is my wife, and she has a good many personal friends here, and I think it won’t distress any one of them to know that, although she is going to be confined to that bed for many months to come from that nervous prostration, there is not any danger and she is coming along very well – and I think it quite appropriate that I should speak of her. I knew her for the first time just in the same year that I first knew John Hay and Tom Reed and Mr. Twichell – thirty-six years ago – and she has been the best friend I have ever had, and that is saying a good deal; she has reared me – she and Twichell together – and what I am I owe to them. Twichell why, it is such a pleasure to look upon Twichell’s face! For five-and-twenty years I was under the Rev. Mr. Twichell’s tuition, I was in his pastorate, occupying a pew in his church, and held him in due reverence. That man is full of all the graces that go to make a person companionable and beloved; and wherever Twichell goes to start a church the people flock there to buy the land; they find real estate goes up all around the spot, and the envious and the thoughtful always try to get Twichell to move to their neighborhood and start a church; and wherever you see him go you can go and buy land there with confidence, feeling sure that there will be a double price for you before very long. I am not saying this to flatter Mr. Twichell; it is the fact. Many and many a time I have attended the annual sale in his church, and bought up all the pews on a margin – and it would have been better for me spiritually and financially if I had stayed under his wing.
I have tried to do good in this world, and it is marvellous in how many different ways I have done good, and it is comfortable to reflect – now, there’s Mr. Rogers – just out of the affection I bear that man many a time I have given him points in finance that he had never thought of – and if he could lay aside envy, prejudice, and superstition, and utilize those ideas in his business, it would make a difference in his bank account.
Well, I like the poetry. I like all the speeches and the poetry, too. I liked Doctor Van Dyke’s poem. I wish I could return thanks in proper measure to you, gentlemen, who have spoken and violated your feelings to pay me compliments; some were merited and some you overlooked, it is true; and Colonel Harvey did slander every one of you, and put things into my mouth that I never said, never thought of at all.
And now, my wife and I, out of our single heart, return you our deepest and most grateful thanks, and – yesterday was her birthday.
