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Mark Twain's Speeches
To The Whitefriars
Address at the dinner given by the Whitefriars club in honor of Mr. Clemens, London, June 20, 1899.
The Whitefriars Club was founded by Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Mr. Clemens was made an honorary member in 1874. The members are representative of literary and journalistic London. The toast of “Our Guest” was proposed by Louis F. Austin, of the Illustrated London News, and in the course of some humorous remarks he referred to the vow and to the imaginary woes of the “Friars,” as the members of the club style themselves.
Mr. Chairman and brethren of the vow – in whatever the vow is; for although I have been a member of this club for five-and twenty years, I don’t know any more about what that vow is than Mr. Austin seems to. But what ever the vow is, I don’t care what it is. I have made a thousand vows.
There is no pleasure comparable to making a vow in the presence of one who appreciates that vow, in the presence of men who honor and appreciate you for making the vow, and men who admire you for making the vow.
There is only one pleasure higher than that, and that is to get outside and break the vow. A vow is always a pledge of some kind or other for the protection of your own morals and principles or somebody else’s, and generally, by the irony of fate, it is for the protection of your own morals.
Hence we have pledges that make us eschew tobacco or wine, and while you are taking the pledge there is a holy influence about that makes you feel you are reformed, and that you can never be so happy again in this world until – you get outside and take a drink.
I had forgotten that I was a member of this club – it is so long ago. But now I remember that I was here five-and-twenty years ago, and that I was then at a dinner of the Whitefriars Club, and it was in those old days when you had just made two great finds. All London was talking about nothing else than that they had found Livingstone, and that the lost Sir Roger Tichborne had been found – and they were trying him for it.
And at the dinner, Chairman (I do not know who he was) – failed to come to time. The gentleman who had been appointed to pay me the customary compliments and to introduce me forgot the compliments, and did not know what they were.
And George Augustus Sala came in at the last moment, just when I was about to go without compliments altogether. And that man was a gifted man. They just called on him instantaneously, while he was going to sit down, to introduce the stranger, and Sala, made one of those marvellous speeches which he was capable of making. I think no man talked so fast as Sala did. One did not need wine while he was making a speech. The rapidity of his utterance made a man drunk in a minute. An incomparable speech was that, an impromptu speech, and – an impromptu speech is a seldom thing, and he did it so well.
He went into the whole history of the United States, and made it entirely new to me. He filled it with episodes and incidents that Washington never heard of, and he did it so convincingly that although I knew none of it had happened, from that day to this I do not know any history but Sala’s.
I do not know anything so sad as a dinner where you are going to get up and say something by-and-by, and you do not know what it is. You sit and wonder and wonder what the gentleman is going to say who is going to introduce you. You know that if he says something severe, that if he will deride you, or traduce you, or do anything of that kind, he will furnish you with a text, because anybody can get up and talk against that.
Anybody can get up and straighten out his character. But when a gentleman gets up and merely tells the truth about you, what can you do?
Mr. Austin has done well. He has supplied so many texts that I will have to drop out a lot of them, and that is about as difficult as when you do not have any text at all. Now, he made a beautiful and smooth speech without any difficulty at all, and I could have done that if I had gone on with the schooling with which I began. I see here a gentleman on my left who was my master in the art of oratory more than twenty-five years ago.
When I look upon the inspiring face of Mr. Depew, it carries me a long way back. An old and valued friend of mine is he, and I saw his career as it came along, and it has reached pretty well up to now, when he, by another miscarriage of justice, is a United States Senator. But those were delightful days when I was taking lessons in oratory.
My other master the Ambassador-is not here yet. Under those two gentlemen I learned to make after-dinner speeches, and it was charming.
You know the New England dinner is the great occasion on the other side of the water. It is held every year to celebrate the landing of the Pilgrims. Those Pilgrims were a lot of people who were not needed in England, and you know they had great rivalry, and they were persuaded to go elsewhere, and they chartered a ship called Mayflower and set sail, and I have heard it said that they pumped the Atlantic Ocean through that ship sixteen times.
They fell in over there with the Dutch from Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and a lot of other places with profane names, and it is from that gang that Mr. Depew is descended.
On the other hand, Mr. Choate is descended from those Puritans who landed on a bitter night in December. Every year those people used to meet at a great banquet in New York, and those masters of mind in oratory had to make speeches. It was Doctor Depew’s business to get up there and apologise for the Dutch, and Mr. Choate had to get up later and explain the crimes of the Puritans, and grand, beautiful times we used to have.
It is curious that after that long lapse of time I meet the Whitefriars again, some looking as young and fresh as in the old days, others showing a certain amount of wear and tear, and here, after all this time, I find one of the masters of oratory and the others named in the list.
And here we three meet again as exiles on one pretext or another, and you will notice that while we are absent there is a pleasing tranquillity in America – a building up of public confidence. We are doing the best we can for our country. I think we have spent our lives in serving our country, and we never serve it to greater advantage than when we get out of it.
But impromptu speaking – that is what I was trying to learn. That is a difficult thing. I used to do it in this way. I used to begin about a week ahead, and write out my impromptu, speech and get it by heart. Then I brought it to the New England dinner printed on a piece of paper in my pocket, so that I could pass it to the reporters all cut and dried, and in order to do an impromptu speech as it should be done you have to indicate the places for pauses and hesitations. I put them all in it. And then you want the applause in the right places.
When I got to the place where it should come in, if it did not come in I did not care, but I had it marked in the paper. And these masters of mind used to wonder why it was my speech came out in the morning in the first person, while theirs went through the butchery of synopsis.
I do that kind of speech (I mean an offhand speech), and do it well, and make no mistake in such a way to deceive the audience completely and make that audience believe it is an impromptu speech – that is art.
I was frightened out of it at last by an experience of Doctor Hayes. He was a sort of Nansen of that day. He had been to the North Pole, and it made him celebrated. He had even seen the polar bear climb the pole.
He had made one of those magnificent voyages such as Nansen made, and in those days when a man did anything which greatly distinguished him for the moment he had to come on to the lecture platform and tell all about it.
Doctor Hayes was a great, magnificent creature like Nansen, superbly built. He was to appear in Boston. He wrote his lecture out, and it was his purpose to read it from manuscript; but in an evil hour he concluded that it would be a good thing to preface it with something rather handsome, poetical, and beautiful that he could get off by heart and deliver as if it were the thought of the moment.
He had not had my experience, and could not do that. He came on the platform, held his manuscript down, and began with a beautiful piece of oratory. He spoke something like this:
“When a lonely human being, a pigmy in the midst of the architecture of nature, stands solitary on those icy waters and looks abroad to the horizon and sees mighty castles and temples of eternal ice raising up their pinnacles tipped by the pencil of the departing sun—”
Here a man came across the platform and touched him on the shoulder, and said: “One minute.” And then to the audience:
“Is Mrs. John Smith in the house? Her husband has slipped on the ice and broken his leg.”
And you could see the Mrs. John Smiths get up everywhere and drift out of the house, and it made great gaps everywhere. Then Doctor Hayes began again: “When a lonely man, a pigmy in the architecture—” The janitor came in again and shouted: “It is not Mrs. John Smith! It is Mrs. John Jones!”
Then all the Mrs. Jones got up and left. Once more the speaker started, and was in the midst of the sentence when he was interrupted again, and the result was that the lecture was not delivered. But the lecturer interviewed the janitor afterward in a private room, and of the fragments of the janitor they took “twelve basketsful.”
Now, I don’t want to sit down just in this way. I have been talking with so much levity that I have said no serious thing, and you are really no better or wiser, although Robert Buchanan has suggested that I am a person who deals in wisdom. I have said nothing which would make you better than when you came here.
I should be sorry to sit down without having said one serious word which you can carry home and relate to your children and the old people who are not able to get away.
And this is just a little maxim which has saved me from many a difficulty and many a disaster, and in times of tribulation and uncertainty has come to my rescue, as it shall to yours if you observe it as I do day and night.
I always use it in an emergency, and you can take it home as a legacy from me, and it is “When in doubt, tell the truth.”
The Ascot Gold Cup
The news of Mr. Clemens’s arrival in England in June, 1907, was announced in the papers with big headlines. Immediately following the announcement was the news – also with big headlines – that the Ascot Gold Cup had been stolen the same day. The combination, Mark Twain arrives-Ascot cup stolen, amused the public. The Lord Mayor of London gave a banquet at the Mansion House in honor of Mr. Clemens.
I do assure you that I am not so dishonest as I look. I have been so busy trying to rehabilitate my honor about that Ascot Cup that I have had no time to prepare a speech.
I was not so honest in former days as I am now, but I have always been reasonably honest. Well, you know how a man is influenced by his surroundings. Once upon a time I went to a public meeting where the oratory of a charitable worker so worked on my feelings that, in common with others, I would have dropped something substantial in the hat – if it had come round at that moment.
The speaker had the power of putting those vivid pictures before one. We were all affected. That was the moment for the hat. I would have put two hundred dollars in. Before he had finished I could have put in four hundred dollars. I felt I could have filled up a blank check – with somebody else’s name – and dropped it in.
Well, now, another speaker got up, and in fifteen minutes damped my spirit; and during the speech of the third speaker all my enthusiasm went away. When at last the hat came round I dropped in ten cents – and took out twenty-five.
I came over here to get the honorary degree from Oxford, and I would have encompassed the seven seas for an honor like that – the greatest honor that has ever fallen to my share. I am grateful to Oxford for conferring that honor upon me, and I am sure my country appreciates it, because first and foremost it is an honor to my country.
And now I am going home again across the sea. I am in spirit young but in the flesh old, so that it is unlikely that when I go away I shall ever see England again. But I shall go with the recollection of the generous and kindly welcome I have had.
I suppose I must say “Good-bye.” I say it not with my lips only, but from the heart.
The Savage Club Dinner
A portrait of Mr. Clemens, signed by all the members of the club attending the dinner, was presented to him, July 6, 1907, and in submitting the toast “The Health of Mark Twain” Mr. J. Scott Stokes recalled the fact that he had read parts of Doctor Clemens’s works to Harold Frederic during Frederic’s last illness.
Mr. Chairman and fellow-savages, – I am very glad indeed to have that portrait. I think it is the best one that I have ever had, and there have been opportunities before to get a good photograph. I have sat to photographers twenty-two times to-day. Those sittings added to those that have preceded them since I have been in Europe – if we average at that rate – must have numbered one hundred to two hundred sittings. Out of all those there ought to be some good photographs. This is the best I have had, and I am glad to have your honored names on it. I did not know Harold Frederic personally, but I have heard a great deal about him, and nothing that was not pleasant and nothing except such things as lead a man to honor another man and to love him. I consider that it is a misfortune of mine that I have never had the luck to meet him, and if any book of mine read to him in his last hours made those hours easier for him and more comfortable, I am very glad and proud of that. I call to mind such a case many years ago of an English authoress, well known in her day, who wrote such beautiful child tales, touching and lovely in every possible way. In a little biographical sketch of her I found that her last hours were spent partly in reading a book of mine, until she was no longer able to read. That has always remained in my mind, and I have always cherished it as one of the good things of my life. I had read what she had written, and had loved her for what she had done.
Stanley apparently carried a book of mine feloniously away to Africa, and I have not a doubt that it had a noble and uplifting influence there in the wilds of Africa – because on his previous journeys he never carried anything to read except Shakespeare and the Bible. I did not know of that circumstance. I did not know that he had carried a book of mine. I only noticed that when he came back he was a reformed man. I knew Stanley very well in those old days. Stanley was the first man who ever reported a lecture of mine, and that was in St. Louis. When I was down there the next time to give the same lecture I was told to give them something fresh, as they had read that in the papers. I met Stanley here when he came back from that first expedition of his which closed with the finding of Livingstone. You remember how he would break out at the meetings of the British Association, and find fault with what people said, because Stanley had notions of his own, and could not contain them. They had to come out or break him up – and so he would go round and address geographical societies. He was always on the warpath in those days, and people always had to have Stanley contradicting their geography for them and improving it. But he always came back and sat drinking beer with me in the hotel up to two in the morning, and he was then one of the most civilized human beings that ever was.
I saw in a newspaper this evening a reference to an interview which appeared in one of the papers the other day, in which the interviewer said that I characterized Mr. Birrell’s speech the other day at the Pilgrims’ Club as “bully.” Now, if you will excuse me, I never use slang to an interviewer or anybody else. That distresses me. Whatever I said about Mr. Birrell’s speech was said in English, as good English as anybody uses. If I could not describe Mr. Birrell’s delightful speech without using slang I would not describe it at all. I would close my mouth and keep it closed, much as it would discomfort me.
Now that comes of interviewing a man in the first person, which is an altogether wrong way to interview him. It is entirely wrong because none of you, I, or anybody else, could interview a man – could listen to a man talking any length of time and then go off and reproduce that talk in the first person. It can’t be done. What results is merely that the interviewer gives the substance of what is said and puts it in his own language and puts it in your mouth. It will always be either better language than you use or worse, and in my case it is always worse. I have a great respect for the English language. I am one of its supporters, its promoters, its elevators. I don’t degrade it. A slip of the tongue would be the most that you would get from me. I have always tried hard and faithfully to improve my English and never to degrade it. I always try to use the best English to describe what I think and what I feel, or what I don’t feel and what I don’t think.
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts. I don’t know anything that mars good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a deal of poetry, but you can’t use too many of them without damaging your literature. I love all literature, and as long as I am a doctor of literature – I have suggested to you for twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature, and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor everybody else’s.
Now I think I ought to apologize for my clothes. At home I venture things that I am not permitted by my family to venture in foreign parts. I was instructed before I left home and ordered to refrain from white clothes in England. I meant to keep that command fair and clean, and I would have done it if I had been in the habit of obeying instructions, but I can’t invent a new process in life right away. I have not had white clothes on since I crossed the ocean until now.
In these three or four weeks I have grown so tired of gray and black that you have earned my gratitude in permitting me to come as I have. I wear white clothes in the depth of winter in my home, but I don’t go out in the streets in them. I don’t go out to attract too much attention. I like to attract some, and always I would like to be dressed so that I may be more conspicuous than anybody else.
If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow. I so enjoy gay clothes in which women clothe themselves that it always grieves me when I go to the opera to see that, while women look like a flower-bed, the men are a few gray stumps among them in their black evening dress. These are two or three reasons why I wish to wear white clothes: When I find myself in assemblies like this, with everybody in black clothes, I know I possess something that is superior to everybody else’s. Clothes are never clean. You don’t know whether they are clean or not, because you can’t see.
Here or anywhere you must scour your head every two or three days or it is full of grit. Your clothes must collect just as much dirt as your hair. If you wear white clothes you are clean, and your cleaning bill gets so heavy that you have to take care. I am proud to say that I can wear a white suit of clothes without a blemish for three days. If you need any further instruction in the matter of clothes I shall be glad to give it to you. I hope I have convinced some of you that it is just as well to wear white clothes as any other kind. I do not want to boast. I only want to make you understand that you are not clean.
As to age, the fact that I am nearly seventy-two years old does not clearly indicate how old I am, because part of every day – it is with me as with you, you try to describe your age, and you cannot do it. Sometimes you are only fifteen; sometimes you are twenty-five. It is very seldom in a day that I am seventy-two years old. I am older now sometimes than I was when I used to rob orchards; a thing which I would not do to-day – if the orchards were watched. I am so glad to be here to-night. I am so glad to renew with the Savages that now ancient time when I first sat with a company of this club in London in 1872. That is a long time ago. But I did stay with the Savages a night in London long ago, and as I had come into a very strange land, and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings.
I am glad to be here, and to see you all again, because it is very likely that I shall not see you again. It is easier than I thought to come across the Atlantic. I have been received, as you know, in the most delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here. It keeps me choked up all the time. Everybody is so generous, and they do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. Nobody in the world can appreciate it higher than I do. It did not wait till I got to London, but when I came ashore at Tilbury the stevedores on the dock raised the first welcome – a good and hearty welcome from the men who do the heavy labor in the world, and save you and me having to do it. They are the men who with their hands build empires and make them prosper. It is because of them that the others are wealthy and can live in luxury. They received me with a “Hurrah!” that went to my heart. They are the men that build civilization, and without them no civilization can be built. So I came first to the authors and creators of civilization, and I blessedly end this happy meeting with the Savages who destroy it.
