There was a
frightful
pause.
Twain - Speeches
" "The fourth what?
" said I.
"The
fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going
to move. " "You don't tell me! " said I; "who were the others? " "Mr.
Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the
lot! "
You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot
whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he:
"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of
course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but
that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson
was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as
a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins
all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a
prizefighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig
made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger
with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that.
And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he
took me by the buttonhole, and says he:
"'Through the deep caves of thought
I hear a voice that sings,
Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul! '
"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to. '
Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that
way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson
came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole
and says:
"'Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes. '
"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel. ' You
see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells.
But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and
buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he:
"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'
"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll
be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get
this grub ready, you'll do me proud. ' Well, sir, after they'd filled up
I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it, and then he fires up all of a
sudden and yells:
"Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!
For I would drink to other days. '
"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was
getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky
here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows
herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry. ' Them's the
very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous littery
people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing
onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on
my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's
different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take
whiskey straight or you'll go dry. ' Well, between drinks they'd swell
around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they
got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a
corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr.
Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:
"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'
and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout.
Says he:
"'They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
I pass and deal again! '
Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one!
Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a
sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already
corralled two tricks, and each of the others one. So now he kind of
lifts a little in his chair and says:
"'I tire of globes and aces!
Too long the game is played! '
--and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as
pie and says:
"'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught,'
--and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! Emerson claps
his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went
under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes
rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the
first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him! ' All quiet
on the Potomac, you bet!
"They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow.
Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie. "'
Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Biglow Papers. "' Says Holmes,
'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both. ' They mighty near ended in a
fight. Then they wished they had some more company--and Mr. Emerson
pointed to me and says:
"'Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed? '
He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir,
next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so
they made me stand up and sing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" till
I dropped-at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've
been through, my friend. When I woke at seven, they were leaving, thank
goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his
arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with
them? ' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em; because:
"'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. '
"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and I'm
going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere. "
I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious
singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these
were impostors. "
The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he,
"Ah! impostors, were they? Are you? "
I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled on my
'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved
to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated
the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since
I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular
fact on an occasion like this.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Mark Twain's Autobiography.
January 11, 1906.
Answer to a letter received this morning:
DEAR MRS. H. ,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that
curious passage in my life. During the first year or, two after it
happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were
so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,
established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my
mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have
lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse,
vulgar, and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you and
your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to
look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to
delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy
of it.
It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am
not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously
funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.
What I have said to Mrs. H. is true. I did suffer during a year or two
from the deep humiliations of that episode. But at last, in 1888, in
Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs. A. P. C. , of Concord,
Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing
but death terminates. The C. 's were very bright people and in every way
charming and companionable. We were together a month or two in Venice
and several months in Rome, afterward, and one day that lamented break
of mine was mentioned. And when I was on the point of lathering those
people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it
almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C. 's were indignant
about the way that my performance had been received in Boston. They
poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty
attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about
the Boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the
matter. That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief,
beyond imagination. Very well; I had accepted that as a fact for a year
or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of
it--which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought
of it I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy
a thing. Well, the C. 's comforted me, but they did not persuade me to
continue to think about the unhappy episode. I resisted that. I tried to
get it out of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded. Until Mrs. H. 's
letter came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought
of that matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if
possibly she might be right. At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and
I wrote to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth.
I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can
see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables
feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. I don't know who
they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and
facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr.
Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face;
Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face;
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all
good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being
turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man,
and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting
still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion
to other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctness
across this abyss of time.
One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years
dramatic editor of the New York Tribune, and still occupying that high
post in his old age) was there. He was much younger then than he is now,
and he showed 'it. It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter
at a banquet. During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet
where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a
charming poem written for the occasion. He did it this time, and it was
up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen
to as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of
heart and brain.
Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable
celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at
that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed
would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the
Boston paper. I had written it all out the day before and had
perfectly memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and
self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests;
that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened; as did
everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered
myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was
expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the
case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: "The old
miner said, 'You are the fourth, I'm going to move. ' 'The fourth what? '
said I. He answered, 'The fourth littery man that has been here in
twenty-four hours. I am going to move. ' 'Why, you don't tell me;' said
I. 'Who were the others? ' 'Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--'"
Now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of
interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered
what the trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty--I
struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description
of the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always
hoping--but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody--would laugh, or
that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know enough
to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I
went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to
the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with
horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if
I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the
Trinity; there is no milder way, in which to describe the petrified
condition and the ghastly expression of those people.
When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat.
I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as
miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what
the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I
shall never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near
me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp.
There was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had
good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It
was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's
salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put
into Cellini's autobiography.
There was a frightful pause. There was an
awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had
to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just
burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any novel
respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was
recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was
away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,
consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may
say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from
Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands
ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for
the first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging
conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had
spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to
go on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop
had had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those
other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in
his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in
his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard
from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that
dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head
like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there
wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not
many sentence's after his first before he began to hesitate, and break,
and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down
in a limp and mushy pile.
Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than
one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man hadn't
strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied,
paralyzed; it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try.
Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. Howells mournfully, and
without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of
the room. It was very kind--he was most generous. He towed us tottering
away into some room in that building, and we sat down there. I don't
know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it. It was the
kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can
help your case. But Howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking
things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this
shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that
had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "That is, for
you--and consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in
your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you
deserve to have all you are going to get. But here is an innocent man.
Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him.
He can never hold his head up again. The world can never look upon
Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse. "
That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which
pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two
whenever it forced its way into my mind.
Now then, I take that speech up and examine it. As I said, it arrived
this morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an
idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last.
It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with
humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it
anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is
amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and
those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with
me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was
going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I
showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully
funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for
it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back
here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old
speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all
over that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with me, it is not in the
speech at all.
PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS
ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E. SOCIETY,
PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881
On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response,
President Rollins said:
"This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly
born in New England, nor, perhaps, were any of his ancestors.
He is not technically, therefore, of New England descent.
Under the painful circumstances in which he has found himself,
however, he has done the best he could--he has had all his
children born there, and has made of himself a New England
ancestor. He is a self-made man. More than this, and better
even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature he is of New
England ascent. To ascend there in any thing that's reasonable
is difficult; for--confidentially, with the door shut--we all
know that they are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly
land who never leave it, and it is among and above them that
Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent--become
a man of mark. "
I rise to protest. I have kept still for years; but really I think there
is no sufficient justification for this sort of thing. What do you want
to celebrate those people for? --those ancestors of yours of 1620--the
Mayflower tribe, I mean. What do you want to celebrate them for? Your
pardon: the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating
the Pilgrims themselves, but the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
rock on the 22d of December. So you are celebrating their landing. Why,
the other pretext was thin enough, but this is thinner than ever;
the other was tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf.
Celebrating their lauding! What was there remarkable about it, I would
like to know? What can you be thinking of? Why, those Pilgrims had been
at sea three or four months. It was the very middle of winter: it was
as cold as death off Cape Cod there. Why shouldn't they come ashore? If
they hadn't landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact:
It would have been a case of monumental leatherheadedness which the
world would not willingly let die. If it had been you, gentlemen, you
probably wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be
celebrating, in your ancestors, gifts which they did not exercise,
but only transmitted. Why, to be celebrating the mere landing of the
Pilgrims--to be trying to make out that this most natural and simple and
customary procedure was an extraordinary circumstance--a circumstance
to be amazed at, and admired, aggrandized and glorified, at orgies like
this for two hundred and sixty years--hang it, a horse would have known
enough to land; a horse--Pardon again; the gentleman on my right assures
me that it was not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are
celebrating, but the Pilgrims themselves. So we have struck an
inconsistency here--one says it was the landing, the other says it was
the Pilgrims. It is an inconsistency characteristic of your intractable
and disputatious tribe, for you never agree about anything but Boston.
Well, then, what do you want to celebrate those Pilgrims for? They
were a mighty hard lot--you know it. I grant you, without the slightest
unwillingness, that they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just
than were the people of Europe of that day; I grant you that they are
better than their predecessors. But what of that? --that is nothing.
People always progress. You are better than your fathers and
grandfathers were (this is the first time I have ever aimed a
measureless slander at the departed, for I consider such things
improper). Yes, those among you who have not been in the penitentiary,
if such there be, are better than your fathers and grandfathers were;
but is that any sufficient reason for getting up annual dinners and
celebrating you? No, by no means--by no means. Well, I repeat, those
Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but they
abolished everybody else's ancestors. I am a border-ruffian from the
State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you
have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the
combination which makes the perfect man. But where are my ancestors?
Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?
My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian--an early Indian.
Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of
my blood flows in that Indian's veins today. I stand here, lone and
forlorn, without an ancestor. They skinned him! I do not object to that,
if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen--alive! They skinned him
alive--and before company! That is what rankles. Think how he must have
felt; for he was a sensitive person and easily embarrassed. If he had
been a bird, it would have been all right, and no violence done to his
feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed. " But he
was not a bird, gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most
undressed men that ever was. I ask you to put yourselves in his place.
I ask it as a favor; I ask it as a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the
interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask it
that the world may contemplate, with vision unobstructed by disguising
swallow-tails and white cravats, the spectacle which the true New
England Society ought to present. Cease to come to these annual orgies
in this hollow modern mockery--the surplusage of raiment. Come in
character; come in the summer grace, come in the unadorned simplicity,
come in the free and joyous costume which your sainted ancestors
provided for mine.
Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke
Stevenson, et al. Your tribe chased them out of the country for their
religion's sake; promised them death if they came back; for your
ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of
the sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire
that highest and most precious of boons, freedom for every man on
this broad continent to worship according to the dictates of his own
conscience--and they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous
Quakers to interfere with it. Your ancestors broke forever the chains
of political slavery, and gave the vote to every man in this wide land,
excluding none! --none except those who did not belong to the orthodox
church. Your ancestors--yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless,
they gave us religious liberty to worship as they required us to
worship, and political liberty to vote as the church required; and so
I the bereft one, I the forlorn one, am here to do my best to help you
celebrate them right.
The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine. Your people
were pretty severe with her you will confess that. But, poor thing! I
believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into
their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died
she went to the same place which your ancestors went to. It is a great
pity, for she was a good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.
I don't really remember what your people did with him. But they banished
him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe, recognizing that this
was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took
pity on him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem
witches were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them.
Yes, they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal
with them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our
family from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine
years. The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your
progenitors was an ancestor of mine--for I am of a mixed breed, an
infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your sham
meerschaums that you can color in a week. No, my complexion is the
patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time, I had acquired
a lot of my kin--by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and
another--and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn
perversity of your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away
from me. And so, again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my
blood flows in the veins of any living being who is marketable.
O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have
heard the speeches. Disband these New England societies--nurseries of
a system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if
persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you
into prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still
temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech
you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a
simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before,
or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for
hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this
one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know
that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing
with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five
cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least
throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its
taxes:
Yes, hear your true friend--your only true friend--list to his voice.
Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay--perpetuators
of ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I
see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are but steps upon the downward
path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee--hotel coffee.
A few more years--all too few, I fear--mark my words, we shall have cider!
Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late. You are on the broad road which
leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and the
gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious
friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your
impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New
England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from
varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors--the
super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of
Plymouth Rock--go home, and try to learn to behave!
However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your
Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and
adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once--a man of sturdy
opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery. He said:
"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all's
said and done, it would be pretty hard to improve on those people; and,
as for me, I don't mind coming out flatfooted and saying there ain't any
way to improve on them--except having them born in Missouri! "
COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES
DELIVERED AT THE LOTOS CLUB, JANUARY 11, 1908
In introducing Mr. Clemens, Frank R. Lawrence, the President
of the Lotos Club, recalled the fact that the first club dinner
in the present club-house, some fourteen years ago, was in
honor of Mark Twain.
I wish to begin this time at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether;
that is to say, I wish to thank you for this welcome that you are
giving, and the welcome which you gave me seven years ago, and which I
forgot to thank you for at that time. I also wish to thank you for the
welcome you gave me fourteen years ago, which I also forgot to thank you
for at the time.
I hope you will continue this custom to give me a dinner every seven
years before I join the hosts in the other world--I do not know which
world.
Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Porter have paid me many compliments. It is very
difficult to take compliments. I do not care whether you deserve the
compliments or not, it is just as difficult to take them. The other
night I was at the Engineers' Club, and enjoyed the sufferings of
Mr. Carnegie. They were complimenting him there; there it was all
compliments, and none of them deserved. They say that you cannot live by
bread alone, but I can live on compliments.
I do not make any pretence that I dislike compliments. The stronger the
better, and I can manage to digest them. I think I have lost so much by
not making a collection of compliments, to put them away and take them
out again once in a while. When in England I said that I would start to
collect compliments, and I began there and I have brought some of them
along.
The first one of these lies--I wrote them down and preserved them--I think
they are mighty good and extremely just. It is one of Hamilton Mabie's
compliments. He said that La Salle was the first one to make a voyage
of the Mississippi, but Mark Twain was the first to chart, light, and
navigate it for the whole world.
If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on
the Mississippi], it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you, it
is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring
true. It's an art by itself.
Here is another compliment by Albert Bigelow Paine, my biographer. He
is writing four octavo volumes about me, and he has been at my elbow two
and one-half years.
I just suppose that he does not know me, but says he knows me. He says
"Mark Twain is not merely a great writer, a great philosopher, a great
man; he is the supreme expression of the human being, with his strength
and his weakness. " What a talent for compression! It takes a genius in
compression to compact as many facts as that.
W. D. Howells spoke of me as first of Hartford, and ultimately of the
solar system, not to say of the universe:
You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches
to Neptune and Saturn; that will satisfy even me. You know how modest
and retiring Howells seems to be, but deep down he is as vain as I am.
Mr. Howells had been granted a degree at Oxford, whose gown was red. He
had been invited to an exercise at Columbia, and upon inquiry had been
told that it was usual to wear the black gown: Later he had found that
three other men wore bright gowns, and he had lamented that he had been
one of the black mass, and not a red torch.
Edison wrote: "The average American loves his family. If he has any love
left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain. "
Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl which came to me
indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of
me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:
"We've got a John the Baptist like that. " She also said: "Only ours has
more trimmings. "
I suppose she meant the halo. Now here is a gold-miner's compliment. It
is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to which
I lectured in a log school-house. There were no ladies there. I wasn't
famous then.
fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours--I'm going
to move. " "You don't tell me! " said I; "who were the others? " "Mr.
Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes--consound the
lot! "
You can easily believe I was interested. I supplicated--three hot
whiskeys did the rest--and finally the melancholy miner began. Said he:
"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in of
course. Said they were going to the Yosemite. They were a rough lot, but
that's nothing; everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson
was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as
a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins
all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a
prizefighter. His head was cropped and bristly, like as if he had a wig
made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger
with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking, I could see that.
And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he
took me by the buttonhole, and says he:
"'Through the deep caves of thought
I hear a voice that sings,
Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul! '
"Says I, 'I can't afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don't want to. '
Blamed if I liked it pretty well, either, coming from a stranger, that
way. However, I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson
came and looked on awhile, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole
and says:
"'Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes. '
"Says I, 'Mr. Emerson, if you'll excuse me, this ain't no hotel. ' You
see it sort of riled me--I warn't used to the ways of littery swells.
But I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow and
buttonholes me, and interrupts me. Says he:
"'Honor be to Mudjekeewis!
You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis--'
"But I broke in, and says I, 'Beg your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you'll
be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes and let me get
this grub ready, you'll do me proud. ' Well, sir, after they'd filled up
I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it, and then he fires up all of a
sudden and yells:
"Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!
For I would drink to other days. '
"By George, I was getting kind of worked up. I don't deny it, I was
getting kind of worked up. I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, 'Looky
here, my fat friend, I'm a-running this shanty, and if the court knows
herself, you'll take whiskey straight or you'll go dry. ' Them's the
very words I said to him. Now I don't want to sass such famous littery
people, but you see they kind of forced me. There ain't nothing
onreasonable 'bout me; I don't mind a passel of guests a-treadin' on
my tail three or four times, but when it comes to standing on it it's
different, 'and if the court knows herself,' I says, 'you'll take
whiskey straight or you'll go dry. ' Well, between drinks they'd swell
around the cabin and strike attitudes and spout; and pretty soon they
got out a greasy old deck and went to playing euchre at ten cents a
corner--on trust. I began to notice some pretty suspicious things. Mr.
Emerson dealt, looked at his hand, shook his head, says:
"'I am the doubter and the doubt--'
and ca'mly bunched the hands and went to shuffling for a new layout.
Says he:
"'They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways I keep.
I pass and deal again! '
Hang'd if he didn't go ahead and do it, too! Oh, he was a cool one!
Well, in about a minute things were running pretty tight, but all of a
sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye he judged he had 'em. He had already
corralled two tricks, and each of the others one. So now he kind of
lifts a little in his chair and says:
"'I tire of globes and aces!
Too long the game is played! '
--and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as
pie and says:
"'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught,'
--and blamed if he didn't down with another right bower! Emerson claps
his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went
under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes
rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he, 'Order, gentlemen; the
first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him! ' All quiet
on the Potomac, you bet!
"They were pretty how-come-you-so by now, and they begun to blow.
Emerson says, 'The nobbiest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie. "'
Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Biglow Papers. "' Says Holmes,
'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both. ' They mighty near ended in a
fight. Then they wished they had some more company--and Mr. Emerson
pointed to me and says:
"'Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed? '
He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot--so I let it pass. Well, sir,
next they took it into their heads that they would like some music; so
they made me stand up and sing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" till
I dropped-at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've
been through, my friend. When I woke at seven, they were leaving, thank
goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his'n under his
arm. Says I, 'Hold on, there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with
them? ' He says, 'Going to make tracks with 'em; because:
"'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time. '
"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours--and I'm
going to move; I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere. "
I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious
singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these
were impostors. "
The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he,
"Ah! impostors, were they? Are you? "
I did not pursue the subject, and since then I have not travelled on my
'nom de guerre' enough to hurt. Such was the reminiscence I was moved
to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated
the details a little, but you will easily forgive me that fault, since
I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular
fact on an occasion like this.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Mark Twain's Autobiography.
January 11, 1906.
Answer to a letter received this morning:
DEAR MRS. H. ,--I am forever your debtor for reminding me of that
curious passage in my life. During the first year or, two after it
happened, I could not bear to think of it. My pain and shame were
so intense, and my sense of having been an imbecile so settled,
established and confirmed, that I drove the episode entirely from my
mind--and so all these twenty-eight or twenty-nine years I have
lived in the conviction that my performance of that time was coarse,
vulgar, and destitute of humor. But your suggestion that you and
your family found humor in it twenty-eight years ago moved me to
look into the matter. So I commissioned a Boston typewriter to
delve among the Boston papers of that bygone time and send me a copy
of it.
It came this morning, and if there is any vulgarity about it I am
not able to discover it. If it isn't innocently and ridiculously
funny, I am no judge. I will see to it that you get a copy.
What I have said to Mrs. H. is true. I did suffer during a year or two
from the deep humiliations of that episode. But at last, in 1888, in
Venice, my wife and I came across Mr. and Mrs. A. P. C. , of Concord,
Massachusetts, and a friendship began then of the sort which nothing
but death terminates. The C. 's were very bright people and in every way
charming and companionable. We were together a month or two in Venice
and several months in Rome, afterward, and one day that lamented break
of mine was mentioned. And when I was on the point of lathering those
people for bringing it to my mind when I had gotten the memory of it
almost squelched, I perceived with joy that the C. 's were indignant
about the way that my performance had been received in Boston. They
poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty
attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about
the Boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the
matter. That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief,
beyond imagination. Very well; I had accepted that as a fact for a year
or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of
it--which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought
of it I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so unholy
a thing. Well, the C. 's comforted me, but they did not persuade me to
continue to think about the unhappy episode. I resisted that. I tried to
get it out of my mind, and let it die, and I succeeded. Until Mrs. H. 's
letter came, it had been a good twenty-five years since I had thought
of that matter; and when she said that the thing was funny I wondered if
possibly she might be right. At any rate, my curiosity was aroused, and
I wrote to Boston and got the whole thing copied, as above set forth.
I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering--dimly I can
see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures sitting at tables
feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless forevermore. I don't know who
they were, but I can very distinctly see, seated at the grand table and
facing the rest of us, Mr. Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr.
Whittier, grave, lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face;
Mr. Longfellow, with his silken white hair and his benignant face;
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all
good-fellowship everywhere like a rose-diamond whose facets are being
turned toward the light first one way and then another--a charming man,
and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he was sitting
still (what he would call still, but what would be more or less motion
to other people). I can see those figures with entire distinctness
across this abyss of time.
One other feature is clear--Willie Winter (for these past thousand years
dramatic editor of the New York Tribune, and still occupying that high
post in his old age) was there. He was much younger then than he is now,
and he showed 'it. It was always a pleasure to me to see Willie Winter
at a banquet. During a matter of twenty years I was seldom at a banquet
where Willie Winter was not also present, and where he did not read a
charming poem written for the occasion. He did it this time, and it was
up to standard: dainty, happy, choicely phrased, and as good to listen
to as music, and sounding exactly as if it was pouring unprepared out of
heart and brain.
Now at that point ends all that was pleasurable about that notable
celebration of Mr. Whittier's seventieth birthday--because I got up at
that point and followed Winter, with what I have no doubt I supposed
would be the gem of the evening--the gay oration above quoted from the
Boston paper. I had written it all out the day before and had
perfectly memorized it, and I stood up there at my genial and happy and
self-satisfied ease, and began to deliver it. Those majestic guests;
that row of venerable and still active volcanoes, listened; as did
everybody else in the house, with attentive interest. Well, I delivered
myself of--we'll say the first two hundred words of my speech. I was
expecting no returns from that part of the speech, but this was not the
case as regarded the rest of it. I arrived now at the dialogue: "The old
miner said, 'You are the fourth, I'm going to move. ' 'The fourth what? '
said I. He answered, 'The fourth littery man that has been here in
twenty-four hours. I am going to move. ' 'Why, you don't tell me;' said
I. 'Who were the others? ' 'Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, consound the lot--'"
Now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of
interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered
what the trouble was. I didn't know. I went on, but with difficulty--I
struggled along, and entered upon that miner's fearful description
of the bogus Emerson, the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always
hoping--but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody--would laugh, or
that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know enough
to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I
went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to
the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with
horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if
I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the
Trinity; there is no milder way, in which to describe the petrified
condition and the ghastly expression of those people.
When I sat down it was with a heart which had long ceased to beat.
I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as
miserable again as I was then. I speak now as one who doesn't know what
the condition of things may be in the next world, but in this one I
shall never be as wretched again as I was then. Howells, who was near
me, tried to say a comforting word, but couldn't get beyond a gasp.
There was no use--he understood the whole size of the disaster. He had
good intentions, but the words froze before they could get out. It
was an atmosphere that would freeze anything. If Benvenuto Cellini's
salamander had been in that place he would not have survived to be put
into Cellini's autobiography.
There was a frightful pause. There was an
awful silence, a desolating silence. Then the next man on the list had
to get up--there was no help for it. That was Bishop--Bishop had just
burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel, which had
appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, a place which would make any novel
respectable and any author noteworthy. In this case the novel itself was
recognized as being, without extraneous help, respectable. Bishop was
away up in the public favor, and he was an object of high interest,
consequently there was a sort of national expectancy in the air; we may
say our American millions were standing, from Maine to Texas and from
Alaska to Florida, holding their breath, their lips parted, their hands
ready to applaud, when Bishop should get up on that occasion, and for
the first time in his life speak in public. It was under these damaging
conditions that he got up to "make good," as the vulgar say. I had
spoken several times before, and that is the reason why I was able to
go on without dying in my tracks, as I ought to have done--but Bishop
had had no experience. He was up facing those awful deities--facing those
other people, those strangers--facing human beings for the first time in
his life, with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in
his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard
from. I suppose that after that, and under the smothering pall of that
dreary silence, it began to waste away and disappear out of his head
like the rags breaking from the edge of a fog, and presently there
wasn't any fog left. He didn't go on--he didn't last long. It was not
many sentence's after his first before he began to hesitate, and break,
and lose his grip, and totter, and wobble, and at last he slumped down
in a limp and mushy pile.
Well, the programme for the occasion was probably not more than
one-third finished, but it ended there. Nobody rose. The next man hadn't
strength enough to get up, and everybody looked so dazed, so stupefied,
paralyzed; it was impossible for anybody to do anything, or even try.
Nothing could go on in that strange atmosphere. Howells mournfully, and
without words, hitched himself to Bishop and me and supported us out of
the room. It was very kind--he was most generous. He towed us tottering
away into some room in that building, and we sat down there. I don't
know what my remark was now, but I know the nature of it. It was the
kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can
help your case. But Howells was honest--he had to say the heart-breaking
things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this
shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that
had ever happened in anybody's history--and then he added, "That is, for
you--and consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in
your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you
deserve to have all you are going to get. But here is an innocent man.
Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him.
He can never hold his head up again. The world can never look upon
Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse. "
That is the history of that episode of twenty-eight years ago, which
pretty nearly killed me with shame during that first year or two
whenever it forced its way into my mind.
Now then, I take that speech up and examine it. As I said, it arrived
this morning, from Boston. I have read it twice, and unless I am an
idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last.
It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with
humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it
anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? It is
amazing, it is incredible, that they didn't shout with laughter, and
those deities the loudest of them all. Could the fault have been with
me? Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was
going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I
showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can't be successfully
funny if you show that you are afraid of it. Well, I can't account for
it, but if I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back
here now on the platform at Carnegie Hall I would take that same old
speech, deliver it, word for word, and melt them till they'd run all
over that stage. Oh, the fault must have been with me, it is not in the
speech at all.
PLYMOUTH ROCK AND THE PILGRIMS
ADDRESS AT THE FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, N. E. SOCIETY,
PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 22, 1881
On calling upon Mr. Clemens to make response,
President Rollins said:
"This sentiment has been assigned to one who was never exactly
born in New England, nor, perhaps, were any of his ancestors.
He is not technically, therefore, of New England descent.
Under the painful circumstances in which he has found himself,
however, he has done the best he could--he has had all his
children born there, and has made of himself a New England
ancestor. He is a self-made man. More than this, and better
even, in cheerful, hopeful, helpful literature he is of New
England ascent. To ascend there in any thing that's reasonable
is difficult; for--confidentially, with the door shut--we all
know that they are the brightest, ablest sons of that goodly
land who never leave it, and it is among and above them that
Mr. Twain has made his brilliant and permanent ascent--become
a man of mark. "
I rise to protest. I have kept still for years; but really I think there
is no sufficient justification for this sort of thing. What do you want
to celebrate those people for? --those ancestors of yours of 1620--the
Mayflower tribe, I mean. What do you want to celebrate them for? Your
pardon: the gentleman at my left assures me that you are not celebrating
the Pilgrims themselves, but the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
rock on the 22d of December. So you are celebrating their landing. Why,
the other pretext was thin enough, but this is thinner than ever;
the other was tissue, tinfoil, fish-bladder, but this is gold-leaf.
Celebrating their lauding! What was there remarkable about it, I would
like to know? What can you be thinking of? Why, those Pilgrims had been
at sea three or four months. It was the very middle of winter: it was
as cold as death off Cape Cod there. Why shouldn't they come ashore? If
they hadn't landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact:
It would have been a case of monumental leatherheadedness which the
world would not willingly let die. If it had been you, gentlemen, you
probably wouldn't have landed, but you have no shadow of right to be
celebrating, in your ancestors, gifts which they did not exercise,
but only transmitted. Why, to be celebrating the mere landing of the
Pilgrims--to be trying to make out that this most natural and simple and
customary procedure was an extraordinary circumstance--a circumstance
to be amazed at, and admired, aggrandized and glorified, at orgies like
this for two hundred and sixty years--hang it, a horse would have known
enough to land; a horse--Pardon again; the gentleman on my right assures
me that it was not merely the landing of the Pilgrims that we are
celebrating, but the Pilgrims themselves. So we have struck an
inconsistency here--one says it was the landing, the other says it was
the Pilgrims. It is an inconsistency characteristic of your intractable
and disputatious tribe, for you never agree about anything but Boston.
Well, then, what do you want to celebrate those Pilgrims for? They
were a mighty hard lot--you know it. I grant you, without the slightest
unwillingness, that they were a deal more gentle and merciful and just
than were the people of Europe of that day; I grant you that they are
better than their predecessors. But what of that? --that is nothing.
People always progress. You are better than your fathers and
grandfathers were (this is the first time I have ever aimed a
measureless slander at the departed, for I consider such things
improper). Yes, those among you who have not been in the penitentiary,
if such there be, are better than your fathers and grandfathers were;
but is that any sufficient reason for getting up annual dinners and
celebrating you? No, by no means--by no means. Well, I repeat, those
Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but they
abolished everybody else's ancestors. I am a border-ruffian from the
State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you
have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the
combination which makes the perfect man. But where are my ancestors?
Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material?
My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian--an early Indian.
Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. Not one drop of
my blood flows in that Indian's veins today. I stand here, lone and
forlorn, without an ancestor. They skinned him! I do not object to that,
if they needed his fur; but alive, gentlemen--alive! They skinned him
alive--and before company! That is what rankles. Think how he must have
felt; for he was a sensitive person and easily embarrassed. If he had
been a bird, it would have been all right, and no violence done to his
feelings, because he would have been considered "dressed. " But he
was not a bird, gentlemen, he was a man, and probably one of the most
undressed men that ever was. I ask you to put yourselves in his place.
I ask it as a favor; I ask it as a tardy act of justice; I ask it in the
interest of fidelity to the traditions of your ancestors; I ask it
that the world may contemplate, with vision unobstructed by disguising
swallow-tails and white cravats, the spectacle which the true New
England Society ought to present. Cease to come to these annual orgies
in this hollow modern mockery--the surplusage of raiment. Come in
character; come in the summer grace, come in the unadorned simplicity,
come in the free and joyous costume which your sainted ancestors
provided for mine.
Later ancestors of mine were the Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke
Stevenson, et al. Your tribe chased them out of the country for their
religion's sake; promised them death if they came back; for your
ancestors had forsaken the homes they loved, and braved the perils of
the sea, the implacable climate, and the savage wilderness, to acquire
that highest and most precious of boons, freedom for every man on
this broad continent to worship according to the dictates of his own
conscience--and they were not going to allow a lot of pestiferous
Quakers to interfere with it. Your ancestors broke forever the chains
of political slavery, and gave the vote to every man in this wide land,
excluding none! --none except those who did not belong to the orthodox
church. Your ancestors--yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless,
they gave us religious liberty to worship as they required us to
worship, and political liberty to vote as the church required; and so
I the bereft one, I the forlorn one, am here to do my best to help you
celebrate them right.
The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine. Your people
were pretty severe with her you will confess that. But, poor thing! I
believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into
their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died
she went to the same place which your ancestors went to. It is a great
pity, for she was a good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.
I don't really remember what your people did with him. But they banished
him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe, recognizing that this
was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took
pity on him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem
witches were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them.
Yes, they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal
with them that there hasn't been a witch and hardly a halter in our
family from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine
years. The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your
progenitors was an ancestor of mine--for I am of a mixed breed, an
infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I'm not one of your sham
meerschaums that you can color in a week. No, my complexion is the
patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time, I had acquired
a lot of my kin--by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and
another--and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn
perversity of your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away
from me. And so, again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my
blood flows in the veins of any living being who is marketable.
O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have
heard the speeches. Disband these New England societies--nurseries of
a system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if
persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you
into prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still
temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech
you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a
simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before,
or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for
hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this
one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know
that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing
with rocks, this one isn't worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five
cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least
throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its
taxes:
Yes, hear your true friend--your only true friend--list to his voice.
Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay--perpetuators
of ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I
see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are but steps upon the downward
path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee--hotel coffee.
A few more years--all too few, I fear--mark my words, we shall have cider!
Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late. You are on the broad road which
leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and the
gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious
friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your
impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New
England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from
varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors--the
super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of
Plymouth Rock--go home, and try to learn to behave!
However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your
Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and
adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once--a man of sturdy
opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery. He said:
"People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all's
said and done, it would be pretty hard to improve on those people; and,
as for me, I don't mind coming out flatfooted and saying there ain't any
way to improve on them--except having them born in Missouri! "
COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES
DELIVERED AT THE LOTOS CLUB, JANUARY 11, 1908
In introducing Mr. Clemens, Frank R. Lawrence, the President
of the Lotos Club, recalled the fact that the first club dinner
in the present club-house, some fourteen years ago, was in
honor of Mark Twain.
I wish to begin this time at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether;
that is to say, I wish to thank you for this welcome that you are
giving, and the welcome which you gave me seven years ago, and which I
forgot to thank you for at that time. I also wish to thank you for the
welcome you gave me fourteen years ago, which I also forgot to thank you
for at the time.
I hope you will continue this custom to give me a dinner every seven
years before I join the hosts in the other world--I do not know which
world.
Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Porter have paid me many compliments. It is very
difficult to take compliments. I do not care whether you deserve the
compliments or not, it is just as difficult to take them. The other
night I was at the Engineers' Club, and enjoyed the sufferings of
Mr. Carnegie. They were complimenting him there; there it was all
compliments, and none of them deserved. They say that you cannot live by
bread alone, but I can live on compliments.
I do not make any pretence that I dislike compliments. The stronger the
better, and I can manage to digest them. I think I have lost so much by
not making a collection of compliments, to put them away and take them
out again once in a while. When in England I said that I would start to
collect compliments, and I began there and I have brought some of them
along.
The first one of these lies--I wrote them down and preserved them--I think
they are mighty good and extremely just. It is one of Hamilton Mabie's
compliments. He said that La Salle was the first one to make a voyage
of the Mississippi, but Mark Twain was the first to chart, light, and
navigate it for the whole world.
If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on
the Mississippi], it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you, it
is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring
true. It's an art by itself.
Here is another compliment by Albert Bigelow Paine, my biographer. He
is writing four octavo volumes about me, and he has been at my elbow two
and one-half years.
I just suppose that he does not know me, but says he knows me. He says
"Mark Twain is not merely a great writer, a great philosopher, a great
man; he is the supreme expression of the human being, with his strength
and his weakness. " What a talent for compression! It takes a genius in
compression to compact as many facts as that.
W. D. Howells spoke of me as first of Hartford, and ultimately of the
solar system, not to say of the universe:
You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches
to Neptune and Saturn; that will satisfy even me. You know how modest
and retiring Howells seems to be, but deep down he is as vain as I am.
Mr. Howells had been granted a degree at Oxford, whose gown was red. He
had been invited to an exercise at Columbia, and upon inquiry had been
told that it was usual to wear the black gown: Later he had found that
three other men wore bright gowns, and he had lamented that he had been
one of the black mass, and not a red torch.
Edison wrote: "The average American loves his family. If he has any love
left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain. "
Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl which came to me
indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of
me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:
"We've got a John the Baptist like that. " She also said: "Only ours has
more trimmings. "
I suppose she meant the halo. Now here is a gold-miner's compliment. It
is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to which
I lectured in a log school-house. There were no ladies there. I wasn't
famous then.
