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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. |
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