Mark Twain's Speeches

Galveston Orphan Bazaar

Address at a fair held at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, in October, 1900, in aid of the orphans at Galveston.

I expected that the Governor of Texas would occupy this place first and would speak to you, and in the course of his remarks would drop a text for me to talk from; but with the proverbial obstinacy that is proverbial with governors, they go back on their duties, and he has not come here, and has not furnished me with a text, and I am here without a text. I have no text except what you furnish me with your handsome faces, and – but I won’t continue that, for I could go on forever about attractive faces, beautiful dresses, and other things. But, after all, compliments should be in order in a place like this.

I have been in New York two or three days, and have been in a condition of strict diligence night and day, the object of this diligence being to regulate the moral and political situation on this planet – put it on a sound basis – and when you are regulating the conditions of a planet it requires a great deal of talk in a great many kinds of ways, and when you have talked a lot the emptier you get, and get also in a position of corking. When I am situated like that, with nothing to say, I feel as though I were a sort of fraud; I seem to be playing a part, and please consider I am playing a part for want of something better, and this, is not unfamiliar to me; I have often done this before.

When I was here about eight years ago I was coming up in a car of the elevated road. Very few people were in that car, and on one end of it there was no one, except on the opposite seat, where sat a man about fifty years old, with a most winning face and an elegant eye – a beautiful eye; and I took him from his dress to be a master mechanic, a man who had a vocation. He had with him a very fine little child of about four or five years. I was watching the affection which existed between those two. I judged he was the grandfather, perhaps. It was really a pretty child, and I was admiring her, and as soon as he saw I was admiring her he began to notice me.

I could see his admiration of me in his eye, and I did what everybody else would do – admired the child four times as much, knowing I would get four times as much of his admiration. Things went on very pleasantly. I was making my way into his heart.

By-and-by, when he almost reached the station where he was to get off, he got up, crossed over, and he said: “Now I am going to say something to you which I hope you will regard as a compliment.” And then he went on to say: “I have never seen Mark Twain, but I have seen a portrait of him, and any friend of mine will tell you that when I have once seen a portrait of a man I place it in my eye and store it away in my memory, and I can tell you now that you look enough like Mark Twain to be his brother. Now,” he said, “I hope you take this as a compliment. Yes, you are a very good imitation; but when I come to look closer, you are probably not that man.”

I said: “I will be frank with you. In my desire to look like that excellent character I have dressed for the character; I have been playing a part.”

He said: “That is all right, that is all right; you look very well on the outside, but when it comes to the inside you are not in it with the original.”

So when I come to a place like this with nothing valuable to say I always play a part. But I will say before I sit down that when it comes to saying anything here I will express myself in this way: I am heartily in sympathy with you in your efforts to help those who were sufferers in this calamity, and in your desire to heap those who were rendered homeless, and in saying this I wish to impress on you the fact that I am not playing a part.

San Francisco Earthquake

After the address at the Robert Fulton Fund meeting, June 19, 1906, Mr. Clemens talked to the assembled reporters about the San Francisco earthquake.

I haven’t been there since 1868, and that great city of San Francisco has grown up since my day. When I was there she had one hundred and eighteen thousand people, and of this number eighteen thousand were Chinese. I was a reporter on the Virginia City Enterprise in Nevada in 1862, and stayed there, I think, about two years, when I went to San Francisco and got a job as a reporter on The Call. I was there three or four years.

I remember one day I was walking down Third Street in San Francisco. It was a sleepy, dull Sunday afternoon, and no one was stirring. Suddenly as I looked up the street about three hundred yards the whole side of a house fell out. The street was full of bricks and mortar. At the same time I was knocked against the side of a house, and stood there stunned for a moment.

I thought it was an earthquake. Nobody else had heard anything about it and no one said earthquake to me afterward, but I saw it and I wrote it. Nobody else wrote it, and the house I saw go into the street was the only house in the city that felt it. I’ve always wondered if it wasn’t a little performance gotten up for my especial entertainment by the nether regions.

Charity And Actors

Address at the actors’ fund fair in the Metropolitan opera house, New York, may 6, 1907.

Mr. Clemens, in his white suit, formally declared the fair open. Mr. Daniel Frohman, in introducing Mr. Clemens, said:

“We intend to make this a banner week in the history of the Fund, which takes an interest in every one on the stage, be he actor, singer, dancer, or workman. We have spent more than $40,000 during the past year. Charity covers a multitude of sins, but it also reveals a multitude of virtues. At the opening of the former fair we had the assistance of Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson. In their place we have to-day that American institution and apostle of wide humanity – Mark Twain.”

As Mr. Frohman has said, charity reveals a multitude of virtues. This is true, and it is to be proved here before the week is over. Mr. Frohman has told you something of the object and something of the character of the work. He told me he would do this – and he has kept his word! I had expected to hear of it through the newspapers. I wouldn’t trust anything between Frohman and the newspapers – except when it’s a case of charity!

You should all remember that the actor has been your benefactor many and many a year. When you have been weary and downcast he has lifted your heart out of gloom and given you a fresh impulse. You are all under obligation to him. This is your opportunity to be his benefactor – to help provide for him in his old age and when he suffers from infirmities.

At this fair no one is to be persecuted to buy. If you offer a twenty-dollar bill in payment for a purchase of $1 you will receive $19 in change. There is to be no robbery here. There is to be no creed here – no religion except charity. We want to raise $250,000—and that is a great task to attempt.

The President has set the fair in motion by pressing the button in Washington. Now your good wishes are to be transmuted into cash.

By virtue of the authority in me vested I declare the fair open. I call the ball game. Let the transmuting begin!

Russian Republic

The American auxiliary movement to aid the cause of freedom in Russia was launched on the evening of April 11, 1906, at the Club A house, 3 Fifth Avenue, with Mr. Clemens and Maxim Gorky as the principal spokesmen. Mr. Clemens made an introductory address, presenting Mr. Gorky.

If we can build a Russian republic to give to the persecuted people of the Tsar’s domain the same measure of freedom that we enjoy, let us go ahead and do it. We need not discuss the methods by which that purpose is to be attained. Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or averted for a while, but if it must come—

I am most emphatically in sympathy with the movement, now on foot in Russia, to make that country free. I am certain that it will be successful, as it deserves to be. Any such movement should have and deserves our earnest and unanimous co-operation, and such a petition for funds as has been explained by Mr. Hunter, with its just and powerful meaning, should have the utmost support of each and every one of us. Anybody whose ancestors were in this country when we were trying to free ourselves from oppression, must sympathize with those who now are trying to do the same thing in Russia.

The parallel I have just drawn only goes to show that it makes no difference whether the oppression is bitter or not; men with red, warm blood in their veins will not endure it, but will seek to cast it off. If we keep our hearts in this matter Russia will be free.

Russian Sufferers

On December 18, 1905, an entertainment was given at the Casino for the benefit of the Russian sufferers. After the performance Mr. Clemens spoke.

Ladies and gentlemen, – It seems a sort of cruelty to inflict upon an audience like this our rude English tongue, after we have heard that divine speech flowing in that lucid Gallic tongue.

It has always been a marvel to me – that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is. How expressive it seems to be. How full of grace it is.

And when it comes from lips like those, how eloquent and how liquid it is. And, oh, I am always deceived – I always think I am going to understand it.

Oh, it is such a delight to me, such a delight to me, to meet Madame Bernhardt, and laugh hand to hand and heart to heart with her.

I have seen her play, as we all have, and oh, that is divine; but I have always wanted to know Madame Bernhardt herself – her fiery self. I have wanted to know that beautiful character.

Why, she is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself – for I always feel young when I come in the presence of young people.

I have a pleasant recollection of an incident so many years ago – when Madame Bernhardt came to Hartford, where I lived, and she was going to play and the tickets were three dollars, and there were two lovely women – a widow and her daughter – neighbors of ours, highly cultivated ladies they were; their tastes were fine and elevated, but they were very poor, and they said “Well, we must not spend six dollars on a pleasure of the mind, a pleasure of the intellect; we must spend it, if it must go at all, to furnish to somebody bread to eat.”

And so they sorrowed over the fact that they had to give up that great pleasure of seeing Madame Bernhardt, but there were two neighbors equally highly cultivated and who could not afford bread, and those good-hearted Joneses sent that six dollars – deprived themselves of it – and sent it to those poor Smiths to buy bread with. And those Smiths took it and bought tickets with it to see Madame Bernhardt.

Oh yes, some people have tastes and intelligence also.

Now, I was going to make a speech – I supposed I was, but I am not. It is late, late; and so I am going to tell a story; and there is this advantage about a story, anyway, that whatever moral or valuable thing you put into a speech, why, it gets diffused among those involuted sentences and possibly your audience goes away without finding out what that valuable thing was that you were trying to confer upon it; but, dear me, you put the same jewel into a story and it becomes the keystone of that story, and you are bound to get it – it flashes, it flames, it is the jewel in the toad’s head – you don’t overlook that.

Now, if I am going to talk on such a subject as, for instance, the lost opportunity – oh, the lost opportunity. Anybody in this house who has reached the turn of life – sixty, or seventy, or even fifty, or along there – when he goes back along his history, there he finds it mile-stoned all the way with the lost opportunity, and you know how pathetic that is.

You younger ones cannot know the full pathos that lies in those words – the lost opportunity; but anybody who is old, who has really lived and felt this life, he knows the pathos of the lost opportunity.

Now, I will tell you a story whose moral is that, whose lesson is that, whose lament is that.

I was in a village which is a suburb of New Bedford several years ago – well, New Bedford is a suburb of Fair Haven, or perhaps it is the other way; in any case, it took both of those towns to make a great centre of the great whaling industry of the first half of the nineteenth century, and I was up there at Fair Haven some years ago with a friend of mine.

There was a dedication of a great town-hall, a public building, and we were there in the afternoon. This great building was filled, like this great theatre, with rejoicing villagers, and my friend and I started down the centre aisle. He saw a man standing in that aisle, and he said “Now, look at that bronzed veteran – at that mahogany-faced man. Now, tell me, do you see anything about that man’s face that is emotional? Do you see anything about it that suggests that inside that man anywhere there are fires that can be started? Would you ever imagine that that is a human volcano?”

“Why, no,” I said, “I would not. He looks like a wooden Indian in front of a cigar store.”

“Very well,” said my friend, “I will show you that there is emotion even in that unpromising place. I will just go to that man and I will just mention in the most casual way an incident in his life. That man is getting along toward ninety years old. He is past eighty. I will mention an incident of fifty or sixty years ago. Now, just watch the effect, and it will be so casual that if you don’t watch you won’t know when I do say that thing – but you just watch the effect.”

He went on down there and accosted this antiquity, and made a remark or two. I could not catch up. They were so casual I could not recognize which one it was that touched that bottom, for in an instant that old man was literally in eruption and was filling the whole place with profanity of the most exquisite kind. You never heard such accomplished profanity. I never heard it also delivered with such eloquence.

I never enjoyed profanity as I enjoyed it then – more than if I had been uttering it myself. There is nothing like listening to an artist – all his passions passing away in lava, smoke, thunder, lightning, and earthquake.