Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 3, Part 2

A >> Albert Bigelow Paine >> Mark Twain, A Biography, Vol. 3, Part 2


Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout
"Mark Twain!"--that serves you for a deathless sign
--On Mississippi's waterway rang out
Over the plummet's line--
Still where the countless ripples laugh above
The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep
Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love
Ten thousand fathoms deep!

--O. S. [OWEN SEAMAN].

Augustine Birrell made the speech of introduction, closing with this
paragraph:

Mark Twain is a man whom Englishmen and Americans do well to honor.
He is a true consolidator of nations. His delightful humor is of
the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. His
truth and his honor--his love of truth and his love of honor
--overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his
presence, and we rejoice to see him here. Long may he live to reap
a plentiful harvest of hearty honest human affection.

The toast was drunk standing. Then Clemens rose and made a speech which
delighted all England. In his introduction Mr. Birrell had happened to
say, "How I came here I will not ask!" Clemens remembered this, and
looking down into Mr. Birrell's wine-glass, which was apparently unused,
he said:

"Mr. Birrell doesn't know how he got here. But he will be able to get
away all right--he has not drunk anything since he came."

He told stories about Howells and Twichell, and how Darwin had gone to
sleep reading his books, and then he came down to personal things and
company, and told them how, on the day of his arrival, he had been
shocked to read on a great placard, "Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup
Stolen."

No doubt many a person was misled by those sentences joined together
in that unkind way. I have no doubt my character has suffered from
it. I suppose I ought to defend my character, but how can I defend
it? I can say here and now that anybody can see by my face that I
am sincere--that I speak the truth, and that I have never seen that
Cup. I have not got the Cup, I did not have a chance to get it. I
have always had a good character in that way. I have hardly ever
stolen anything, and if I did steal anything I had discretion enough
to know about the value of it first. I do not steal things that are
likely to get myself into trouble. I do not think any of us do
that. I know we all take things--that is to be expected; but really
I have never taken anything, certainly in England, that amounts to
any great thing. I do confess that when I was here seven years ago
I stole a hat--but that did not amount to anything. It was not a
good hat it was only a clergyman's hat, anyway. I was at a
luncheon-party and Archdeacon Wilberforce was there also. I dare say
he is archdeacon now--he was a canon then--and he was serving in the
Westminster Battery, if that is the proper term. I do not know, as
you mix military and ecclesiastical things together so much.

He recounted the incident of the exchanged hats; then he spoke of graver
things. He closed:

I cannot always be cheerful, and I cannot always be chaffing. I
must sometimes lay the cap and bells aside and recognize that I am
of the human race. I have my cares and griefs, and I therefore
noticed what Mr. Birrell said--I was so glad to hear him say it
--something that was in the nature of these verses here at the top
of the program:

He lit our life with shafts of sun
And vanquished pain.
Thus two great nations stand as one
In honoring Twain.

I am very glad to have those verses. I am very glad and very grateful
for what Mr. Birrell said in that connection. I have received since I
have been here, in this one week, hundreds of letters from all conditions
of people in England, men, women, and children, and there is compliment,
praise, and, above all, and better than all, there is in them a note of
affection.

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and
final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character
or achievement, and I am very grateful to have that reward. All these
letters make me feel that here in England, as in America, when I stand
under the English or the American flag I am not a stranger, I am not an
alien, but at home.




CCLVIII

DOCTOR OF LITERATURE, OXFORD

He left, immediately following the Pilgrim luncheon, with Hon. Robert P.
Porter, of the London Times, for Oxford, to remain his guest there during
the various ceremonies. The encenia--the ceremony of conferring the
degrees--occurred at the Sheldonian Theater the following morning, June
26, 1907.

It was a memorable affair. Among those who were to receive degrees that
morning besides Samuel Clemens were: Prince Arthur of Connaught; Prime
Minister Campbell-Bannerman; Whitelaw Reid; Rudyard Kipling; Sidney Lee;
Sidney Colvin; Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland; Sir Norman
Lockyer; Auguste Rodin, the sculptor; Saint-Saens, and Gen. William
Booth, of the Salvation Army-something more than thirty, in all, of the
world's distinguished citizens.

The candidates assembled at Magdalen College, and led by Lord Curzon, the
Chancellor, and clad in their academic plumage, filed in radiant
procession to the Sheldonian Theater, a group of men such as the world
seldom sees collected together. The London Standard said of it:
So brilliant and so interesting was the list of those who had been
selected by Oxford University on Convocation to receive degrees,
'honoris causa', in this first year of Lord Curzon's chancellorship,
that it is small wonder that the Sheldonian Theater was besieged
today at an early hour.

Shortly after 11 o'clock the organ started playing the strains of
"God Save the King," and at once a great volume of sound arose as
the anthem was taken up by the undergraduates and the rest of the
assemblage. Every one stood up as, headed by the mace of office,
the procession slowly filed into the theater, under the leadership
of Lord Curzon, in all the glory of his robes of office, the long
black gown heavily embroidered with gold, the gold-tasseled mortar-
board, and the medals on his breast forming an admirable setting,
thoroughly in keeping with the dignity and bearing of the late
Viceroy of India. Following him came the members of Convocation, a
goodly number consisting of doctors of divinity, whose robes of
scarlet and black enhanced the brilliance of the scene. Robes of
salmon and scarlet-which proclaim the wearer to be a doctor of civil
law--were also seen in numbers, while here and there was a gown of
gray and scarlet, emblematic of the doctorate of science or of
letters.

The encenia is an impressive occasion; but it is not a silent one. There
is a splendid dignity about it; but there goes with it all a sort of
Greek chorus of hilarity, the time-honored prerogative of the Oxford
undergraduate, who insists on having his joke and his merriment at the
expense of those honored guests. The degrees of doctor of law were
conferred first. Prince Arthur was treated with proper dignity by the
gallery; but when Whitelaw Reid stepped forth a voice shouted, "Where's
your Star-spangled Banner?" and when England's Prime
Minister-Campbell-Bannerman--came forward some one shouted, "What about
the House of Lords?" and so they kept it up, cheering and chaffing, until
General Booth was introduced as the "Passionate advocate of the dregs of
the people, leader of the submerged tenth," and "general of the Salvation
Army," when the place broke into a perfect storm of applause, a storm
that a few minutes later became, according to the Daily News, "a
veritable cyclone," for Mark Twain, clad in his robe of scarlet and gray,
had been summoned forward to receive the highest academic honors which
the world has to give. The undergraduates went wild then. There was
such a mingling of yells and calls and questions, such as, "Have you
brought the jumping Frog with you?" "Where is the Ascot Cup?" "Where are
the rest of the Innocents?" that it seemed as if it would not be possible
to present him at all; but, finally, Chancellor Curzon addressed him (in
Latin), "Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole
world with your merriment," and the great degree was conferred. If only
Tom Sawyer could have seen him then! If only Olivia Clemens could have
sat among those who gave him welcome! But life is not like that. There
is always an incompleteness somewhere, and the shadow across the path.

Rudyard Kipling followed--another supreme favorite, who was hailed with
the chorus, "For he's a jolly good fellow," and then came Saint-Satins.
The prize poems and essays followed, and then the procession of newly
created doctors left the theater with Lord Curzon at their head. So it
was all over-that for which, as he said, he would have made the journey
to Mars. The world had nothing more to give him now except that which he
had already long possessed-its honor and its love.

The newly made doctors were to be the guests of Lord Curzon at All Souls
College for luncheon. As they left the theater (according to Sidney
Lee):

The people in the streets singled out Mark Twain, formed a vast and
cheering body-guard around him and escorted him to the college
gates. But before and after the lunch it was Mark Twain again whom
everybody seemed most of all to want to meet. The Maharajah of
Bikanir, for instance, finding himself seated at lunch next to Mrs.
Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), and hearing that she knew Mark Twain,
asked her to present him a ceremony duly performed later on the
quadrangle. At the garden-party given the same afternoon in the
beautiful grounds of St. John's, where the indefatigable Mark put
in an appearance, it was just the same--every one pressed forward
for an exchange of greetings and a hand-shake. On the following
day, when the Oxford pageant took place, it was even more so. "Mark
Twain's Pageant," it was called by one of the papers.--[There was a
dinner that evening at one of the colleges where, through mistaken
information, Clemens wore black evening dress when he should have
worn his scarlet gown. "When I arrived," he said, "the place was
just a conflagration--a kind of human prairie-fire. I looked as out
of place as a Presbyterian in hell."]

Clemens remained the guest of Robert Porter, whose house was besieged
with those desiring a glimpse of their new doctor of letters. If he went
on the streets he was instantly recognized by some newsboy or cabman or
butcher-boy, and the word ran along like a cry of fire, while the crowds
assembled.

At a luncheon which the Porters gave him the proprietor of the catering
establishment garbed himself as a waiter in order to have the distinction
of serving Mark Twain, and declared it to have been the greatest moment
of his life. This gentleman--for he was no less than that--was a man
well-read, and his tribute was not inspired by mere snobbery. Clemens,
learning of the situation, later withdrew from the drawing-room for a
talk with him.

"I found," he said, "that he knew about ten or fifteen times as much
about my books as I knew about them myself."

Mark Twain viewed the Oxford pageant from a box with Rudyard Kipling and
Lord Curzon, and as they sat there some one passed up a folded slip of
paper, on the outside of which was written, "Not true." Opening it, they
read:

East is East and West is West,
And never the Twain shall meet,

--a quotation from Kipling.

They saw the panorama of history file by, a wonderful spectacle which
made Oxford a veritable dream of the Middle Ages. The lanes and streets
and meadows were thronged with such costumes as Oxford had seen in its
long history. History was realized in a manner which no one could
appreciate more fully than Mark Twain.

"I was particularly anxious to see this pageant," he said, "so that I
could get ideas for my funeral procession, which I am planning on a large
scale."

He was not disappointed; it was a realization to him of all the gorgeous
spectacles that his soul had dreamed from youth up.

He easily recognized the great characters of history as they passed by,
and he was recognized by them in turn; for they waved to him and bowed
and sometimes called his name, and when he went down out of his box, by
and by, Henry VIII. shook hands with him, a monarch he had always
detested, though he was full of friendship for him now; and Charles I.
took off his broad, velvet-plumed hat when they met, and Henry II. and
Rosamond and Queen Elizabeth all saluted him--ghosts of the dead
centuries.




CCLIX

LONDON SOCIAL HONORS

We may not detail all the story of that English visit; even the path of
glory leads to monotony at last. We may only mention a few more of the
great honors paid to our unofficial ambassador to the world: among them a
dinner given to members of the Savage Club by the Lord Mayor of London at
the Mansion House, also a dinner given by the American Society at the
Hotel Cecil in honor of the Fourth of July. Clemens was the guest of
honor, and responded to the toast given by Ambassador Reid, "The Day we
Celebrate." He made an amusing and not altogether unserious reference to
the American habit of exploding enthusiasm in dangerous fireworks.

To English colonists he gave credit for having established American
independence, and closed:

We have, however, one Fourth of July which is absolutely our own,
and that is the memorable proclamation issued forty years ago by
that great American to whom Sir Mortimer Durand paid that just and
beautiful tribute--Abraham Lincoln: a proclamation which not only
set the black slave free, but set his white owner free also. The
owner was set free from that burden and offense, that sad condition
of things where he was in so many instances a master and owner of
slaves when he did not want to be. That proclamation set them all
free. But even in this matter England led the way, for she had set
her slaves free thirty years before, and we but followed her
example. We always follow her example, whether it is good or bad.
And it was an English judge, a century ago, that issued that other
great proclamation, and established that great principle, that when
a slave, let him belong to whom he may, and let him come whence he
may, sets his foot upon English soil his fetters, by that act, fall
away and he is a free man before the world!

It is true, then, that all our Fourths of July, and we have five of
them, England gave to us, except that one that I have mentioned--the
Emancipation Proclamation; and let us not forget that we owe this
debt to her. Let us be able to say to old England, this great-
hearted, venerable old mother of the race, you gave us our Fourths
of July, that we love and that we honor and revere; you gave us the
Declaration of Independence, which is the charter of our rights;
you, the venerable Mother of Liberties, the Champion and Protector
of Anglo-Saxon Freedom--you gave us these things, and we do most
honestly thank you for them.

It was at this dinner that he characteristically confessed, at last, to
having stolen the Ascot Cup.

He lunched one day with Bernard Shaw, and the two discussed the
philosophies in which they were mutually interested. Shaw regarded
Clemens as a sociologist before all else, and gave it out with great
frankness that America had produced just two great geniuses--Edgar Allan
Poe and Mark Twain. Later Shaw wrote him a note, in which he said:

I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works
as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts
of Voltaire. I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which a
priest says, "Telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world," a
piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me.

Clemens saw a great deal of Moberly Bell. The two lunched and dined
privately together when there was opportunity, and often met at the
public gatherings.

The bare memorandum of the week following July Fourth will convey
something of Mark Twain's London activities:

Friday, July 5. Dined with Lord and Lady Portsmouth.

Saturday, July 6. Breakfasted at Lord Avebury's. Lord Kelvin, Sir
Charles Lyell, and Sir Archibald Geikie were there. Sat 22 times
for photos, 16 at Histed's. Savage Club dinner in the evening.
White suit. Ascot Cup.

Sunday, July 7. Called on Lady Langattock and others. Lunched with
Sir Norman Lockyer.

Monday, July 8. Lunched with Plasmon directors at Bath Club. Dined
privately at C. F. Moberly Bell's.

Tuesday, July 9. Lunched at the House with Sir Benjamin Stone.
Balfour and Komura were the other guests of honor. Punch dinner in
the evening. Joy Agnew and the cartoon.

Wednesday, July 10. Went to Liverpool with Tay Pay. Attended
banquet in the Town Hall in the evening.

Thursday, July 11. Returned to London with Tay Pay. Calls in the
afternoon.

The Savage Club would inevitably want to entertain him on its own
account, and their dinner of July 6th was a handsome, affair. He felt at
home with the Savages, and put on white for the only time publicly in
England. He made them one of his reminiscent speeches, recalling his
association with them on his first visit to London, thirty-seven years
before. Then he said:

That is a long time ago, and as I had come into a very strange land,
and was with friends, as I could see, that has always remained in my
mind as a peculiarly blessed evening, since it brought me into
contact with men of my own kind and my own feelings. I am glad to
be here, and to see you all, because it is very likely that I shall
not see you again. I have been received, as you know, in the most
delightfully generous way in England ever since I came here. It
keeps me choked up all the time. Everybody is so generous, and they
do seem to give you such a hearty welcome. Nobody in the world can
appreciate it higher than I do.

The club gave him a surprise in the course of the evening. A note was
sent to him accompanied by a parcel, which, when opened, proved to
contain a gilded plaster replica of the Ascot Gold Cup. The note said:

Dere Mark, i return the Cup. You couldn't keep your mouth shut
about it. 'Tis 2 pretty 2 melt, as you want me 2; nest time I work
a pinch ile have a pard who don't make after-dinner speeches.

There was a postcript which said: "I changed the acorn atop for another
nut with my knife." The acorn was, in fact, replaced by a well-modeled
head of Mark Twain.

So, after all, the Ascot Cup would be one of the trophies which he would
bear home with him across the Atlantic.

Probably the most valued of his London honors was the dinner given to him
by the staff of Punch. Punch had already saluted him with a front-page
cartoon by Bernard Partridge, a picture in which the presiding genius of
that paper, Mr. Punch himself, presents him with a glass of the
patronymic beverage with the words, "Sir, I honor myself by drinking your
health. Long life to you--and happiness--and perpetual youth!"

Mr. Agnew, chief editor; Linley Sambourne, Francis Burnand, Henry Lucy,
and others of the staff welcomed him at the Punch offices at 10 Bouverie
Street, in the historic Punch dining-room where Thackeray had sat, and
Douglas Jerrold, and so many of the great departed. Mark Twain was the
first foreign visitor to be so honored--in fifty years the first stranger
to sit at the sacred board--a mighty distinction. In the course of the
dinner they gave him a pretty surprise, when little joy Agnew presented
him with the original drawing of Partridge's cartoon.

Nothing could have appealed to him more, and the Punch dinner, with its
associations and that dainty presentation, remained apart in his memory
from all other feastings.

Clemens had intended to return early in July, but so much was happening
that he postponed his sailing until the 13th. Before leaving America, he
had declined a dinner offered by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool.

Repeatedly urged to let Liverpool share in his visit, he had reconsidered
now, and on the day following the Punch dinner, on July 10th, they
carried him, with T. P. O'Connor (Tay Pay) in the Prince of Wales's
special coach to Liverpool, to be guest of honor at the reception and
banquet which Lord Mayor Japp tendered him at the Town Hall. Clemens was
too tired to be present while the courses were being served, but arrived
rested and fresh to respond to his toast. Perhaps because it was his
farewell speech in England, he made that night the most effective address
of his four weeks' visit--one of the most effective of his whole career:
He began by some light reference to the Ascot Cup and the Dublin Jewels
and the State Regalia, and other disappearances that had been laid to his
charge, to amuse his hearers, and spoke at greater length than usual, and
with even greater variety. Then laying all levity aside, he told them,
like the Queen of Sheba, all that was in his heart.

. . . Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own
home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest
honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life's prizes. It is
the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others,
the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift
of man or state. During my four weeks' sojourn in England I have
had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has
flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all
these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor--the
heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend
from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red
blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me
humble, too. Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from
Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a
presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop
engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was
always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to
hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur. One day a majestic
Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering
into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull
burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious
spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the
Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course
the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail,
"Ship ahoy! What ship is that? And whence and whither?" In a deep
and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking-
trumpet, "The Begum, of Bengal--142 days out from Canton--homeward
bound! What ship is that?" Well, it just crushed that poor little
creature's vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, "Only the
Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point
--with nothing to speak of!" Oh, what an eloquent word that "only,"
to express the depths of his humbleness! That is just my case.
During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and
reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your
English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble.
Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the
Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware;
but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency
rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a
stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and
laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any
wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate
days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am
the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound!

He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances, an
American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls. It took the
dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a
list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel
the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young
companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost
every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of the
poor and the rich alike. One day they visited the home of an old
bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large establishment,
earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had risen mightily,
for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment on a salary of
six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and fortune for his
old age.