CXXIV

ANOTHER “ATLANTIC” SPEECH

The December good-fortune was an opportunity Clemens had to redeem himself with the Atlantic contingent, at a breakfast given to Dr. Holmes.

Howells had written concerning it as early as October, and the first impulse had been to decline.  It would be something of an ordeal; for though two years had passed since the fatal Whittier dinner, Clemens had not been in that company since, and the lapse of time did not signify.  Both Howells and Warner urged him to accept, and he agreed to do so on condition that he be allowed to speak.

If anybody talks there I shall claim the right to say a word myself, and be heard among the very earliest, else it would be confoundedly awkward for me—­and for the rest, too.  But you may read what I say beforehand, and strike out whatever you choose.

Howells advised against any sort of explanation.  Clemens accepted this as wise counsel, and prepared an address relevant only to the guest of honor.

It was a noble gathering.  Most of the guests of the Whittier dinner were present, and this time there were ladies.  Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier were there, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe; also the knightly Colonel Waring, and Stedman, and Parkman, and grand old John Bigelow, old even then.—­[He died in 1911 in his 94th year.]

Howells was conservative in his introduction this time.  It was better taste to be so.  He said simply: 

“We will now listen to a few words of truth and soberness from Mark Twain.”

Clemens is said to have risen diffidently, but that was his natural manner.  It probably did not indicate anything of the inner tumult he really felt.

Outwardly he was calm enough, and what he said was delicate and beautiful, the kind of thing that he could say so well.  It seems fitting that it should be included here, the more so that it tells a story not elsewhere recorded.  This is the speech in full: 

Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen,—­I would have traveled a much greater distance than I have come to witness the paying of honors to Dr. Holmes, for my feeling toward him has always been one of peculiar warmth.  When one receives a letter from a great man for the first time in his life it is a large event to him, as all of you know by your own experience.  You never can receive letters enough from famous men afterward to obliterate that one or dim the memory of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it gave you.  Lapse of time cannot make it commonplace or cheap.  Well, the first great man who ever wrote me a letter was our guest, Oliver Wendell Holmes.  He was also the first great literary man I ever stole anything from, and that is how I came to write to him and he to me.  When my first book was new a friend of mine said, “The dedication is very neat.”  Yes, I said,