I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.  I don’t know anything that mars good literature so completely as too much truth.  Facts contain a deal of poetry, but you can’t use too many of them without damaging your literature.  I love all literature, and as long as I am a doctor of literature—­I have suggested to you for twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature, and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor everybody else’s.

Now I think I ought to apologize for my clothes.  At home I venture things that I am not permitted by my family to venture in foreign parts.  I was instructed before I left home and ordered to refrain from white clothes in England.  I meant to keep that command fair and clean, and I would have done it if I had been in the habit of obeying instructions, but I can’t invent a new process in life right away.  I have not had white clothes on since I crossed the ocean until now.

In these three or four weeks I have grown so tired of gray and black that you have earned my gratitude in permitting me to come as I have.  I wear white clothes in the depth of winter in my home, but I don’t go out in the streets in them.  I don’t go out to attract too much attention.  I like to attract some, and always I would like to be dressed so that I may be more conspicuous than anybody else.

If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow.  I so enjoy gay clothes in which women clothe themselves that it always grieves me when I go to the opera to see that, while women look like a flower-bed, the men are a few gray stumps among them in their black evening dress.  These are two or three reasons why I wish to wear white clothes:  When I find myself in assemblies like this, with everybody in black clothes, I know I possess something that is superior to everybody else’s.  Clothes are never clean.  You don’t know whether they are clean or not, because you can’t see.

Here or anywhere you must scour your head every two or three days or it is full of grit.  Your clothes must collect just as much dirt as your hair.  If you wear white clothes you are clean, and your cleaning bill gets so heavy that you have to take care.  I am proud to say that I can wear a white suit of clothes without a blemish for three days.  If you need any further instruction in the matter of clothes I shall be glad to give it to you.  I hope I have convinced some of you that it is just as well to wear white clothes as any other kind.  I do not want to boast.  I only want to make you understand that you are not clean.