It was the night of December 17, 1877, that Mark Twain made his
unfortunate speech at the dinner given by the Atlantic staff to John G.
Whittier on his seventieth birthday. Clemens had attended a number of
the dinners which the Atlantic gave on one occasion or another, and had
provided a part of the entertainment. It is only fair to say that his
after-dinner speeches at such times had been regarded as very special
events, genuine triumphs of humor and delivery. But on this particular
occasion he determined to outdo himself, to prepare something unusual,
startling, something altogether unheard of.
When Mark Twain had an impulse like that it was possible for it to
result in something dangerous, especially in those earlier days. This
time it produced a bombshell; not just an ordinary bombshell, or even a
twelve-inch projectile, but a shell of planetary size. It was a sort
of hoax-always a doubtful plaything--and in this case it brought even
quicker and more terrible retribution than usual. It was an imaginary
presentation of three disreputable frontier tramps who at some time had
imposed themselves on a lonely miner as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes,
quoting apposite selections from their verses to the accompaniment of
cards and drink, and altogether conducting themselves in a most unsavory
fashion. At the end came the enlightenment that these were not what they
pretended to be, but only impostors--disgusting frauds. A feature like
that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The
thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which
he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow,
and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and
must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow
splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which
would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did
not show his effort to any one beforehand. He wanted its full beauty to
burst upon the entire company as a surprise.
It did that. Howells was toastmaster, and when he came to present
Clemens he took particular pains to introduce him as one of his foremost
contributors and dearest friends. Here, he said, was “a humorist who
never left you hanging you head for having enjoyed his joke.”
Thirty years later Clemens himself wrote of his impressions as he rose
to deliver his speech.
I vaguely remember some of the details of that gathering: dimly I
can see a hundred people--no, perhaps fifty--shadowy figures,
sitting at tables feeding, ghosts now to me, and nameless
forevermore. I don't know who they were, but I can very distinctly
see, seated at the grand table and facing the rest of us, Mr.
Emerson, supernaturally grave, unsmiling; Mr. Whittier, grave,
lovely, his beautiful spirit shining out of his face; Mr.
Longfellow, with his silken-white hair and his benignant face; Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, flashing smiles and affection and all good-
fellowship everywhere, like a rose-diamond whose facets are being
turned toward the light, first one way and then another--a charming
man, and always fascinating, whether he was talking or whether he
was sitting still (what he would call still, but what would be more
or less motion to other people). I can see those figures with
entire distinctness across this abyss of time.
William Winter, the poet, had just preceded him, and it seemed a moment
aptly chosen for his so-different theme. “And then,” to quote Howells,
“the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was
upon us.”
After the first two or three hundred words, when the general plan and
purpose of the burlesque had developed, when the names of Longfellow,
Emerson, and Holmes began to be flung about by those bleary outcasts,
and their verses given that sorry association, those Atlantic diners
became petrified with amazement and horror. Too late, then, the speaker
realized his mistake. He could not stop, he must go on to the ghastly
end. And somehow he did it, while “there fell a silence weighing many
tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was
broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single
guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.”
Howells can remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that
one speaker made an effort to follow him--Bishop, the novelist, and that
Bishop didn't last long.
It was not many sentences after his first before he began to
hesitate and break, and lose his grip, and totter and wobble, and at
last he slumped down in a limp and mushy pile.
The next man had not strength to rise, and somehow the company broke up.
Howells's next recollection is of being in a room of the hotel, and of
hearing Charles Dudley Warner saying in the gloom:
“Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow.”
He remembers how, after a sleepless night, Clemens went out to buy some
bric-a-brac, with a soul far from bric-a-brac, and returned to Hartford
in a writhing agony of spirit. He believed that he was ruined forever,
so far as his Boston associations were concerned; and when he confessed
all the tragedy to Mrs. Clemens it seemed to her also that the mistake
could never be wholly repaired. The fact that certain papers quoted the
speech and spoke well of it, and certain readers who had not listened
to it thought it enormously funny, gave very little comfort. But perhaps
his chief concern was the ruin which he believed he had brought upon
Howells. He put his heart into a brief letter:
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows.
I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a
list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years
old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentances.
I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country;
therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at
present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages
now. So it is my opinion, and my wife's, that the telephone story
had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises
to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?
It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and
saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced
so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in
introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it.
The whole matter is a dreadful subject. Let me drop it here--at
least on paper.