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.
He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd
of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude
who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. He was sailing
away from them for the last time. They hoped he would make a speech, but
that would not have been possible. To the reporters he gave a farewell
message: “It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I
am sorry the end of it has come. I have met a hundred, old friends, and
I have made a hundred new ones. It is a good kind of riches to have;
there is none better, I think.” And the London Tribune declared that
“the ship that bore him away had difficulty in getting clear, so thickly
was the water strewn with the bay-leaves of his triumph. For Mark Twain
has triumphed, and in his all-too-brief stay of a month has done more
for the cause of the world's peace than will be accomplished by the
Hague Conference. He has made the world laugh again.”
His ship was the Minnetonka, and there were some little folks aboard
to be adopted as grandchildren. On July 5th, in a fog, the Minnetonka
collided with the bark Sterling, and narrowly escaped sinking her. On
the whole, however, the homeward way was clear, and the vessel reached
New York nearly a day in advance of their schedule. Some ceremonies
of welcome had been prepared for him; but they were upset by the early
arrival, so that when he descended the gang-plank to his native soil
only a few who had received special information were there to greet him.
But perhaps he did not notice it. He seldom took account of the absence
of such things. By early afternoon, however, the papers rang with the
announcement that Mark Twain was home again.
It is a sorrow to me that I was not at the dock to welcome him. I had
been visiting in Elmira, and timed my return for the evening of the a
2d, to be on hand the following morning, when the ship was due. When
I saw the announcement that he had already arrived I called a greeting
over the telephone, and was told to come down and play billiards. I
confess I went with a certain degree of awe, for one could not but be
overwhelmed with the echoes of the great splendor he had so recently
achieved, and I prepared to sit a good way off in silence, and hear
something of the tale of this returning conqueror; but when I arrived he
was already in the billiard-room knocking the balls about--his coat off,
for it was a hot night. As I entered he said:
“Get your cue. I have been inventing a new game.” And I think there were
scarcely ten words exchanged before we were at it. The pageant was over;
the curtain was rung down. Business was resumed at the old stand.