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, I thought it was. My friend said,
“I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.”
I naturally said, “What do you mean? Where did you ever see it
before?” “Well, I saw it first, some years ago, as Dr. Holmes's
dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.” Of course my first impulse
was to prepare this man's remains for burial, but upon reflection I
said I would reprieve him for a moment or two, and give him a chance
to prove his assertion if he could. We stepped into a book-store.
and he did prove it. I had stolen that dedication almost word for
word. I could not imagine how this curious thing happened; for I
knew one thing, for a dead certainty—that a certain amount of pride
always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride
protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas.
That is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a man, and admirers
had often told me I had nearly a basketful, though they were rather
reserved as to the size of the basket. However, I thought the thing
out and solved the mystery. Some years before I had been laid up a
couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, and had read and reread Dr.
Holmes's poems till my mental reservoir was filled with them to the
brim. The dedication lay on top and handy, so by and by I
unconsciously took it. Well, of course, I wrote to Dr. Holmes and
told him I hadn't meant to steal, and he wrote back and said, in the
kindest way, that it was all right, and no harm done, and added that
he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in
reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves.
He stated a truth and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over
my sore spot so gently and so healingly, that I was rather glad I
had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward
called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of
mine that struck him as good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by
that time that there wasn't anything mean about me; so we got along,
right from the start.—[Holmes in his letter had said: “I rather
think The Innocents Abroad will have many more readers than Songs in
Many Keys... You will be stolen from a great deal oftener than
you will borrow from other people.”]
I have met Dr. Holmes many times since; and lately he said—However,
I am wandering wildly away from the one thing which I got on my feet
to do; that is, to make my compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of
the great public, and likewise to say I am right glad to see that
Dr. Holmes is still in his prime and full of generous life, and as
age is not determined by years but by trouble, and by infirmities of
mind and body, I hope it may be a very long time yet before any can
truthfully say, “He is growing old.”
Whatever Mark Twain may have lost on that former occasion, came back to him multiplied when he had finished this happy tribute. So the year for him closed prosperously. The rainbow of promise was justified.
CXXV. THE QUIETER THINGS OF HOME
Upset and disturbed as Mark Twain often was, he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside. His days and his nights might be fevered, but the evenings belonged to another world. The long European wandering left him more than ever enamoured of his home; to him it had never been so sweet before, so beautiful, so full of peace. Company came: distinguished guests and the old neighborhood circles. Dinner-parties were more frequent than ever, and they were likely to be brilliant affairs. The best minds, the brightest wits, gathered around Mark Twain's table. Booth, Barrett, Irving, Sheridan, Sherman, Howells, Aldrich: they all assembled, and many more. There was always some one on the way to Boston or New York who addressed himself for the day or the night, or for a brief call, to the Mark Twain fireside.
Certain visitors from foreign lands were surprised at his environment, possibly expecting to find him among less substantial, more bohemian surroundings. Henry Drummond, the author of Natural Law in the Spiritual World, in a letter of this time, said:
I had a delightful day at Hartford last Wednesday.... Called
on Mark Twain, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the widow of Horace
Bushnell. I was wishing A——had been at the Mark Twain interview.
He is funnier than any of his books, and to my surprise a most
respected citizen, devoted to things esthetic, and the friend of the
poor and struggling.—[Life of Henry Drummond, by George Adam
Smith.]
The quieter evenings were no less delightful. Clemens did not often go out. He loved his own home best. The children were old enough now to take part in a form of entertainment that gave him and them especial pleasure-acting charades. These he invented for them, and costumed the little performers, and joined in the acting as enthusiastically and as unrestrainedly as if he were back in that frolicsome boyhood on John Quarles's farm. The Warner and Twichell children were often there and took part in the gay amusements. The children of that neighborhood played their impromptu parts well and naturally. They were in a dramatic atmosphere, and had been from infancy. There was never any preparation for the charades. A word was selected and the parts of it were whispered to the little actors. Then they withdrew to the hall, where all sorts of costumes had been laid out for the evening, dressed their parts, and each detachment marched into the library, performed its syllable and retired, leaving the audience, mainly composed of parents, to guess the answer. Often they invented their own words, did their own costuming, and conducted the entire performance independent of grown-up assistance or interference. Now and then, even at this early period, they conceived and produced little plays, and of course their father could not resist joining in these. At other times, evenings, after dinner, he would sit at the piano and recall the old darky songs-spirituals and jubilee choruses-singing them with fine spirit, if not with perfect technic, the children joining in these moving melodies.
He loved to read aloud to them. It was his habit to read his manuscript to Mrs. Clemens, and, now that the children were older, he was likely to include them in his critical audience.