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148. Introducing Dr. Henry Van Dyke
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MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 487 Governor Nye in Carson City, Nevada, began a friendly relationship that endured thereafter. Fuller was an active promotor of Mark Twain's first New York lecture at Cooper Union, May 6, 1867, providing most, if not all, of the money to stage the event. See "Utah's War Governor Talks of Many Famous Men," Times, October 1,1911; alsoMTB, 1:312-17.· 148 · The date ofthe introduction below is conjectural, and the occasion is unknown to the editor of this volume. The time was probably shortly before March 4, because ofsome similarity between the speech ofthat date and the introduction of Dr. Van Dyk£. Introducing Dr. Henry Van Dyke Late February or Early March 1906 I am here-ostensibly-to introduce to you the lecturer of the occasion, the Rev. Dr. Van Dyke, of Princeton University: not to tell you who he is, you know that already: not to praise his delicious books, they praise themselves better than any words of mine could do it for them. Then is there any real use or advantage in my being here at all? Yes; I am here to talk and put in the time while Dr. Van Dyke reflects upon what he is going to say, and whether he had better say it or not. Chance has furnished me a text-a text which offers me an opportunity to teach, an opportunity to be instructive; and if I have a passion for anything, it is for teaching. It is noble to teach oneself; it is still nobler to teach others-and less trouble. My text is a telegram from the Daily Review, an Illinois newspaper which says, "In what book of yours will we find a definition ofa gentleman?" This question has been asked me a number of times by mail in the past month or two, and I have not replied; but if it is now going to be taken up by telegraph, it is time for me to say something, and I think that this is the right time and place for it. 488 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING The source of these inquiries was an Associated Press telegram of a month or so ago, which said, in substance, that a citizen of Joplin, Missouri, who had just died, had left $10,000 to be devoted to the dissemination, among young men, of Mark Twain's idea of the true gentleman. This was a puzzle to me, for I had never in my life uttered in print a definition of that word-a word which once had a concrete meaning, but has no clear and definite meaning now, either in America or elsewhere. In England, long ago, and in America in early times the term was compact and definite, and was restricted to a certain grade of birth, and it had nothing to do with character; a gentleman could commit all the crimes and bestialities known to the Newgate Calendar, and be shunned and despised by everybody, great and small, yet he would still be unquestionably a gentleman just the same, and no one could dispute it. But in our day how would you define that loose and shackly and shadowy and colorless word?-in case you had thirty-five years to do it in. None but a very self-complacent and elaborately incompetent person would ever try to define it; and then the result wouldn't be worth the violent mental strain it had cost. The weeks drifted along, and I remained puzzled; but at last when this telegram came, I suddenly remembered! Remembered that I had once defined the word? Not at all. What I remembered was this: In the first fortnight of March, four years ago, a New York lady defined the word in a published interview. The main feature of her definition was, that no man is a gentleman who hasn't had a college education. Oh, dear me-Adam, for instance! And Arkwright-and Watt-and Stephenson -and Whitney-and Franklin-and Fulton-and Morse-and Elias Howe-and Edison-and Graham Bell-and Lincoln -and Washington-and-and me. What a project! to select and set apart a majestic and monumental class for the people's reverence and homage, then degrade it, belittle it, make it trivial, make it comical, make it grotesque, by leaving out of it the makers of history, the uplifters of man, the creators and preservers of civilization! The idea ofleavingus out! It was my privilege to laugh...