Mark Twain Speaking

56. On Speech-Making Reform

190 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING -56The date and occasion ofthe speech below are conjectural. It is assigned to the Hutton dinner, March 31, 1885, chiefly on the strength of Mark Twain's statement that he kept his New Year's resolution to make no more speeches "from that day to this"--three months, a time that seems reasonable for him. On Speech-Making Reform Tile Club Dinnerfor Laurence Hutton, New York, March 31,1885 Like many another well-intentioned man, I have made too many speeches. And like other transgressors of this sort, I have from time to time reformed; binding myself, by oath, on New Year's Days, to never make another speech. I found that a new oath holds pretty well; but that when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retyings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it. So, last New Year's Day I strengthened my reform with a money penalty; and made that penalty so heavy that it has enabled me to remain pure from that day to this. Although I am falling once more now, I think I can behave myself from this out, because the penalty is going to be doubled ten days hence. I see before me and about me the familiar faces of many poor sorrowing fellow sufferers, victims of the passion for speech-making-poor sad-eyed brothers in affliction, who, fast in the grip of this fell, degrading, demoralizing vice, have grown weak with struggling, as the years drifted by, and at last have all but given up hope. To them I say, in this last final obituary of mine, don't give up-don't do it; there is still hope for you. I beseech you, swear one more oath, and back it up with cash. I do not say this to all, of course; for there are some among you who are past reform; some who, being long accustomed to success, and to the delicious intoxication of the applause which follows it, are too wedded to their dissipation to be capable now or hereafter ofabandoning it. They have thoroughly learned the deep art of speech-making, and they suffer no longer from those misgivings and embarrassments and apprehension which are really the only things which ever make a speech-maker want to reform. They have learned their art by long observation and slowly MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 191 compacted experience; so now they know, what they did not know at first, that the best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one, but the counterfeit ofit; they know that that speech is most worth listening to which has been carefully prepared in private and tried on a plaster cast, or an empty chair, or any other appreciative object that will keep quiet, until the speaker has got his matter and his delivery limbered up so that they will seem impromptu to an audience. The expert knows that. A touch of indifferent grammar flung in here and there, apparently at random, has a good effect-often restores the confidence of a suspicious audience. He arranges these errors in private; for a really random error wouldn't do any good; it would be sure to fall in the wrong place. He also leaves blanks here and there-leaves them where genuine impromptu remarks can be dropped in, of a sort that will add to the natural aspect of the speech without breaking its line of march. At the banquet, he listens to the other speakers, invents happy turns upon remarks oftheirs, and sticks these happy turns into his blanks for impromptu use by and by when he shall be called up. When this expert rises to his feet, he looks around over the house with the air of a man who has just been strongly impressed by something. The uninitiated cannot interpret his aspect, but the initiated can. They know what is coming. When the noise of the clapping and stamping has subsided, this veteran says: "Aware that the hour is late, Mr. Chairman, it was my intention to abide by a purpose which I framed in the beginning of the evening-to simply rise and return my duty and thanks, in case I should be called upon, and then make way for men more able, and who have come with something to say. But, sir, I was so struck by General Smith's remark concerning...