Mark Twain Speaking

15. Savage Club

MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 15· 69 Mark Twain made hisfirst trip to England in August 1872, going over to keep Roughing It out ofthe hands ofBritish pirates likeJohn Camden H otten, and also to take notesfor a book on Britain, which he never wrote. He was received with lavish hospitality. Called the Belle of London, he was guest of honor at dinners ofthe Savage Club, Whitefriars Club, the Sheriffs ofLondon, and the Lord Mayor, as well as at convivial gatherings in country homes and London town houses. He met men eminent in the arts and professions: Tom Hood, Robert Browning, Charles Reade, Henry Irving, Alexander Kinglake, Charles Kingsley, Henry M. Stanley, Stopford Brooke, Richard Monkton Milnes, and others. It was a heady experience for Mark Twain. He had received no such flattering attention back home, where conservative opinion regarded him as a wild westerner oferratic talent, a literary upstart not worthy ofmention in the same breath as the Brahmins ofNew England. At the Savage Club dinner he was greeted with a roar of cheers. Moncure D. Conway, reporting the event, described him as "tall, thin, grave, with something ofthe look ofayoung divinity studentfallen among worldlings." Dinner Speech Savage Club, London, ca. September 22,1872 Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, it affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club, a club which has extended its hospitalities and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen. I hope you will excuse these clothes. I am going to the theater; that will explain these clothes. I have other clothes than these. Judging human nature by what I have seen of it, I suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club, under the impression, of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature-not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows, and you know, we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle innocuous little thing about 70 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING "Twain" and "one flesh," and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush that man into the earth-no. I feel like saying: "Let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you: I have not heard that pun for weeks." We will deal in palpable puns. We will call parties named "King" Your Majesty, and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere. Such is human nature. We cannot alter this. It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose. Let us not repine. But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it-a week. I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours. Its wonders seem to me to be limitless. I go about as in a dream-as in a realm of enchantment -where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvelous. Hour after hour I stand-I stand spellbound, as it were-and gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square. I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII, and Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most. I go to that matchless Hyde Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble Arch-and-am induced to "change my mind." It is a great benefaction -is Hyde Park. There, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go-the poor, sad child of misfortune-and insert his nose between the railings , and breathe the pure health-giving air of the country and of heaven. And if he is a swell invalid, who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air, he can drive inside-if he owns his vehicle. I drive round and round Hyde Park, and the more I see of the edges of it the...