The Russian Count’sⒶtextual note luncheon at the St. Regis and his political speech in response to Mr. Clemens’s speech in behalf of the ladies present.
It was my intention to continue and complete the list of important-unimportant happenings which have fallen to my share lately, and no longer ago than yesterday afternoon there was a basketful of them in my head, but to my astonishment they are all gone this morning, and the basket is empty. I am sorry, for as far as I had proceeded in recording them they were a revelation to me of what a diary is, and of necessity must be: fine and precious gold to-day, ashes, and valueless, to-morrowⒶtextual note. Never mind—let it go.
[begin page 18] Yesterday I went to the plutocratic St. Regis Hotel to lunch with the Russian Count who dined with us a week agoⒺexplanatory note. There were about thirty ladies and gentlemen present, all prominent people and all useful people; people not only distinguished for high place in society, but also for achievement—the women as well as the men. I knew nearly all of them, and the time passed very pleasantly. Toward the end of the function the Count did a rather startling thing; he sent a member of the Russian EmbassyⒶtextual note to me to ask me to get up and make a speech. It was a startling proposition only because it came from the giver of the feast. Properly there could be but one text for a speech on such an occasion, and that text would be the host himself, and the speech an irruption of compliments to that person. By the custom of our country, some conspicuous guest does always use that text, and produce that kind of a speech, but he either does this of his own motion or at the suggestion of another guest; the suggestion never comes from the host.
Some occult instinct seemed to inform me that I was in an embarrassing position, and so I thought it best to secure a moment or two in which to collect my judgment and determine what to do. Then the saving idea came to the rescue, and I went to the Count and said I was gratified by the honor which he had done me, but that it would not be quite properly deferential in me to take precedence of Mr. John Bigelow in so important a matter, I never having served a public office of any kind in my life, whereas Mr. Bigelow had represented the United States in ambassadorial capacities at foreign courts with high and memorable distinction; and I also observed that his age gave him another right of precedence over me, he being past ninetyⒺexplanatory note, and I only seventy-one—and so, for these various reasons, I ought to follow Mr. Bigelow, not precede him. I offered to go and say these things to Mr. Bigelow, and invite him, in the Count’s name, to speak. The Count thanked me, and I went to Mr. Bigelow with my mission. I can’t help admiring my smartness. It makes me proud every time I think of it—not because I was any smarter than usual, for I wasn’t; I am always smart. Let other people think as they may, I privately know that I am always smart, and as a rule considerably smarter than anybody else—but with this defect: that my smartness heretofore has always arrived a matter of twenty-four hours too late, when it couldn’t do any good, nor attract any attention, nor furnish me any self-admirationⒶtextual note; but this time I was smart right on the spot, and I couldn’t have been smarter if I had had a week to arrange the smartness in. I delivered the message to Mr. Bigelow, and his reply almost snuffed out my admiration of my own smartness, because of the suddenness of his responding smartness and the deep and wise and superiorⒶtextual note character of it. His training as a diplomat showed out very conspicuously. Through my inexperience I had been caught unprepared, and had been stunned, and had been obliged to procrastinate and gain time in which to find out what I would better do; but his trained and educated sagacityⒶtextual note had qualified him to be ready on the moment to meet any exigency, and he was ready this time. He reminded me that this Russian Count and Major GeneralⒶtextual note must naturally be on the imperial side in Russia’s present great quarrel with the people of Russia; that I was publicly known to be on the side of the revolutionistsⒺexplanatory note, where all right feeling Americans ought to be; that the imperialists and the revolutionists [begin page 19] were laboring hard, both for the same object—to win the sympathies of the American people. He said,
“It is possible that if you and I should speak the Count would use the opportunity to introduce Russian politics into his reply; then if his speech should get into print, it could make you and me seem to be in sympathy with the Czar’s side of the questionⒺexplanatory note, and certainly neither of us would enjoy that. I am not saying that the Count would Ⓐtextual note do this; I am only saying it is a possibility; but no matter, a possibility is enough; the barest possibility is argument enough and reason enough for you and meⒶtextual note to keep silent—but particularly meⒶtextual note. I have no text; I cannot speak without one. It is different with you; you are at your best when you haven’t a text and when you don’t know anything about the subject you are instructing your audience upon. I give you leave to speak, but you mustn’t by any accident make an opening for any political remarks in return. You may praise the Count himself, if you want to, but you are not to say anything about the Czar or the revolution—not even a word.”
I went back to my place and reported results to the ladies in my neighborhood. They said it was quite too bad to leave the matter so; somebody ought to get up and say a pleasant thing about this sumptuous luncheon and pay the Count a handsome compliment or two, and that I ought to do it, and must do it. I said I had no text; that I could not do this complimenting on my own motion; it would be as difficult as it would be for me to get up and compliment myself—in fact more difficult, twice as difficult. They said, “ButⒶtextual note couldn’t you make the speech and the compliment in our behalf—in behalf of the ladies?”Ⓐtextual note I said, “CertainlyⒶtextual note, I can do that; that will be simple and easy, and I can do it with very real pleasure.”Ⓐtextual note
So I got up and made the speech. Of course it hadn’t a reference in it to the Czar, or to Russia, or to the Duma, or to the revolution, or to the daily slaughter of the helpless Jews that that infamous Government has been carrying on daily for two yearsⒺexplanatory note. It confined itself strictly to the ladies, and their thanks.
Then straightway the wisdom of that old diplomat was confirmed: theⒶtextual note Count got up and made a political speech!Ⓐtextual note It was ludicrously out of harmony with the light stuff which I had been delivering there. It was odd enough to hear a man respond to a batch of gilded and lightsome personal compliments with a flowing stream of memorized adulations of the Russian EmperorⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note, and his great and good and divine nature and noble and beneficent intentions. Certainly a memorized speech can be a grotesque thing when you can’t know what sort of a speech it is destined to respond to. A practisedⒶtextual note talker like ChoateⒺexplanatory note would make a memorized speech look convincingly as if every word of it had been suggested by some remark in the speechⒶtextual note which preceded it. Choate would have found a word somewhere in my speech—even if he had to invent that word himself and insertⒶtextual note it—that would have made the Count’s speech look quite satisfactorily impromptu, but the Count lacked that art. Without a single preliminary word, and without a single reference to what I had been saying, he jumped right into his memorized adulations, and I think it was the funniest incident of the kind I have ever seen in an after-dinner experience of forty years.
[begin page 20]Mr. Clemens walks home from the St. Regis luncheon; on the way he thinks about the Christian Union article and wishes he had a copy of it; at 42d street a stranger puts the clippings concerning that article into his hand, saying he was just going to mail them to him.
SomeⒶtextual note months ago I commented upon a chapter of Susy’s Biography wherein she very elaborately discussed an article about the training and disciplining of children, which I had published in the Christian Union, Ⓐtextual note (this was twenty-one years ago), an article which was full of worshipful praises of Mrs. Clemens as a mother, and which little Clara, and Susy, and I had been hiding from this lovely and admirable mother because we knew she would disapprove of public and printed praises of herself.Ⓐtextual note At the time that I was dictating thoseⒶtextual note comments, several months ago, I was trying to call back to my memory some of the details of that article, but I was not able to do it, and I wished I had a copy of the article so that I could see what there was about it which gave it such large interest for SusyⒺexplanatory note.
Yesterday afternoon I elected to walk home from the luncheon at the St. Regis, which is in 55th streetⒶtextual note and Fifth Avenue, for it was a fine spring day and I hadn’t had a walk for a year or two, and felt the need of exercise. As I walked along down Fifth Avenue the desire to see that Christian Union Ⓐtextual note article came into my head again. I had just reached the corner of 42d streetⒶtextual note then, and there was the usual jam of wagons, carriages, and automobiles there. I stopped to let it thin out before trying to cross the street, but a stranger, who didn’t require as much room as I do, came racing by and darted into a crack among the vehicles and made the crossing. But on his way past meⒶtextual note he thrust a couple of ancient newspaper clippings into my hand, and said,
“There, you don’t know me, but I have saved them in my scrap-book for twenty years, and it occurred to me this morning that perhaps you would like to see them, so I was carrying them down town to mail them, I not expecting to run across you in this accidental way, of course; but I will give them into your own hands now. Good-byeⒶtextual note”—and he disappeared among the wagons.
Those scraps which he had put into my hand were ancient newspaper copies of that Christian Union Ⓐtextual note article!Ⓐtextual note It is a handsome instance of mental telegraphy—or if it isn’t that, it is a handsome case of coincidence.
Yesterday I went to the plutocratic St. Regis Hotel . . . dined with us a week ago] The luncheon was hosted by Count Tcherep-Spiridovitch (1858–1926), who sent Clemens a printed invitation (in the original Mark Twain Papers). The count dined at Clemens’s house on 22 March. The two men had probably first met ten days earlier, when on 12 March they shared a box at a benefit performance by Ethel Barrymore in Carrots at the Hudson Theatre (Lyon 1907, entries for 12 and 22 Mar; see also AD, 26 Mar 1907, note at 14.38–39). Tcherep-Spiridovitch, a major general in the Russian Army (although no longer in active service), owned several sugar factories as well as a commercial fleet on the Volga River, and was a major shareholder in many oil and mining companies. He was touring America in his capacity as president of the Pan-Slavic League, which advocated the unification of all Slavic peoples. In September 1907, after his return to Russia, he wrote to Clemens, “Am sending You my heartiest remembrances from old Moscow, which by its warm hospitality, reminds me of ever dear America.” He sent his “compliments” to Miss Lyon—despite her failure to send a promised photograph of Clemens (2 Sept 1907, CU-MARK). By 1920, when he emigrated to the United States, Tcherep-Spiridovitch was an ardent anti-Bolshevik and antisemite. In 1926 he published The Secret World Government, a political screed that denounced the Jews as “heirs of Satan” and warned that “the White Race is facing a most terrific World Revolution staged by the Judeo-Mongol Hidden Hand which may put an end to civilization based on Christianity” (Cherep-Spiridovitch 1926, 24, 41; Russia Culture 2012; “Russian Cup for Roosevelt,” New York Times, 18 Jan 1907, 8; “Count Cherep-Spiridovich, Russian Anti-Semite Agitator, Found Dead in Room,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, 25 Oct 1926, 2).
Mr. John Bigelow . . . he being past ninety] Bigelow (1817–1911), aged eighty-nine at the time of the luncheon, had a distinguished career as a diplomat and author. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1838, and from 1848 to 1861 was coeditor and part owner of the New York Evening Post. Appointed consul general at Paris in 1861, he later served as minister to France (1865–67). He had a large role in establishing the New York Public Library, and served as president of its board of trustees from 1895 until his death. His published works included numerous histories and biographies, as well as ten volumes of the complete writings of Benjamin Franklin.
I was publicly known to be on the side of the revolutionists] Clemens had publicly advocated assassination of the Romanoff house in “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” published in the North American Review in March 1905 (SLC 1905a). In April 1906 he sent a letter to be read by Maxim Gorky at a meeting in New York, in which he said his sympathies were “with the Russian revolution, of course” and that he hoped the tsar and the grand dukes would soon be as scarce in Russia “as I trust they are in heaven” (“Arms to Free Russia, Tchaykoffsky’s Appeal,” New York Times, 30 Mar 1906, 9, in AutoMT1 , 463–64). In a subsequent interview he identified himself as “a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute” (“Gorky Sent from Hotel,” New York Tribune, 15 Apr 1906, 2, reprinted in Scharnhorst 2006, 542–43). That same month a newspaper cartoon depicted him upsetting the tsar’s throne (“A Yankee in Czar Nicholas’s Court,” New York World, 13 Apr 1906, 8; Schmidt 2014).
it could make you and me seem to be in sympathy with the Czar’s side of the question] Clemens’s mere presence at the luncheon sparked the kind of criticism Bigelow feared. The New York Worker, a Socialist Party newspaper, printed the following article on 27 April 1907 (4):
What has come over Mark Twain, the fearless, outspoken, stimulating Mark Twain, the Mark Twain whom we had come to look upon as free from the cant that characterizes so many “popular” writers? What does he mean by attending a banquet given by General Spiridovitch and there sit, silent and apparently unashamed, as that supporter of the Russian autocracy emits fulsome eulogy of the Tsar and all his detestable court, the same Tsar whom Mark Twain so bitterly satirized a few years ago? Are we to reckon Mark as among the lost from now on? Last year he snubbed Maxim Gorky, when the newspapers opened their mud batteries on that splendid genius. Now he sits at the feet of the Tsar himself and pays homage to a coarse and blatant toady of the infamous regime at St. Petersburg. The cause of progress has not suffered from this so much as Mark Twain himself has lost by it.
Gorky caused a scandal when he visited the United States in April 1906 accompanied by a woman who was not his wife. Clemens had initially agreed to speak at a dinner to raise funds for the Russian revolution, but he and Howells (and others) withdrew their support when Gorky’s offense was revealed (see Budd 1959).
I got up and made the speech . . . Government has been carrying on daily for two years] A single report of Clemens’s speech has been found, in the New York Times, stating only that he “paid some compliments” to the count (“Count Spiridovitch Gives a Luncheon,” 28 Mar 1907, 9). For the slaughter of Jews in Russia see the Autobiographical Dictation of 22 June 1906 ( AutoMT2 , 132–33, 524 nn. 132.35–133.3, 133.11–12).
the Count got up and made a political speech . . . adulations of the Russian Emperor] The New York Times reported four paragraphs of the count’s speech—presumably an excerpt:
“I thank you for your sympathetic interest, which I attribute to my having come from Russia, that old and sincerest friend of the United States.
“While I, as a soldier, would willingly die for the Czar, the liberal-minded and brave Emperor prefers that every one of his people should live for the progress of not only Russia, but the whole human race. He has already immortalized himself in history first by declaring against wars in the world outside and bringing about the creation of The Hague conference, and in the second place by granting to his people a Constitution regardless of dangers and obstacles.
“The Constitution has been definitely introduced, but necessarily half a thousand politically trained men to work in the Parliament cannot be produced in a day. We must wait a generation. Andrew Carnegie, one of your best men, has already materialized the idea of the Czar by building a Temple of Peace in The Hague.
“The Russian people remember that the American Nation is formed from the cream of the best European peoples, and Russia is infinitely more proud of every expression of American sympathy than of all other expressions.” (“Count Spiridovitch Gives a Luncheon,” 28 Mar 1907, 9)
For the International Peace Conference at The Hague and Carnegie’s Palace of Peace, see the Autobiographical Dictation of 8 April 1907, note at 22.6–16, and AutoMT2 , 172, 541 n. 172.26–34.
Source documents.
TS1 ribbon (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 1931–33 (1924–30 are missing), made from Hobby’s notes and revised.TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1924–33, revised.
NAR 18pf (lost) Galley proofs of NAR 18, typeset from the revised TS1 ribbon; now lost.
NAR 18 North American Review 185 (17 May 1907), 118–19: ‘Some months . . . of coincidence.’ (20.5–31).
This dictation consists of two parts, each introduced by the dateline of 28 March and a summary paragraph. It is not known if the two parts were actually dictated on that same day: according to notes typed by Hobby, the first part (through ‘forty years.’ [19.42]) took ninety minutes to dictate, while the second was created in only thirty minutes. TS1 carbon is complete, but the ribbon copy of the first part (pages 1924–30) is now lost. For the first part, TS1 carbon was revised, but it was not used in NAR. For the second part, TS1 ribbon and TS1 carbon are revised in three (identical) places. Clemens altered TS1 ribbon for use in NAR by deleting the summary paragraph. On the last leaf he wrote ‘Run to 1541’—that is, to a page of typescript from AD, 21 Dec 1906. The leaves of the two ADs were combined and renumbered to create printer’s copy for an NAR installment. (See the Textual Commentary of the December 1906 dictation for further discussion of the NAR installment that Clemens originally created, which eventually ran over two numbers, NAR 18 and NAR 19, and included texts from three additional ADs.) NAR editor David Munro added several styling revisions of his own to the printer’s copy, and this dictation was published in NAR 18, sandwiched between two excerpts from AD, 21 Dec 1906. There is no indication that Clemens read the galley proofs of NAR 18, and the minor variants in NAR 18 have been rejected as nonauthorial.