Carnegie continued—He gives two additional millions to Carnegie Institute—Everybody likes attentions—Prince of Wales once showed Mr. Clemens a match-box and told him it was presented to him by King of Spain.
The Carnegie InstituteⒺexplanatory note will be Carnegie’s best monument. While he was performing at the engineers’ banquet on the 9th, he was once more his very self as heretofore described by me—his very self in that he was eagerly and delightedly advertising an inconsequential attention which had been paid him, and at the same time overlooking, forgetting, holding of small consequence and leaving unmentioned, a very handsome and public-spirited act of his which almost any other man, in his place, would have found [begin page 194] some means to bring to the notice of those banqueteers. But Andrew was Andrew—to give away millions upon millions to splendid causes cannot excite him, cannot accelerate the pulse of his vanity by so much as three beats per minute; his great achievements are nothing to him, the only events in his career that are really important in his eyes, and memorable and caressable, are the attentions shown him by his fellowmen. I clip the following telegram from the newspaperⒺexplanatory note:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10.—Andrew Carnegie has added $2,000,000 to the $10,000,000 endowment fund of the Carnegie Institute. The announcement was made at a dinner given to-night by the Board of Trustees at the New Willard.
Mr. Carnegie was unable to attend, and sent this letter from his home in New York to President R. S. WoodwardⒺexplanatory note:
“Dear Sir—I have watched the progress of the institution under your charge, and am delighted to tell you that it has been such as to lead me to add two millions of dollars more to its endowment. It has borne good fruit, and the trustees are to be highly congratulated. In their hands and yours I am perfectly satisfied it is going to realize not only our expectations but our fondest hopes, and I take this opportunity to thank one and all who have so zealously labored from its inception.”
The dinner followed a business meeting of the trustees. For scientific research next year, $529,940 was allotted. The trustees decided to erect an administration building at Sixteenth and P streets, Northwest, to take the place of the present rented quarters.
We all like attentions. Mr. Carnegie is not any fonder of them than are the rest of us; he differs from the rest of us only in this: that while we try to advertise our accumulation of attentions while not seeming to be advertising them, he spreads his attentions on a thirty-foot hoarding with a long-handled brush, so to speak. No, I am all wrong; that is not the difference. The real difference is that Andrew’s art in advertising his attentions while pretending that he is mentioning them for quite other reasons, is less delicate than ours, less subtly surreptitious. Even the purple is human—even the purple is pleased with small attentions under certain conditions. For instance, seventeenⒶtextual note years ago, in Germany, I was one of the guests at a small dinner party of six men and two women, and I sat at the left of that excellent and very human man who was then Prince of Wales and is now KingⒶtextual note and EmperorⒶtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note. He had a small silver match-box, and he kept picking it up and handling it in a preoccupied way and then laying it down again. Gradually the impression was built up in my mind that he wanted to say something about that box and didn’t know how to get at it. The impression was correct. Eventually he passed the box to me to look at, and mentioned with the artful casualness which we are all so well acquainted with in our own persons, that it was given to him by the King of Spain. It was a startling and light-throwing incident. It seemed almost unthinkable that the heir to the colossal British Empire could prize an attentionⒶtextual note from any human being in this earth, but it was so; that seventh-rate KingⒶtextual note was still a KingⒶtextual note and ranked the PrinceⒶtextual note; therefore the PrinceⒶtextual note prized an attention from that source.
I have several times said that I could live upon compliments alone, if I could get no [begin page 195] other sustenance, and I think that in this I do not differ from the rest of the race, even the members of it that wear the purple.
Carnegie Institute] The Carnegie Institution in Washington, founded in 1902 with a gift of $10 million, supported research in all the sciences (“Carnegie Institution,” Washington Post, 5 Jan 1902, 5).
following telegram from the newspaper] The article appeared in the New York World on 11 December 1907.
R. S. Woodward] Robert Simpson Woodward (1849–1924), a mathematical physicist, was president of the Carnegie Institution from 1905 to 1920 (“Dr. R. S. Woodward, Carnegie Scientist, Dies at Age of 75,” Washington Post, 30 June 1924, 10).
seventeen years ago, in Germany, I was one of the guests . . . Prince of Wales and is now King and Emperor] The dinner took place at Bad Homburg on 25 August 1892, four days after Clemens was introduced to the prince (see AutoMT2 , 181, 546 n. 181.31–36). He described the occasion in his notebook: “Dined at the Kursaal with Sir Charles Hall, to meet the Prince of Wales. 7 present. Sat at the Prince’s left. [Chauncey] Depew at his right. . . . Much talk, many yarns, everything sociable, pleasant, no formality. Two hours delightfully spent” (Notebook 32, TS p. 22, TxU-Hu). Sir Charles Hall (1843–1900) was a judge and Conservative politician who was close to the royal family.
Source document.
World Facsimile of the New York World (the original clipping that Hobby transcribed is now lost), “Carnegie Gives $2,000,000 More to the Institute,” 11 December 1907, 5: ‘WASHINGTON . . . rented quarters.’ (194.7–21).TS1 Typescript, leaves numbered 2419–22, made from Hobby’s notes and World and revised.
TS1, as revised by Clemens, is the only authoritative source for the dictated portion of this text. For the article from the New York World we follow the original newspaper, and Hobby’s accidental variations from copy are not reported. Clemens omitted the headline, and a final sentence about the election of trustees, from the excerpt.