The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain (good book recommendations .TXT) 📕

one or another of those previous speakers will furnish all the texts needed. In fact, you are likely to have more texts than you do need, and so they can become an embarrassment. You would like to talk to all of those texts, and of course that is a dangerous thing. You should choose one of them and talk to that one⁠—and it is a hundred to one that before you have been on your feet two minutes you will wish you had taken the other one. You will get away from the one you have chosen, because you will perceive that there was another one that was better.

I am reminded of this old, old fact in my experience by what happened the other night at the Players’, where twenty-two of my friends of ancient days in the Players’ Club gave me a dinner20 in testimony of their satisfaction in having me back again after an absence of three years, occasioned by the stupidity of the board of management of that club⁠—a board which had been in office ever since the founding of the club; and if it were not the same old board that they had in the beginning it amounted to the same, because they must have been chosen, from time to time, from the same asylum that had furnished the original board. On this occasion Brander Matthews was chairman, and he opened the proceedings with an easy and comfortable and felicitous speech. Brander is always prepared and competent when he is going to make a speech. Then he called up Gilder, who came empty, and probably supposed he was going to be able to fill from Brander’s tank, whereas he struck a disappointment. He labored through and sat down, not entirely defeated, but a good deal crippled. Frank Millet (painter) was next called up. He struggled along through his remarks, exhibiting two things⁠—one, that he had prepared and couldn’t remember the details of his preparation, and the other that his text was a poor text. In his talk the main sign of preparation was that he tried to recite two considerable batches of poetry⁠—good poetry⁠—but he lost confidence and turned it into bad poetry by bad recitation. Sculpture was to have been represented, and Saint-Gaudens had accepted and had promised a speech, but at the last moment he was not able to come and a man who was thoroughly unprepared had to get up and make a speech in Saint-Gaudens’s place. He did not hit upon anything original or disturbing in his remarks, and, in fact, they were so tottering and hesitating and altogether commonplace that really he seemed to have hit upon something new and fresh when he finished by saying that he had not been expecting to be called upon to make a speech! I could have finished his speech for him, I had heard it so many times.

Those people were unfortunate because they were thinking⁠—that is Millet and Gilder were⁠—all the time that Matthews was speaking; they were trying to keep in mind the little preparations which they had made, and this prevented them from getting something new and fresh in the way of a text out of what Brander was saying. In the same way Millet was still thinking about his preparation while Gilder was talking, and so he overlooked possible texts furnished by Gilder. But as I had asked Matthews to put me last on the list of speakers, I had all the advantages possible to the occasion. For I came without a text, and these boys furnished plenty of texts for me, because my mind was not absorbed in trying to remember my preparations⁠—they didn’t exist. I spoiled, in a degree, Brander’s speech, because his speech had been prepared with direct reference to introducing me, the guest of the occasion⁠—and he had to turn that all around and get out of it, which he did very gracefully, explaining that his speech was a little lopsided and wrong end first because I had asked to be placed last in the list of speakers. I had a plenty good-enough time, because Gilder had furnished me a text; Brander had furnished me a text; Millet had furnished me a text. These texts were fresh, hot from the bat, and they produced the same eager disposition to take hold of them and talk that they would have produced in ordinary conversation around a table in a beer mill.

Now then, I know how banquet speeches should be projected, because I have been thinking over this matter. This is my plan. Where it is merely a social banquet for a good time⁠—such as the one which I am to attend in Washington on the 27th, where the company will consist of the membership of the Gridiron Club (newspaper correspondents exclusively, I think), with as guests the President and Vice-President of the United States and two others⁠—certainly that is an occasion where a person will be privileged to talk about any subject except politics and theology, and even if he is asked to talk to a toast he needn’t pay any attention to the toast, but talk about anything. Now then, the idea is this⁠—to take the newspaper of that day, or the newspaper of that evening, and glance over the headings in the telegraphic page⁠—a perfect bonanza of texts, you see! I think a person could pull that day’s newspaper out of his pocket and talk that company to death before he would run out of material. If it were today, you have the Morris incident. And that reminds me how unexciting the Morris incident will be two or three years from now⁠—maybe six months from now⁠—and yet what an irritating thing it is today, and has been for the past few days. It brings home to one this large fact: that the events of life are mainly small events⁠—they only seem large when we are close to them. By and by they settle