Tile Club Dinner for Laurence Hutton, New York
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 of abandoning 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 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 of it; 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 of theirs, 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 the proneness of evil to fly upward, that”—etc., etc., etc.; and before you know it he has slidden smoothly along on his compliment to the general, and out of it and into his set speech, and you can’t tell, to save you, where it was nor when it was that he made the connection. And that man will soar along, in the most beautiful way, on the wings of a practiced memory; heaving in a little decayed grammar here, and a little wise tautology there, and a little neatly counterfeited embarrassment yonder, and a little finely acted stumbling and stammering for a word—rejecting this word and that, and finally getting the right one, and fetching it out with ripping effect, and with the glad look of a man who has got out of a bad hobble entirely by accident, and wouldn’t take a hundred dollars for that accident; and every now and then he will sprinkle you in one of those happy turns on something that has previously been said; and at last, with supreme art, he will catch himself, when in the very act of sitting down, and lean over the table and fire a parting rocket, in the way of an afterthought, which makes everybody stretch his mouth as it goes up, and dims the very stars in heaven when it explodes. And yet that man has been practicing that afterthought and that attitude for about a week.
Well, you can’t reform that kind of a man. It’s a case of Eli joined to his idols—let him alone. But there is one sort that can be reformed. That is the genuinely impromptu speaker. I mean the man who “didn’t expect to be called upon, and isn’t prepared”; and yet goes waddling and warbling along, just as if he thought it wasn’t any harm to commit a crime so long as it wasn’t premeditated. Now and then he says, “but I must not detain you longer”; every little while he says, “Just one word more and I am done”—but at these times he always happens to think of two or three more unnecessary things and so he stops to say them. Now that man has no way of finding out how long his windmill is going. He likes to hear it creak; and so he goes on creaking, and listening to it, and enjoying it, never thinking of the flight of time; and when he comes to sit down at last, and look under his hopper, he is the most surprised person in the house to see what a little bit of a grist he has ground, and how unconscionably long he has been grinding it. As a rule, he finds that he hasn’t said anything—a discovery which the unprepared man ought usually to make, and does usually make—and has the added grief of making it at second hand, too.
This is a man who can be reformed. And so can his near relative, who now rises out of my reconstructed past—the man who provisions himself with a single prepared bite, of a sentence or two, and trusts to luck to catch quails and manna as he goes along. This person frequently gets left. You can easily tell when he has finished his prepared bit and begun on the impromptu part. Often the prepared portion has been built during the banquet; it may consist of ten sentences, but it oftener consists of two—oftenest of all, it is but a single sentence; and it has seemed so happy and pat and bright and good that the creator of it, the person that laid it, has been sitting there cackling privately over it and admiring it and petting it and shining it up, and imagining how fine it is going to “go,” when, of course, he ought to have been laying another one, and still another one; and maybe a dozen or basketful if it’s a fruitful day; yes, and he is thinking that when he comes to hurl that egg at the house there is going to be such an electric explosion of applause that the inspiration of it will fill him instantly with ideas and clothe the ideas in brilliant language, and that an impromptu speech will result which will be infinitely finer than anything he could have deliberately prepared. But there are two damaging things which he is leaving out of the calculation: one is, the historical fact that a man is never called up as soon as he thinks he is going to be called up, and that every speech that is injected into the proceedings ahead of him gives his fires an added chance to cool; and the other thing which he is forgetting is that he can’t sit there and keep saying that fine sentence of his over and over to himself, for three-quarters of an hour without by and by getting a trifle tired of it and losing somewhat of confidence in it.
When at last his chance comes and he touches off his pet sentence, it makes him sick to see how shamefacedly and apologetically he has done it; and how compassionate the applause is; and how sorry everybody feels; and then he bitterly thinks what a lie it is to call this a free country where none but the unworthy and the undeserving may swear. And at this point, naked and blind and empty, he wallows off into his real impromptu speech; stammers out three or four incredibly flat things, then collapses into his seat, murmuring, “I wish I was in”—he doesn’t say where, because he doesn’t. The stranger at his left says, “Your opening was very good”; stranger at his right says, “I liked your opening”; man opposite says, “Opening very good indeed—very good”; two or three other people mumble something about his opening. People always feel obliged to pour some healing thing on a crippled man, that way. They mean it for oil; they think it is oil; but the sufferer recognizes it for aquafortis.
March 31, 1885