I have a great respect for the English language. I am one of its
supporters, its promoters, its elevators. I don’t degrade it. A slip of
the tongue would be the most that you would get from me. I have always
tried hard and faithfully to improve my English and never to degrade it.
I always try to use the best English to describe what I think and what I
feel, or what I don’t feel and what I don’t think.
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to
facts. I don’t know anything that mars good literature so completely as
too much truth. Facts contain a deal of poetry, but you can’t use too
many of them without damaging your literature. I love all literature,
and as long as I am a doctor of literature–I have suggested to you for
twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature,
and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor
everybody else’s.
Now I think I ought to apologize for my clothes. At home I venture
things that I am not permitted by my family to venture in foreign parts.
I was instructed before I left home and ordered to refrain from white
clothes in England. I meant to keep that command fair and clean, and I
would have done it if I had been in the habit of obeying instructions,
but I can’t invent a new process in life right away. I have not had
white clothes on since I crossed the ocean until now.
In these three or four weeks I have grown so tired of gray and black that
you have earned my gratitude in permitting me to come as I have. I wear
white clothes in the depth of winter in my home, but I don’t go out in
the streets in them. I don’t go out to attract too much attention.
I like to attract some, and always I would like to be dressed so that I
may be more conspicuous than anybody else.
If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with
blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow. I so enjoy gay
clothes in which women clothe themselves that it always grieves me when I
go to the opera to see that, while women look like a flower-bed, the men
are a few gray stumps among them in their black evening dress. These are
two or three reasons why I wish to wear white clothes: When I find
myself in assemblies like this, with everybody in black clothes, I know I
possess something that is superior to everybody else’s. Clothes are
never clean. You don’t know whether they are clean or not, because you
can’t see.
Here or anywhere you must scour your head every two or three days or it
is full of grit. Your clothes must collect just as much dirt as your
hair. If you wear white clothes you are clean, and your cleaning bill
gets so heavy that you have to take care. I am proud to say that I can
wear a white suit of clothes without a blemish for three days. If you
need any further instruction in the matter of clothes I shall be glad to
give it to you. I hope I have convinced some of you that it is just as
well to wear white clothes as any other kind. I do not want to boast.
I only want to make you understand that you are not clean.
As to age, the fact that I am nearly seventy-two years old does not
clearly indicate how old I am, because part of every day–it is with me
as with you, you try to describe your age, and you cannot do it.
Sometimes you are only fifteen; sometimes you are twenty-five. It is
very seldom in a day that I am seventy-two years old. I am older now
sometimes than I was when I used to rob orchards; a thing which I would
not do to-day–if the orchards were watched. I am so glad to be here to-
night. I am so glad to renew with the Savages that now ancient time when