December 12 Thursday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam wrote to the Plasmon Co..of America to tender his resignation as Vice-President and Director of the Plasmon Co. of America [MTP].
Clemens’ A.D. for this day included: Andrew 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 [MTP: Autdict. 4].
Harper & Brothers wrote to Sam enclosing statement of his account (not in file) for year ending Nov. 1, 1907, showing due on next Mar. 1 of $22,974.37 [MTP].
Frank Cavendish Lascelles (1875-1934), English actor (born Frank William Thomas Charles Stevens) sent a telegram from London to Sam: “Great London pageant next July has been initiated best wishes cabled from you would help much / Frank Lascelles / Pageant office savoy london” [MTP]. Note: Lascelles was a leading light at Keble College in undergraduate dramatics. After becoming a professional actor he changed his name to Lascelles and appeared in 1904-1906 in His Majesty’s Theatre where Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was actor-manager.
At that time pageants for national pride were popular and Lascelles made a name for himself by directing them. He was known as “the man who staged the Empire.” Sam’s Oxford trip took in the great pageant. See other entries for Lascelles, and a visit to Stormfield in 1909.
Albert E. Ullman for Authors Editorial Assoc. wrote to Sam to introduce, at the request of James Keating, Assoc. editor of Broadway Magazine, Mr. M.L. Hanson [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote on the letter, “Request / He wanted Mr. Clemens to go lecturing in Canada”
Sam’s A.D. for this day, approximately 709 words, included a Dec. 10 clipping:
The Carnegie Institute 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 some moans 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:
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:
“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 sands 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 ouraccumulation 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. [In handwriting:] For instance,
Seventeen 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 and emperor. He had a small silver match-box, and he kept picking it up and hndling 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 and hold so precious a compliment from any human being in this earth, but it was so; that seventh-rate king was still a king and ranked the prince; therefore the price prized an attention from that source.
I have several times said that I could live upon compliments alone, if I could get no 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 [MTP].