In a previous chapter of these rambling reminiscences I have said that I
defied any really human man to return from a lecture season in this
country in a pessimistic frame of mind. To this defiance I would add
another. I defy any man possessed of a hide anywhere short of that of a
rhinoceros, or a head of a thickness less than solid ivory, to return
from a tour of our country with any greater sense of his own importance
than he is entitled to.
There are a good many plain truths spoken in the presence of the
lecturer by the good people to whom he is consigned, especially in our
delightfully frank West, where they seem to have acquired the knack of
drawing a clean-cut distinction between the lecturer as a man and the
lecturer as a lecturer. Discourtesy is never encountered anywhere. At
least in the ten years of my platform experience, with nearly a thousand
public appearances to my credit, I have met with it only twice, and on
both occasions in Eastern communities; a proportion so negligible as to
amount really to nothing. Hospitality to the man has always been
cordial; the attitude toward the lecturer respectful. But in the showing
of this respect there is no slopping over, though now and then there is
an atmosphere of reserve in its manifestation which serves the lecturer
better in the line of criticism, if he is capable of sensing its
significance, than any amount of outspoken condemnation.
There is one element in the work of the Man on the Platform that is in
itself of the highest disciplinary value, and that is that in all
circumstances _he must deliver his goods himself_. There is nothing
vicarious about the operation. No substitute can relieve him of that
necessity. The man who writes books, or makes shoes or motor-cars, can
sit apart and let others face whatsoever blame may be visited upon a
middle man for defects of workmanship; but for the lecturer there is no
such happy shifting of responsibility. If people find his discourse
dull, they either get up and walk out, or, as the saying is, they "go to
sleep in his face."
[Illustration: "The lecturer must deliver the goods!"]
Occasionally, however, an ostentatiously emphatic expression of
disapproval gives the man on the platform a chance to redeem himself. It
is told of Henry Ward Beecher that on one occasion something he had said
proved so offensive to one of his auditors, who happened to be sitting
in the front row of a large and reverberant auditorium, that the
individual rose bruskly and walked out. As a sort of underscoring of his
disapproval the protesting soul was aided by a pair of new shoes that
squeaked so audibly as he strode down the aisle that they distracted the
attention of everybody. Mr. Beecher immediately stopped short, and
waited until the dissatisfied person had faded through the doorway and
the last echo of his suffering boots had died away, and then, with a
benignant smile, recited that good old nursery rime so dear to the
hearts of our childhood:
Rings on his fingers,
And bells on his toes;
He shall have music
Wherever he goes.
It was a bit of ready repartee that captivated the audience, and if
there were present any others who later found themselves in a protesting
mood it is pretty certain that they waited for a safer occasion upon
which to manifest it. Mr. Beecher on his feet was never a man to be
trifled with.
On a stumping campaign myself a number of years ago I was confronted by
a somewhat similar condition. An allusion to a statesman whom I greatly
admired elicited a decided hiss from a group of hostiles seated under
the gallery of a rural opera house. I silenced the hiss by pausing in my
remarks and appealing to the janitor to "turn off that steam radiator,"
since the hall was evidently already too hot for the comfort of some of
the audience. It was not particularly deft, but it served the purpose,
and we heard no more from that particular quarter for the rest of the
evening.
It is a safer rule, however, for the speaker to try to conciliate the
hostile element, and it has been a rule of mine for the last five years
to endeavor to locate such centers of frigidity as may be found before
me, and then direct all my energies toward "thawing them out." Popular
as the platform is in all parts of the country to-day, there is always
present in every community a small leaven of at least reluctant men who
are dragged unwillingly to the lecture halls by their enthusiastic
wives, when, if they were only permitted to have their own way, they
would be resting tranquilly at home, slippers on feet, feet on fender,
book or favorite newspaper in hand, and a sweet-scented briarwood pipe
for company. It is not difficult to locate these sufferers. They are
such conscious martyrs that they immediately betray themselves, and as a
rule while my chairmen are introducing me to my audiences I scan the
rows of faces before me in search of them.
They have certain unmistakable earmarks that betray them to the
sympathetic eye--which, with all due modesty, I may claim mine to be;
for, while I love lecturing, being lectured to or at, as the case may
be, bores me to extinction. I am like those doctors who rejoice in the
opportunity to amputate another man's leg, but would not give seven
cents to cut off one or both of their own.
The first of these earmarks is the expression of the face, which is
either one of hopeless resignation, or full of lowering, one might
almost say vengeful, contempt, as if the owner of the face were calling
down inwardly all the wrath of Heaven upon the lecturer in particular,
and the whole lyceum movement in general. With both these expressions go
arms tightly folded across the breast, as though the sufferer were
really trying hard to hold himself in.
[Illustration: "They may 'go to sleep in his face.'"]
The second almost certain manifestation is in the physical relation of
the sufferer to the chair in which he sits. He makes it bear the heavy
material burden of his despair by sitting not as Nature intended that he
should sit, but as nearly upon the small of his back as the available
space at his disposal will permit. If he occupy an aisle seat, he sits
wholly on the small of his back, with his legs crossed, and his hands
tightly clasped across his freer knee.
Once located, this man is the special person that I go after. It becomes
my persistent effort, and in so far as I can master the situation my
determination, to win his reluctant heart. If I can only get him sitting
up like a vertebrate animal, using his spine like a prop instead of like
a hammock, and returning my gaze with a gleam of interest, I am happy.
If I can get him not only to sit up but to lean forward with his head
cocked to one side, much as a horse will cock its ears when something
unexpected comes within the range of its vision, I feel that I have
scored a triumph. I should say that at a rough guess in eight cases out
of ten the effort is successful, although there have been ninth and
tenth cases that have chilled me to the marrow, and sent me home with
an uncomfortable sense of failure.
My lamented friend, the late R. K. Munkittrick, an American humorist who
never really received the full measure of appreciation to which his
delicious humor entitled him, once when we were "reading" together one
night at Albany, scoring a fiasco so complete that we could only laugh
over it, put the situation before me in terms so wholly comprehensive
that I have never forgotten it.
"See that red-headed chap in the fourth row?" he whispered, as the
chairman was indulging in some extended remarks concerning our greatness
to which we could never hope to live up.
"You mean the pall bearer with the green necktie?" I asked.
"Yes," said Munkittrick, "he's the one."
"Well--what of him?" said I.
"Oh, nothing," grinned Munkittrick, "but I'll bet you seven dollars and
forty-seven cents he's bet the boxoffice fifty cents we can't make him
laugh."
I may record with due humility that if good old Munkittrick's surmise
was correct our highly chromatic but otherwise funereal friend won his
bet. I doubt we could have moved him with dynamite.
But these gentlemen serve a highly useful purpose. They keep us with our
feet on the earth, and prevent us from soaring too high in our own
estimation.
Another effective factor in this disciplinary element in platform work
is the "back-handed" compliment that leaves the party of the second part
suspended like Mahomet's coffin, midway between heaven and earth, and in
some uncertainty as to exactly where "he is going to get off." I have
rejoiced in several such. The great State of Pennsylvania, which has
"officially" done so much for the platform by its liberal appropriations
for teachers' institutes, enabling the school centers to secure the
services of speakers of high cost who would otherwise be beyond their
reach, is responsible for one of these.
It occurred some three years ago, and grew out of an unexpected summons
by wire from one of the largest cities of the Quaker State asking me to
"fill in" for Dr. Griggs, who because of sudden indisposition was
unable to meet his engagement in a large and important course there. It
was an emergency call, which fortunately found me disengaged, and
willing to serve.
The chairman of the occasion was a delightful individual, with a
considerable fund of dry humor, and his introduction was a gem of subtle
wit. It occupied about fifteen minutes, the first five of which were
devoted to matters pertaining to the course; the second five to a well
deserved eulogy of Dr. Griggs for his inspiring lectures and the
uplifting nature of his work, coupled with an expression of the intense
disappointment which he, the chairman, knew the audience must feel on
learning that the good doctor could not be present. I thought he rather
rubbed the "disappointment" idea in a little too vigorously; but I tried
not to show it, and sat through that part of the chairman's remarks with
the usual stereotyped smile of satisfaction at hearing a colleague so
highly spoken of. This done, the chairman launched himself upon a
four-minute discourse upon what he called "The Age of Substitution."
"You know, my friends," said he, "that this great age in which we live
is so rich in resources that at times when we cannot immediately lay
our hands on some particular article we happen to want there is always
to be found somewhere a _just as good as_ article to take its place.
If you desire a particular kind of porous plaster to soothe an
all-too-self-conscious spine, and the druggist you call upon for aid
does not chance to have it in stock, he invariably has another at
hand which he assures you will do quite as well. So it is with the
nerve foods, breakfast foods, corn plasters, face powders, facial
soaps, suspenders, corsets, liver pills, and lecturers. If we
haven't what you want, we have something just as good in this Age of
Substitution. So is it with us to-night. While we may not receive the
all-wool-and-a-yard-wide spiritual uplift that Dr. Griggs would have
given us, we are privileged to listen to the near-silk humor of a
substitute, who, the committee in charge venture to hope, will prove
to be _just as good as_ the other. We of course don't know that it
will be; but we live in hope as well as on it, and, lacking the great
satisfaction that I had expected to be mine in presenting Dr. Griggs to
you this evening, it still gives me a certain melancholy pleasure to
introduce to this audience that highly mercerized near-speaker, Mr.
Just-as-Good-as K. Bangs, on whose behalf I bespeak your charity and
your tolerance."
As a rule I like to play a little with my chairmen; but I deemed it
unwise on this occasion to "monkey with a buzz saw," and plunged
directly into the work in hand without venturing upon the usual
facetious preliminaries. I felt that I had enough work cut out for me
already, and for an hour and a half exerted myself strenuously to be
_just as good as_ I could be, neither more nor less. Then, when it was
all over, and my case was in the hands of the jury, a charming woman,
with a delectable smile on her face, came rushing up to the platform.
She seized my hand and shook it vigorously as she spoke.
"Oh, Mr. Bangs," she said with an enthusiasm so delightful that I
listened eagerly for the honeyed words to come, "we are so glad you
came! _You have made our disappointment complete!_"
Another incident I prefer not to locate other than by saying that it was
in the West--and where the West begins no man may say. I know a New York
lady to whom it begins at the Cortlandt street opening of Mr. McAdoo's
Hudson River tubes, who has no notion at all that anything lies beyond
save the names of a few cities that mean nothing to her, and the Rocky
Mountains. With others it begins on the banks of the Mississippi. Once
in the heart of Iowa, when I was speaking to a young college student
there on the glorious opportunities of the West, in the hope of making
him see how much I appreciated the wonderful country in which he lived,
the young man staggered me with the reply:
"Yes, sir, I believe you are right. _My father wants me to go West when
I get through with my work here._"