Sometimes the Gentleman in the Chair is a Lady, but more often he is a
man, and, strange to relate, contrary to the general impression of the
comparative methods of the sexes, the ladies are vastly more direct in
their introductions than their Brothers in Suffering. Women are seldom
oratorically inclined. Men are invariably so--or at least chairmen are.
And as a result an introduction to an audience by a woman is likely to
become more of an "identification of the remains" than an illuminating
explanation of the speaker's right to be where he is; while the men
"pile it on" to such an extent that the lecturer has often to struggle
immortally to make good the chairman's kindly declarations on his
behalf.
Personally, with all due respect to the Lady Chairman, I prefer the
masculine method: not because I like to hear myself exalted to the
tipmost point of the blue vault above; for I do not. It is hard work to
sit still before five hundred people with a smug expression of
countenance and hear oneself compared to Dickens and Thackeray, and
Shakespeare and Moses, to the distinct disadvantages of that noble
quartet of literary strugglers; and I have never ceased to sympathize
with Anthony Hope, who on a postprandial occasion some years ago when I
was sitting next to him, after listening to a few eulogistic remarks by
a speaker in which he was made to appear the greatest Light of
Literature since the beginning of time, lifted the tablecloth, glanced
under it, and in a muffled tone murmured, "My God, Bangs! Isn't there
any way out of here? I cawn't live up to all this!"
Nevertheless, I do prefer the men's method, because it gives me more
time in which to study my audience, and, in so far as I may, adjust
myself and my discourse to the special problem confronting me. In the
one case (introductions by women) it is as if one were suddenly seized
by the scruff of the neck and thrown overboard without even time to say
one's prayers; in the other the victim is slowly and pleasantly carried
upward from the level of fact on the wings of kindly fancy to a
pinnacle of unearned increment of glory, and left there to shift for
himself: to soar higher if he have afflatus enough to attain loftier
heights, or to slide back to where he belongs as gracefully as may be.
[Illustration: "Pile it on so thick that the lecturer has to struggle
hard to make good."]
I have often thought as I have sat and listened to these delightful
flights of eulogy--so like the obituary notices we read in the
newspapers after a great man dies--of the great disadvantages of those
upper realms. It is very lonely and cold up there, and while the old saw
is undoubtedly correct, and there _is_ plenty of room at the top, let it
be recorded by one who has more than once been summarily hauled thither
as involuntarily as undeservedly, that it is elbow room only, with
mighty little solid earth on which to rest one's feet. The poet who
invented the expression "the giddy heights" knew what he was talking
about, and one has but to go out on the lecture platform and try to
stand gracefully on those abstract peaks to have it proved to his entire
satisfaction.
But there is another reason why I prefer the chair-_man_ to the
chair-_woman_, and it has to do solely with the technic of lecturing. No
one who has ever lectured can deny the apprehension of the first five
minutes of the effort. Those five minutes are perhaps the most critical
period of the evening. If the attack is not right, the whole affair is
likely to come down with a crash; for first impressions count perhaps
more than they should with the average audience. If the attack is good,
and the lecturer can "make himself solid" with his audience at the very
beginning, structural weaknesses and an occasional dull or dragging
moment will be forgiven later, because those who listen have come to
like the speaker personally, and decline to let him fail unless he
really insists upon doing so.
Now the technic of this attack, I should say if I were retained to write
a Primer for Lecturers, involves the chairman most materially. He is
the tangible hook on which the alert lyceumite almost invariably either
hangs or supports himself in those first five minutes. Human nature is
so constituted that people like a pleasantry at the expense of some
person or of some thing with which they are personally familiar. It
grows out of the love of the concrete--which is a failure of us all, I
fancy--and in every community there are always at least two concrete
things that are sure winners for the lecturer--the chairman of the
evening, and the railway system upon which the inhabitants of the
community depend. Jests broad or subtle at the expense of either are
received with howls of joy.
On my first transcontinental trip, made ten years ago, I never failed to
receive an immediate response from my audiences when I referred to the
letters N. P. R. R., the abbreviated form for the Northern Pacific
Railroad, as really signifying a "Not Particularly Rapid Route"; and in
other sections of the country served by those charming corporations the
shortest cut I know to the affections of the people is through a bald or
ribald jest at the expense of the Erie or the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad.
The chairman, however, is an equally safe proposition. He is either a
very popular man in town, or directly the reverse, and in either case
his neighbors enjoy a little joke at his expense. Naturally the joke, to
be successful, must have to do with something peculiar to the moment,
which the lecturer must find in the chairman's opening remarks.
Obviously one cannot be so freely facetious with a woman as with a man,
and if he has been properly brought up does not even wish to be so. So
that the Lady Chairman invariably leaves the speaker with a restricted
field of operations at the outset.
Of course in all these reflections I am speaking merely of the lecturer
who seeks popular rather than academic favor, which is frankly my own
case. I should infinitely prefer to find myself liked by a miscellaneous
audience rather than by a limited company of scientificos who are
professionally more interested in things of the head than of the heart.
It is better to be human than great, and I care more for Humanity than
for the Humanities.
At a rough estimate I should say that in the last ten years I have been
the beneficiary of the services of not less than eight hundred
chairmen, and in that whole list I can recall but one that I did not
like, and no doubt he was a most likable fellow. He was a clergyman and
a man of information, if not education; but he seemed to think that
because somebody had once intimated that I was a "humorist" (a title
that I have neither laid claim to, nor specially desired to win) I must
naturally be reached only by a downward climb from his own dignified
heights. There are individuals in this world who conceive humor to be a
somewhat undignified pursuit, their own education in that branch of
human action having been confined to a study of the antics of the circus
clown, and they are likely to deny to humorists even the right to the
use of correct English.
"Well," said this special chairman unctuously when we met for the first
time, "you are from New York, I understand."
"I have been a New Yorker," I said noncommittally.
"I suppose you know Howells, and Mark Twain, and all that _bunch_?" he
went on, condescending to use the kind of language with which he of
course assumed I was most familiar.
And it was just there that I took a violent dislike to the man. The word
_bunch_, as applied to Mr. Howells and Mark Twain by one of his presumed
education was not pleasing to my soul, though I should have loved it
from a cowboy. It was as if somebody had referred to "those talented
_cusses_, Carlyle and Emerson," and I simmered slightly within.
"Well," I replied, "I've known Howells and his gang for ages--bunked
with the whole kit and caboodle of 'em for nearly twenty years--and you
can take it from me they're a nifty herd! But the other--who was the
other man?"
"Mark Twain," said he.
"I seem to have heard the name somewhere," said I; "but I don't think
I've ever met him, or at least I don't remember it. New York's a pretty
big place, you know, and you can't be expected to know everybody. What
was his line?"
I am not sure, but I think the reverend gentleman woke up at that point.
At any rate he gave me no clue as to Mark Twain's identity. He turned
away, and excused himself on the ground that he wanted to see if the
audience was "all in."
"Don't bother," I called after him. "It will be _all in_ when I get
through with it."
But he never cracked a smile. I presume there were refinements of slang
with which he was not familiar.
As to the others, however, I find as I run the noble army over in
retrospect that many have won their way into my affections, and none are
remembered save pleasantly. Several of them stand out preeminently for
acts of self-sacrificing kindness on my behalf; notably one gentleman in
Iowa who drove me over a distance of eighteen miles after midnight
through a raging blizzard, requiring the unremitting efforts of four
sturdy horses to pull us through, in order that I might catch a train
back East and be with my children at Christmas time, and he was not a
particularly emotional man, or anything of a sentimentalist, at that.
I shall never forget the spur of his answer to a remark I made to him
that night on our way from the hotel to the lecture hall. The snow was
falling lightly when he arrived, but the distance to the hall was so
short that we walked it. As we came to the public square I noticed that
hitched to the white railing about the county courthouse that stood in
the middle thereof were some thirty or forty teams, harnessed to farm
wagons of various types, large and small. It was already after eight
o'clock, and I was surprised to find the wagons there at so late an
hour.
"Your people work late, Mr. Robb," said I, as we sauntered along.
"What do you mean by that?" he inquired.
"Why," said I, "those wagons over there. Isn't it a trifle late for your
farmers to be in town?"
"Oh," he said, "those wagons--why no, Mr. Bangs. Those wagons are here
for pleasure, not on business. They have brought in a good part of your
audience. Some of your people to-night have driven in from as far as
twenty miles to hear you."
My heart sank. "Great Scott!" I ejaculated. "Twenty miles, eh? On a
night like this--I--I hope I'll be good enough for that."
"_I hope so!_" was his laconic response.
The rejoinder was as the prick of a spur, and by its aid, as well as
with the assistance of a delightfully receptive gathering of listeners
who had traveled far to have a good time, and meant to have it
anyhow--a characteristic of your Westerner--we pulled through in good
condition.
When all was over this noncommittal Iowan bundled me up in a borrowed
fur overcoat, and insisted on taking that all-night drive with me
through the raging storm that I might be sent safely and rejoicing back
to my youngsters awaiting my coming on the Atlantic coast. It was
shortly after four in the morning when my train drew out of the distant
station, and the last I saw of my kindly host he was standing on the
railway platform, knee deep in the snow, in the spotlight of a solitary
white electric lamp, hat in hand, and waving his farewells and good
wishes for me and mine.
I rejoice to say that he has remained my friend over the eight or nine
years that have since elapsed, and if by any chance he shall read these
lines I trust they will serve to prove to him that my affection, as
frequently expressed in my letters to him, is still quite as strong and
as deep as one with his capacity for friendliness could possibly wish it
to be. And I wish to add that his figure as it stands out in my memory
has become a symbol to me of the kindness, and courtesy, and
friendliness of the great-hearted people who dwell in what he and his
fellows properly and pridefully refer to always as "God's Own Country."
[Illustration: "The last I saw of my kindly host."]
Another Iowa chairman, whose charming companionship and courtesy I shall
always remember, will not mind, I am sure, if I record here a most
amusing "break" that he made at our first meeting, which, I hasten to
add, he more than redeemed afterward when the stress and strain of the
evening relaxed. He dwelt in what appeared to be a most flourishing
little city in the northern part of the State. I had arrived there early
in the afternoon, and was so much impressed by the clean-cut appearance
of everything I saw that I lingered upon the streets long after I
should have sought my couch to rest up for the evening. The streets were
as clean as a whistle. The dwellings were attractive in design and
setting, and the business blocks were of a dignified if not massive
style of architecture. Best of all, if I could judge from those I saw
to-ing and fro-ing upon the streets, the people themselves were alert
and active.
In view of all this apparent prosperity I was a trifle surprised when
the chairman arrived at the hotel to find him rather depressed. He was a
clergyman, and at first glance seemed to be suffering from profound
melancholy; so very profound indeed that I deemed it my duty to try to
cheer him up.
"What a fine, prosperous little city you have here, Doctor," said I with
genuine enthusiasm. "I've put in the greater part of the afternoon
looking the place over, and I tell you it has filled me with joy."
"Humph!" said he gloomily. "It looks prosperous, but--_it ain't_! It's a
bank-made town. The banks got here first, and induced people to come and
settle on easy terms, and the terms haven't turned out quite so easy as
they might. There's hardly a man in this town that isn't up to his chin
in debt."
"Oh, well, what of that?" said I, still resolved to win out on a
tolerably hopeless proposition. "Of course debt is a bad thing; but
sometimes it acts as a spur. Your people are a bright and brainy looking
lot. It won't take them long to settle up."
"Oh, they look bright and brainy," he returned sadly; "but _they ain't_!
There isn't one man in ten 'll understand a half of what you say to them
to-night."
"Look here, Doctor!" said I, beginning to wax a trifle chilly myself,
especially in the regions of my pedal extremities. "What are you trying
to do, discourage me?"
"Oh, no," he replied, with a mournful shake of his head. "If I'd been
trying to discourage you, I'd have told you about our lecture hall. It's
without any exception the meanest thing of its kind on the American
continent. Why," he added, holding out his hands in a gesture of utter
despair, "why, if we had a lecture hall that was only halfway decent,
_we could afford to have somebody out here to talk to us that
would be worth listening to!_"
The chairman who in the exuberance of his own eloquence forgets the name
of the individual he is introducing, even though he has announced that
that name is a "household word," is no creature of the imagination, and
if the stories that are told of him seem hackneyed, it is not because
they are so frequently told, but because they happen so frequently in
the experience of all platform speakers, and in almost identical manner.
Even so well known a man as Mr. Bryan has suffered from this, one
enthusiastic admirer in New York having once, after a skyscraping
peroration, led up with climacteric force to the name of "our Peerless
Leader, _William J. Brennings_."
In my own platform experience I have had chairmen come to me at the last
moment and confess with most childlike frankness that they have never
heard of me before, asking me to help them out because they really
didn't know "what in Tophet to say." One individual out on the Pacific
Coast approached me one night about ten minutes before the lecture was
scheduled to begin, and revealed to me his terrible embarrassment over
this latter situation.
"I didn't know until half an hour ago that I was to present you to our
people to-night," said he, "and to tell the honest truth, Mr. Bangs, _I
never heard of you before_. Will you please tell me who you are, and
_what_ you are, and _why_ you are? And is there anything pleasant I can
say about you in introducing you to your audience?"
"Well," said I, "if I had known I was to have the privilege of preparing
the obituary notice you are to deliver over my prostrate remains while I
lie in state upon the platform to-night, I should have written out
something that would have been mighty proud reading for the little
Bangses when I sent marked copies of to-morrow morning's papers back
East to show them what a great man their daddy is in the West. But I
haven't time to tell you the whole story of my past life, and there are
certain sections of it I wouldn't tell you if I had. I have been a
Democrat in New York and a Republican in Maine."
"You might at least make a suggestion or two to help me out, though," he
pleaded.
"Oh, yes," said I, "there are plenty of pleasant things you can say
about me. In the first place, you can tell that audience that--"
"Hold on a moment, Mr. Bangs," he interrupted, raising his hand to stop
me. "Just one minute, please! _You've got to remember that I am a
clergyman and must speak the truth!_"
I resolved to let him go his own gait, and comforted him by telling him
he could say whatever he pleased, and that I would "stand for it."
And I must confess he acquitted himself nobly. In his hands I became one
of the Princes of Letters, the titles of whose many books were too well
known to need any enumeration of them there, and as for my name--why, it
would be an impertinence for him even to mention it, "because, my
friends," said he, "I am perfectly well aware that that name is _as
familiar to you as it is to me_."
Another good gentleman in the South, summoned to do duty as chairman at
the last moment, sought no aid either from myself or from "Who's Who,"
trusting, like the good Christian he was, utterly to Holy Writ. He began
most impressively with selections from the Book of Genesis. "In the
beginning God created the earth," said he, and then he ran lightly over
the sequences of created things until he had ushered the birds of the
air, the beasts of the field, and the fishes of the sea on to the stage,
and thence with an easy jump he came to myself.
"And then, my friends," he said, with an impressive pause, "the Creator
felt that He should create something to have dominion over all these
things that He knew were good--a creature of heart, a creature of soul,
a creature of in-till-ect, and so He made man. My friends, it is such a
one that we have with us to-night who will speak to you upon his own
subject as only he can do. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to
you the speaker of the evening, who is too well known to you all to need
any further eulogy on my part."
The good gentleman then retired to a proscenium box at the right of the
stage, where he at once proceeded to fall asleep, and snored so lustily
that everybody in the house was delighted, including myself--although,
to tell the truth, I envied him his nap, for I was immortally tired.
One of the dearest of my chairmen was a fine old gentleman in West
Virginia, to meet and know whom was truly an inspiration. He was a
profound scholar, and had enjoyed the rare privilege in a long and
useful life of knowing intimately some of the demigods of American
literature. His reminiscences of Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and
Longfellow, and Hawthorne, and others of our most brilliant literary
epoch, were a delight to listen to, and I was sorry when the time came
for us to go out upon the platform. It would have been a greater treat
for that audience to listen to him than to me, and I heartily wished we
might exchange places for the moment. Like a great many others of my
chairmen, this gentleman experienced some difficulty in getting the
title of my lecture, "Salubrities I Have Met," straight in his mind.
More than once during our little chat together he would pause and say:
"What is the title of your talk again? It has slipped my mind."
"Sal-u-bri-ties I Have Met," I would say.
"Tell me again--is it Salubrities or Celebrities?" he would ask.
"Salubrities," I would reply. And then I would spell it out for him,
"S-A-L-U-B-R-I-T-I-E-S, Salubrities. Not in any case Celebrities, or you
will spoil my opening."
"I'll try to remember it," he would say, with a mistrustful shake of
his head as if he feared it was impossible. "It's rather elusive, you
know."
"Perhaps I had better write it down on a slip of paper," I said at the
last.
"Oh, no," he replied. "I think I have it now--Salubrities, Salubrities,
Salubrities--yes--I--I think I have it."
We walked out upon the platform, and the dear old gentleman began a
short address so filled with witty and pleasant things that I have ever
since wished I could have had a stenographer present to take it down in
shorthand. It would have formed an excellent standard of conduct and
achievement worthy of any man's striving. And then he came to my
subject.
"And to-night, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "Mr. Bangs has come to us
to give us his famous lecture on--ahem--on--er--he has come, I say, to
give us his inimitable talk on--er--on--er--"
I leaned forward, and tried to give it to him in a stage whisper; but
was too late. His impetus carried him on to destruction.
"--his delightful talk on Lubricators He Has Met," said he.
Without any jealousies let me confess that that observation was truly
the hit of the evening. The bulk of the audience had been themselves so
mystified by the possible significance of the word Salubrities that they
knew the title by heart, and we began the evening with a roar of
laughter that made us all friends at once. And as a matter of fact no
harm was done; for "Lubricators I Have Met" was quite as good a title as
the other, for my Salubrities are men and women who have made the world
happier, and better, and sweeter, by their kindliness and graciousness,
and what in the world could be more fitting than that the people who do
that should be called Lubricators?