THERE are four places where a man may lecture, exclusive of the open
air, which is reserved for political demonstrations and religious
meetings, and I arrange the four in order of demerit. The worst is,
beyond question, a church, because ecclesiastical architects have no
regard for acoustics, and a lecturer is apt to crack his voice yelling
into the corners of churches.
People come to a church, also, in a chastened mood, and sit as if they
were listening to a sermon, so that the unhappy lecturer receives little
encouragement of applause or laughter, and, if he happens to be himself
a clergyman, is hindered from doing anything to enliven the audience.
Besides, the minister of the church will feel it his duty to introduce
the leading members of his congregation after the lecture, and a
reception of this kind in the vestry is the last straw on a weary
lecturer's back. He cannot, however, refuse because he is a fellow
professional, and knows that his discourtesy may be set to the debit of
the minister. Next in badness is a public hall, because it is so bare
and cheerless, and on account of its size is difficult to fill with
an audience, and still more difficult with the voice. Drill halls,
especially, are heart-breaking places, because they are constructed
for the voices of commanding officers shouting “right wheel,” “march,”
“fire,” and such like martial exhortations.
There is also another objection to halls from the lecturer's standpoint,
and that is the accessibility of the platform. Usually there are two
sets of steps, which the audience consider have been constructed in
order that they may come on the platform in a body and shake hands with
the lecturer. If a lecturer be a human being, he is always glad to see
two or three of his fellow-creatures, especially if they say something
encouraging, but just because he is a human being and has spoken for an
hour and a half, he is apt to lose heart when he sees half of his large
audience, say seven hundred people, processing in his direction.
It is on such an occasion that he is full of gratitude to a manager who
will come in with his travelling coat and march the lecturer out at
the back door, as a man in haste to catch his train or on any other
pretence.
A lecturer may count himself fortunate, and need have no anxiety about
circumstances, who speaks from the stage of a theatre, because he will
have his whole audience within convenient compass, and focussed upon
him, and although he comes down to a whisper he will still be heard.
When you lecture at a theatre you are known as the “star,” and as you
cross the dark and mysterious under-world behind the stage you hear some
one crying: “This way to the star's room,” which generally turns out to
be the room of the leading actress, where you may spend a quarter of an
hour in seeing yourself in the innumerable mirrors, and examining the
long array of toilet instruments on the table.
Theatrical people are most sympathetic and good-natured, and although
they may not have the faintest idea who you are or what you are going to
do, they always wish you well, and congratulate you if there is a good
house. Their own house may not have been good last night, but they are
glad if yours is good to-day.
The crowning advantage of a theatre to a nervous and hard-wrought
lecturer is its seclusion. You get in and out by the stage door, and
there is not one person in a hundred of your audience could find that
door, and if he did he would not get admittance. From the floor to the
stage there is no way, and when you pass behind the curtain you are
beyond reach even of an interviewer.
When I become an impresario I shall never allow my “star” to be seen,
except on the platform, and after he has done his work I will remove him
swiftly in a closed conveyance. In this way I shall lay him under a debt
of gratitude, and keep him in good humour, and get out of him a third
more work. As I have no idea of entering on this business at present,
I offer the hint to all impresarios everywhere, with my respectful
compliments.
If a lecturer could always choose--which practically he never can do
at all--he would prefer to lecture to a club of men and women in their
club-room, or in the large drawing-room of a private house. He will then
address a limited number of bright people who are at their best; he can
talk as at a dinner-table and make his point easily; he can venture on
an aside, or stop to tell an anecdote, and after an hour or so he will
be as little fatigued as when he began. When the lecture is over he
mixes with his audience and in a minute is a private individual. This
is the very refinement and luxury of lecturing, which a lecturer enjoys
only on rare occasions.
Local arrangements differ very much, and some of them are rather trying
to a lecturer. There are places where a regular procession is formed
and marches to the platform, headed by a local dignitary, and made up
of clergymen, magistrates, little millionaires, and public characters
of all kinds and degrees. In midst thereof the lecturer marches like a
criminal being taken to the scaffold.
Once I discovered in the ante-room a magnificent embroidered robe, and
the insane idea took possession of my mind that it was intended for the
lecturer. Had it been put upon me there would have been no lecture, for
I should have been smothered with its greatness and its grandeur. I
was still regarding it with horror and perspiring freely when the chief
magistrate of the city came in, and it was put on his shoulders by two
liveried servants, who then decorated us all, from the chief magistrate
down to myself, with flowers. The servants marched first into the hall,
the great man followed, and I crept, following behind his majestic
figure (which was received with frantic howls of applause), and this was
the grandest entry I ever made upon the lecture platform.
In some places there is a chairman--I shall have something to say
about chairmen--and votes of thanks, first to the lecturer, then to the
chairman and to other people who have had some connexion or other with
the matter, till a third of the time is taken up by local talk and the
lecturer is put to confusion.
For votes of thanks I have personally an intense dislike, because the
movers refer to one in terms which might suitably apply to William
Shakespeare (one enthusiastic admirer preferred me to Shakespeare,
because, although he classed us together as occupying a solitary
position, I had the advantage of being more sentimental). As a lecturer
on Scots subjects I have a horror of other speakers, because they feel
it necessary to tell Scots stories without knowing the dialect, and
generally without knowing the story.
Certain places are very business-like in their arrangements, and the
smartest in this respect is, curious to say, not in America, but in
England. You are brought to the place of operation five minutes before
the hour, and at two minutes to eight placed upon the platform. When the
hand of the clock points to eight you begin to speak, and when the hand
stands at nine you close. If you are one minute late in beginning, the
audience grows restless, and if you are five minutes late in closing,
they leave. There are no preliminaries and no after-talk, and you do
your best with one of the most intelligent audiences any lecturer could
address in sixty minutes.
The most risky audience in my experience is afforded by the free
lectures given in an English city, which is made up by men who have
dropped in from the streets because the hall is open and because
something is going on. If they are interested they will listen eagerly
and reward the lecturer with enthusiastic applause, besides giving an
irrelevant cheer occasionally for Old Ireland or Lord Roberts. If the
audience is not interested they leave in solid blocks of fifty, without
any regard to the lecturer's feelings, or the disturbance of their
neighbours.
The most sympathetic and encouraging audience a man can have are the
students of an American ladies' college, because if he is nervous, as
an Englishman is bound to be before three hundred bright American young
women, they will catch his first point, and they will smile upon him and
show that they believe there is something in him if he could only get it
out, and create such a kindly atmosphere that he will rise to his height
and do his best.
This was how the students of a delightful college not very far from
Philadelphia treated myself when I was almost ready to sink through
the floor from sheer terror of facing so many young women, being a
sisterless and daughterless man, and I wish to thank one young lady who
sat in the front and smiled encouragement upon me until I lifted up my
head and took heart.
I have never utterly collapsed, and have never fled from the platform,
but I was reduced to confusion and incoherence of speech when I opened
a clubhouse for a company of women students at a certain American
University, and my whole audience suddenly flopped down upon the floor
as I began my little speech. As the floor had a beautiful carpet and
there were no chairs, the young ladies no doubt did well for themselves,
but as I looked down upon that fair flower-garden all my thoughts
vanished, and I do not think that I uttered a grammatical sentence.
American young women do not know that an Englishman is the most bashful
creature on the face of the earth, and that he would rather face an
audience of two thousand men from the streets than address twenty young
women, every one as sharp as a needle and as pretty as a flower.
My experience of chairmen is wide and varied, and I have lectured under
the Presidency of some very distinguished and able men, but on the whole
I would rather be without a chairman. There was one who introduced me in
a single sentence of five minutes' length, in which he stated that as he
would treasure every word I said more than pure gold he did not wish to
curtail my time by a single minute. He then fell fast asleep, and I had
the honour of wakening him at the close of the lecture. Had he slept
anywhere else I should not have had the smallest objection, but his
restful attitude in the high estate of the chair had an unedifying and
discomposing effect on the audience.
On the whole, I preferred that chairman to another who introduced me to
the extent of twenty-five minutes, and occupied the time in commending
to the exasperated audience the claims of a foundling asylum with which
he had some charitable connexion. This time it was the lecturer who fell
asleep and had to be wakened when the audience drove the chairman to his
seat.
A lecturer is also much refreshed amid his labour by the assurance of
the chairman that he has simply lived upon his books for years, and has
been looking forward to this evening for the last three months with high
expectation, when after these flattering remarks he does not know
your name, and can only put it before the audience after a hurried
consultation with the secretary of the lecture course.
My memory returns also with delight to a chairman who insisted that one
object had brought them together, and that I was no stranger in that
town because the whole audience before him were my friends, and then
having called me Doctor Maclaren and Ian Watson, besides having hinted
more than once at Mr. Barrie, introduced me to an uproarious audience as
Mr. Ian John Maclaren Watson.
It is, of course, my gain, and the loss of two more distinguished
fellow-countrymen, that I should be hopelessly associated in the minds
of many people with Mr. Crockett and Mr. Barrie. But when one speaker
declared that I would be remembered by grateful posterity as the Stickit
Minister, I was inclined to protest, for whatever have been my defects
as a preacher, I still have succeeded in obtaining a church; and when
another speaker explained he had gone three times to see my “Little
Minister,” I felt obliged to deny myself the authorship of that
delightful play.
Allusions on the part of the audience, when they shook hands with me
afterwards, I allowed to paas because there was not time to put things
right; merely smiling at the mention of “A Window in Thrums,” and
looking modest at the adjectives heaped upon “The Raiders.” My cynical
humour was greatly tickled with the chairman, who had been very cordial
with me in private, and who was understood by the public to have been
closely identified with my visit to his city, when he not only escaped
from the stage after he had introduced me, but also immediately left the
theatre and cheerfully betook himself to his office without hearing one
word of the lecture. Perhaps he had discovered from some casual remark
of mine that I was not Mr. Barrie, and was at a loss to make out who I
could be.
With mayors and other public functionaries who have to speak six times a
day on six different subjects, and who get a little confused as to which
meeting they are attending, I have the utmost sympathy, and never have
been discomposed by any reference to the management of hospitals or
the fallacy of bimetallism, even though the references were very
indifferently connected with the lecturer and his subjects.
The labour of shaking hands afterwards with a considerable proportion
of your audience is not only lightened by their kindness, but also much
cheered by their conversation. After a few evenings in the United States
I arrived at the rooted conviction that the majority of the American
people belonged to the Scots race, and that America was the real
Scotland. It was not only that native-born Scots came forward to welcome
a fellow-countryman with an accent which was beyond all dispute and
could be heard six yards off, and with allusions to Auchterarder which
warmed your heart, but that every person seemed to be connected with
Scotland.
One belonged to a family which had emigrated from Scotland in the
seventeenth century, and was anxious to know whether I could give him
any information on the family tree. Another had married a Scots wife,
and believed he owed his prosperity to her; a third was an admirer
of Sir Walter Scott, and looked forward to visiting Scotland as the
ambition of his life. And one lady, full of despair as she heard the
Scots claims of the people around her, came and confessed frankly: “I am
not Scots, and I have no relative a Scot, and none of our family married
a Scot, but my sister has a Scots nurse: will that do?” I assured her it
would, and that I was glad at last to meet a genuine American, because I
had come to see the American people.
I have a vivid recollection of one place where a clan had turned out
to receive me, and I was escorted to the platform by a band of plaided
warriors, who, headed by a piper, marched me in and ranged themselves
round me on the platform. When the lecture was over, one clansman met me
in the anteroom, and I hardly recognized him; he was about three inches
taller and six inches bigger round the chest than before the lecture,
and was as a man intoxicated, though not with strong drink.
“Mr. Maclaren,” he said to me, “eh, but we are a michty people,” and he
slapped his chest vigorously. I hinted that we had one or two faults to
modify our perfection, but he was not in a mood for such consideration.
“No worth mentioning,” he said, and departed in glory. The national
prayer of our people is understood to be: “Lord, give us a good
conceit of ourselves,” and this prayer in my compatriot's case had been
wonderfully fulfilled.
Audiences vary very much in excellence, and it is difficult to
understand the reason, because you may have the most delightful and
the most difficult from the same class of people. Audiences are like
horses--some of them so hard in the mouth and spiritless that they
almost pull your arm out of the socket, and others so bright and
high-spirited that you hardly feel the reins in your hands, and
driving--that is to say, speaking--is a delight.
The ideal audience is not one which accompanies you from beginning
to end with applause and laughter, but one that takes every point and
enjoys it with intelligent reserve, so that your illustrations may be
condensed into allusions, and a word conveys your humour. One of my
pleasures as a lecturer was to test every audience by a certain passage
which divided the sheep from the goats, and I think my enjoyment was
even greater when they were all goats.
It came into a reading from the _Briar-Bush_ where the word
“intoxication” occurs. My custom was to stop and apologise for the
appearance of such a word in my book, and to explain that the word is
not known in Scots speech. There are, I used to say, two reasons why a
Scotsman does not employ the word. The first is that he is imperfectly
acquainted with the painful circumstances to which this word is supposed
to allude, and the second that a Scotsman considers that no one with
a limited human intellect can know enough about the conditions of his
fellow-creatures to make such a statement.
When an audience took in the situation at once, then one could rest
for a moment, since they required that time to appreciate the rigid
temperance and conscientious literary accuracy of the Scotch people.
When they took the statement in perfect seriousness, and one or two
solemn reformers nodded their heads in high approval, then I wanted to
go behind the curtain and shake hands with myself. More than once it was
with difficulty I could continue in face of this unbroken seriousness,
and once I broke down utterly, although I hope the audience only
supposed I was laughing at some poor humour of my own.
The cause of my collapse was not the faces of the audience, but the
conduct of a brother Scot, whose head went down below the seat as
he learned the two reasons why the word intoxicated is not used in
Scotland. When he emerged from the depths he cast a glance of delight in
my direction as to one who was true in all circumstances of his nation,
and then he was composing himself to listen with fresh confidence to a
lecturer who had given such pledges of patriotism, when he caught sight
of the faces of the audience.
As it dawned upon him that the audience had taken the statement
literally, he was again obliged to go into retirement. Twice he made a
brave effort to regain possession of himself, but as often the sight of
the audience shook him to his foundation. At last he rose and left the
theatre, but at the door he lingered to take one look at the unconscious
audience, and then shaking his head in my direction with patriotic joy,
he departed from the building, and I was obliged to imagine an execution
in order to continue my lecture.
The lecturer's nerves ought to be made of wire, for he never knows what
may happen. There is one town in the United States where the
express trains run down the main street, and you lecture there to an
accompaniment of engine bells and the blowing-off of steam. When the
music rises too high for the human voice, the lecturer in that town
ought to abandon the contest and offer between the whistles a few
remarks on the legislative power of American railways. These remarks
will be vastly enjoyed by the audience.
Behind the platform of one large hall is the lift of the next building,
which is used at regular intervals of a minute, and you have your
sentences punctuated by the whoop of the unseen lift till at last you
can calculate the time and know that you have spoken ninety whoops, and
it is nearly time to stop.
One night I was arrested by the sound of steady snoring which could be
heard over the larger part of the theatre, but although every one was
in search for the offender, he could not be found. At last the sound
was traced to the stage, and, as there was no one on the stage except
myself, to be behind the curtain. One of the servants of the theatre
had laid himself down there in order to enjoy the lecture, and that
had proved of such a solid character that he had fallen into a fit of
meditation, from which he was very rudely awakened.
One evening in a Canadian town a fox terrier came in, and owing to some
difference of opinion with a gentleman in the stalls, expressed himself
in public. As there was to be a dog story in the lecture, I thought it
well to explain that the terrier had been engaged to take part, but had
broken in too soon. For a while the dog behaved with much propriety, and
then there was a second outbreak.
Six gentlemen combined to get that dog out of the theatre, but not
without difficulty and danger. The terrier retired fighting.
The platform does many good things for a lecturer; for one thing, it
strengthens his voice; it brings him into contact with large bodies of
his fellow-men, and it inspires him with humanity. Upon the platform
he learns to command himself; to take disappointments like a man; and,
above all, he gains a new conviction of the kindness and goodwill of
large bodies of people whom he has never seen before and may never see
again, and of whom he will ever think with a grateful heart.