CHAPTER XIV
AUDIENCES
I have often been asked which I consider my best audiences. It is not an easy question to answer, for people vary so in different parts of the same county even. But I have no hesitation in saying that the northern folk, right away to Scotland, are almost uniformly good and quick. And as far as my experience goes, though it may be true (not in my experience) that the Scots joke with difficulty, I have never known any audience quicker or keener to note every point, or more generous with their applause than I have found in Scotland. Of course, in common with every lecturer, I suppose, no matter how long or varied his experience, I have affectionate recollections of certain audiences. The thought of them is very cheering to me in my retirement. I think of the sea of upturned faces now hanging on every syllable, now sending up peal after peal of laughter, and withal by their intense sympathy with me, urging me on to give them better words than I had ever known before that I possessed.
For I learned many years ago the prime secret of the successful—I was going to say orator, but the term is a bit fly-blown to me: it means stilted high-falutin rubbish, meaningless, and leaving any audience cold—lecturer. It is to get yourself on conversational terms with your hearers. This I do not think is possible with obviously prepared speech, and I am sure is impossible to the man who reads his address. The latter course is no doubt necessary at the Universities before a crowd of students with notebooks, seeking learning, and entirely unenthusiastic, but for a popular lecturer it is fatal. Shall I ever forget the look of woe with which I was greeted by a secretary at a big hall near London. To my earnest enquiry as to what was wrong he returned the astounding answer that the committee looked upon me as their only hope. If I gave them as good a lecture as I had given them on a previous occasion the society might survive, but if not it must perish. I wanted to know more, naturally, and the secretary then told me that with the laudable idea of giving their society the best talent obtainable they had engaged at a fee of twenty-five guineas an exceedingly big pot and eminent authority upon a certain subject.
He duly arrived, and appeared before a full house with a sheaf of manuscript, no pictures, a feeble, mumbling voice, and very bad eyesight. He could not decipher his notes, he was in trouble with his glasses, and he could not make himself intelligible. Before he had been on the platform fifteen minutes the hall was empty, and the chairman was compelled to suggest to him that he might as well retire. Within the week half the subscribers had indignantly resigned, and I was now expected to save the remnant, if not to win back some of the seceders. I think I should have been more than human if I had not asked that secretary whether he thought it quite fair to pay one man twenty-five guineas to destroy the society, and another ten guineas to rehabilitate it, but the question was not quite fair, since he was but the mouthpiece of the committee. Still, that question does arise occasionally, and will do so until societies learn that enormous fees to big pots do not always mean general satisfaction and increase of membership.
This recollection brings another in its train, as usual—this time a very delightful one for me. In the early days I went to a celebrated lecture society in London to lecture, and the secretary in conversation in the anteroom before the lecture told me, rather pompously I thought:
“We consider ourselves the best lecture audience in London. And our people will not stay and listen to what they do not care for. So if you find your audience melting away, don’t be discouraged; it may only mean that your subject does not interest them, not any reflection on your ability as a lecturer.”
I thanked him for his caution, but added that I thought I could have done without it. However, I would do my best, as usual. But I was piqued, and I believe I did strive to capture that audience. Anyhow I did get them, and the result remains with me always. For they took me to their collective heart, and together we romped through two hours of delight, at least so the clock said, but when I came off the platform I could not realise that I had been talking more than half an hour. Malapropos to the last, that secretary said to me:
“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my life, Mr. Bullen, though, for the life of me, I don’t know what I’ve been laughing about.”
As if it mattered! The great fact was that even he, in whom a sense of humour was absent from his mental equipment, had laughed even unto physical disablement. Yes, that was a very pleasant evening, of a good savour even now.
I have told in another place of the great evening of my life in the Town Hall of Birmingham, and I am thereby precluded from adding very much on that head. I must add, however, that then, as never before, did I realise the utter blessedness of being in complete sympathy with a great company of one’s fellow-mortals, of being able to talk with them as one of themselves, fearlessly, without any reserves or sense of weakness, conscious only of simple truth-telling, and your fellow’s acceptance thereof. That supreme joy had been mine before, but unconsciously—that night in Birmingham was my first realisation of the great fact. Many and many a time when I used to preach in the open air, I have been enabled to forget overdue rent, shabby children, hardly sufficient food and bullying seniors in the office, in the pure joy of swaying a multitude of my fellow men and women, and taking them with me for a while into a rarer and purer atmosphere, where the sordid, irritating things of earth were forgotten in the better world of truth and justice.