Ah, me! was ever worm so crushed. My face and neck burned. I wonder my clothes didn’t catch fire, as, muttering something unintelligible, but meant to be apologetic, I stumbled off the dais, and, pierced by those two thousand merry eyes, found my way out. Then the revulsion set in, and I felt hideously angry, because I felt sure I had been led into that false position for a joke, and that I had no business there at all. But I learned that the true reason was that the wonderful old lady had just sustained a bad fall from her tricycle. She had recovered with marvellous celerity, considering her age, but there could be no doubt that the occurrence had affected her temper, and who could wonder if it did? Still, I wished most sincerely that some other lightning-conductor might have been found than myself, or that one other man might have been there to lend me a little moral support. I felt just as if I had been caught in some prohibited meeting and was being led off to execution.
CHAPTER XVIII
DIVAGATIONS
Lecturing, as I believe I have said before in these pages, is a most fascinating pursuit, though few who listen would imagine how it exhausts its votaries. And by this I do not mean those astonishing people of whom we are told that they come off the platform dripping with sweat, necessitating their being stripped, bathed, and massaged before they become normal again. I am inclined to think that such lecturers must be very few indeed, and ought rather to be classed with acrobats or gymnasts, than with professors of the essentially quiet and peaceful art of speaking in public. And yet I do not know. I have sometimes listened to public speakers whose efforts to make themselves heard and to vocalise their ideas involved them in a struggle that it was painful to witness, what it must have been for them to perform must be left to the imagination. The saddest thing about these contortions of mind and body is that the result of them is always in inverse proportion to the amount of muscular and mental effort expended upon them—indeed, I have several times been witness to a public speaker producing an entirely unintelligible roar, who in ordinary conversation was pleasant to listen to and quite easy to understand.
Unfortunately there are a large number of people who feel a fierce longing to teach their fellows vocally, who, although they have ideas in plenty, cannot realise at all that to make yourself heard intelligibly it is not merely useless, it is fatal to shout, that the only result of such folly is injury to the vocal organs, and that the complaint known as “clergyman’s sore throat” is simply caused by not knowing how to use the voice. And here, although it is a digression (which I love) I will add that another very prevalent ailment known as “writer’s cramp” or “pen paralysis” is caused not by the amount of writing done by the sufferer but through ignorance of the proper method of holding a pen while writing. Indeed, to see the way that most people hold a pen when writing is enough to induce wonder that their hands are not cramped without any writing but simply by holding the fingers in such an outrageous position.
I believe that voice production can be taught and that some people can learn it, but I know that some people whose vocation is public speaking are always painful to listen to and always give a sympathetic hearer the impression, true or false, that they are suffering very much also. With such people, if their matter is good, and it often is, this is a real affliction, and I condole with them very much, although I am grateful to say that I have never, since I began lecturing, had any difficulty in making myself heard distinctly, nor have I ever had a lesson in voice production. But I did have a long apprenticeship to open-air speaking and singing, some fifteen years altogether, and besides the inestimable practice thus gained, there was also the lesson, always to be learned from terrible examples, what to avoid.
Repeatedly secretaries and others have warned me that their hall was very bad for speaking in and on some occasions I have been told that no one had ever succeeded in making himself heard in a certain hall, but I can gratefully record the fact that I have never yet failed to make myself heard distinctly in every corner of the worst halls I have ever used for the purpose of lecturing. Yet some places, notably places of worship, are very trying to the voice, and after an hour and a half speaking in them there is a sense of weariness which is entirely absent after a similar effort in a good hall perhaps three times larger. This peculiarity of acoustics is, I believe, one of the chief trials of architects, and one that the greatest skill and care often fail to compete with successfully.
But I started this chapter with the idea of the exhaustion consequent upon a lecture. It varies, of course, according to the physical and mental fitness of the lecturer, but it is one of the most insidious forms of fatigue known. To the enthusiastic lecturer who rejoices in his task, and to whom it appears not only easy but natural and delightful, there is a strain upon the nerves that, unnoticed at the time, is severely felt afterwards. Just as some people feel a long train journey. “Surely,” say the unthinking, “you cannot be tired after sitting for eight hours!” Can you not? I can answer for myself, who am a fairly good traveller, that it is almost as tiring as a day’s manual labour, while many robust people it will make absolutely ill. And it is so with lecturing. In spite of the appearance of ease and the obvious delight of the lecturer in his work, it is using up his nerve force at a great rate, and he will do well to remember this afterwards, when those who have been listening to him often expect him to entertain them until midnight or after.
But there is another class of lecturer to whom every lecture is a tremendous ordeal. Gifted persons, with an ability to express themselves far above the average, the time that they are on their feet facing the audience may almost be described as a period of torture. What the interval of waiting for the time of the lecturer’s beginning must mean to such unfortunate people I cannot tell, but I feel sure it must be agonising. I have heard one splendidly muscular friend of mine say that he would far rather do three days’ heavy labour than give a couple of hours’ reading from one of his books. And I have no choice but to believe him, the proof being that although the terms offered him were glittering enough he only endured for one season.
Unfortunately there are to be found folks who can neither make themselves heard nor say anything worth listening to if they could. I should think they have few nerves to speak of, or they could never survive one attempt to address an audience. Yet these are the very people who are the most anxious to be heard. In my open-air experience I suffered many things from them, because volunteers for that service are always eagerly welcomed, the rule being among most religious communities that if a man is fit for no other form of Christian service he will do to preach the Gospel in the open air. If any proof of this be needed it is only necessary to become an auditor at any open-air meeting for the propagation of the Gospel. The Salvation Army, which certainly does not follow the rule that anybody will do for the open air that is unfit for anything else, because all the members are called upon if willing, is no exception to the former rule. You will hear good speakers in the open-air meetings of the S.A., but—they are nearly always women. The men all seem to drop into a raucous, nauseous shout to which it is painful and entirely unprofitable to listen. The painful and pitiful thing is that people do listen, showing thereby that they have never heard any good speaking and so do not know how bad that is to which they are listening so intently.
I have taken the open-air preachers of the Gospel as my awful example, because of the splendid opportunities they daily and nightly waste through the ignorance of their leaders. If you want to hear good open-air speaking, listen to the Socialist orator, or the Suffragette speaker. They have no use for the duffers, and so none are employed. I might go farther and say that they are in earnest—but I am afraid I shall be misunderstood. However, I cannot help it, I know it is as I say.