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.