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.