Mr. Sargent was good enough to take me on as a pupil, uninteresting a one as I must have been. He began by putting me on the simplest exercises but with severe instructions about keeping them up. I went about my apartment day and night shouting “Ma, Me, Mi, Mo,” “Ba, Be, Bi, Bo.” I learned that the voice must come from the diaphragm, and that the diaphragm must be strong to throw it out for an hour at a time. Regularly every morning and every night, lying on my back with books on my stomach, I breathed deeply until I could lift four or five volumes.
By the time the circuit opened in July I knew theoretically how to use my voice; but I soon found that to do it without now and then getting it into my throat, making horrible noises and throwing myself into nervous panics, I must be more conscious of it than was good for my method of handling my material. Indeed, it was not until my second year of speaking that I could count on my voice for the hour of the performance. I never came to a point where I did not have to ask that a glass of water be put within reach—just in case. I found a glass of water a safety device if my attention was distracted for a moment and I lost my line of argument. I could pick it up, pretend to drink, change my position, regain poise.
So much for my voice. I knew how to make people hear what I was saying. Now as to material. I was to talk on the same subject day after day. That is, I was supposed to make daily the same speech. I was afraid of a memorized speech. A lecture experience of my old friend George Kennan was largely responsible for that. After he had published his classic work on Siberia Mr. Kennan took his story to the lecture platform. He wrote his lecture with characteristic care—memorized it and repeated it night after night on the long tours he made. It was an admirable lecture, one of the most moving I ever heard.
In telling me of his platform experiences Mr. Kennan dropped this warning: “In giving a memorized lecture one must be very careful that no two sentences end with the same words. In my lecture on Siberia I unwittingly used five or six identical words to end different sentences—one near the opening, the other near the closing of my talk. One night when perhaps I was unusually tired, instead of picking up what followed the first sentence I picked up the words that followed the second. That is, I was ending my lecture when I had only just begun it. I saved myself, but after that I always took care that there were no two sentences in my talk with identical, even similar endings.”
My memory is a tricky and unreliable organ—never properly trained, never held resolutely to its job. I should have been afraid to trust it on a lecture platform. Moreover, I realized that, since I was no orator and never should be, my only hope was to give the appearance of talking naturally, spontaneously. I put together what seemed to me a logical framework and decided to drape it afresh every day, never to begin with the same words, to use fresh illustrations, to think aloud, experimenting. I soon discovered a fresh beginning every day was too much to ask of myself under the conditions of travel. I found it foolish, too, for if I had struck an opening that arrested attention, why change it for one that might not? I soon found that illustrations which were all right in an article did not serve with an audience. The line of argument which I would have followed in an article became more effective on a platform if switched. That is, as it turned out, although I was giving the same lecture every day, it was never quite the same. I worked on it constantly; and that is what kept my interest. I think, because always I found however tired I might be, however much I despised myself for undertaking to do what I more and more realized I did not know how to do, I always was interested in my subject, talking as if it was something of which I had never talked before. It was that personal interest in my material which carried me through.
I had not given a thought in advance to the physical aspect of my undertaking. I had known that every day for forty-nine days I was to speak in a different place; I knew that meant daily traveling, but that had not disturbed me. I had always prided myself that I was superior to physical surroundings. I had not been long on the Chautauqua Circuit before I was realizing that they played an enormous part in my day. I found I was inquiring about the town to which we were headed: “How about the hotel? Are there bathrooms? If so, am I to get one?”
I was uneasy about the table—the ideas of cooking and serving—and at night about the noises, the drafts and other unmentionable worries. To my amazement the bed in which I was to sleep soon was taking an altogether disproportionate place in my mind. It is a fact that, when the circuit was over and I came to tell its story, I could draw a diagram of any one of the rooms in which I had slept, giving the exact location of the bed in relation to windows and doors and bathroom. I remembered these beds when I did not remember the hotel.
To my surprise I found myself deeply interested in the physical life of the circuit, so like the life of the circus. We performed in tents, and our outfit was as gay as ever you saw—khaki tents bound in red, with a great khaki fence about, pennants floating up and down the streets, and within, order, cleanliness, and the smartest kind of little platform and side dressing rooms.
Naturally I had no little curiosity about my traveling companions. Scoffing eastern friends told me that there would be bell ringers, trained dogs, and Tyrolese yodelers. I found no such entertainment, but I could hardly have fallen in with pleasanter company. A quintette of young people whose business it was to sing for three-quarters of an hour before my afternoon lecture and for a like period before the evening entertainment, proved to be the gayest, kindest, healthiest of companions. They were hard workers, seriously interested in pleasing their audiences. They knew not only how to work, but how to live on the kind of junket that I had undertaken. In other words, here was a group of five young people who were doing what to me was very unusual, in a thoroughly professional way. The seventh member of our party, the evening entertainer, Sydney Landon, had had long experience on the circuit. He was doing his work exactly as a good writer or a good lawyer would do his. I saw at once that what I had joined was not, as I had hastily imagined, a haphazard semi-business, semi-philanthropic, happy-go-lucky new kind of barnstorming. It was serious work.
In starting the Chautauqua work I was not conscious that there was a large percentage of condescension in my attitude. My first audience revealed my mind to me with painful definiteness, and humbled me beyond expression. It was all so unlike anything that I had had in my mind. I was to speak in the evening and arrived at my destination late and after a rather hard day. It was a steel town—one which I had known long years before. The picturesqueness of the thing struck me with amazement. Planted on an open space in the straggling, dimly lighted streets, where the heavy panting of the blast furnaces could be clearly heard, I saw the tent ablaze with electric lights, for, if you please, we carried our own electric equipment. From all directions men, women, and children were flocking—white shirtwaists in profusion, few coats, and still fewer hats. And there were so many of them! I felt a queer sensation of alarm. Here in the high-banked tiers were scores upon scores of serious faces of hard-working men. I had come to talk about the hopeful and optimistic things that I had seen in the industrial life of the country; but face to face with these men, within sound of the heavy panting of great furnaces, within sight of the unpainted, undrained rows of company houses which I had noticed as I came in on the train, the memory of many a long and bitter labor struggle that I had known of in that valley came to life, and all my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were so serious, they listened so intently to get something; and the tragedy was that I had not more to give them. This was my first audience. I never had another that made so deep an impression upon me.