From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

by John Kendrick Bangs

Sometimes the Gentleman in the Chair is a Lady, but more often he is a man, and, strange to relate, contrary to the general impression of the comparative methods of the sexes, the ladies are vastly more direct in their introductions than their Brothers in Suffering. Women are seldom oratorically inclined. Men are invariably so—or at least chairmen are. And as a result an introduction to an audience by a woman is likely to become more of an "identification of the remains" than an illuminating explanation of the speaker's right to be where he is; while the men "pile it on" to such an extent that the lecturer has often to struggle immortally to make good the chairman's kindly declarations on his behalf.

Personally, with all due respect to the Lady Chairman, I prefer the masculine method: not because I like to hear myself exalted to the tipmost point of the blue vault above; for I do not. It is hard work to sit still before five hundred people with a smug expression of countenance and hear oneself compared to Dickens and Thackeray, and Shakespeare and Moses, to the distinct disadvantages of that noble quartet of literary strugglers; and I have never ceased to sympathize with Anthony Hope, who on a postprandial occasion some years ago when I was sitting next to him, after listening to a few eulogistic remarks by a speaker in which he was made to appear the greatest Light of Literature since the beginning of time, lifted the tablecloth, glanced under it, and in a muffled tone murmured, "My God, Bangs! Isn't there any way out of here? I cawn't live up to all this!"

Nevertheless, I do prefer the men's method, because it gives me more time in which to study my audience, and, in so far as I may, adjust myself and my discourse to the special problem confronting me. In the one case (introductions by women) it is as if one were suddenly seized by the scruff of the neck and thrown overboard without even time to say one's prayers; in the other the victim is slowly and pleasantly carried upward from the level of fact on the wings of kindly fancy to a pinnacle of unearned increment of glory, and left there to shift for himself: to soar higher if he have afflatus enough to attain loftier heights, or to slide back to where he belongs as gracefully as may be.

"Pile it on so thick that the lecturer has to struggle hard to make good."

I have often thought as I have sat and listened to these delightful flights of eulogy—so like the obituary notices we read in the newspapers after a great man dies—of the great disadvantages of those upper realms. It is very lonely and cold up there, and while the old saw is undoubtedly correct, and there is plenty of room at the top, let it be recorded by one who has more than once been summarily hauled thither as involuntarily as undeservedly, that it is elbow room only, with mighty little solid earth on which to rest one's feet. The poet who invented the expression "the giddy heights" knew what he was talking about, and one has but to go out on the lecture platform and try to stand gracefully on those abstract peaks to have it proved to his entire satisfaction.

But there is another reason why I prefer the chair-man to the chair-woman, and it has to do solely with the technic of lecturing. No one who has ever lectured can deny the apprehension of the first five minutes of the effort. Those five minutes are perhaps the most critical period of the evening. If the attack is not right, the whole affair is likely to come down with a crash; for first impressions count perhaps more than they should with the average audience. If the attack is good, and the lecturer can "make himself solid" with his audience at the very beginning, structural weaknesses and an occasional dull or dragging moment will be forgiven later, because those who listen have come to like the speaker personally, and decline to let him fail unless he really insists upon doing so.

Now the technic of this attack, I should say if I were retained to write a Primer for Lecturers, involves the chairman most materially. He is the tangible hook on which the alert lyceumite almost invariably either hangs or supports himself in those first five minutes. Human nature is so constituted that people like a pleasantry at the expense of some person or of some thing with which they are personally familiar. It grows out of the love of the concrete—which is a failure of us all, I fancy—and in every community there are always at least two concrete things that are sure winners for the lecturer—the chairman of the evening, and the railway system upon which the inhabitants of the community depend. Jests broad or subtle at the expense of either are received with howls of joy.

On my first transcontinental trip, made ten years ago, I never failed to receive an immediate response from my audiences when I referred to the letters N. P. R. R., the abbreviated form for the Northern Pacific Railroad, as really signifying a "Not Particularly Rapid Route"; and in other sections of the country served by those charming corporations the shortest cut I know to the affections of the people is through a bald or ribald jest at the expense of the Erie or the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.

The chairman, however, is an equally safe proposition. He is either a very popular man in town, or directly the reverse, and in either case his neighbors enjoy a little joke at his expense. Naturally the joke, to be successful, must have to do with something peculiar to the moment, which the lecturer must find in the chairman's opening remarks. Obviously one cannot be so freely facetious with a woman as with a man, and if he has been properly brought up does not even wish to be so. So that the Lady Chairman invariably leaves the speaker with a restricted field of operations at the outset.