Just before leaving New York, I saw in a comic paper that Bismarck must really now be considered as a great man, because, since his departure from office, there had been no rumor of his having applied to Major Pond to get up a lecturing tour for him in the United States.
It was not news to me that there are plenty of people in America who laugh at the European author’s trick of going to the American platform as soon as he has made a little name for himself in his own country. The laugh finds an echo in England, especially from some journalists who have never been asked to go, and from a few men who, having done one tour, think it wise not to repeat the experience. For my part, when I consider that Emerson, Holmes, Mark Twain, have been lecturers, that Dickens, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Sala, Stanley, Archdeacon Farrar, and many more, all have made their bow to American audiences, I fail to discover anything very derogatory in the proceeding.
| A PIG SQUEALING. |
Besides, I feel bound to say that there is nothing in a lecturing tour in America, even in a highly successful one, that can excite the envy of the most jealous “failure” in the world. Such work is about the hardest that a man, used to the comforts of this life, can undertake. Actors, at all events, stop a week, sometimes a fortnight, in the cities they visit; but a lecturer is on the road every day, happy when he has not to start at night.
No words can picture the monotony of journeys through an immense continent, the sameness of which strikes you as almost unbearable. Everything is made on one pattern. All the towns are alike. To be in a railroad car for ten or twelve hours day after day can hardly be called luxury, or even comfort. To have one’s poor brain matter thus shaken in the cranium is terrible, especially when the cranium is not quite full. Constant traveling softens the brain, liquefies it, churns it, evaporates it, and it runs out of you through all the cracks of your head. I own that traveling is comfortable in America, even luxurious; but the best fare becomes monotonous and unpalatable when the dose is repeated every day.
To-morrow night I lecture in Minneapolis. The next night I am in Detroit. Distance about seven hundred miles.
“Can I manage it?” said I to my impresario, when he showed me my route.
“Why, certn’ly,” he replied; “if you catch a train after your lecture, I guess you will arrive in time for your lecture in Detroit the next day.”
These remarks, in America, are made without a smile.
On arriving at Chicago this morning, I found awaiting me at the Grand Pacific Hotel, a letter from my impresario. Here is the purport of it: