No one ever profited by the experience of another, any more than any person inherited the learning of an ancestor. Alas and alack, we must acquire both for ourselves.
To our mothers and grandmothers, with their sweet but secluded and often sequestered lives, it would have seemed a deed of daring for a woman to lecture the public. Would they have thought it—would our grandfathers rather have held it “ladylike”?
It is curious how one acquires a reputation without the least foundation. For instance, I am always being asked to lecture; sometimes it is at a People’s Palace, sometimes before a learned society, or on behalf of various charities, or to address the blind, or deliver educational discourses; and even the famous Major Pond of America once tried to persuade me to go on a lecturing tour in the States.
Tempting as his money offer was, I dared not face that vast public.
This reputation is a chimera, for I have only lectured a few times in my life; and these occasions have chiefly been at the People’s Palace at Vauxhall, where an audience of two or three thousand persons, paying from one penny to sixpence, eat oranges, smoke pipes, and otherwise enjoy themselves after their manner, while the lecturer is doing his (or her) best to amuse them. To keep these people out of the public-houses and well occupied for an evening seems worth even the pain and nervousness of standing alone on a stage, nearly as big as that of Drury Lane, with footlights before, and a huge white curtain for one’s slides behind.
The first time I ever spoke in public was at a large meeting (seven or eight hundred) held in the St. Martin’s Town Hall, when at an hour or two’s notice I took the place of the late Earl of Winchilsea, and, in reply to his bidding by telegram, discoursed for fifteen minutes on the position of women in Agriculture, a subject in which I was much interested at the time. I spoke from notes only, having a horror of a read paper, which is always exasperating or inaudible. Most speeches are too low and too long. The fifteen minutes appeared to be nothing, but the moments of waiting were torture until the first words had come forth. When one’s knees shake, and one’s tongue seems to cleave to the roof of the mouth, when the audience dances like myriads of fireflies before one’s eyes, the misery is so awful that the result is not worth the effort.
Women are often excellent speakers, both in matter and style, and those who have an equal amount of practice are quite as good as the best men. Nevertheless, after-dinner speaking is, alas, far more often boring than entertaining, and one regrets a bell does not ring after five minutes, as a gentle hint to sit down. The poor speaker seldom knows when the right moment to end has arrived.
Everyone is shy about something. The rough-edged shyness of youth wears away, but we each remain tender somewhere. Shyness overpowers me when making a speech, or on hearing my name roared into a room full of people. The first makes me sick, in spite of having addressed an audience of three thousand people, which I find easier than thirty; the second makes me wish to run away.
“I’m shy,” is the excuse of youth to cover rudeness. Gauche, awkward, ill-mannered boys and girls call these delinquencies shyness. Being shy, however, is no extenuation of being discourteous. It is merely selfish self-conceit allowed to run rampant instead of being checked. How much easier it is to form a bad impression than to destroy one.
We are all imperfect, but the only chance of bettering ourselves is to realise the fact early and try self-reform.