I approached it in fear and trembling, especially when I noticed as I was awaiting my "turn" the vast quantities of chewing gum that were being sold to my audience by the inevitable boy with the basket. There is always something disconcerting to a public speaker in the constant, simultaneous, and automatic movement of other jaws than his own, and in the face of a collective jaw, made up of sixteen hundred lowers that chewed as one, I feared that mine, singly and alone, would find the odds against it overpowering. Strange to say, however, my real fear on this occasion was not on the score of my audience, but whether I should be able to acquit myself creditably before them. I have fondly hoped that my little talk contained a message, and as I observed these seekers after pleasure slowly gathering, and taking their places on tiers of pine benches under the kindly shade of a row of noble pines, it occurred to me that if there was any fruitful soil for my message anywhere it was in the hearts of just such people as sat before me toilers, the humbler folk, the men and women whose lives had been too busy with bread-and-butter problems for the acquirement of culture, and whose sole opportunity for amusement, uplifting or otherwise, came on these very Sunday afternoons.
There were men and boys there who under other conditions might have been idling on street corners. I counted three Chinese, several Japanese, and a half-dozen Negroes in my audience. A dozen women had their babies with them, and many a small kiddie, too young to chew gum without exposure to the peril of swallowing it, nibbled and absorbed ginger cookies as I watched them. The question became not were they good enough for me, but could I convince them that I was good enough for them. It was not a question of "getting down to their level," but of my own ability to climb up to the level of my opportunity. For the time being whatever superiority there was was altogether on their side, and the point was how I could prove myself the real thing, and not the artificial; how I could find the common denominator which would enable us to get on "like a house afire" together.
As I was speaking the solution came and a mighty simple one it turned out to be; for it lay wholly in the simplest possible use of the English language. "Cut out the big words," I said to myself. "Cut out all unfamiliar terms. Get right down to good old Anglo-Saxon. Drop such jawbreakers as differentiate, terminology, intimations, implications, and psychological." My chief hope became that I might once more at least measure up to that condition which was clearly set forth a great many years ago by a Western chairman, at a time when I was too much of a novice to do my work even passably well, who said to me as we walked to my hotel after the lecture was over:
"We don't care so much for your lecture, Mr. Bangs; but we like you, and we're going to have you back."
Whether or not my plan was successful I shall not attempt to say; but I may be pardoned, perhaps, for recording here one of the most delightful compliments I have ever had, paid me by a threadbare workingman who came up behind me as I was leaving the park that afternoon, and put his arm through mine as he spoke.
"Are you goin' to speak here to-night, Brother?" he said.
"No," said I. "I am hurrying off to Boston on the five o'clock train."
"Well, I'm sorry," said he. "I wanted to come out and hear ye again."
Bearing upon the cultivation, or lack of it, of the average American audience, I recall a remark made to me several years ago by a well-known poet from the shores of Britain, who had come here to lecture on the Celtic Renaissance.
"I have had a most delightful surprise," said he, "in the wonderful amount of real culture that I have found in the United States, and especially in the smaller communities. Why, do you know," he added, "when I first started in on my work I supposed that I should have to spend at least half of my time explaining to my audiences just what a Renaissance was, and the rest in consideration of the Irish movement; but I hadn't been here a week before I discovered that for the most part the people I was to talk to knew quite as much as I did about the history of the movement, and I had all I could do to shed any new light on it whatsoever."
He had, fortunately for himself, made the discovery at a critical part of the "lecture game," as some people delight to call it, that it was up to him to keep climbing, and not waste any of his valuable time trying to descend to a lower level, if he wished his discourse to be favorably regarded in this country a discovery that I devoutly wish some of our modern editors and theatrical managers, who think they must cater exclusively to a "lowbrow" audience, as they call it, a clientele made up out of the whole cloth of their own imaginings, might make.
Our wonderful West frequently affords illuminating incidents demonstrating the real truth, as discovered by our distinguished visitor. I remember going a few years ago into a small community in Iowa, where possibly the English lecturer would have looked for very little in the way of what he would consider learning. When sitting in the office of the chairman of the lecture committee, a particularly alert young man, a lawyer, and a graduate of the Harvard Law School, the door opened, and a splendid specimen of physical manhood, a typical pioneer in appearance, stalked in. The chairman introduced me to him.
"Mr. Bangs," said he, "I want you to know my father."
The caller gave my hand a grip that even now makes my fingers ache every time I think of it. He then led me to a comfortable, leather-covered arm chair, and, after almost shoving me into its capacious depths, seated himself directly in front of me.
"Sit down, young man," said he. "I want to talk to you."
"Fire ahead!" said I. "And thank you for calling me a young man. I've been feeling a trifle old for a couple of days."
"Well, you are young compared to me," he said. "I'm eighty."
"Good Lord!" said I. "You don't look over sixty, anyhow."
"No," he smiled, "I don't but that's Ioway. I've been farmin' out here for nigh onto seventy years, and we're all too busy to grow old. We live forever in Ioway. It's the grandest country on the footstool."
I didn't feel at all inclined to dispute him, considering his more than six feet of towering height, the fresh, healthful hardness of his weather-beaten face, the breadth of his shoulders, and depth of his chest. I contented myself with agreeing with him. And I didn't have to work hard to do that, either; for I have known magnificent Iowa as a most salubrious State for many years.
"Well, you see, sir," I said, "we can't all pick out our birthplaces. I was born in New York through no choice of my own. Some are born at birthplaces, some achieve birthplaces, and others have birthplaces thrust upon them which last was my case."
"Same here," said he. "I was born in Ohier; but my folks moved out here when I was a babby. I've lived here ever since and I'm glad of it. Of course I hain't had your advantages in gettin' an eddication most o' mine's in my wife's name but I've got some, and I've had to work so dam hard to get it that sometimes I think I appreciate it just a leetle more than you Eastern boys do who have it served to you on a silver platter. I didn't know how to read till I was twenty-five."
"I congratulate you," said I. "Considering the sort of things the greater part of our young people are reading to-day, I wish that condition might prevail a little more widely than it does."
"That's it," said he. "When a thing comes too easy we're not likely to make the best of it. When I think of how I had to sweat to learn to read you don't ketch me wastin' any o' my talents in that direction on trash."