Chapter XXIX: On the Rostrum

On reaching Sonora, Tuolumne County, with the frozen toes alluded to in the great slide down the mountain, I went to work and dug post-holes for a living. Inspired by the posts or the holes, I wrote what I called a lecture. This I learned by heart. Next I practised its delivery in the woods, behind barns, and sometimes at early morn in the empty Court-house--for the Temple of Justice in Sonora stood open night and day, and he that would might enter and sleep on the benches, or even in the bar itself, as many did in those days. Many weeks I drilled and disciplined this lecture, addressing it to rocks, trees, barns, and sometimes to unseen auditors wandering about, whose sudden appearance would cover me with confusion and send me blushing home. But I dreaded bringing it to an engagement with the enemy--the audience. The glories and triumphs of oratory I eagerly coveted, but the preliminary labor, the pangs and the terrible chances of speaking in public I dreaded and avoided as long as possible. But Destiny, despite all our backwardness, steadily pushes us on to the most painful experiences. I required yet feared the living audience. Rocks, trees, and barn doors will not do for a speaker the specific work of a few listening human beings. Listening ears sooner or later teach a man who would speak to multitudes to modulate his voice or increase it to a volume, or spend more time and strength in accentuating each syllable; and above all, to take things coolly and not get hurried. At last I concluded to risk myself on an experimental audience. I borrowed one for the occasion. Going into the main street of Sonora one evening, I collected half a dozen appreciative souls and said, “Follow me to the Court-house; I would have a few words with you.” There was a County Clerk, his deputy, a popular physician and saloon-keeper, and an enterprising carpenter. They followed me wonderingly. Arrived at the Court-house I seated them, marched myself to the Judge’s bench, stuck two candles in two bottles, lit them, and then informed the crowd that I had brought them hither to serve as an experimental audience to a lecture I proposed delivering. After which I plunged into the subject, and found that portion of the brain which with a speaker always acts independent of the rest wondering that I should be really talking to live auditors. There is a section of a man’s faculties, during the operation of speaking in public, which will always go wandering around on its own hook, picking up all manner of unpleasant thoughts and impressions. Apparently it is ever on the watch to find something which shall annoy the other half. It seems to me that no one can become a very successful speaker or actor until this idle, vagrant part of the mind is put down altogether, total forgetfulness of all else save the work in hand be established, and self-consciousness abolished. However, I spoke half the piece to my borrowed audience, and then, feeling that I could really stand fire, told them they could go home. But Dr. ----, constituting himself spokesman, rose and declared that having served as hearers for half the lecture they thought they were entitled to the other half. Being thus encored, I gave them the other half. A great apprehension was now taken from my mind. I could speak to a crowd without forgetting my lines, and deemed myself already a lecturer if not an orator. I did not then realize how vast is the difference between mere speaking and the properly delivering of words and sentences to a multitude, be it large or small; how unfit are the tone, pitch, and manner of ordinary converse to public speaking; how a brake must be put on every word and syllable, to slow down its accentuation and make it audible in a hall; how great the necessity for deliberation in delivery; how the force and meaning of entire sentences may be lost by a gabbling, imperfect, and too rapid enunciation; how the trained speaker keeps perfect control of himself, not only as to his delivery, but the mood underneath it; which should prompt how much depends on the establishment of a certain chain of sympathy betwixt speaker and audience, and how much the establishment of such chain depends on the speaker’s versatility to accommodate himself to the character, intelligence, moods, and requirements of different audiences. I state this, having since my debut in the Sonora Court-house learned these things, and learned also that Nature has not given me the power to surmount all these difficulties. I am not a good speaker, as many doubtless discovered before I did. However, my friends whom I consulted said by all means give the lecture in public, knowing, of course, that I wanted them to encourage me, and feeling this to be the best way of getting rid of me. So I had posters printed and commenced public life on a small field. I hired a hall; admittance twenty-five cents. I felt guilty as I read this on the bills. I read one alone furtively by moonlight, because after they were posted and the plunge taken I was ashamed to appear by daylight on the streets. It seemed so presumptuous to ask respectable, God-fearing citizens of that town to sit and hear _me_. This was a result of the regular oscillations of my mental and temperamental seesaw.

I was always too far above the proper scale of self-esteem one day and too far below it the next. The real debut was not so easy as the preliminary, borrowed, bogus one. There were the hard, stern, practical people present, who counted on receiving their regular “two bits” worth of genuine, solid fact, knowledge and profitable information, who discounted all nonsense, didn’t approve of it and didn’t understand it. I felt their cold and withering influence as soon as I mounted the platform. Not many of such hearers were present, but that was enough to poison. I saw their judgment of my effort in their faces. I weakly allowed those faces, and the opinions I deemed shadowed forth on them, to paralyze, psychologize and conquer me. I allowed my eyes, numberless times, to wander and meet their stony, cynical gaze, and, at each time, the basilisk orbs withered up my self-assertion and self-esteem. Becoming more and more demoralized, I sometimes cowardly omitted or forgot what I deemed my boldest matter and best hits. However, the large majority of the audience being kindly disposed toward me, heard, applauded and pronounced the lecture a “success.” Some ventured, when it was over, to advise me that the subject-matter was much better than the manner of its delivery. Of that there was not the least doubt. In speaking, I had concentrated matter enough for two hours’ proper delivery into one, and a part of the mental strain and anxiety during the lecture was to race my words so as to finish within the limits of an hour on time. I feared wearying the audience, and so took one of the best methods of doing so. The next day self-esteem, going up to fever-heat, and my comparative failure not being so bad as the one I had anticipated when my estimates of myself were at zero, I determine on pressing my newly-found vocation and “starring” Tuolumne County. Carried by this transient gleam of self-conceit beyond the bounds of good judgment, and overwhelmed with another torrent of composition, I wrote still another lecture, and advertised that. The curiosity, complaisance, and good-nature of my friends I mistook for admiration. Indeed, during the fever, I planned a course, or rather a constant succession of lectures which might, if unchecked, have extended to the present time. But, on the second attempt, I talked largely to empty benches. A character of audience I have since become accustomed to, and with whom I am on terms of that friendship and sympathy only begotten of long acquaintance. The benches were relieved here and there by a discouraged-looking hearer who had come in on a free ticket, and who, I felt, wanted to get out again as quickly as possible. Then, I knew that my friends did not care to hear me any more. This was bitter, but necessary and useful. People will go often to church and hear dull sermons because of custom, of conventionality, and of religious faith and training. They will attend political meetings during an exciting campaign and hear equally dull political speeches because of patriotic or partisan sympathy or fealty. They will go also to hear noted people because of curiosity, but they will not hear more than once a mere man unbolstered by any of these outside influences. I next gave the lecture at Columbia. Columbia, though but four miles distant, was then the rival of Sonora as the metropolis of Tuolumne County, and it was necessary to secure a Columbian indorsement before attempting to star it through the provincial cities of Jimtown, Chinese Camp, Don Pedro’s, and Pine Log. I billed Columbia, hired the theatre for two dollars and a half, and, after my effort, had the satisfaction of hearing from a friend that the appreciative and critical magnates of the town had concluded to vote me a “success.” Then I spoke at Jamestown, Coulterville, Mariposa, Snelling’s and other places, with very moderate success. Perhaps I might have arisen to greater distinction or notoriety than that realized on the Tuolumne field had I better known that talent of any sort must be handled by its possessor with a certain dignity to insure respect. Now, I travelled from town to town on foot. I was met, dusty and perspiring, tramping on the road, by people who knew me as the newly-arisen local lecturer. I should have travelled in a carriage. I posted my own bills. I should have employed the local bill-sticker. I lectured for ten cents per head, when I should have charged fifty. Sometimes I dispensed with an admittance fee altogether and took up contributions. In Coulterville, the trouser-buttons of Coultervillians came back in the hat, mixed with dimes. Looking back now on that experience, I can sincerely say to such as may follow me in any modification of such a career, “Never hold yourself cheap.” If you put a good picture in a poor frame, it is only the few who will recognize its merit. Don’t let your light shine in a battered, greasy lamp. It’s all wrong. We all know the dread that genius inspires when clad in a seedy coat. Lecturing frequently tries a man’s soul; especially when the lecturer’s career is not a very successful one. If his path be strewn with roses and success, there may not be much of a story to tell. But it is different when his path is strewn with thorns and he steps on them. It is sad to hire a hall in a strange village and wait for an audience which never comes. It is ominous to hear your landlord, just before supper, remark, “Our people don’t go much on lecters. But they’ll pile into a circus or menagerie or anything else that isn’t improvin’.” They say this all over the land. It is sadder when you offer him a handful of your free tickets for himself and family to hear him, “Guess the folks hain’t got time to go to-night. There is a ball over to Pappooseville, and everybody’s goin’.” I never did bill myself yet in a village for a lecture, but that I happened to pitch on the night of all nights when some great local event was to take place. Or else it rained. It is sad to speak to thirty-two people in a hall large enough to hold a thousand and try to address those thirty-two people scattered about at the thirty-two points of the mariner’s compass. Once in New York I spoke to a fair audience in a hall on the ground floor. Things went on beautifully till 9 o’clock, when a big brass band struck up in the bigger hall over my head and some fifty couples commenced waltzing. It was an earthquake reversed. It ruined me for the night. None can realize until they enter the lecture field what trivial occurrences may transpire to upset the unfortunate on the platform and divert and distract the attention of an audience. On one occasion a cat got into a church where I was speaking, and trotted up and down a course she had laid out for herself before the pulpit. She did this with an erect tail, and at times made short remarks. It is singular that a single cat acting in this manner is more effective in interesting and amusing an “intelligent audience” than any speaker. Under such conditions Cicero himself would have to knock under to the cat. He might go on talking, but the cat would capture the house. And then the awful sensation of being obliged to keep on as though nothing had disturbed you; to pretend you don’t see such a cat; that you are not thinking of it; and knowing all the while that your audience are getting their money’s worth out of the cat and not out of you! On another fearful occasion I was speaking at Bridgehampton, Long Island, on the subject of temperance. I lectured on temperance occasionally, though I never professed teetotalism--for any length of time. One can lecture on temperance just as well without bring a total abstainer--and perhaps better. Now, I was born and they attempted to bring me up properly near Bridgehampton. Every one knew me and my ancestors, immediate and remote. I had not spoken over ten minutes when a man well-known in the neighborhood and much moved by the whiskey he had been drinking all day, arose and propounded some not very intelligible queries. I answered him as well as I could. Then he put more. Nay, he took possession of the meeting. No one ventured to silence him. They are a very quiet, orderly people in Bridgehampton. Such an interruption of a meeting had never before been heard of there, and the people seemed totally unable to cope with the emergency. The wretch delivered himself of a great variety of remarks, but ever and anon recurred to the assertion that “he’d vouch for my character, because he not only knew me, but my parents before me.” “He was present,” he said, “at their wedding, which he remembered well from the fact of wine being served there, as well as rum, gin, and brandy.” That for me was a laborious evening. Sometimes I spoke, and then the inebriate would get the floor and keep it. He rambled about the aisles, allayed a cutaneous disturbance in his back by rubbing himself against one of the fluted pillars, and, when I had at last finished, made his way up to the choir and, interpolating himself between two damsels, sang everything and everybody out of tune from a temperance hymn-book.