The Art of Lecturing Part 2

This is why the Jews play so tremendous a part in the Socialist movement of the world. The Jew is almost always a student and often a fine scholar. The wide experience of the Jewish people has taught them (and they have always been quick to learn) the value of that something called "scholarship," which many of their duller Gentile brethren affect to despise. "Sound scholarship" should be one of the watchwords of the lecturer, and as he will never find time to read everything of the best that has been written, it is safe to conclude that, except for special reasons, he cannot spare time or energy for books of second or third rate.

Of course, in the beginning it is usually better to approach the great masters through some well informed, popularizing disciple. A beginner in biological evolution would do well to approach Darwin through Huxley's essays and John Spargo has been kind enough to say that Marx should be approached through the various volumes of my published lectures.

The lecturer must be familiar with the very best; he must plunge to the greatest depths and rise to the topmost heights.

CHAPTER VIII

SUBJECT

A great lecture must have a great theme. One of the supreme tests of a lecturer's judgment presents itself when he is called upon to choose his subject. Look over the list of subjects on the syllabus of any speaker and the man stands revealed. His previous intellectual training, or lack of it, what he considers important, his general mental att.i.tude, the extent of his information and many other things can be predicated from his selection of topics.

Early in his career the lecturer is obliged to face this question, and his future success hinges very largely on his decision. Not only is the selection determined by his past reading, but it in turn largely determines his future study.

Not long ago a promising young speaker loomed up, but he made a fatal mistake at the very outset. He selected as his special subject a question in which few are interested, except corporation lawyers--the American const.i.tution.

The greatest intellectual achievements of the last fifty years center around the progress of the natural sciences. Those greatest of all problems for the human race, "whence, whither, wherefore," have found all that we really know of their solution in the discoveries of physics and biology during recent times. What Charles Darwin said about "The Origin of Species" is ten thousand times more important than what some pettifogging lawyer said about "States' Rights." The revelations of the cellular composition of animals by Schwan and plants by Schleiden mark greater steps in human progress than any or all of the decisions of the supreme court. Lavoisier, the discoverer of the permanence of matter and the founder of modern chemistry, will be remembered when everybody has forgotten that Judge Marshall and Daniel Webster ever lived. From these and other epoch-making discoveries in the domain of science, modern Socialism gets its point of departure from Utopianism, and without those advances would have been impossible.

Here is a new and glorious world from which the working cla.s.s has been carefully shut out. Here we find armor that cannot be dented and weapons whose points cannot be turned aside in the struggle of the Proletariat for its own emanc.i.p.ation.

Any lecturer who will acquaint himself with the names of Lamarck, Darwin, Lyell, Lavoisier, Huxley, Haeckel, Virchow, Tyndall, Fiske, Wallace, Romanes, Helmholtz, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Weismann, etc., in science, and Marx, Engels, Lafargue, Labriola, Ferri, Vandervelde, Kautsky, Morgan, Ward, Dietzgen, etc., in sociology, and learn what those names stand for, such a lecturer, other things being equal, has a great and useful field before him.

It was well enough in the middle ages for great conclaves of clericals to discuss sagely what language will be spoken in heaven, and how many angels could dance a saraband on the point of a needle, but the twentieth century is face to face with tremendous problems and the public mind clamors for a solution. It will listen eagerly to the man who knows and has something to say. But it insists that the man who knows no more than it knows itself, shall hold his peace.

This is why the Socialist and the Scientist are the only men who command real audiences--they are the only men with great and vital truths to proclaim.

CHAPTER IX

LEARN TO STOP

The platform has no greater nuisance than that interminable bore--the speaker who cannot stop. Of all platform vices this is about the worst.

The speaker who acquires a reputation for it becomes a terror instead of an attraction to an audience.

As a rule there is no audience when his name is the only item on the card; he gets his chance speaking with some one else whom the listeners have really come to hear. And this is just when his performance is least desirable. Either he gets in before the real attraction and taxes everybody's patience, or he follows and addresses his remarks to retreating shoulders.

I met a man recently who had made quite a name in his own town as a speaker, and his townsmen visiting other cities proudly declared him a coming Bebel. I took the first opportunity to hear him. He had a good voice and was a ready speaker, but I soon found he carried a burden that more than balanced all his merits--he simply could not stop.

I heard him again when the committee managing the program had especially warned him not to speak more than thirty minutes. At the end of forty he was sailing along as though eternity was at his disposal. Three different times, at intervals of about ten minutes, they pa.s.sed him notes asking him to stop. He read them in plain view of an audience which knew what they meant, and then tried to close, and finally did so, not by finishing his speech, but by shutting his mouth and walking off the platform. The next item was something which the audience had paid money to enjoy, but many had to leave to catch a last car home. As they pa.s.sed me near the door, the men swore and the women came as near to it as they dared. And yet the speaker complained afterward of his treatment by the committee. When he began he received a fine ovation; had he finished at the end of thirty minutes he would have covered himself with glory; he spoke an hour and a quarter and most of those present hoped they would never be obliged to listen to him again.

I thought somebody ought to play the part of candid friend, and I told him next day how it looked to me.

He said: "I guess you are right; I believe I'll get a watch."

But this malady is usually much deeper than the question of having a watch. This speaker acquired it while addressing street meetings. A street audience is always changing in some degree. A hall lecture is not required and would be out of place. The auditors decide when they have had enough and leave the meeting unnoticed and the speaker launches out again on another question with fifty per cent of his audience new and his hopping from question to question, and ending with good-night for a peroration is quite proper on a street corner. Not only is it proper, but it is very successful, and good street speakers cultivate that method. This is why men who are excellent street speakers and who get their training out doors are usually such flat failures in a hall.

Even when all is going well, an audience or some part of it will grow uneasy toward the close, not because they cannot stay ten or fifteen minutes longer, but because they do not know whether the lecturer is going to close in ten minutes or thirty.

An experienced lecturer will always detect that uneasiness in moving feet or rustling clothes, and at the first appropriate period will look at his watch and say, in a quiet but decided tone, "I shall conclude in ten minutes," or whatever time he requires. Then those who cannot wait so long will at once withdraw, the rest will settle down to listen and harmony will be restored.

But woe to the speaker who forgets his pledge and thinks he may take advantage of that restored quiet to go beyond the time he stated. Next time he speaks before that audience and they become restless he will have no remedy.

It is better to have your hearers say, "I could have listened another hour," than "It would have been better if he had finished by ten o'clock."

CHAPTER X

CHAIRMAN

Lecturers learn by experience that the chairman question may become at times a very trying problem.

Many a meeting has been spoiled by an impossible chairman, and the lecturer who wishes to have his work produce the best result will always keep a keen eye on the chair, though, of course, he should not appear to do so.

The functions of the chairman are mainly two: To introduce the speaker, and to decide points of procedure. The latter function is only necessary in delegate gatherings where all present have the right to partic.i.p.ate.

The former applies where a speaker is visiting a town and is a stranger to many in his audience.

In this case, when the chairman has told the audience who the speaker is, where he comes from, what his subject will be, the occasion and auspices of the meeting, his work is done, and the chairman who at this point leaves the platform and takes a seat in the front row, should be presented with a medal of unalloyed gold and his name should be recorded in the munic.i.p.al archives as an example to the lecture chairmen of future generations.

How often has one seen a chairman during the lecture, conscious that he is in full view of the audience, crossing his legs, first one way, then the other, trying a dozen different ways of disposing of his hands with becoming grace, fumbling with his watch chain, looking at his watch as if the speaker had already overstepped his time, looking nervously at his program as if something of enormous importance had been forgotten, and doing a dozen similar things, most of them unconsciously, but none the less continuously diverting the attention of the audience from the speaker and his speech.

How pleasantly do I recall the chairman who came to my hotel and asked me to write him a two-minute speech, which he committed to memory, but promptly forgot before a crowded opera house and subst.i.tuted for it, "Mr. Lewis of San Francisco will now address you," and disappeared in the wings. The fates be kind to him! He was the prince of chairmen.

I spoke on one occasion in a large city to a good audience at a well advertised meeting on the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone question. I had for chairman a local speaker, who, fascinated by so fine an audience, spoke over thirty minutes in this style: "Mr. Lewis will tell you how these men were kidnapped in Denver; he will tell you how the railroads provided a special train free of charge; he will tell you," etc., until he had mentioned about all that was known of the case at that time. The fact that we had a good meeting and took up a big collection for the defense fund was no fault of his.

Another chairman I shall ever remember is the one who closed a rambling speech with the following terse remarks: "You have all heard of the speaker, you have seen his name in our papers; he has a national reputation. I will now call upon him to make good."

Fortunately, most inexperienced chairmen seek the speaker's advice and follow it.

CHAPTER XI

MANNERISMS

Speaking mannerisms are of two kinds, those of manner, of course, and those which by a metaphorical use of the term may be called mannerisms of matter.

"The memory," said the quaint old Fuller, "must be located in the back of the head, because there men dig for it." Some speakers appear to imagine it can be found in the links of a watch chain, or observed in the c.h.i.n.ks in the ceiling.