Frank Thomas Bullen

“ I am not now thinking of those secretaries who seem to imagine that no one but themselves has any idea of time, dates or engagements. Who will worry with correspondence, both agency and lecturer, weeks ahead of an engagement, as if other people had nothing else to do but write and say, “Yes, I have your date noted, and if I live will be on hand as arranged.” No, I am now thinking of the usual secretary, who, having got his agreement signed, goes calmly on his way, until the day of the lecture. ”

“ But I am not talking to idiots, but ordinarily sensible men and women who are able to make themselves heard at a considerable distance without shouting. If they have not had the opportunity as I had for fifteen years of practising the art, I suppose I may call it, of voice production in the open air, let them go to a professor of elocution, who will teach them so to use their voices that they will not have clergyman’s sore throat at the end of a short address, and feel as if they can never speak again. ”

“ This recollection brings another in its train, as usual—this time a very delightful one for me. In the early days I went to a celebrated lecture society in London to lecture, and the secretary in conversation in the anteroom before the lecture told me, rather pompously I thought:
“We consider ourselves the best lecture audience in London. And our people will not stay and listen to what they do not care for. So if you find your audience melting away, don’t be discouraged; it may only mean that your subject does not interest them, not any reflection on your ability as a lecturer.” ”

“ There comes over me a feeling like that of the invalid who takes to his bed knowing that he will leave his room no more until he is carried out. For I feel that I am now closing the door behind me upon a profession which with all its manifold delights I did not enter upon until middle age, and did not lay down until physical disability rendered it impossible to carry it on any longer. I have never enjoyed anything more than lecturing, except in America, where I felt that the people might as well sit and chew gum anywhere else as sit there stolidly before me and do so. ”

“ And I have hated Preston Station with a perfect hatred ever since. I suppose all the fraternity are like that—have their special likes and dislikes among stations as amongst people.
Pocklington is a name branded upon my memory, not because of its school, of which I have heard many excellent reports, but know nothing, but because I have made two visits there to lecture and each time have been filled with wonder and laughter. The secretary and mainstay of the lecture society was (and is for all I know) a genial eccentric doctor, a widower living with his daughter. ”

“ A chairman who knows his business, and confines his share of the proceedings to a few well-chosen sentences, and the appearance of his name on the bills, is a jewel of price, and I have often been very glad to meet him. But I must admit that he is rare, and the difficulty that a secretary is always in when inviting a local celebrity to take the chair at a lecture is his inability to know whether the L.C. will not consider it a part of his functions to make a long rambling speech while the audience is waiting impatiently to hear the lecturer. ”

“ Shyness, indolence, want of confidence in themselves: these are all heavy handicaps against a budding public speaker, and it is for such as these that I would speak now.
In the first place, I would say get rid of self-consciousness. Do not dare to allow yourself to think of your personal appearance. If you haven’t done your best for that in the solitude of your dressing-room before your mirror you are hopeless, but if you have, and then continue to wonder how you are appearing to the audience, you are equally hopeless. ”

“ Now while it is perfectly true that I have never given my lanternist any trouble, and that all my slides are perfectly simple, and that I never have any of them repeated, I do not for one moment suggest that this is the reason why I have been so very fortunate in my experiences of lantern operators. Only on the rarest of occasions have I had any trouble, for which I am, I hope, duly grateful, for of all the disconcerting things that can occur to a lecturer, I think anything happening to his pictures through the incompetence of the lanternist is about the worst. ”

“ Let it be understood once for all that I dislike hotels as necessary evils, but that my sense of justice compels me to admit that one may be made comfortable in a gigantic caravanserai where it would seem impossible for the personal element to have any chance to express itself, and, conversely, that one may be made abjectly miserable in a very small hotel where it might naturally be thought that the proprietor would make it his sole business to see that his guests were comfortable. ”

“ For I had only made one flying visit to Scotland before except as a sailor and then very briefly, seeing only the seamy sides of Glasgow and Dundee. But I had delightful remembrances of Scotsmen the world over, and especially in New Zealand; some of my most dearly loved shipmates had been Scotsmen and I flattered myself that I could pass as a Scotsman anywhere in any northern dialect except that of Glasgow, which I confess always bothered me. ”

“ On the stroke of eight I mounted the platform, and faced an audience of I should say 1200, but such a congregation as I have never addressed before, and hope never to again. It was evident at once that most of them had come in there for shelter out of the bleak and bitter night, for they were nearly all in rags or at any rate very poorly clad. And they smelt. Poor things, they looked wolfish from hunger, scarred with brutality, and desperate with want. And I was to lecture to them upon Romance and Reality at Sea! ”

“ It was a long drive in the open, but the sleet had ceased and only the bitter wind searched my none too well clad form. But when we arrived at the College my amazement at the magnificent pile—it must be remembered that I had never seen a great Public School before—was so great that I almost forgot my physical discomfort in admiration. Then my hostess enwrapped me in her gentle hospitality, and having heard my brief account of the recent happenings she first gave me hot tea, then ordered me a hot bath, a warm bed, and laid upon me strict injunction not to appear until dinner-time. ”

“ Speaking generally, I have no doubt that it is true that an experienced traveller is far less liable to get into trouble on his journeys than a novice. But that any experience, no matter how great and varied, can render a traveller immune from the troubles of travel is a fond and vain superstition, only believed in by those who have had no experience. Take a recent experience of my own, for instance, and with it comfort, ye who have hitherto blamed your own inexperience for trouble into which you have fallen on some journeys. I am a Londoner, and I lived in London at the time of which I speak. ”

“ I have often been asked which I consider my best audiences. It is not an easy question to answer, for people vary so in different parts of the same county even. But I have no hesitation in saying that the northern folk, right away to Scotland, are almost uniformly good and quick. And as far as my experience goes, though it may be true (not in my experience) that the Scots joke with difficulty, I have never known any audience quicker or keener to note every point, or more generous with their applause than I have found in Scotland. ”

“ This could only be looked upon by me as an opening into the larger lecture field, and I, who have always been the most diffident and self-distrustful of men, could not help feeling that I should be able to do full justice to my selection. My long experience in open-air preaching came to my recollection, those Sunday evenings on Peckham Rye, when thousands hung upon my words and I never had an angry voice raised against me, and I felt confident that as I knew all there was to be known about my subject, I could make it attractive to my audience. ”

“ Of course, I do not in the least mean to suggest or imply that a speaker should be careless of or neglect his or her personal appearance; on the contrary, I regard it as a duty to the audience you have the honour to address that you should appear as neat and trim as possible without showing yourself eccentric or bizarre. Any fool can do that, and I may add with conviction that only fools will try by means of long hair and quaint clothing to attract the attention they could not gain otherwise. ”

“ Why is it, I wonder, that Edinburgh and Glasgow can and do so easily excel our great metropolis in railway stations and hotels? The finest terminus in London is a mere undistinguished siding compared with Waverley, Princes Street or Central Stations; nor, although St. Pancras Hotel is architecturally very fine, does it compare with the castellated splendour of the North British Hotel at Waverley. ”

“ But if you are not one of the knights of the road, you are in parlous case. The worst room in the house, the almost undisguised scorn of the attendants, the quite undisguised dislike of the guests are yours without asking. The very last hotel I stayed in was a Temperance Commercial Hotel, which outside looked like a large and charming family villa—but my room was positively filthy, with black rotten paper hanging off the walls, a bed apparently made of dumplings, no fire-place, and for light a feeble gas-jet in a remote corner, where it only served to show what a den the room was. ”

“ But there is another class of lecturer to whom every lecture is a tremendous ordeal. Gifted persons, with an ability to express themselves far above the average, the time that they are on their feet facing the audience may almost be described as a period of torture. What the interval of waiting for the time of the lecturer’s beginning must mean to such unfortunate people I cannot tell, but I feel sure it must be agonising. I have heard one splendidly muscular friend of mine say that he would far rather do three days’ heavy labour than give a couple of hours’ reading from one of his books. ”

“ All of us have felt sincere difficulty when asked by those who have the direction of societies and selection of lectures which of our colleagues we would recommend for a succeeding season. It is a tactless question, of course, but that does not make the answer easier, and we are often driven to some quaint subterfuges in reply. But when the secretary says, “We have got Mr. or Professor or Miss —— coming for the next lecture,” we get our opportunity, and I know from much pleasant experience how eagerly those occasions are seized and made full use of by all of us. ”

“ So I felt very satisfied as I whispered to my host, the pastor of the chapel, what had happened.
It is not, therefore, easy to judge of my disgust and annoyance when after an opening that was a model of what a chairman’s address should be, this worthy man slid into an anecdote about his one and only voyage, which had neither point nor wit nor moral, and took twenty-five minutes in the telling. After which the usual wicked insult about not standing between the audience and the lecturer because they all wanted to hear what Mr. Bullen had to tell them. ”

“ I have gone into a house one day and left it the next, having in the meantime made friends whom I can never cease to love while I live and who I feel humbly grateful to think will never cease to love me until they can love no longer. But of all the hospitality I ever enjoyed the quaintest was at Rishton, a suburb of Blackburn, and the manner of it was as follows. I was lecturing at Blackburn in the Town Hall, and on arrival went to the principal hotel with the secretary of the society who met me at the station. ”

“ He told the intent audience such things about me as made me go hot and cold all over. If he could have been believed, I ought never to have been sitting upon that platform, but enstatued in gold and set upon high, clear for all men to see and take pattern by. I was [Pg 177] the fine flower not only of a blameless, strenuous and overcoming life, but the quintessence of the best of the age. Never but once have I had to listen to such encomia upon myself, and that was at second-hand in a theological college near Gisborne, New Zealand. ”

“ I looked around at the mighty ship in all her beauty of strength and cleanliness, upon her seven gigantic sisters lying motionless in their exact stations near, at the soft splendours of the evening sky, and silken, many-coloured sea, and I felt truly that, although such a moment comes to a man but once in his lifetime, he cannot then appreciate all its wonders. ”

“ But I will add that I do not think that any man, however great his other qualifications as a public speaker may be, can possibly succeed as a lecturer unless he enjoys his work, unless he is able to feel that glorious thrill of sympathy emanating from his audience lifting him on to a far higher plane than he could ever reach otherwise. ”

“ It is passing strange that any man should dream of addressing an audience upon a topic about which it is dollars to doughnuts that they know as much or more than he does, yet there are such people. Of course, they do not go very far, still they exist. One such asked me if I would kindly lend him my notes (I never had any, by the way) of the whaling lecture, and the negatives of my slides, as he felt sure he could work up quite a nice little connection for himself in South Wales. ”

“ Here I feel moved to interpolate a remark which does not really apply to the learner or beginner, but to men who are very fluent and enthusiastic. Gentlemen, forgive me for saying so, but the human brain is like a sponge, it will only hold so much at a time; afterwards you can pour as much liquid as you like on it, it will not absorb another drop. Also the average listener’s attention with the best of intentions will flag after ninety minutes at the outside, much quicker than that if he or she has a train to catch. ”

“ In fact I always feel a certain pride in the fact that I did manage to suppress the sense of being, and the appearance of having been, a drudge afraid to call my soul my own for all those years, and that I took my place in Society as naturally as if I had been born thereto. ”

“ Now I would not for one moment attempt to dissuade any of my brethren or sisters of the lecture platform from giving their services in the cause of charity, when asked to do so beforehand. But I would strongly urge them always to insist upon their full fee being paid to them, and then making it, or part of it, a donation to the funds. For if a lecturer consents to give his services, he may be very sure that he will get a very poor audience, no one will think it is worth their while to work in order that his, the lecturer’s, efforts in the cause of charity may be successful. ”

“ I was speaking upon “Romance and Reality at Sea,” amid an ominous quiet on the part of my very juvenile audience which gave me the uneasy consciousness that I was often outside their depth. A lecturer can always tell whether his audience be with him or not, whatever be their ages or conditions. Suddenly [Pg 99] there broke from the boys a spontaneous peal of laughter, so ringing, so universal that I almost fancied hysteria had seized upon them, and wondered whether I was to blame. ”

“ I do not pretend to explain it, but I have known many men who were total abstainers who shuddered at the thought even of going to a temperance hotel. Is it, I wonder, anything to do with the fact that all temperance drinks are vile, thirst-provokers and stomach-destroyers. Except perhaps water, and even water in satisfying quantity is not good for the middle-aged. It is a puzzle which I leave to wiser heads than mine.
Then there is the Commercial Hotel. If you are a commercial, nothing can well be better. The food is of the best, the charges are reasonable, and the tips exceedingly modest. ”

“ It would be a pity, for I firmly believe that lecturers as a class are the best of good fellows, and never speak of each other but in the highest terms of eulogy. They are naturally of many different talents, each a specialist in his way, not all equally excellent or equally successful, that need hardly be said, but all animated not only by a desire to please their public, but to help one another. ”

“ Here it suddenly occurs to me that some folks will suppose that because of the few cranks I have endeavoured to sketch, my experiences of chairmen have been almost uniformly unpleasant. Now nothing could well be further from the truth. The chairmen whom I have had the good fortune to meet and to appear on the platform with have been with very few exceptions gentlemen with a perfect conception of their duties to the audience and the lecturer, and it has fairly often fallen to my lot to enjoy the chairman’s speech so thoroughly that I have been sorry when he has left off. ”

“ Then why shouldn’t men admit that what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and let it go at that? They don’t, though. One of the most frequent remarks made to me during my lecturing days by hostesses was:
“Now, Mr. Bullen, tell me just what you would like before you lecture and what afterwards. I only want to know, because I am aware how necessary it is that a lecturer should have just what food agrees with him and at the time he needs it.” ”

“ Kingdom of ours, I could count my experiences that were unpleasant on the fingers of one hand, so well is the virtue understood and carried out. In the United States, where I once had a lecture tour, I was never offered hospitality, beyond a meal, but once. And if that once was a fair sample of the custom of the country in that direction, I am very glad. For both my host and hostess regarded me as their property, bound to go through certain performances as a sort of return for my entertainment ”

“ Nothing could well be more paltry, dishonest and irritating than such a system, for even the seaside lodging-house keepers’ extras are not nearly so annoying. Fortunately the better class of hotels have abolished the system altogether. You know what you have to pay, and even if you feel that the old extras are added in, that is not half so irritating as the old system.
One of the strangest things that I have noted in my hotel experience is the inferiority of the Temperance Hotel. ”