a certain amount of wear and tear, and here, after all this time, I find
one of the masters of oratory and the others named in the list.
And here we three meet again as exiles on one pretext or another, and you
will notice that while we are absent there is a pleasing tranquillity in
America–a building up of public confidence. We are doing the best we
can for our country. I think we have spent our lives in serving our
country, and we never serve it to greater advantage than when we get out
of it.
But impromptu speaking–that is what I was trying to learn. That is a
difficult thing. I used to do it in this way. I used to begin about a
week ahead, and write out my impromptu, speech and get it by heart. Then
I brought it to the New England dinner printed on a piece of paper in my
pocket, so that I could pass it to the reporters all cut and dried, and
in order to do an impromptu speech as it should be done you have to
indicate the places for pauses and hesitations. I put them all in it.
And then you want the applause in the right places.
When I got to the place where it should come in, if it did not come in
I did not care, but I had it marked in the paper. And these masters of
mind used to wonder why it was my speech came out in the morning in the
first person, while theirs went through the butchery of synopsis.
I do that kind of speech (I mean an offhand speech), and do it well, and
make no mistake in such a way to deceive the audience completely and make
that audience believe it is an impromptu speech–that is art.
I was frightened out of it at last by an experience of Doctor Hayes. He
was a sort of Nansen of that day. He had been to the North Pole, and it
made him celebrated. He had even seen the polar bear climb the pole.
He had made one of those magnificent voyages such as Nansen made, and in
those days when a man did anything which greatly distinguished him for
the moment he had to come on to the lecture platform and tell all about
it.
Doctor Hayes was a great, magnificent creature like Nansen, superbly
built. He was to appear in Boston. He wrote his lecture out, and it was
his purpose to read it from manuscript; but in an evil hour he concluded
that it would be a good thing to preface it with something rather
handsome, poetical, and beautiful that he could get off by heart and
deliver as if it were the thought of the moment.
He had not had my experience, and could not do that. He came on the
platform, held his manuscript down, and began with a beautiful piece of
oratory. He spoke something like this:
“When a lonely human being, a pigmy in the midst of the architecture of
nature, stands solitary on those icy waters and looks abroad to the
horizon and sees mighty castles and temples of eternal ice raising up
their pinnacles tipped by the pencil of the departing sun–”
Here a man came across the platform and touched him on the shoulder, and
said: “One minute.” And then to the audience:
“Is Mrs. John Smith in the house? Her husband has slipped on the ice and
broken his leg.”
And you could see the Mrs. John Smiths get up everywhere and drift out of
the house, and it made great gaps everywhere. Then Doctor Hayes began
again: “When a lonely man, a pigmy in the architecture–” The janitor
came in again and shouted: “It is not Mrs. John Smith! It is Mrs. John
Jones!”
Then all the Mrs. Jones got up and left. Once more the speaker started,
and was in the midst of the sentence when he was interrupted again, and
the result was that the lecture was not delivered. But the lecturer
interviewed the janitor afterward in a private room, and of the fragments
of the janitor they took “twelve basketsful.”