From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book. John Kendrick Bangs
Yes, I sympathized with that excellent gentleman. I have known him to take to his bed three days before the ordeal, tremblingly approach the banquet board, rise to his feet, his nerves taut as a G string, his knees quaking in the merciful seclusion of the regions under the table, and then, with hardly a glimmering of consciousness of what he was doing or saying, his whole being thrilled with terror, acquit himself brilliantly, to return home at the conclusion of his trial physically and nervously prostrated.
One of the happiest recollections of my platform work, nevertheless, had to do with just such a shivering, quivering condition. It was many years ago—back in the mid-'90's of the last century, that so-called crazy end-of-the-century period, which inspired Max Nordau's depressing treatise on Degeneracy, and yet now seems so gloriously sane in contrast to what is going on in the world at the present time.
In some mysterious fashion I had succeeded in writing what the literary world is pleased to term a "best seller," and was in consequence enjoying a taste of that notoriety which inexperienced youth so often confounds with immortality. One result was a tolerably persistent demand that I exhibit myself at one of those then popular functions known as Authors' Readings. This was a form of entertainment almost as barbarically cruel as those ancient ceremonies in which Christian martyrs were thrown into an arena to demonstrate their powers in combatting irritated tigers, and such other blood-thirsty beasts of the jungle as the ingenious fancy of the management might suggest. It was, in a manner of speaking, a sort of Literary Hagenbeck Show, whither the curious among the readers of the day were lured in sweet Charity's name by the promise of a personal performance by real literary lions, with an occasional wild goose or two wearing temporarily the gorgeous plumage of the Birds of Parnassus, thrown in to make the program longer.
Invited to take part in one of these affairs, and feeling that for posterity's sake it was my duty to rivet my firm grasp upon Fame by keeping such company as my remotest great-grandchild could wish to have me known by, I carelessly accepted as if it were easy to comply, and all in the day's work of a new sun dawning upon the horizon of letters.
But when the fateful evening arrived a "change came o'er the spirit of my dream." Two dread situations arose which bade fair to drive me either into the nearest sanatorium, or to the obscurity of the deepest available jungle. Had I yielded to my immediate impulse, I should have flown as far afield as the Virginia negro who, upon being advised to leave town lest he suffer certain extreme penalties for his misdeeds, replied that he was "gwine, an' gwine so fur it'll cost nine dollars to send a postal card back."
On one side of the curtain at the great metropolitan hall where the Readings were to be held sat nearly three thousand hungry readers, waiting to see six unhappy authors prove whether or no they could read their own productions and survive; and on the other side of the curtain were five real Immortals and my sorely agitated self. My fellow sufferers that night were Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, William Dean Howells, the lamented Frank R. Stockton, and the ever unforgettable Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.
It was rather godlike company for a mere mortal like myself, and as I gazed upon them I realized, perhaps for the first time, the magnificent distances that lie between Yonkers-on-Hudson and Parnassus-by-Helicon. Frozen from heel to toe by the thought of having to appear before so vast and critical an audience, the complete refrigeration of my nervous system was accomplished by the thought of even temporary association with those fixed stars in the firmament of American Letters. Instead of a burning torch on the heights of Olympus, I felt myself more of a possible cinder in the public eye. One might be willing to appear before a Court of Literary Justice in the company of any one of them, but to assume equality with five such household words all at once, and especially before an audience many of whose members had from time immemorial known me as "Johnny"—well, to speak with frankness, it got on my nerves.
My condition was like that foreshadowed by a good old neighbor of mine up on the coast of Maine, who when I asked him one morning if he ever felt nervous when the thunder was roaring, and the lightning was striking viciously, replied, "No, I hain't never felt nervous: I'm jest plain dam skeert to death!" If the exits from the stage had not been guarded, I should have fled; but there was no escape, and while I awaited my turn to go out upon the platform I paced the back of the stage, concealed from the public gaze by a drop scene, shaking from head to foot with a nervous chill. I can scarcely even now bring myself to believe that there was a seismograph anywhere between the northern and southern poles so callous as to fail to register my vibrations.
It became evident as the moment approached that I should be utterly unable to go out upon the platform and do anything but dance: not after the graceful manner of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, but of Saint Vitus himself. To have held a book, even so light a one as my own, in my shaking hand would have been physically impossible, and then, just as I was about to seek out the chairman of the committee of arrangements, and plead a sudden stroke of some sort, I felt a womanly arm thrust through my own, and a soft white hand was laid gently and soothingly upon my wrist. I glanced to my side, and there stood Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, her lovely eyes full of sympathy, touched with a joyous reassuring twinkle.
"Oh, Mr. Bangs," said she, with a slight catch and tremor in her voice, "do you know I am so nervous about going out before all those people to-night that I really believe I shall have to borrow some of your manly courage and strength to carry me through!"
A marvelous transformation of nervous attitude was the immediate result, a determination to rush to the aid of a lady flying a signal of distress summoning all my latent courage to her cause. A realization of the lovely tactfulness of her approach and its true significance, and the prompt response of my sense of humor, not yet quite dead, to the exact facts of the situation, made a man of me for the time being—a man who would dare the undarable, attempt the unattainable, and if need be, as the eloquent African preacher once observed, "onscrew the onscrutable." Nervousness, cowardice, muscular vibrations, and all disappeared like the mists of the night before the radiance of the dawn in the face of that gracious woman's tactful humor, and later on I went forth to my doom so brazenly, and smiling so confidently, that one critic in the next morning's newspaper intimated without much subtlety of phrasing that I enjoyed myself far more than my audience did.
It would be too much to say that Mrs. Howe's timely intervention on my behalf effected a permanent cure of my nervousness in platform work; but it has helped me much to overcome it; for many a time since, when through sheer weariness, or for some purely psychological reason, I have approached my work with uneasy forebodings, the memory of that delightful incident has come back to me, and I have invariably found relief from my fears in the smile which it never fails to bring to my lips, and to my spirit as well.
I do not know that it would be a good thing for any public speaker ever to approach the emergent hour with entire assurance and utterly calloused nerves. Such a condition might well bespeak an indifference to the work in hand which would result either in a purely mechanical delivery, or one so careless as to destroy the effect of the lecturer's most valuable asset—a sympathetic personality. I recall far back in my college days, in the early '80's of the last century, meeting at one of my fraternity conventions that inspiring publicist, the late Senator Frye of Maine. In the course of a pleasant chat, having myself to appear before the convention with a committee report the following morning, and feeling a trifle uncertain as to how I was going to "come through," I asked the senator if he was ever a victim to nervousness when making a public address, and his answer was very suggestive.
"Always, my lad," said he, "always! I have been making public speeches off and on now for twenty-five or thirty years, and even to-day when I rise up to speak in the United States Senate, or on the stump, my knees shake a little under me. And I'm glad they do, Son," he went on significantly; "for if they didn't, I should begin to feel that the days of my usefulness were over, for it would mean that I really didn't care whether I got through safely or not."
So it was that up to a certain point I sympathized with my friend the distinguished after-dinner speaker when he intimated that the lecture platform was no bed of roses. For one of his nervous organization and temperament it would be impossible. It would make a nervous wreck of him in a short while, and in the end would shorten his life, even as it has shortened the span of many another robust spirit; such as the late