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 Alfred Tennyson Dickens, for instance, who in very truth succumbed to the exactions of travel and of a lovely hospitality that he knew not how to resist.
But for myself there is so much in the work that is inspiring, so much that is pleasing in the human relationships it makes possible, that but for the discomforts of travel I could really feed upon it spiritually, and seek no happier diet. I defy any man to be a pessimist on the subject of American character after a season or two on the lecture platform; provided of course that he is a reasonably sympathetic man, and is so constituted in matters social that he is what the politicians call a "good mixer."
To the man who is not interested in the human animal, and insists upon judging all men by his own rigid and narrow standards, measuring souls by a yardstick, as it were, the work can never be a joy; but if he is broad enough to take people as he finds them, looking for the good that lies inherent in every human being, and judging them by the measure of their capacity to become what they were designed to be, and are honestly trying to be, then he will find it full of a living and a loving interest almost equal to that of the "joy forever."
Pasted in my spiritual hat is a little rime by one whose name modesty forbids my mentioning, running:
I can't be what Shakespeare was,
I can't do what great folks does;
But, by Ginger, I can be
ME!
And among the folks that love me
Nothin' more's expected of me.
The wandering platform speaker who will heed the intimations of that little rime, and seize the friendships in kind that surely await his coming in all parts of this great, genial country of ours, will find a wondrous store of happiness ready to his hand. If in addition to this he will cultivate the habit of looking for good in unpromising places, and of resolutely refusing to admit the power of small irritations to destroy his peace of mind, he will get along nicely. The latter of course requires resolution of a kind that is persistent in the face of unremitting annoyances. To say that these annoyances do not exist would be idle; but not half so idle as the act of giving them controlling importance in the making or the unmaking of a day's happiness.
The sooner one who travels the Platform Path learns to suspend judgment as to his fellow beings, and to suspect the fallacy of the obvious, the better it will be for him, and for his personal comfort. The first conspicuous lesson I had in this particular was out in Arizona on my first extended tour in our wonderful West in 1906. I found myself one afternoon on my way from Los Angeles to Phœnix. After having satisfied the inner man with an excellent Fred Harvey luncheon an edible oasis always in a desert of indigestibility I had retired to the smoking car for that spiritual refreshment which comes from watching the smoke wreaths curl upward from the end of a good cigar.
Unhappily for the quality of that refreshment, I was no sooner seated in the smoking room that I perceived that I was surrounded by men who, judging by surface indications, were hopeless vulgarians. Among them were three especially whose conversation was even lower than their brows. I think I can best describe their conversation by saying that in all probability Boccaccio's lady companions out Fiesole way, at the time of the plague that drove the Florentine Four Hundred beyond the city limits, would have fled blushingly before it, taking refuge by preference in the pure, undefiled Rolloisms of the Decameron itself; while poor old Rabelais, not always a master of reticence in things better left unsaid, would, I am sure, have joined a literary branch of the I. W. W. in sheer rebellion, rather than sully the refinement of his pen by taking down any part of it.