ses. There is no desire to interfere with the rich.

IX. "We Have With Us To-night"

NOT only during my tour in England but for many years past it has been
my lot to speak and to lecture in all sorts of places, under all sorts
of circumstances and before all sorts of audiences. I say this, not in
boastfulness, but in sorrow. Indeed, I only mention it to establish the
fact that when I talk of lecturers and speakers, I talk of what I know.

Few people realise how arduous and how disagreeable public lecturing is.
The public sees the lecturer step out on to the platform in his little
white waistcoat and his long tailed coat and with a false air of a
conjurer about him, and they think him happy. After about ten minutes
of his talk they are tired of him. Most people tire of a lecture in ten
minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to
lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired
of it, presently hold it as a sort of a grudge against the lecturer
personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.

For my own part I always try to appear as happy as possible while I am
lecturing. I take this to be part of the trade of anybody labelled a
humourist and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever with the idea
that a humourist ought to be a lugubrious person with a face stamped
with melancholy. This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to the
level of a circus clown. The image of "laughter shaking both his sides"
is the truer picture of comedy. Therefore, I say, I always try to appear
cheerful at my lectures and even to laugh at my own jokes. Oddly enough
this arouses a kind of resentment in some of the audience. "Well, I
will say," said a stern-looking woman who spoke to me after one of my
lectures, "you certainly do seem to enjoy your own fun." "Madam," I
answered, "if I didn't, who would?" But in reality the whole business of
being a public lecturer is one long variation of boredom and fatigue.
So I propose to set down here some of the many trials which the lecturer
has to bear.

The first of the troubles which any one who begins giving public
lectures meets at the very outset is the fact that the audience won't
come to hear him. This happens invariably and constantly, and not
through any fault or shortcoming of the speaker.

I don't say that this happened very often to me in my tour in England.
In nearly all cases I had crowded audiences: by dividing