New York and London, Oxford and Harvard. But, after all, training tells, and Sir Oliver Lodge, if not such an expositor of the marvels of nature as an earlier generation on both sides of the Atlantic found in Huxley, does at least, in presence and manner, suggest the masters of the Victorian age as he invests the mighty atom with an afternoon charm.

§ 3

The Great War, needless to say, wrought an immense change in the lecture situation. Among other things it introduced a new and troublesome element. The American public became acquainted with the phenomena of European propaganda, from the effects of which we cannot hope to be speedily delivered. Many well known writers and public men accepted speaking commissions from their governments, and for Anglo-American relations especially this development was significant. The lecturer fell under a general, though not necessarily an unkind, suspicion. He was no longer accepted without question as a man whose word was his own. Audiences Audiences and responsible secretaries were tempted to think that a lecturer from England, even if he were the writer of books that had gained him a host of friends, should be regarded as an interested missioner or special pleader; and hence it happened that some of the most admired representatives of letters, of the law and the church, found that they had to overcome a barrier of reserve before they could be sure that they were accepted on the basis of their personal value.

In the case of not a few who during the war were able to survey the American lecture-field the results were valu

able. There was revealed to them the possibilities of a profession which in England for the most part is a depressed or sweated occupation. The contrast presented by the two countries is almost indescribable. Not, of course, that England is deficient in the volume of public speech. There is palpable exaggeration in the statement, frequently made, that the Americans are a lecture-hearing public while the English are not. Every considerable city in Great Britain has its lecture societies at work during the winter. The list of the day's engagements in the London "Times" may contain almost as many gatherings with speeches as appear in the daily lists of New York. Nearly every educational and propagandist society in the island has its annual program of lectures. University extension is a national service. The summer schools have grown to a large total. Year after year a certain number of well known men and women add to their incomes by lecturing, and a few make large sums. Now and again a foreign lecturer may earn on the American scale. Nansen's tour after his "Farthest North" was an event. George Kennan, describing the prisons of czarist Russia, met with an immense response. And two years ago Stephen Leacock's rediscovery of England was, I believe, a venture no less lucrative for the voyager than it was diverting for his victims. Nevertheless, it remains true that the United States is precisely what Kipling said it was not, while England, speaking generally, provides a meager income for the professional lecturer, and for the lecturer of the other kind only a small measure of opportunity.

Consider the picture of the North

American continent as the lecturer sees it. Here are the hundreds of colleges standing ready to invite the visiting European; the city clubs and chambers of commerce; the university extension centers and such widely different agencies of public service as Cooper Union and the League for Political Education in New York; the vast network of the Chautauqua and the more recent meeting-places of the open forum; the extraordinary number of the women's clubs. Is it any wonder that the English lecturer or the author of a novel that has hit the market feels, when an agent lays a chart of the ground before him, that the Lord is leading him into a land flowing with milk and honey?

Or the point may be made in another way. Think of a half-dozen English cities bearing historic names, and then of their nominal counterparts in the United States: Plymouth, Worcester, Rochester, Northampton, Richmond, Stamford. As Gilbert K. Chesterton has it,

"Birmingham grew so big, so big, And Stratford stayed so small. The English city may be a flourishing industrial center, and its American namesake a small residential town, or vice versa.

In either case the astonish

ing difference, for the lecturer, is there. In Plymouth or Rochester, England, there would be perhaps one or two openings for the speaker from a distance, and the certainty of an ovation for the rare great man; in Rochester, New York, or Plymouth, Massachusetts, a women's club, a college or two, several associations of business men, a forum; and each would be a first-rate "prospect" for the lecture agent. And, what is still more amazing from

the English point of view, not a single one of them would be in the least alarmed when some member suggested that an invitation might just as well be despatched, by wireless to the Aquitania, to Lloyd George, the Earl of Balfour, M. Clemenceau, Sir James Barrie, H. G. Wells, or whatever European celebrity might chance to be on the high seas.

Of course the American conditions are sufficient in themselves to account for the annual invasion of lecturers from England. The temptation is almost irresistible for any successful English writer, or any man whose name may have reached a place in the Sunday head-lines. He has heard entrancing stories, not at all exaggerated, of American hospitality, of large and marvelously respectful audiences. He has no fear of the one-night stand and the Pullman sleeper, for he does not know what they are. know what they are. He cannot believe himself to be more awkward or less expert than this or that one among his literary acquaintance who has done it, and has returned with something more in hand than a batch of press clippings. And, naturally, the New York agent who is prepared to route him through the country appeals to him as a discerning and thoroughly businesslike man.

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As one runs over the records of the last ten years, one may observe that the invading lecturers fall into three unequal divisions. There is, first, the spectacular head-liner, who, as likely as not, is not a speaker at all. He is a reputation. He has dug up the dodo or the mummy of Pharaoh's daughter, has crossed the Rubicon, or sent a radio message to the outer planets.

He need not be an orator, but on the whole it is advisable that he should be able to deliver an address in intelligible English. The marvel is that so many of them can; but the memory is still fresh in New York of the day on which Maurice Maeterlinck confronted a great audience in New York and strove vainly to translate his manuscript into English phonetics. The art of the platform, indeed, is a mysterious thing, as more than one recent striking example would show. Mrs. Asquith, for instance, had no training in public speaking before her appearance in New York, and her initial ordeal was sufficiently affrighting. But by the day of her second lecture she had acquired a technic that, as Heywood Broun remarked, most professional lecturers might envy; and it is reasonable to suppose that if Mrs. Asquith, with her skill of voice and vocabulary, had cared to draw upon her knowledge of England and public affairs, instead of keeping to the green and quiet ways of social anecdote, she would be remembered in America as a successful example of the lecturer ad hoc.

Quite otherwise was it with the war diarist who shared the social interest of the same season. Colonel Repington could never for a moment have thought of dropping the manner of the cavalry officer, which fits him like his dinner jacket. He discoursed of Europe after the war, and the results of the Washington conference, in the soothing accents of the Pall Mall Club; and if the Middle Western audience felt that the tones appropriate to a chronique scandaleuse of Europe in dissolution were rather low-pitched for Chicago, well, why should the colonel be troubled? He had his reward, and the sale of his diary was not impaired.

More surprising, on the whole, than either of these was G. K. Chesterton, whose platform manner two years ago was in disconcerting contrast to his physique and to the boisterous laughter of his stories and verses. And not only so; it was the very reverse of the earlier manner familiar to his friends in England. G. K. C. is the triumphant improviser; it is absurd that he should put his mind or his humor in shackles. Yet in America he tried hard to keep within the bounds of a little black note-book, and those who listened to him are still trying to reconcile their memory of the man who held it in his hand with their rollicking vision of "The Man Who Was Thursday." To this division of the head-liners belongs properly Sir Philip Gibbs, because of the boundless audience reached by his day-to-day story of the war. It gave him a standing from which he was enabled later to tell certain things about Europe which They would not allow any one to whisper before 1919.

In the second division I should include those lecturers who come to America in the happy knowledge that their public, large or small, is already in being. They are exceedingly diversified, ranging from great lights of the intellectual realm, such as Gilbert Murray and Bertrand Russell at one end, to the maker of the current day's wonder at the other. It is a fascinating procession that moves before the mind's eye: W. B. Yeats, in voice and bearing very nearly the ideal of the poet-reader; John Masefield, looking and speaking less like a victim of the one-night system than any one you could name; John Galsworthy, manifestly resenting the pressure that would make a speaker out of a man whose single instrument is the pen;