A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things

As democracy makes progress in England, journalism will become more and more American, although the English reporter will have some trouble in succeeding to compete with his American confrère in humor and liveliness.

Under the guidance of political leaders, the newspapers of Continental Europe direct public opinion. In a democracy, the newspapers follow public opinion and cater to the public taste; they are the servants of the people. The American says to his journalists: “I don’t care a pin for your opinions on such a question. Give me the news and I will comment on it myself. Only don’t forget that I am an overworked man, and that before, or after, my fourteen hours’ work, I want to be entertained.”

So, as I have said elsewhere, the American journalist must be spicy, lively, and bright. He must know how, not merely to report, but to relate in a racy, catching style, an accident, a trial, a conflagration, and be able to make up an article of one or two columns upon the most insignificant incident. He must be interesting, readable. His eyes and ears must be always open, every one of his five senses on the alert, for he must keep ahead in this wild race for news. He must be a good conversationalist on most subjects, so as to bring back from his interviews with different people a good store of materials. He must be a man of courage, to brave rebuffs. He must be a philosopher, to pocket abuse cheerfully.

He must be a man of honor, to inspire confidence in the people he has to deal with. Personally I can say this of him, that wherever I have begged him, for instance, to kindly abstain from mentioning this or that which might have been said in conversation with him, I have invariably found that he kept his word.

But if the matter is of public interest, he is, before and above all, the servant of the public; so, never challenge his spirit of enterprise, or he will leave no stone unturned until he has found out your secret and exhibited it in public.

I do not think that American journalism needs an apology.

It is the natural outcome of circumstances and the democratic times we live in. The Théâtre-Français is not now, under a Republic, and probably never again will be, what it was when it was placed under the patronage and supervision of the French Court. Democracy is the form of government least of all calculated to foster literature and the fine arts. To that purpose, Monarchy, with its Court and its fashionable society, is the best. This is no reason to prefer a monarchy to a republic. Liberty, like any other luxury, has to be paid for.

Journalism cannot be now what it was when papers were read by people of culture. In a democracy, the stage and journalism have to please the masses of the people. As the people become better and better educated, the stage and journalism will rise with them. What the people want, I repeat it, is news, and journals are properly called news papers.

Speaking of American journalism, no man need use apologetic language.

Not when the proprietor of an American paper will not hesitate to spend thousands of dollars to provide his readers with the minutest details about some great European event.

Not when an American paper will, at its own expense, send Henry M. Stanley to Africa in search of Livingstone.

Not so long as the American press is vigilant, and keeps its thousand eyes open on the interests of the American people.

…Midnight.

Dined this evening with Richard Mansfield at Delmonico’s. I sat between Mr. Charles A. Dana, the first of American journalists, and General Horace Porter, and had what my American friends would call “a mighty elegant time.” The host was delightful, the dinner excellent, the wine “extra dry,” the speeches quite the reverse. “Speeches” is rather a big word for what took place at dessert. Every one supplied an anecdote, a story, a reminiscence, and contributed to the general entertainment of the guests.

The Americans have too much humor to spoil their dinners with toasts to the President, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the army, the navy, the militia, the volunteers, and the reserved forces.

I once heard Mr. Chauncey M. Depew referring to the volunteers, at some English public dinner, as “men invincible – in peace, and invisible – in war.” After dinner I remarked to an English peer:

“You have heard to-night the great New York after-dinner speaker; what do you think of his speech?”

“Well,” he said, “it was witty; but I think his remark about our volunteers was not in very good taste.”

I remained composed, and did not burst.

… Newburgh, N. Y., January 21.

I lectured in Melrose, near Boston, last night, and had the satisfaction of pleasing a Massachusetts audience for the second time. After the lecture, I had supper with Mr. Nat Goodwin, a very good actor, who is now playing in Boston in a new play by Mr. Steele Mackaye. Mr. Nat Goodwin told many good stories at supper. He can entertain his friends in private as well as he can the public.

…

To-night I have appeared in a church, in Newburgh. The minister, who took the chair, had the good sense to refrain from opening the lecture with prayer. There are many who have not the tact necessary to see that praying before a humorous lecture is almost as irreverent as praying before a glass of grog. It is as an artist, however, that I resent that prayer. After the audience have said Amen, it takes them a full quarter of an hour to realize that the lecture is not a sermon; that they are in a church, but not at church; and the whole time their minds are in that undecided state, all your points fall flat and miss fire. Even without the preliminary prayer, I dislike lecturing in a church. The very atmosphere of a church is against the success of a light, humorous lecture, and many a point, which would bring down the house in a theater, will be received only with smiles in a lecture hall, and in respectful silence in a church. An audience is greatly influenced by surroundings.

Now, I must say that the interior of an American church, with its lines of benches, its galleries, and its platform, does not inspire in one such religious feelings as the interior of a European Catholic church. In many American towns, the church is let for meetings, concerts, exhibitions, bazaars, etc., and so far as you can see, there is nothing to distinguish it from an ordinary lecture hall.

Yet it is a church, and both lecturer and audience feel it.

CHAPTER XIV

Marcus Aurelius in America – Chairmen I have had – American, English, and Scotch Chairmen – One who had Been to Boulogne – Talkative and Silent Chairmen – A Trying Occasion – The Lord is Asked to Allow the Audience to See my Points New York, January 22.

There are indeed very few Americans who have not either tact or a sense of humor. They make the best of chairmen. They know that the audience have not come to hear them, and that all that is required of them is to introduce the lecturer in very few words, and to give him a good start. Who is the lecturer that would not appreciate, nay, love, such a chairman as Dr. R. S. MacArthur, who introduced me yesterday to a New York audience in the following manner?

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said he, “the story goes that, last summer, a party of Americans staying in Rome paid a visit to the famous Spithöver’s bookshop in the Piazza di Spagna. Now Spithöver is the most learned of bibliophiles. You must go thither if you need artistic and archæological works of the profoundest research and erudition. But one of the ladies in this tourists’ party only wanted the lively travels in America of Max O’Rell, and she asked for the book at Spithöver’s. There came in a deep guttural voice – an Anglo-German voice – from a spectacled clerk behind a desk, to this purport: ‘Marcus Aurelius vos neffer in te Unided Shtaates!’ But, ladies and gentlemen, he is now, and here he is.”

With such an introduction, I was immediately in touch with my audience.

What a change after English chairmen!

A few days before lecturing in any English town, under the auspices of a Literary Society or Mechanics’ Institute, the lecturer generally receives from the secretary a letter running somewhat as follow:

Dear Sir:

I have much pleasure in informing you that our Mr. Blank, one of our vice-presidents and a well-known resident here, will take the chair at your lecture.

Translated into plain English, this reads:

My poor fellow, I am much grieved to have to inform you that a chairman will be inflicted upon you on the occasion of your lecture before the members of our Society.

In my few years’ lecturing experience, I have come across all sorts and conditions of chairmen, but I can recollect very few that “have helped me.” Now, what is the office, the duty, of a chairman on such occasions? He is supposed to introduce the lecturer to the audience. For this he needs to be able to make a neat speech. He has to tell the audience who the lecturer is, in case they should not know it, which is seldom the case. I was once introduced to an audience who knew me, by a chairman who, I don’t think, had ever heard of me in his life. Before going on the platform he asked me whether I had written anything, next whether I was an Irishman or a Frenchman, etc.

Sometimes the chairman is nervous; he hems and haws, cannot find the words he wants, and only succeeds in fidgeting the audience. Sometimes, on the other hand, he is a wit. There is danger again. I was once introduced to a New York audience by General Horace Porter. Those of my readers who know the delightful general and have heard him deliver one of those little gems of speeches in his own inimitable manner, will agree with me that certainly there was danger in that; and they will not be surprised when I tell them that after his delightfully witty and graceful little introduction, I felt as if the best part of the show was over.

Sometimes the chair has to be offered to a magnate of the neighborhood, though he may be noted for his long, prosy orations – which annoy the public; or to a very popular man in the locality who gets all the applause – which annoys the lecturer.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” should be the motto of chairmen, and I sympathize with a friend of mine who says that chairmen, like little boys and girls, should be seen and not heard.

Of those chairmen who can and do speak, the Scotch ones are generally good. They have a knack of starting the evening with some droll Scotch anecdote, told with that piquant and picturesque accent of theirs, and of putting the audience in a good humor. Occasionally they will also make apropos and equally droll little speeches at the close. One evening, in talking of America, I had mentioned the fact that American banquets were very lively, and that I thought the fact of Americans being able to keep up such a flow of wit for so many hours, was perhaps due to their drinking Apollinaris water instead of stronger things after dessert. At the end of the lecture, the chairman rose and said he had greatly enjoyed it, but that he must take exception to one statement the lecturer had made, for he thought it “fery deeficult to be wutty on Apollinaris watter.”

Another kind of chairman is the one who kills your finish, and stops all the possibility of your being called back for applause, by coming forward, the very instant the last words are out of your mouth, to inform the audience that the next lecture will be given by Mr. So-and-So, or to make a statement of the Society’s financial position, concluding by appealing to the members to induce their friends to join.

Then there is the chairman who does not know what you are going to talk about, but thinks it his duty to give the audience a kind of summary of what he imagines the lecture is going to be. He is terrible. But he is nothing to the one who, when the lecture is over, will persist in summing it up, and explaining your own jokes, especially the ones he has not quite seen through. This is the dullest, the saddest chairman yet invented.

Some modest chairmen apologize for standing between the lecturer and the audience, and declare they cannot speak, but do. Others promise to speak a minute only, but don’t.

“What shall I speak about?” said a chairman to me one day, after I had been introduced to him in the little back room behind the platform.

“If you will oblige me, sir,” I replied, “kindly speak about – one minute.”

Once I was introduced to the audience as the promoter of good feelings between France and England.

“Sometimes,” said the chairman, “we see clouds of misunderstanding arise between the French – between the English – between the two. The lecturer of this evening makes it his business to disperse these clouds – these clouds – to – to – But I will not detain you any longer. His name is familiar to all of us. I’m sure he needs no introduction to this audience. We all know him. I have much pleasure in introducing to you Mr. – Mosshiay – Mr. – ” Then he looked at me in despair.

It was evident he had forgotten my name.

“Max O’Rell is, I believe, what you are driving at,” I whispered to him.

…

The most objectionable chairmen in England are, perhaps, local men holding civic honors. Accustomed to deliver themselves of a speech whenever and wherever they get a chance, aldermen, town councilors, members of local boards, and school boards, never miss an opportunity of getting upon a platform to address a good crowd. Not long ago, I was introduced to an audience in a large English city by a candidate for civic honors. The election of the town council was to take place a fortnight afterward, and this gentleman profited by the occasion to air all his grievances against the sitting council, and to assure the citizens that if they would only elect him, there were bright days in store for them and their city. This was the gist of the matter. The speech lasted twenty minutes.

Once the chair was taken by an alderman in a Lancashire city, and the hall was crowded. “What a fine house!” I remarked to the chairman as we sat down on the platform.

“Very fine indeed,” he said; “everybody in the town knew I was going to take the chair.”

I was sorry I had spoken.

More than once, when announced to deliver a lecture on France and the French, I have been introduced by a chairman who, having spent his holidays in that country once or twice, opened the evening’s proceedings by himself delivering a lecture on France. I have felt very tempted to imitate a confrère, and say to the audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, as one lecture on France is enough for an evening, perhaps you would rather I spoke about something else now.” The confrère I have just mentioned was to deliver a lecture on Charles Dickens one evening. The chairman knew something of Charles Dickens and, for quite a quarter of an hour, spoke on the great English novelist, giving anecdotes, extracts of his writings, etc. When the lecturer rose, he said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, two lectures on Charles Dickens are perhaps more than you expected to hear to-night. You have just heard a lecture on Charles Dickens. I am now going to give you one on Charles Kingsley.”

Sometimes I get a little amusement, however (as in the country town of X.), out of the usual proceedings of the society before whose members I am engaged to appear. At X., the audience being assembled and the time up, I was told to go on the platform alone and, being there, to immediately sit down. So I went on, and sat down. Some one in the room then rose and proposed that Mr. N. should take the chair. Mr. N., it appeared, had been to Boulogne (to B’long), and was particularly fitted to introduce a Frenchman. In a speech of about five minutes duration, all Mr. N.’s qualifications for the post of chairman that evening were duly set forth. Then some one else rose and seconded the proposition, re-enumerating most of these qualifications. Mr. N. then marched up the hall, ascended the platform, and proceeded to return thanks for the kind manner in which he had been proposed for the chair and for the enthusiasm (a few friends had applauded) with which the audience had sanctioned the choice. He said it was true that he had been in France, and that he greatly admired the country and the people, and he was glad to have this opportunity to say so before a Frenchman. Then he related some of his traveling impressions in France. A few people coughed, two or three more bold stamped their feet, but he took no heed and, for ten minutes, he gave the audience the benefit of the information he had gathered in Boulogne. These preliminaries over, I gave my lecture, after which Mr. N. called upon a member of the audience to propose a vote of thanks to the lecturer “for the most amusing and interesting discourse, etc.”

Now a paid lecturer wants his check when his work is over, and although a vote of thanks, when it is spontaneous, is a compliment which he greatly appreciates, he is more likely to feel awkwardness than pleasure when it is a mere red-tape formality. The vote of thanks, on this particular occasion, was proposed in due form. Then it was seconded by some one who repeated two or three of my points and spoiled them. By this time I began to enter into the fun of the thing, and, after having returned thanks for the vote of thanks and sat down, I stepped forward again, filled with a mild resolve to have the last word:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said, “I have now much pleasure in proposing that a hearty vote of thanks be given Mr. N. for the able manner in which he has filled the chair. I am proud to have been introduced to you by an Englishman who knows my country so well.” I went again through the list of Mr. N.’s qualifications, not forgetting the trip to Boulogne and the impressions it had left on him. Somebody rose and seconded this. Mr. N. delivered a speech to thank the audience once more, and then those who had survived went home.

Some Nonconformist societies will engage a light or humorous lecturer, put him in their chapel, and open his mouth with prayer. Prayer is good, but I would as soon think of saying grace before dancing as of beginning my lecture with a prayer. This kind of experience has been mine several times. A truly trying experience it was, on the first occasion, to be accompanied to the platform by the minister, who, motioning me to sit down, advanced to the front, lowered his head, and said in solemn accents: “Let us pray.” After I got started, it took me fully ten minutes to make the people realize that they were not at church. This experience I have had in America as well as in England. Another experience in this line was still worse, for the prayer was supplemented by the singing of a hymn of ten or twelve verses. You may easily imagine that my first remark fell dead flat.

I have been introduced to audiences as Mossoo, Meshoe, and Mounzeer O’Reel, and other British adaptations of our word Monsieur, and found it very difficult to bear with equanimity a chairman who maltreated a name which I had taken some care to keep correctly spelt before the public. Yet this man is charming when compared with the one who, in the midst of his introductory remarks, turns to you, and in a stage whisper perfectly audible all over the hall, asks: “How do you pronounce your name?”

Passing over chairman chatty and chairman terse, chairman eloquent and chairman the reverse, I feel decidedly most kindly toward the silent chairman. He is very rare, but he does exist and, when met with, is exceedingly precious. Why he exists, in some English Institutes, I have always been at a loss to imagine. Whether he comes on to see that the lecturer does not run off before his time is up, or with the water bottle, which is the only portable thing on the platform generally; whether he is a successor to some venerable deaf and dumb founder of his Society; or whether he goes on with the lecturer to give a lesson in modesty to the public, as who should say: “I could speak an if I would, but I forbear.” Be his raison d’être what it may, we all love him. To the nervous novice he is a kind of quiet support, to the old stager he is as a picture unto the eye and as music unto the ear.

…

Here I pause. I want to collect my thoughts. Does my memory serve me? Am I dreaming, or worse still, am I on the point of inventing? No, I could not invent such a story, it is beyond my power.

I was once lecturing to the students of a religious college in America. Before I began, a professor stepped forward, and offered a prayer, in which he asked the Lord to allow the audience to see my points.

Now, I duly feel the weight of responsibility attaching to such a statement, and in justice to myself I can do no less than give the reader the petition just as it fell on my astonished ears:

“Lord, Thou knowest that we work hard for Thee, and that recreation is necessary in order that we may work with renewed vigor. We have to-night with us a gentleman from France [excuse my recording a compliment too flattering], whose criticisms are witty and refined, but subtle, and we pray Thee to so prepare our minds that we may thoroughly understand and enjoy them.”

“But subtle!”

I am still wondering whether my lectures are so subtle as to need praying over, or whether that audience was so dull that they needed praying for.

Whichever it was, the prayer was heard, for the audience proved warm, keen, and thoroughly appreciative.

CHAPTER XV

Reflections on the Typical American New York, January 23.

I was asked to-day by the editor of the North American Review to write an article on the typical American.

The typical American!

In the eyes of my beloved compatriots, the typical American is a man with hair falling over his shoulders, wearing a sombrero, a red shirt, leather leggings, a pair of revolvers in his belt, spending his life on horseback, and able to shoot a fly off the tip of your nose without for a moment endangering your olfactory organ; and, since Buffalo Bill has been exhibiting his Indians and cowboys to the Parisians, this impression has become a deep conviction.

I shall never forget the astonishment I caused to my mother when I first broke the news to her that I wanted to go to America. My mother had practically never left a lovely little provincial town of France. Her face expressed perfect bewilderment.

“You don’t mean to say you want to go to America?” she said. “What for?”

“I am invited to give lectures there.”

“Lectures? in what language?”

“Well, mother, I will try my best in English.”

“Do they speak English out there?”

“H’m – pretty well, I think.”

We did not go any further on the subject that time. Probably the good mother thought of the time when the Californian gold-fields attracted all the scum of Europe, and, no doubt, she thought that it was strange for a man who had a decent position in Europe, to go and “seek fortune” in America.

Later on, however, after returning to England, I wrote to her that I had made up my mind to go.

Her answer was full of gentle reproaches, and of sorrow at seeing that she had lost all her influence over her son. She signed herself “always your loving mother,” and indulged in a postscript. Madame de Sévigné said that the gist of a woman’s letter was to be found in the postscript.

My mother’s was this:

“P.S. – I shall not tell any one in the town that you have gone to America.”

This explains why I still dare show my face in my little native town.

…

The typical American!

First of all, does he exist? I do not think so. As I have said elsewhere, there are Americans in plenty, but the American has not made his appearance yet. The type existed a hundred years ago in New England. He is there still; but he is not now a national type, he is only a local one.

I was talking one day with two eminent Americans on the subject of the typical American, real or imaginary. One of them was of opinion that he was a taciturn being; the other, on the contrary, maintained that he was talkative. How is a foreigner to dare decide, where two eminent natives find it impossible to agree?

In speaking of the typical American, let us understand each other. All the civilized nations of the earth are alike in one respect; they are all composed of two kinds of men, those that are gentlemen, and those that are not. America is no exception to this rule. Fifth Avenue does not differ from Belgravia and Mayfair. A gentleman is everywhere a gentleman. As a type, he belongs to no particular country, he is universal.