Pieces of Hate

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24. We Have With Us This Evening----



We have always wondered just what it is which frightens the after dinner speaker. He is protected by tradition, the Christian religion and the game laws. And yet he trembles. Perhaps he knows that he is going to be terrible, but it is common knowledge that after dinner speakers seldom reform. The life gets them. It was thought, once upon a time, that the practice was in some way connected with alcoholic stimulation, but this has since been disproved. After dinner speaking is a separate vice. Total abstainers from every other evil practice are not immune.

The chief fault is that an irrationally inverted formula has come into being. The after dinner speaker almost invariably begins with his apology. He is generally becomingly frank when he first gets to his feet. There is always a confident prophecy that the audience is not going to be very much interested in what he has to say and the admission that he is pretty sure to do the job badly. Unfortunately, no speaker ever succeeds in deterring himself by these forebodings of disaster. He never fails to go on and prove the truth of his own estimate of inefficiency.

Many men profess to find the greatest difficulty in getting to their feet. Perhaps this is sincere, but the task does not seem to be one-sixteenth as hard as sitting down again. People whose vision is perfect in every other respect suffer from a curious astigmatism which prevents them from recognizing a stopping point when they come to it. We suggest to some ingenious inventor that he devise a combination of time clock and trip hammer by which a dull, blunt instrument shall be liberated at the end of five minutes so that it may fall with great force, killing the after dinner speaker and amusing the spectators. The mechanical difficulties might be great, but the machine would be even more useful if it could be attuned in some way so that the hammer should fall, if necessary, before the expiration of the five minutes, the instant the speaker said, "That reminds me of the story about the two Irishmen."

Funny stories are endurable, in moderation, if only the teller is perfectly frank in introducing them for their own sake and not pretending that they have any conceivable relationship to the endowment fund of Wellesley College, or the present condition of the silk business in America. To such length has hypocrisy gone, that there is now at large and dining out, a gentleman who makes a practice of kicking the leg of the table and then remarking, "Doesn't that sound like a cannon?--Speaking of cannon, that reminds me----"

Another young man of our own acquaintance has been using the same anecdote for all sorts of occasions for the last four years. His story concerns an American soldier who drove a four-mule team past the first line trench in the darkness and started rumbling along an old road that led across no-man's-land. He had gone a few yards when a doughboy jumped up out of a listening post and began to signal to him. "What's the matter?" shouted the driver.

"Shush! Shush!" hissed the outpost with great terror and intensity. "You're driving right toward the German lines. For Heaven's sake go back and don't speak above a whisper."

"Whisper, Hell!" roared the driver. "I've got to turn four mules around."

It may be that there actually was such an outpost and such a driver, but neither had any intention of acting as a perpetual symbol and yet we know positively that this particular story has been introduced as an argument for buying another Liberty Bond of the fourth issue; as a justification for the vehemence of the American novelists of the younger generation; and as a reason for the tendency to overstatement in the dramatic and literary criticism of New York newspapers. We are also under the impression that it was used in a debate concerning the propriety of a motion picture censorship in New York state.

Indeed the speaker whom we have in mind never failed to use the mule story, no matter what the nature of the occasion, unless he substituted the one about the man who wanted to go to Seville. He was a farmer, this man, and he lived some few miles away from Seville in a little ramshackle farm house. It had been his ambition of a lifetime to go to Seville and upon one particular morning he came out of the house carrying a suitcase.

"Where are you going?" asked his wife.

"To Seville," replied the farmer.

His wife was a very pious woman and she added by way of correction, "You mean, God willing."

"No," objected the farmer, dogmatically, "I mean I'm going to Seville."

Now Heaven was angered by this impiety and the dogmatic farmer was immediately transformed into a frog. Before the very eyes of his wife he lost his mortal form and hopped with a great splash into the big pond behind the house. To that pond the good woman went every day for a year and prayed that her husband should be restored to his natural form. On the first morning of the second year the big frog began to grow bigger and bigger and suddenly he was no longer a frog but a man. Out of the pond he leaped and ran straightaway into the house. He came out carrying a suitcase.

"Where are you going?" exclaimed the startled wife.

"To Seville," said the farmer.

"You mean," his wife implored in abject terror, "God willing."

"No," answered the farmer, "to Seville or back to the frog pond!"

The young man of whom we are writing first heard the story from Major General Robert Lee Bullard in a training school in Lyons. The doughty warrior told it in reply to the question, "What is this offensive spirit of which you've been telling us?" But with a sea change the story took up many other and varied rôles. It served as the climax of an eloquent speech in favor of the release of political prisoners; it began an address urging greater originality upon the dramatists of America and it was conscripted at a luncheon to Hughie Jennings to explain the speaker's interpretation of the fundamental reason for the victory of the New York Giants over the Yankees in the world's series of last season.

Speaking of baseball, a great football coach once said that he could develop a championship eleven any time at all out of good material and seven simple plays well learned. Likewise, an after-dinner speaker can manage tolerably well with a limited supply of stories, if only they are elastic enough in interpretation and he covers a sufficiently wide range of territory in his dining rambles.

It is our experience that the most inveterate story tellers among public speakers are ministers. Unfortunately, the average clergyman has a tendency to select tales a little rowdy in an effort to set himself down among his listeners as a fellow member in good standing of the fraternity of Adam. Still more unfortunately the ministerial speaker often attempts to modify and deodorize the anecdote a little and, on top of that, gets it just a little wrong. No matter who the narrator may be, nothing is quite so ghastly as the improper story when told to an audience of more than ten or eleven listeners. Even more than a poetic drama a purple story needs a group, small and select. Any one interested in preserving impropriety might very well endow a chain of thimble theaters with a maximum seating capacity of ten. Some such step is needed or the off color yarn will disappear entirely from American life. It was nurtured upon big mirrors and brass rails and, these being lacking, there is no proper atmosphere in which it may suitably be reared. Most certainly the anecdote of doubtful character does not belong to large banquets even of visiting Elks. Literature of this sort is fragile. It represents what the Freudians call an escape, and the most brazen of us is a little shamefaced about taking off his inhibitions in front of a hundred people, mostly strangers.

There must be something wrong with after-dinner speaking because it is notoriously the lowest form of American oratory. It if were not for Chauncey M. Depew whole generations in this country would have been born and lived and died without once having any memory worth preserving after the demitasse. The trouble, we think, is that dinner guests are much too friendly. It is the custom that the man at the speakers' table may not be heckled. He is privileged and privilege has made him dull. According to our observation there is never anything of interest said with the laying of cornerstones or the dedication of new high school buildings. On the other hand, we have frequently been amused and excited by tilts at political conventions and mass meetings.

William Jennings Bryan is among the prize bores of the world when he gets up to do his canned material about The Prince of Peace, but no sensitive soul can fail to admire this same Commoner if he has ever had the privilege of hearing him talk down political foes upon the floor of a convention. All the labored tricks of oratory are forgotten then. Give Mr. Bryan some one at whom he may with propriety shake a finger and he becomes direct, vivid and moving.

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt was a speaker of somewhat the same type. He did not talk well unless there was some living and present person for him to speak against. Upon one occasion we heard him make a particularly dreary discourse, and incidentally a political one, until he came to a point where a group in the audience took exception to some statement and attempted to howl him down. It was like the touch of a whip on the flanks of a stake horse. Roosevelt returned to the statement and said it over again, only this time he said it much more dogmatically and twice as well. Before that speech was done he had climbed to the top of a table and was putting all his back and shoulders into every word. Even his platitudes seemed to be knockout blows. He was inspiring. He was magnificent.

The after-dinner speaker needs this same stimulus of emotion. He ought to have something into which he can get his teeth. Every well conducted banquet should include a special committee to heckle the guests of honor. Even a dreary person might be aroused to fervor if his opening sentence was met with a mocking roar of, "Is that so!" Loud cries of "Make him sit down" would undoubtedly serve to make the speaker forget his entire stock of anecdotes about Pat and Mike. There would be no calm in which he could be reminded of anything except that certain desperadoes were not willing to listen, and that, by the Old Harry, he was going to give it to them so hot and heavy that they would have to.

The scheme may sound a little cruel, but we ought to face the fact that a time has come when we must choose between cutting off the heads of our after-dinner speakers or slapping them in the face. We believe that they deserve to have a chance to show us whether or not they have a right to live.