been brought together, expect more. In
England they still associate lectures with information. We don't. Our
American lecture audiences are, in nine cases out of ten, organised by
a woman's club of some kind and drawn not from the working class, but
from--what shall we call it?--the class that doesn't have to work,
or, at any rate, not too hard. It is largely a social audience, well
educated without being "highbrow," and tolerant and kindly to a degree.
In fact, what the people mainly want is to see the lecturer. They have
heard all about G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole and John Drinkwater,
and so when these gentlemen come to town the woman's club want to have
a look at them, just as the English people, who are all crazy about
animals, flock to the zoo to look at a new giraffe. They don't expect
the giraffe to do anything in particular. They want to see it, that's
all. So with the American woman's club audience. After they have
seen Mr. Chesterton they ask one another as they come out--just as an
incidental matter--"Did you understand his lecture?" and the answer is,
"I can't say I did." But there is no malice about it. They can now go
and say that they have seen Mr. Chesterton; that's worth two dollars in
itself. The nearest thing to this attitude of mind that I heard of in
England was at the City Temple in London, where they have every week a
huge gathering of about two thousand people, to listen to a (so-called)
popular lecture. When I was there I was told that the person who had
preceded me was Lord Haldane, who had lectured on Einstein's Theory
of Relativity. I said to the chairman, "Surely this kind of audience
couldn't understand a lecture like that!" He shook his head. "No," he
said, "they didn't understand it, but they all enjoyed it."

I don't mean to imply by what I said above that American lecture
audiences do not appreciate good things or that the English lecturers
who come to this continent are all giraffes. On the contrary: when the
audience finds that Chesterton and Walpole and Drinkwater, in addition
to being visible, are also singularly interesting lecturers, they are
all the better pleased. But this doesn't alter the fact that they have
come primarily to see the lecturer.

Not so in England. Here a lecture (outside London) is organised on a
much sterner footing. The people are there for information. The lecture
is organised not by idle, amiable, charming women, but by a body called,
with variations