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The professor of botany himself sat in the front row and hammered the floor with his cane in approval. But his very success was the lecturer's undoing. Envy grew in place of the poverty he had conquered. The instructor, Nils Rosén, was abroad taking his doctor's degree. He came home to find his lectures deserted for the irresponsible teachings of a mere undergraduate.
I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian tales and traditions.
But that idea will never illume the hearer's brain as the lecturer's until the hearer knows as does the lecturer what there is back of it. There is only one way in which this can be done the hearer must have access to the same sources of knowledge as the lecturer. This does not necessarily mean that every hearer should have a lecturer's library.
At the lecturer's desk the same attraction made itself still more effectually felt. 'I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, Mr. Lowell says, 'but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertone in that rich barytone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deep waters with a drift that we cannot and would not resist.
"And I thought, perhaps, if we could manage to connect it in some way with the Primrose League " "But what can it have to do with the Primrose League?" I asked stiffly. I will admit now to a slight prejudice against the Ambulance business due perhaps to the lecturer's having chosen to start it in my absence. Sir Felix was disappointed, and showed it.
Such definitions are of the letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. To define a great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick for which audiences should stone him.
"I am looked upon as good as mad," he wrote to his brother, "because, on a hasty notice, I took a defaulting lecturer's place at the Philosophical Institution, and discoursed on the Polarization of Light.... But I like work: it is a family weakness." Then followed chronic malaise sleepless nights, days of pain, and more spitting of blood. "My only painless moments," he says, "were when lecturing."
Perhaps he broke up with his "jealous" wife "She kept imagining that I was looking at other women... " in search of the many. Once I invited a friend from work to one of Rama's public lectures. She was interested in meditation and had recently left her boyfriend. "Thanks, but no thanks!" she exclaimed when I mentioned the lecturer's name. "So, what's wrong with Rama?"
"Have you any advice for me?" said the young man, that awful breakdown looming large in his mind. "Yes," said the senior, "cultivate the pause." One of the lecturer's most valuable assets is variety of pace, and this is almost entirely lost by the speaker whose speed is always high. Observe two men arguing in conversation where there is no thought of art or oratory.
What I wanted to see now was the effect of the lecturer's will when exerted upon some independent member of the audience. He came round to that as the concluding exhibition in his performance. "I have shown you," he said, "that a mesmerised subject is entirely dominated by the will of the mesmeriser.
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