Lectures and Lecturers
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LECTURES AND LECTURERS.
The Tribune yesterday published a long alphabetical list of the talented and disinterested gentlemen and gentlewomen who propose during the coming winter to enlighten the ignorance and pocket the dimes of the dear people. Out of the whole list, we might select the names of half-a-dozen men who have something to say and are worth listening to. The great mass, however, of what remains are mere word-spinners, quacks and mountebanks of science and literature.
The lecture system reached its culminating point some three or four years ago. Then it was a perfect furor. Lectures almost usurped the place of theatres and other amusements of the kind. There were scientific lectures and literary lectures and transcendental lectures and practical lectures—serious and funny, long and short, good and bad—the people rushed to be edified all the same, and swallowed with the most omnivorous appetite and ostrich-like digestion, almost anything, in that shape, that could be offered it. When Thackeray1 came, the whole community became lecture-mad, and rushed in crowds to hear him. In a word, lecture going became the fashion, and after running its brief career like all other fashions, it has finally begun to fall somewhat into the “sere and yellow leaf.”
Of late the thing has degenerated into a mere money-making speculation, excessively profitable to the complacent literary adventurer who can “travel” on the strength of a couple of manuscript rechauffes of odds and ends of erudition or diluted sentimentalities, and pocket his $50 or more from the lecture committee of any little town he chooses to stop at—but very stale, flat, and unsatisfactory to the audiences who are seduced into listening to the platitudes of the peregrinating humbug. Three-fourths of these compositions are composed of mere commonplace generalities, of no possible interest or profit to anybody, and no small share of them are arrant plagiarisms in the shape of stealings from unoffending authors too conscientious or too “slow” to peddle out the product of their brains in much the same way as a travelling conjuror deals out the infinitesimal doses from his inexhaustible bottle.
We do not wish to indulge in any sweeping censure in regard to this system, but merely to deprecate its patent abuses. When men like Thackeray, or Emerson,2 or Curtis speak, we feel sure of being delighted and instructed—that thought and labor have been bestowed in originating and elaborating their golden sentences. Such men as these all of us are glad to hear, and esteem it a privilege not to be lightly regarded. Occasionally, too, a course of first-class scientific lectures, illustrated by experiments, is useful in the extreme as a popular educator. But the Snookses, the Joneses and the hoi polloi of travelling spouters of superficial twaddle are, as Dogberry says, “most tolerable and not to be endured.” It is a comfortable conviction, most devoutly cherished by most sensible people, that their course is almost run, and that they will in a few years leave the field to the few who are really worthy of the high office of popular instructor and who may be said to be “called” to that function. According to present appearances that time is not far distant. Audiences are getting tired of listening to voluble commonplace, and in the stead of “milk for babes” will, in the future, require “meat for strong men.”
Notes:
1. William Thackeray (1811–1863) was an English satirical author and illustrator. Whitman summarized his assessment of Thackery when asked by Horace Traubel late in life as follows: "I have read Vanity Fair and liked it: it seemed to me a considerable story of its kind—to have its own peculiar value. But Thackeray as a whole did not cast his sinker very deep though he's none the worse for that" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, October 29, 1888). [back]
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American poet and transcendentalist. [back]