The Lecture Season
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THE LECTURE SEASON.
The Lecture season has already commenced; and volumes of vapid nonsense, with occasionally a few scintillations of sound information and practical common sense, are projected into our ears by the tribe of itinerant winter evening declaimers. We have great respect for the Lecturer's mission, but not a great deal for the manner in which it is fulfilled in many instances. We cannot esteem too highly the vocation of that man of study and education, who carefully condenses and popularises his knowledge on a subject of importance, and delivers it in a form calculated to awaken an interest in the minds of his auditory in the subject itself, so as to prepare the way, and furnish inducements, for subsequent investigation on their part. We cannot sufficiently despise or pity the man who transcribes a chapter of Bancroft1 or Irving,2 and attempts to palm it off on an audience as an equivalent for the quarter or fifty cents apiece they have paid for admission. Yet this class of Lecturers bears a fair proportion to the more honorable and industrious. Closely allied to it is the old fogy class, who select a subject familiar to every school boy, and take care to treat it only in the most hacknied and common-place manner.
Yet how wide is the range of subjects provided to the industrious and conscientious Lecturer! How many topics there are, interesting to the public at large, on which even well-educated men are deficient in information, and which the newspapers have not space to treat of as they deserve. How many parts of the world are there, which we are forever reading about in the papers, but which we have only the faintest idea of. We are going to annex Cuba, one day; cannot some one who has been there furnish us with a descriptive lecture thereon, meanwhile? We hear a monstrous deal about the horrors of negro slavery; cannot some one who has visited the Court of his Majesty Faustin I, give us an idea of the results of negro freedom there, and also in the West Indies?3 Central America occupies a considerable portion of newspaper space; surely some returned fillibuster or traveler could give us an interesting stock of information thereon, not easily obtainable from books or papers.
Nor is modern geography the only live subject for interesting lectures. There is hardly a science on which much may not be told, in an interesting shape, which persons of ordinary intelligence do not know. Yet most of our crack lecturers avoid these really useful topics, in order to bore us with interminable disquisitions on the remarkable adventures of some Munchausen of the Middle Ages,4 or to sicken us with insincere and oft repeated eulogies on the character of some of the Revolutionary Heroes, whose exploits and praises are already "familiar in our mouths as household words."
Notes:
1. George Bancroft (1800–1891) was a US-American historian, diplomat, and author whose work focused on the origins of the United States. [back]
2. Washington Irving (1783–1859) was a writer, historian, and diplomat well known for his works of fiction; in particular, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van Winkle." [back]
3. Faustin-Élie Soulouque (1782?–1867), also known as Faustin I, was born into slavery under French rule; as a military leader and politician, Faustin I participated in the war of independence and later became the president and emperor of Haiti. [back]
4. Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen (1720–1797) was a German soldier in the Russian army known for telling highly sensationalized stories about the battles in which he participated. [back]