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Also: The Reception of Thoreau as a Lecturer
Presentation delivered December 28, 1987 at a convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, California
On February 12th 1843, four days after listening to Thoreau read his lecture on Sir Walter Raleigh, Lidian Emerson wrote to her husband and told him that “Henry ought to be known as a man who can read a lecture.” But during his lifetime Thoreau was never particularly well known as a man who could read a lecture. And nowadays many people, being more familiar with the stereotypes about Thoreau than the facts of his life, are surprised to hear that he lectured at all. Here, for example, is one critic writing on the subject of Thoreau and lecturing:
[3] His career began in Concord, Massachusetts, on April 21st 1838 and ended in Waterbury, Connecticut, almost twenty-three years later, on December 11th 1860. During those twenty-three years, Thoreau wrote twenty-three lectures and delivered them a total of seventy — perhaps as many as seventy-four times. He published all but seven of the twenty-three lectures during his lifetime, a fact which indicates that for him lectures usually represented an intermediate stage in the composition process, with his journal the initial stage and publication the final stage of that process.
[4] During the last few months of his life, he struggled to revise five of his seven unpublished lectures, and each of them was published fairly soon after his death on May 12th 1862. Of the other two unpublished lectures — “Society” and “Moonlight” — Thoreau seems to have chalked the former up to experience, salvaging only a few fragments for posterity by recording them in his journal. As for “Moonlight,” he apparently toyed with the notion of working it up in the late 1850s, probably in connection with a large natural-history project he was working on at that time, but that’s only speculation on my part. In any event, no portions of “Moonlight” appeared in print before Thoreau’s death.
[5] Those, then, are the basic facts of Thoreau’s lecturing career. What I’m going to do in the next fifteen minutes or so is try to provide a context for those facts by tracing what I see as a fairly pronounced shift of interest on Thoreau’s part during the course of his career as a lecturer — a shift away from his early interest in various literary, social, and political concerns and toward his later, almost exclusive interest in nature or man’s relation to nature, as opposed to man’s various relations to his fellow men.
[6] In order to trace this shift, I have divided Thoreau’s lecturing career into three periods. As you can see by looking at your handout, the first period spans the years from the spring of 1838, when Thoreau delivered his first lecture, titled — significantly — “Society,” to the spring of 1851, when he first delivered “Walking, or the Wild.” The second period covers the four years from the spring of 1855, when Thoreau began suffering from a mysterious malady that apparently kept him pretty much confined to his bed for several months. This confinement allowed him to begin work on that large natural-history project I mentioned a moment ago — a project that dominated the third and final period of his career as a lecturer.
[7] Thoreau’s friend and biographer Frank Sanborn once wrote that “Thoreau may be said to have fairly entered on his career as a lecturer” in 1847, when he delivered the first of the three Walden lectures that dominate the first period of his career. But Thoreau had written six lectures before 1847. You will note that only one of those lectures — “Concord River” — is on a nature-related subject; the others are on literary and social subjects. (By the way, I’ve taken the liberty of circling on your handouts the lectures I consider to be on nature-related subjects.) At the outset of his career, Thoreau apparently aspired to a vocation as a scholar-critic, a vocation much like the one James Russell Lowell later took up with such distinction. Most of the essays he wrote early on in his writing career — essays he could conceivably have used as lectures — were published in the Transcendentalists’ magazine, The Dial.
[8] In 1843 he moved to Staten Island in order to pursue his aspiration to become a scholar-critic by trying to break into the New York literary market. But he was there only a few months before he decided to return home to Concord. He had changed his mind about becoming a scholar-critic. Before leaving New York, he told a friend that he had been studying books, but that he now intended to study nature and daily life. This change of mind indicates that a fairly major shift of interest had taken place — a shift away from the study of books, as he said, toward a more exclusive study of nature. This shift was to continue until 1855. A year and a half after leaving New York, Thoreau moved to Walden — and the rest, as they say, is literary history. But not quite. There was life for Thoreau after Walden, as I shall try to show in a few minutes. But first let me say a few words about the single most important influence on Thoreau during the first period of his career as a lecturer.
[9] That influence, of course, was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was himself an accomplished and fairly well known lecturer before Thoreau had even delivered his own first lecture. It may have been with Emerson in mind that Thoreau wrote in his journal two months before his first lecture, “It is hard to subject ourselves to an influence.” No doubt it was hard, but subject himself Thoreau certainly did. James Russell Lowell mentioned in a letter he wrote at about this time that with his eyes closed he couldn’t distinguish Thoreau’s voice from Emerson’s, and another acquaintance of the two men went so far as to claim that Thoreau was even getting up a nose like Emerson’s. These aren’t isolated observations either. An amazing number of the newspaper reviews of Thoreau’s lectures over the years mention that either his platform manner or his subject-matter — and very often both — was very like, if not identical to, Emerson’s.
[10] But for all the similarities between the two men, their careers and their interests moved in opposite directions. Consider, for example, that Thoreau’s first lecture was “Society,” whereas Emerson’s first publication was Nature. Consider, too, that the last lecture Thoreau delivered was “Autumnal Tints,” while the last publication over which Emerson exercised some degree of control was Letters and Social Aims. It seems fitting, doesn’t it, that Emerson had his famous “transparent-eyeball” experience while walking on the Boston Common and that Thoreau had his somewhat analogous experience, not in the heart of a major metropolis, or even at Walden Pond, but while on an excursion deep into the woods of Maine, on a ridge near the summit of Mount Ktaadn. Too much can be made of these contrasts, of course, but they do suggest that as Thoreau moved further out of Emerson’s sphere of influence, he moved closer to the subjects and themes that were eventually to absorb virtually all of his interest and attention.
[11] Of the twenty-three lectures Thoreau wrote, two figure more prominently than any of the others, and I had these two lectures very much in mind when I divided Thoreau’s career into three periods. I’m referring to “Walking, or the Wild,” which ends the first period of his career, and “What Shall It Profit,” which ends the second period in the sense that it was the last lecture Thoreau wrote prior to his long illness in the spring of 1855. (You may be more familiar with the published versions of these lectures — the essays “Walking” and “Life without Principle.” Thoreau revised these lectures quite a bit before submitting them for publication, but the essays are still pretty much the same as the lectures. The same is true for most, though not all, of the published versions of his other lectures. But let me continue — ) These two lectures — “Walking, or the Wild” and “What Shall It Profit” — are more prominent than Thoreau’s other lectures for a number of reasons, only a couple of which I can touch on now. For one, Thoreau delivered them more times than any of the others except “Economy,” the first Walden lecture. It’s not clear which, but he read one of these lectures nine times and the other eight times.
[12] Another reason these two lectures figure so prominently in Thoreau’s career is that they are, in a sense, the only two lectures he ever wrote. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. I mentioned earlier that in the last months of his life Thoreau revised five lectures for publication. Well, he wrote three of those five lectures during the last period of his career — “The Allegash and East Branch,” “Autumnal Tints,” and “Wild Apples.” The other two lectures he revised just before he died are, as you may expect, “Walking, or the Wild,” written in 1851, and “What Shall It Profit,” written in 1854. Why in these two instances hadn’t he followed his usual practice and moved these two lectures into print during those seven and more intervening years?
[13] The answer is that he wrote those two lectures as lectures — with no intention of publishing them during his lifetime. He only submitted them for publication when he knew he was dying and could no longer use them as lectures. So what, you might ask. Well, here’s what I contend: these two lectures were sort of mid-career summaries for Thoreau in the sense that they contain the essential elements of his views on man’s relation to nature (in the case of “Walking, or the Wild”) and on man’s relation to himself and his fellow men (in the case of “What Shall It Profit”). I realize that’s a bold claim, and unfortunately I don’t have time now to back it up. But let me make just a few observations before I move on to talk about what I think Thoreau was up to during the second period of his lecturing career.
[14] Thoreau wrote “Walking, or the Wild” three years after writing “Ktaadn” and just over a year after writing “Cape Cod.” Among the things he learned on his excursions to Maine and Cape Cod was the importance of what he called a border or a shore life. Such a life, he found, placed him in the position of an intermediary — between the wild and the cultivated, between unhandselled nature on the one hand and civilization on the other. From such a position he was able to set himself up as nature’s spokesman, and it was this position that he assumed when he first delivered “Walking, or the Wild” in Concord on April 23rd 1851.
[15] He began that evening by saying he felt that he should apologize for not speaking on the recently passed Fugitive-Slave Law; “but,” he continued, “I had prepared myself to speak a word now for Nature — for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture simply civil — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature — rather than a member of society.” In his journal just a few months later, he wrote of devoting one’s life to discovering the divinity in nature, of being a watchman on the city walls — the border between wild nature and civilization — and then he wrote, “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature. . . .”
[16] That announcement — or, I wonder, was it a realization on his part? — at any rate, that announcement signals a crucial transition in Thoreau’s life and in his career as a lecturer, a transition that was not complete until the spring of 1855. In the meantime, he took care of unfinished business — generally, that is what he was up to during the second period of his lecturing career — and a major portion of that unfinished business involved taking his Walden manuscript through the last four of its seven drafts. Just three and a half months after Walden was published, he began writing “What Shall It Profit.” With a single exception, which I will discuss in a moment, Thoreau never wrote another social or political lecture. Four months or so after his first delivery of “What Shall It Profit” he was in bed, sick, working on the large natural-history project that he continued to work on till his death and that even now remains incomplete.
[17] That we know very little about this late project prevents me from saying much about it, so instead of wasting time in speculation I will only note that of the five lectures Thoreau wrote during the last period of his career as a lecturer, three were associated in one way or another with his natural-history project. Those three are “Autumnal Tints,” “Wild Apples,” and “The Succession of Forest Trees.” “The Allegash and East Branch,” one of the other two lectures of this period, is Thoreau’s account of the last of his three excursions into the Maine Woods; as such, I have classified it as one of his nature-related lectures.
[18] The remaining lecture of this final period, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” is clearly a political lecture — the only such lecture that Thoreau wrote during the last seven and a half years of his life. What is most striking, it seems to me, about Thoreau’s interest in John Brown is how intense yet short-lived it was. He first heard about Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 19th 1859. If you look at the entries in his published journal from that day to the end of the month, when he first delivered the lecture, you will find that he had written thirty-nine and a half pages during those eleven days. But only four of those pages contain his observations on natural phenomena. All the other thirty-five and a half pages contain his thoughts on the John Brown affair.
[19] One day’s entry, for example, begins with less than a full page of observations on vetch, a marsh hawk, Viola Pedata flowers, indigo-weed, and the changing color of the earth that fall from green to, of course, brown. He followed this page of observations on nature with twenty pages of vituperation on the State of Virginia, editors of newspapers, and anything or anyone else who didn’t see John Brown’s raid as a heroic attempt to free four million slaves. Nonetheless, the long entry ends, significantly, with this query: “Swamp-pink and waxwork were bare October 23d; how long?”
[20] Thereafter we hear nothing at all of John Brown in the journal till November 12th, when Thoreau was recalling a beautiful sunset he had seen a couple of weeks earlier. After describing the sunset, he wrote, “But it was hard for me to see its beauty then, when my mind was filled with Captain Brown. So great a wrong as his fate implied overshadowed all beauty in the world.” Note Thoreau’s use of the past tense here — the great wrong implied by Brown’s fate, he says, had overshadowed all beauty in the world for him, and his mind had been filled with Captain Brown in late October. But less than two weeks later that was no longer the case; he was then able once again to appreciate the beauty of nature, as his recollection of that late-October sunset attests. When he wrote those two sentences in his journal, John Brown was still alive; he wasn’t hanged until December 2nd. But it was the past tense Thoreau used whenever he wrote about John Brown after October 1859, though (and this is my point) he rarely did write about Brown after that time.
[21] What I am suggesting, of course, is that the John Brown affair was a brief and anomalous episode in the final period of Thoreau’s career as a lecturer — an important episode, certainly, but an episode nonetheless. Immediately after Brown’s execution, Thoreau returned to what had been his abiding interest after 1854 and prior to mid-October 1859. That abiding interest, as I have tried to show, was man’s relation to nature. In his first lecture, “Society,” Thoreau claimed that “Society was made for man.” But as the years passed he increasingly came to see society as something of a conspiracy against the integrity of the individual. And it was nature — or, more properly speaking, a true relation to nature — that would help restore an individual’s integrity. In “What Shall It Profit” Thoreau said, “Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.”
[22] In another lecture, also written in 1854, he grappled with the issue of slavery — slavery not in Georgia or South Carolina, but closer to home — slavery in Massachusetts. What is it that settles the conflicts of slavery in Massachusetts? Not, you may be certain, a joint resolution of both Houses of the State Congress. No, what resolves the conflicts in that lecture is — of all things — a flower, a white water-lily, the symbol (for Thoreau) of purity. The movement of “Slavery in Massachusetts” — that is, the movement from society and its conflicts to nature and its ability to help us preserve our sanity — is one which characterizes what we might call the development of Thoreau’s career as a lecturer.
Copyright © 2000 Bradley P. Dean, All Rights Reserved
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