THE LECTURER.
When Doctor Warren gave up the Parkman professorship at Harvard, in
1847, Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place as Professor of
Anatomy and Physiology. For eight months of the year, four lectures are
delivered each week in this department of the college, and yet Doctor
Holmes still found time "between whiles," to attend to his Boston
practice, and to write many charming poems and essays. He also entered
the lyceum arena, "an original American contrivance," as Theodore Parker
describes it in 1857, "for educating the people. The world has nothing
like it. In it are combined the best things of the Church: i.e., the
preaching; and of the College: i.e., the informing thought, with some of
the fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural districts a chance
to see the men they read about--to see the lions--for the lecturer is
also a show to the eyes. For ten years past six or eight of the most
progressive minds in America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred
times a year."
Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes touched upon in these lyceum
lectures was a fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on the
_English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_. What a pity that Oscar Wilde
and his brother poets of this later day could not have the benefit of
just such a clear, microscopic analysis! What the Autocrat himself
thought of these lecturing tours through the country we have in his own
words:
"I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' before many audiences," he
says; "more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a
stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of burnt cork; but I was
placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I
came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and
made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters
so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I
have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in my pocket, and seen
myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of _buffos_. I have
been through as many hardships as Ulysses in the exercise of my
histrionic vocation. I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering
spirit, and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night
after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me
wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening turning up to me
the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy
incantation."
Of his audiences he writes again as follows:
"Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that
they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite
mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell
the 'remarkably intelligent audience' of a town in New York or Ohio from
one in any New England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle
of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men
which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the
assemblage. But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one
knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in. Front seats, a few old folks--shiny-headed--slant up best ear toward
the speaker--drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a
little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and
middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front--(pick out the
best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance, sharp
and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An
indefinite number of pairs of young people--happy, but not always very
attentive. Boys in the background more or less quiet. Dull faces here,
there--in how many places! I don't say dull _people_, but faces without
a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the
lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony
lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;--that is the chief
reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
"Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated--a great
compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two
mammals of the same species are like each other."
"Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about
lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums--as he
used to say--goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples
and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and
comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse
distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how
kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown
comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the
lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours
after the lectur, jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been
like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had
got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin'
himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'."
To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more
which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes Breakfast.
"I well remember," he said, "the first time I saw Doctor Holmes. It was
long ago; not as our Autocrat expresses it, 'in the year eighteen
hundred and ever so few;' nor, as Thackeray has it, 'when the present
century was in its teens.' It was just after the close of the last half
century, and on a cold winter's afternoon, when the sun was fast setting
behind the then ungilded dome of the State House, and it was in old
Bromfield street. It was not in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church,
nor in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the Bromfield House,
which, for many years, might have been the convenient resort of good
Methodist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding elders, who were
called by the genial Bishop Wainwright, the 'bob-tailed bishops' of
their flocks and districts.... I was in the large stable adjoining the
Bromfield House, endeavoring to secure a sleigh, when there entered a
gentleman apparently of my own age. He came in quickly, and with
impatience demanded the immediate production of a team and sleigh,
which, though ordered for him, had somehow been forgotten. The
new-comer, it was evident, was not to be trifled with. There was no
nonsense about him, and I was not surprised, when, a few years later, I
learned that he had become an Autocrat.
"On that particular night he had a long drive before him, for he was to
lecture at Newburyport, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other then
unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if the horse survived the drive, and
I am quite sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, and the
young New Yorker who then admired him, and would fain have driven with
him on that cold winter night, has since, in common with thousands of
other New Yorkers, been filled with grateful admiration for what that
driver has done for literature, and for the happiness and improvement of
the world."
In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the _Boylston Prize Dissertation_, and in
1842, _Homoeopothy and its kindred Delusions_. The Boylston prizes
were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas Boylston. Doctor Holmes
gained three of these prizes, and the _Dissertations_, one of which was
upon Intermittent Fever, were published together in book form in 1838.
When, in February of the same year (1842), the young men of Boston gave
a dinner to Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed the distinguished
visitor in the following beautiful song:
The stars their early vigils keep,
The silent hours are near,
When drooping eyes forget to weep--
Yet still we linger here;
And what--the passing churl may ask--
Can claim such wondrous power,
That Toil forgets his wonted task,
And Love his promised hour?
The Irish harp no longer thrills,
Or breathes a fainter tone;
The clarion blast from Scotland's hills
Alas! no more is blown.
And Passion's burning lip bewails
Her Harold's wasted fire,
Still lingering o'er the dust that veils
The Lord of England's lyre.
But grieve not o'er its broken strings,
Nor think its soul hath died,
While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings,
As once o'er Avon's side;--
While gentle summer sheds her bloom,
And dewy blossoms wave,
Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb
And Nelly's nameless grave.
Thou glorious island of the sea!
Though wide the wasting flood
That parts our distant land from thee,
We claim thy generous blood.
Nor o'er thy far horizon springs
One hallowed star of fame.
But kindles, like an angel's wings,
Our western skies in flame!