The Utica _Herald_ in a pleasant article recently recalled the lecture
lyceum of a quarter of a century ago. It was then what is called a
power. It greatly influenced public opinion. Its spirit was indicated by
the reply of Wendell Phillips to an invitation which asked him his terms
and his subject. He answered that for a literary lecture he should
expect a hundred dollars, but he would deliver an antislavery address
for nothing, and pay his own expenses. The lecturers who were most
sought at that time were almost without exception men of very strong
convictions upon the great question which, however evaded and
dexterously hidden, was the vital thought of the country; and every
successive week from November to April, in the largest cities and the
smallest cities, along the belt of country from the Kennebec through
New England and New York westward through Ohio and the Northwest to the
Mississippi, before thousands of the most intelligent American citizens,
this band of lecturers advanced, like a well-ordered platoon of
sharp-shooters, and delivered their destructive volley at what they felt
to be the common enemy.
Edward Everett, "the monarch of the platform," as Mr. Edward Parker
called him in his book upon American contemporary orators, during part
of this same time was making a tour through much of the same region with
his oration upon Washington, for the benefit of the fund for the
purchase of Mount Vernon, and he was also writing the Mount Vernon
papers for the _Ledger_, in one of which he gave an entertaining
description of a night in a sleeping-car, when those itinerant
bedchambers had but recently taken to the road. Mr. Everett's
conservative temperament made his oration a kind of corrective of the
influence of the great tendency of the lyceum lecture. But patriotic as
his purpose undoubtedly was, his effort to stem the rapidly rising tide
of public sentiment was like the protests of Governor Hutchinson and the
Colonial conservatives against the fervid revolutionary appeals of Otis
and Adams and Quincy. Other popular speakers of the same sympathy as
that of Mr. Everett found themselves out of tune with the lyceum
audience, and were but meteors flashing across the stage, whose light
was lost in the steady and increasing glow of the group of men who were
identified with the great day of the lyceum lecture. These men were not
all like Wendell Phillips, open leaders of a specific agitation, nor
were these lectures always ostensibly upon what are called public
questions. But the influence of the lecturers was unmistakable. They
were all men known to be in the strongest sympathy with the most
advanced feeling of the agitation. It was the plain spirit and tone and
drift of those lectures, an occasional allusion and the necessary
application of the remarks, however general, to the actual situation,
rather than any deliberate discussion of the question itself, which
characterized the lyceum of that day. There was sometimes an attempted
reaction against this tendency. In Philadelphia it was discovered that
colored persons were not admitted to the Musical Fund Hall, in which the
lectures had been given. The leading lecturers instantly informed the
committee that they declined to speak in the hall so long as the
restriction continued. In Albany the reactionary sentiment in the Young
Men's Association succeeded in electing a lecture committee which was
resolved upon a purely "literary" course, and which would not invite the
usual lecturers. The result was an independent course, under the
auspices of dissatisfied members of the association, in which the
rejected lecturers spoke in the largest hall in the city, and the signal
triumph of the seceders lay in the immense audience which assembled in
contrast to the attenuated attendance upon the regular course.
The singular success of the lyceum lecture of that time was due,
undoubtedly, to two causes--the simultaneous appearance of a remarkable
group of orators, and their profound sympathy with the question which
absorbed the public mind. The weekly lecture was not merely a display of
oratory, not only an amusing recreation, but it brought wit and
accomplishment and eloquence to strengthen the public feeling and arouse
the public conscience, and to confirm the earnest spirit which was
universal, and which forecast the great events and the noble elevation
of the public mind that followed. Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Gough,
Beecher, Chapin, Starr King, Theodore Parker, could of themselves carry
any course of lectures, and each in his own way was thoroughly in accord
with the truest American life of that time. The situation and the
condition of the public mind would not have availed, indeed, without the
happy chance of such orators to create the lyceum, but with that chance
the lyceum of that day was as remarkable a continuous display of various
and effective eloquence as has been ever known.
If the faithful diary of any lecturer who went the grand rounds
twenty-five years ago, from Maine to the Mississippi, could be
published, it would be full of the most amusing stories. The lecturers
all had them to tell, and they were all men of a singularly fine
perception of humor. James T. Fields, the publisher in Boston, was the
friend of all the lyceum orators, and towards the close of his life he
was himself a popular and attractive lecturer upon literary subjects.
His little cell or private office in the old corner book-store in Boston
was an exchange of lecturers for that neighborhood, which teemed with
lyceums, and no similar space has ever heard fresher stories better
told, or has ever echoed with gayer laughter.
It was the pleasant company in that little retreat which first heard,
the day after it occurred, the tale of the belated lecturer who,
hurrying from the cars in a carriage to the hall in Boston, long beyond
the hour, dinnerless, and with no chance to dress, opened his
travelling-bag, and proceeded, to the consternation of the lady who had
taken a seat in the same carriage, and whose pardon he politely and
briefly invoked, to change his collar and his coat. As he began to pull
off his coat, having pulled off his collar, his amazed and terrified
fellow-passenger began to pull at the door, and to call loudly upon the
driver, who was furiously whipping his horses into a pace that increased
both the noise of the carriage and the conviction of the terrified lady
that she was the victim of some dreadful conspiracy, or the hapless
victim of a maniac. The maniac's earnest but interjectional explanation
as he proceeded in his toilet, begging his companion to be pacified, as
he was merely going to lecture, was an unintelligible asseveration,
which only made his madness more indisputable and awful, and what might
have befallen the poor lady, if the carriage had not suddenly stopped at
the hall, and the lecturer, in his clean collar and black coat, had not
begged her pardon for frightening her, with a fervor that frightened her
all the more, and disappeared from the vehicle with his travelling-bag,
shawl, and umbrella, he was not prepared to say. But the tale, as he
told it the next morning with infinite humor in Fields's corner, was
received, as he ruefully admitted, with louder shouts of laughter than
had greeted the brightest witticisms of his lecture.
Fields is gone, and his old friend and neighbor Whipple, who was one of
the earliest of the noted lyceum lecturers. The old corner in the old
corner book-store is gone, and with it have vanished many of the happy
company that gathered there, not only of orators, but of famous authors.
The lyceum of the last generation is gone, but it is not surprising that
those who recall with the Utica _Herald_ its golden prime should cherish
a kindly and regretful feeling for an institution which was so
peculiarly American, and which served so well the true American spirit
and American life.