James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

It was near the close of the first quarter of the century that what was called the “lyceum system” came into being in New England. It worked wonderfully well under the original plans. The institution, as it may be called, or the habit, if you please, of lecturing and listening to lectures, was formed again, probably never to be abandoned in our communities. The method by which this was done in the New England towns worked well for a generation. And Lowell, as a youngster starting on life, made some of his first addresses “under the auspices” of the old-fashioned lyceum committees.

I am rather fond of saying, what nobody seems to care for excepting myself, that high among the causes which sent Winthrop’s colony to Massachusetts was the passion of such men as he to hear lectures on week-days. Now this was important. It means that the contest between the “left wing” and the “right wing” in the English Church turned largely on the wish of the more advanced clergy to speak in other pulpits than their own, and the greater wish of the Puritan people to hear them. Of course, if a bishop could shut up a man in his own pulpit, the influence of one of the Garrisons, or Phillipses, or Parkers, or Pillsburys of the day would be very much restricted. But so long as John Cotton could travel over half England, he was much more formidable to Bishop Laud and the other people who directed the Establishment than he would have been if he had remained in his own pulpit in the Lincolnshire Boston.

So there grew up for that generation the habit of a week-day lecture in the New England meeting-houses; a habit preserved with more or less interest to the present day. But as time went by, these week-day lectures, so far as I recollect them, were little more than the repetition of sermons which had been preached on Sunday. Now, if there is anything dangerous anywhere for a lecturer’s usefulness, it is a habit of repeating the average sermon. A sermon is one thing and a lyceum lecture is another. A lyceum lecture has one purpose, and a sermon ought to have another purpose. However this may be, the people of the generations of this century who did not much like to go to the “Thursday lecture” in Boston, or similar lectures in other towns, were very glad to hear the best speakers of the time. And they generally gave them more latitude than was to be found in the creed-bound churches of the time.

I do not think I stray too far from our central subject if I take a few lines to speak of the value to the whole Northern community of this very curious system. To introduce such men as have been named above, and a hundred other men, some of them of equal prominence in our history, and all of them of a certain ability as public speakers,—to introduce such men to the average community of the North, so that it knew them personally, was in itself a great achievement. To go back to the comparison which I have made already, these Peter the Hermits, passing from place to place, preached a crusade. They were in very much the position of John Cotton and those other Puritan lecturers whom Bishop Laud and the Star Chamber disliked in England. And the history of the twenty years before our Civil War is not rightly written unless it refers to the effect which was wrought by such speakers. Phillips, Parker, Ward Beecher, and even Garrison, would have been little known outside a small circle around their respective homes but for this lecturing practice.

There will be found in Lowell’s letters and in other memoranda of the time an occasional joke about the external hardships of the thing. He speaks somewhere of three “committeemen,” with three cold hands like raw beefsteak, welcoming him and bidding him good-by. But such little jokes as this must not give a false idea of the reception which was given to the pioneers of larger thought than that which the hidebound churches of the time were willing to interpret. For one such story of the beefsteak hands there could be told a thousand stories of warm welcomes into charming families, and of immediate mutual recognition of people of kindred thought who would never have seen each other’s faces but for the happy appointment which brought one as a lecturer to the other as “committeeman.” Anything that taught the separated people of this country that it was a country, that they were citizens of the same nation, and that they had each other’s burdens to bear, was of great value in those days. The reader of to-day forgets that in the same years in which South Carolina was defying the North, Massachusetts gave directions that the national flag should not float over her State House. That is to say, in those days there was an intense sensitiveness which kept men of different sections of the country apart from each other. Anything which overcame such sensitiveness, and brought real lovers of their country and lovers of God face to face, was an advantage. In this case the advantage can hardly be overestimated.

To this hour the popular lecture in America differs from the lecture, so called, which the Useful Knowledge Society of England, and what they used to call Mechanics’ Institutes, established there in the earlier part of the century. Mr. Emerson told me that when he delivered his lectures in London, intelligent people went back to Coleridge’s morning lectures, of a dozen or more years before, as a precedent. And you see in the accounts of Carlyle’s London lectures that it was regarded as a novelty that anything should be said at a lecture which decently intelligent people needed to hear. But in October, 1843, Emerson wrote to his friend John Sterling, “There is now a ‘lyceum,’ so called, in almost every town in New England, and if I would accept an invitation I might read a lecture every night.” Sterling had written to him not long before, “I doubt whether there are anywhere in Britain, except in London, a hundred persons to be found capable of at all appreciating what seems to find, as spoken by you, such ready acceptance from various bodies of learners in America.” Such people meet, in their moribund feudal fashion, “to encourage the others,” as Sir Walter Vivian looked on the experiments in his own park, or as Murat charged at Borodino. The amusing condescension, so often observable in the English pulpit, is even more marked in the English “popular lecture.”

But, in the beginning, it was not so here. As early as 1814 Jacob Bigelow had lectured on botany in Boston, and, not long after, Edward Everett on Greek art and antiquities, and Henry Ware on the Holy Land, in courses of lectures, which were attended by the very best and most intelligent people. And when Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips, and James Lowell lectured in the same region, they gave the best they could give, and no one thought he condescended in going to hear.

I do not forget a bright saying of Starr King, one of those best worth hearing of the brilliant group of traveling lecturers of whom Lowell was one. King said that a popular lyceum lecture was made of five parts of sense and five of nonsense. “There are only five men in America,” said he, “who know how to mix them—and I think I am one of the five.” Other people thought so too, and did not detect the nonsense. His carefully wrought lectures are worth anybody’s study to-day.

He is the author of another lyceum chestnut. Some one asked him what his honorarium was for each lecture. “F.A. M.E.,” said he—“Fifty And My Expenses.”

Lowell’s hearers got no nonsense. His subjects were generally literary or critical—I think always so. On one or more expeditions he went to what was then the Far West—speaking in Wisconsin, I observe, within twenty years after Black Hawk and Keokuk addressed Americans on the same fields.