MELVILLE AS ARTIST
After his return from the Holy Land, Melville tried to eke out the small income from his books and his farm by lecturing. J. E. A. Smith says: “Between 1857 and 1861, a rage for lyceum lectures prevailed all over the northern and western states. In Pittsfield the Burbank hall, now Mead’s carriage repository, was filled at least once every week to its full capacity of over a thousand seats, with eager and intelligent listeners to the most brilliant orators in the country. Some of the most noted authors, as well as orators, were induced to mount the platform partly by the liberal pay which they received directly—and also for the increased sale which it gave their books. Among these was Herman Melville, who lectured in Burbank hall, and in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, St. Louis, San Francisco as well as intermediate cities and towns. He did not take very kindly to the lecture platform, but had large and well pleased audiences.”
If his audiences were composed of people of the jaunty and shallow provincialism of J. E. A. Smith—and J. E. A. Smith is a very fair product of his country and his time—Melville’s distaste for their prim, bland receptivity does not pass understanding. The place and date of Melville’s lectures, together with the “liberal pay directly received” follows.
For these lyceum gatherings, Melville prepared two lectures: one on the South Seas, one on Statuary in Rome.
On December 2, 1857, in competition with another Melville, a bareback rider, who at the circus at Bingo “nightly performed before the élite and respectability of the city,” Melville lectured on Statuary in Rome. On December 3, 1857, the Boston Journal thus reported Melville’s lecture:
“A large audience assembled last evening to listen to the author of Omoo and Typee. He began by asserting that in the realm of art there was no exclusiveness. Dilettanti might accumulate their technical terms, but that did not interfere with the substantial enjoyment of those who did not understand them. As the beauties of nature could be appreciated without a knowledge of botany, so art could be enjoyed without the artist’s skill. With this principle in view, he, claiming to be neither critic nor artist, would make some plain remarks on the statuary of Rome.
“As you approach the city from Naples, you are first struck by the statues of the Church St. John Lateran. Here you have the sculptured biographies of ancient celebrities. The speaker then vividly described the statues of Demosthenes, Titus Vespasian, Socrates, looking like an Irish comedian. Julius Cæsar, so sensible and business-like of aspect that it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca, with the visage of a pawn broker; Nero, the fast young man; Plato, with the locks and air of an exquisite, as if meditating on the destinies of the world under the hand of a hair-dresser. Thus these statues confessed, and, as it were, prattled to us of much that does not appear in history and the written works of those they represent. They seem familiar and natural to us—and yet there is about them all a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. It is to be hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.