The choice of a subject has already been spoken of as a matter of importance, and a word should be said touching its manner of treatment. This introduces a discussion of the kind of lecture which at the present time is mainly in demand. Many wise and good men have questioned the character of the popular lecture. In their view, it does not add sufficiently to the stock of popular knowledge. The results are not solid and tangible. They would prefer scientific, or historical, or philosophical discourses. This conviction is so strong with these men, and the men themselves are so much respected, that the people are inclined to coincide with them in the matter of theory, while at the same time they refuse to give their theory practical entertainment. One reason why scientific and historical lectures are not popular is to be found in the difficulty of obtaining lecturers who have sufficient ingenuity and enthusiasm to make such lectures interesting. The number of men in the United States who can make such lectures attractive to popular audiences can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. We have had but one universally popular lecturer on astronomy in twenty years, and he is now numbered among the precious sacrifices of the war. There is only one entirely acceptable popular lecturer on the natural sciences in New England; and what is he among so many?
But this class of lectures has not been widely successful, even under the most favorable circumstances, and with the very best lecturers; and it is to be observed, that they grow less successful with the increasing intelligence of the people. In this fact is to be found an entirely rational and competent explanation of their failure. The schools have done so much toward popularizing science, and the circulating-library has rendered so familiar the prominent facts of history, that men and women do not go to the lecture to learn, and, as far as any appreciably practical benefit is concerned, do not need to go. It is only when some eminent enthusiast in these walks of learning consents to address them that they come out, and then it is rather to place themselves under the influence of his personality than to acquire the knowledge which he dispenses. Facts, if they are identified in any special way with the experience and life of the lecturer, are always acceptable; but facts which are recorded in books find a poor market in the popular lecture-room. Thus, while purely historical and scientific lectures are entirely neglected, narratives of personal travel, which, combine much of historical and scientific interest, have been quite popular, and, indeed, have been the specialties of more than one of the most popular of American lecturers, whose names will be suggested at once by this statement.
Twenty years ago the first popular lectures on anatomy and physiology were given, and a corps of lecturers came up and swept over the whole country, with much of interest and instruction to the people and no small profit to themselves. These lectures called the attention of educators to these sciences. Text-books for schools and colleges were prepared, and anatomy and physiology became common studies for the young. In various ways, through school-books and magazines and newspapers, there has accumulated a stock of popular knowledge of these sciences, and an apprehension of the limit of their practical usefulness, which have quite destroyed the demand for lectures upon them. Though a new generation has risen since the lecture on anatomy and physiology was the rage, no leaner field could possibly be found than that which the country now presents to the popular lecturer on these sciences. These facts are interesting in themselves, and they serve to illustrate the truth of that which has been stated touching lectures upon general historical and scientific subjects.
For facts alone the modern American public does not go hungry. American life is crowded with facts, to which the newspaper gives daily record and diffusion. Ideas, motives, thoughts, these are always in demand. Men wish for nothing more than to know how to classify their facts, what to do with them, how to govern them, and how far to be governed by them; and the man who takes the facts with which the popular life has come into contact and association, and draws from them their nutritive and motive power, and points out their relations to individual and universal good, and organizes around them the popular thought, and uses them to give direction to the popular life, and does all this with masterly skill, is the man whose houses are never large enough to contain those who throng to hear him. This is the popular lecturer, par excellence. The people have an earnest desire to know what a strong, independent, free man has to say about those facts which touch the experience, the direction, and the duty of their daily life; and the lecturer who with a hearty human sympathy addresses himself to this desire, and enters upon the service with genuine enthusiasm, wins the highest reward there is to be won in his field of effort.
The more ill-natured critics of the popular lecturer have reflected with ridicule upon his habit of repetition, A lecturer in full employment will deliver the same discourse perhaps fifty or a hundred times in a single season. There are probably half a dozen favorite lectures which have been delivered from two hundred to five hundred times within the last fifteen years. It does, indeed, at first glance, seem ridiculous for a man to stand, night after night, and deliver the same words, with the original enthusiasm apparently at its full height; and some lecturers, with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition, have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous, and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see again, and which he never would see again, if he were to consult his own judgment alone. Then the popular lecturer, as has been already intimated, is usually engaged during two thirds of the year in some business or profession whose duties forbid the worthy preparation of more than one discourse for winter use. Then, if he has numerous engagements, he has neither time nor strength to do more than his nightly work; for, among all the pursuits in which literary men engage, none is more exhaustive in its demands upon the nervous energy than that of constant lecturing. The fulfilment of from seventy-five to ninety engagements involves, in round numbers, ten thousand miles of railroad-travel, much of it in the night, and all of it during the most unpleasant season of the year. There is probably nothing short of a military campaign that is attended by so many discomforts and genuine hardships as a season of active lecturing. Unless a man be young and endowed with an extraordinary amount of vital power, he becomes entirely unfitted by his nightly work, and the dissipation consequent upon constant change of scene, for consecutive thought and elaborate composition.
It is fortunate for the lecturer that there is no necessity for variety. The oft-repeated lecture is new to each new audience, and, being thoroughly in hand, and entirely familiar, is delivered with better effect than if the speaker were frequently choosing from a well-furnished repertory. It is popularly supposed that a lecturer loses all interest in a performance which he repeats so many times. This supposition is correct, in certain aspects of the matter, but not in any sense which detracts from his power to make it interesting to others. It is the general experience of lecturers, that, until they have delivered a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success. The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded only as an instrument by which a desirable and important result is to be achieved; and familiarity with it, and steady use in its elocutionary handling, are conditions of the best success. Having selected the subject which, at the time, and for the times, he considers freshest and most fruitful, and with thorough care written out all he has to say upon it, there is no call for recurrence to minor themes, either as regards the credit of the lecturer or the best interests of those whom he addresses.
What good has the popular lecture accomplished? Its most enthusiastic advocates will not assert that it has added greatly to the stock of popular knowledge, in science or art, in history, philosophy, or literature; yet the most modest of them may claim that it has bestowed upon American society a permanent good of incalculable value. The relentless foe of all bigotry in politics and religion, the constant opponent of every form of bondage to party and sect, the practical teacher of the broadest toleration of individual opinion, it has had more to do with the steady melioration of the prejudices growing out of denominational interests in Church and State than any other agency whatever. The platform of the lecture-hall has been common ground for the representatives of all our social, political, and religious organizations. It is there that orthodox and heterodox, progressive and conservative, have won respect for themselves and toleration for their opinions by the demonstration of their own manhood, and the recognition of the common human brotherhood; for one has only to prove himself a true man, and to show a universal sympathy with men, to secure popular toleration for any opinion he may hold. Hardly a decade has passed away since, in nearly every Northern State, men suffered social depreciation in consequence of their political and religious opinions. Party and sectarian names have been freely used as reproachful and even as disgraceful epithets. To call a man by the name which he had chosen as the representative of his political or religious opinions was considered equivalent to calling him a knave or a fool; and if it happened that he was in the minority, his name alone was regarded as the stamp of social degradation. Now, thanks to the influence of the popular lecture mainly, men have made, and are rapidly making, room for each other. A man may be in the minority now without consequently being in personal disgrace. Men of liberal and even latitudinarian views are generously received in orthodox communities, and those of orthodox faith are gladly welcomed by men who subscribe to a shorter creed and bear a broader charter of life and liberty. There certainly has never been a time in the history of America when there was such generous and general toleration of all men and all opinions as now; and as the popular lecture has been universal, with a determined aim and a manifest influence toward this end, it is but fair to claim for it a prominent agency in the result.
Another good which may be counted among the fruits of the popular lecture is the education of the public taste in intellectual amusements. The end which the lecture-goer seeks is not always improvement, in any respect. Multitudes of men and women have attended the lecture to be interested, and to be interested intellectually is to be intellectually amused. Lecturers who have appealed simply to the emotional nature, without attempting to engage the intellect, have ceased to be popular favorites. So far as the popular lecture has taken hold of the affections of a community, and secured its constant support, it has destroyed the desire for all amusements of a lower grade; and it will be found, that, generally, those who attend the lecture rarely or never give their patronage and presence to the buffooneries of the day. They have found something better,—something with more of flavor in the eating, with more of nutriment in the digestion. How great a good this is those only can judge who realize that men will have amusements of some sort, and that, if they cannot obtain such as will elevate them, they will indulge in such as are frivolous and dissipating. The lecture does quite as much for elevated amusement out of the hall as in it. The quickening social influence of an excellent lecture, particularly in a community where life flows sluggishly and all are absorbed in manual labor, is as remarkable as it is beneficent. The lecture and the lecturer are the common topics of discussion for a week, and the conversation which is so apt to cling to health and the weather is raised above the level of commonplace.
Notwithstanding the fact that a moiety, or a majority, of the popular lecturers are clergymen, the lecture has not always received the favor of the cloth. Indeed, there has often been private and sometimes public complaint on the part of preachers, that the finished productions of the lecturer, the results of long and patient elaboration, rendered doubly attractive by a style of delivery to be won only by frequent repetition of the same discourse, have brought the hastily prepared and plainly presented Sunday sermon into an unjust and damaging comparison. The complaint is a strange one, particularly as no one has ever claimed that the highest style of eloquence or the most remarkable models of rhetoric are to be found in the lecture-hall. There has, at least, been no general conviction that a standard of excellence in English and its utterance has been maintained there too high for the comfort and credit of the pulpit. It is possible, therefore, that the pulpit betrays its weak point, and needs the comparison which it deprecates. A man of brains will gratefully receive suggestions from any quarter. That impulses to a more familiar and direct style of sermonizing, a brighter and better elocution, and a bolder utterance of personal convictions, have come to the pulpit from the platform, there is no question. This feeling on the part of preachers is by no means universal, however; for some of them have long regarded the lecture with contempt, and have sometimes resented it as an impertinence. And it may be (for there shall be no quarrel in the matter) that lecturers are quacks, and that lectures, like homoeopathic remedies, are very contemptible things; but they have pleasantly modified the doses of the old practice, however slow the doctors are to confess it; and so much, at least, may be counted among the beneficent results of the system under discussion.
Last in the brief enumeration of the benefits of the popular lecture, it has been the devoted, consistent, never tiring champion of universal liberty. If the popular lecturer has not been a power in this nation for the overthrow of American Slavery,—for its overthrow in the conscientious convictions and the legal and conventional fastnesses of the nation,—then have the friends of oppression grossly lied; for none have received their malicious and angry objurgations more unsparingly than our plain-speaking gentleman who makes his yearly circuit among the lyceums. No champion of slavery, no advocate of privilege, no apologist for systematized and legalized wrong has ever been able to establish himself as a popular lecturer. The people may listen respectfully to such a man once; but, having heard him, they drop him forever. In truth, a man cannot be a popular lecturer who does not plant himself upon the eternal principles of justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving, slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole æsthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who bears it. The popular lecture, as it has been described in this article, has never existed at the South, and could not be tolerated there. Until within three years it has never found opportunity for utterance in the capital of the nation; but where liberty goes, it makes its way, and helps to break the way for liberty everywhere.