|
6 December 1854, Wednesday; 7:30 p.m.
Providence, Rhode Island; Railroad Hall
"What Shall It Profit"
[Back to Calendar of Lectures]
NARRATIVE OF EVENT: On or about 18 October,
Thoreau received a letter from Asa Fairbanks asking if he would allow his name to appear
in a program of reform lectures scheduled to commence in Providence, Rhode Island, on 1
November. Fairbanks informed Thoreau that "every Lecturer will choose his own
Subject, but we expect all . . . will be of a reformatory Character" (C,
p. 345). After indicating that remuneration to the course lecturers would be an expected
"expenses and fifteen to twenty dollars" or "perhaps better,"
Fairbanks pressed the issue of reform as a required topic:
The Anthony Burns affair and the Nebraska bill, and other outrages of Slavery has done
much to awaken the feeling of a class of Minds heretofore quiet, on all questions of
reform[.] In getting up these popular Lectures we thought at first, it would not do as
well to have them too radical, or it would be best to have a part of the Speakers of the
conservative class, but experience has shown us in Providence surely, that the Masses who
attend such Lectures are better suited with reform lectures than with the old school
conservatives. (C, p. 346)
The independent Thoreau may have bristled at the reform stipulation, as the editors of
his correspondence suggest, but he responded within a short time and accepted the offer.
Fairbanks’s letter of 6 November
suggests that letters had passed between him and Thoreau in which efforts to establish a
date were being made:
I am in receipt of yours of the 4th inst, You stating explicitly that the 6th December
would suit you better than any other time. . . . Had you named the last Wednesday in Nov.
or the second Wedn[e]sday in December, I could have replied to you at once or any
time in Janu[a]ry or Feb[ruary] it would have been the same[.] I shall regret the
disappointment very much but must submit to it if you have such overtures as you cannot
avoid. (C, pp. 348-49)
Fairbanks’s cryptic reference to "such overtures as you cannot avoid" is
no doubt an indication that Thoreau’s schedule for the next four months was so full
that he could not be as flexible as Fairbanks wished. He was scheduled to deliver one of
his two "Walking, or the Wild" lectures in Philadelphia on 21 November; and he
was planning to make a western lecture tour in late December, January, and—if the
demand he encountered warranted an extension—February. Very likely, then, 6 December
was the only Wednesday between mid-November 1854 and February 1855 that he expected to be
available. Interestingly enough, on 17 November Thoreau wrote to a William E. Sheldon
announcing that he was "still at liberty" to read "a lecture either on the
Wild or on Moosehunting as you may prefer" before an unspecified "Society"
on the evening of 5 December, the day before his Providence engagement (C, p. 351).
There is no record of this proposed lecture taking place (see Appendix A below). Moreover,
on 27 November, Andrew Whitney wrote from Nantucket in response to a letter Thoreau had
sent two days earlier: "We cannot have you between the 4 & 15th of Dec. without
bringing two lecturers in one week—which we wish to avoid if possible" (C,
p. 352). This suggests that as late as 25 November Thoreau did not regard the 6 December
Providence engagement as firmly established.
On 6 December, Thoreau took the train to
Providence, where, his journal reports, he was "struck with the Providence depot, its
towers and great length of brick" (J, 7:79). The depot’s hall was also
the site of his evening talk. A month earlier, on 2 November, the Providence Daily
Journal had cautioned that the new building’s steep entry with no handrail was a
peril, especially to ladies during the impending winter. It is not known if the problem
had been corrected by the date of the lecture. Advertisements in the Liberator and
in all four of Providence’s major newspapers indicate that Thoreau’s lecture was
the fourth of a scheduled ten, commencing with Theodore Parker and including talks by
Thomas W. Higginson, Cassius M. Clay, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and
others. Tickets for the entire course cost one dollar, while single-lecture admission cost
twenty-five cents. The doors to Railroad Hall opened Wednesday evening at 6:30 for the
lecture, which was scheduled to begin an hour later. Thoreau made the most of his two-day
Providence visit by inspecting Roger Williams’ Rock on the Blackstone River and an
old fort overlooking Narragansett Bay, both in the company of Emerson’s friend
Charles King Newcomb, and by walking through the countryside west of Providence (J,
7:79-80).
The only indications of how the audience
responded to the lecture come, rather obliquely, from Thoreau himself. In a journal entry
of that evening, he wrote:
After lecturing twice this winter I
feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer, i.e.,
to interest my audiences. I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value myself
for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience. I fail to get even the attention of the
mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less. I feel that the public demand an
average man,—average thoughts and manners,—not originality, nor even absolute
excellence. You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them.
I would rather that my audience come to me than that I should go to them, and so they be
sifted; i.e., I would rather write books than lectures. That is fine, this coarse.
To read to a promiscuous audience who are at your mercy the fine thoughts you solaced
yourself with far away is as violent as to fatten geese by cramming, and in this case they
do not get fatter. (J, 7:79-80)
This appraisal of what his audiences
demanded of him and what he was willing to give suggests that "What Shall It
Profit" may not have been well received in Providence. Moreover, Thoreau was out of
sorts from having been forced to abandon his plans for a lecture tour and from having
spent most of the preceding four months at his desk writing lectures for
"promiscuous" audiences. Indeed, his unusually rigorous schedule had prevented
him even from seeing the winter come in. "I see thick ice and boys skating all the
way to Providence," he wrote in his journal on 6 December, "but [I] know not
when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture" (J, 7:79). And two days
later he complained:
Winter has come unnoticed by me, I have been so busy writing. This is the life most
lead in respect to Nature. How different from my habitual one! It is hasty, coarse, and
trivial, as if you were a spindle in a factory. The other is leisurely, fine, and
glorious, like a flower. In the first case you are merely getting your living; in the
second you live as you go along. (J, 7:80)
Thoreau’s reference to writing lectures as "merely getting your living"
is a fine touch of self-directed irony, for in almost the entire first half of "What
Shall It Profit"—the very lecture he had just finished writing and
delivering—he argues that "A man had better starve at once than lose his
innocence in the process of getting his bread."1
Subsequently, in a 19 December 1854 letter to H. G. O. Blake, Thoreau punningly testified
to his "truly providential meeting with Mr T[heophilus] Brown; providential because
it saved me from the suspicion that my words had fallen altogether on stony ground, when
it turned out that there was some Worcester soil there" (C, p. 354). Since
Thoreau had yet to give his Worcester lecture, he here clearly refers to Brown’s
fortuitous presence in his Providence audience.
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: The lecture was advertised in the Liberator on 1 December and, the
day before and the day of the lecture, in all four of Providence’s major
newspapers—the Daily Post, Daily Journal, Bulletin, and Daily
Tribune. The Liberator remarked that "The people are anticipating the
remaining lectures with a great deal of interest, and the names of the lecturers are a
sufficient guarantee that their anticipations will not be disappointed." On the day
Thoreau lectured the Post and the Tribune also ran brief articles in which
Thoreau was described as "a young man of high ability, who built his house in the
woods, and there lived five years for about $30 a year, during which time he stored his
mind with a vast amount of useful knowledge—setting an example for poor young
men who thirst for learning, showing those who are determined to get a good education how
they can have it by pursuing the right course."
In a diary entry of 11 December 1854,
Bronson Alcott wrote, "Monday 11. I pass the morning and dine with Thoreau, who read
me parts of his new Lecture lately read at Philadelphia and Providence[.]"2 Alcott was mistaken about Thoreau having read
"What Shall It Profit" in Philadelphia: Bradley P. Dean’s detailed study of
Thoreau’s composition process for the lecture,3
and Thoreau’s own journal remark about being extremely busy writing his lecture,
indicate that he was just able to finish writing the lecture before delivering it in
Providence. It is also unlikely that Thoreau would have changed the lecture topic that had
been advertised in the Philadelphia newspapers (see lecture 45 above).
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: Using
textual and physical evidence from the extant lecture manuscripts, as well as newspaper
summaries of Thoreau’s several deliveries of "What Shall It Profit" and its
later (1859-60, see lectures 64 and 72 below) manifestation, "Life Misspent,"
Bradley P. Dean was able to trace in remarkable detail Thoreau’s composition process
from the time Thoreau first conceived of the lecture to the time he mailed the final draft
of "Life without Principle" to James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic
Monthly magazine. "What Shall It Profit" contained precisely one hundred
paragraphs, fifty-four of which remained in the text and were eventually published in
"Life without Principle."4
Notes
1. Quoted from the
reconstructed text of "What Shall It Profit" in Dean, "Reconstructions of
Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures," p. 323. [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, "Diary for
1854," entry of 11 December, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
3. Dean’s study is
summarized in his "Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without
Principle’ Lectures," pp. 286-91; for its more detailed counterpart, see the
first volume of his two-volume M.A. thesis, "The Sound of a Flail: Reconstructions of
Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures," Eastern Washington
University, 1984. Copies of Dean’s thesis are available at WaChenE; CtU; the Thoreau
Textual Center, CU-SB; and the Thoreau Society Archives, MCo. [Back to Text]
4. Seven of these
fifty-four lecture paragraphs Thoreau conflated to three paragraphs in the essay.
Dean’s "Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without
Principle’ Lectures," p. 337, contains a graph showing the structural changes
between the lectures and the essay. [Back
to Text] |