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14 February 1855, Wednesday; 7:30 p.m.
Concord, Massachusetts; Brick or Centre School House, High School Room
"What Shall It Profit"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: Thoreau delivered a
slightly revised version of "What Shall It Profit" before the Concord Lyceum on
Wednesday evening, 14 February 1855. The manuscript notebook "Concord Lyceum,
1828-1859," says of this lecture, "D. H. Thoreau Esq, of Concord gave a lecture
from the text, ‘What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world & lose his
own soul?[’]"1 Emerson, who was one of the
lyceum’s two curators that season, had initially scheduled Professor Cornelius C.
Felton of Harvard College to deliver the lecture that evening, but for some reason
Felton’s engagement was moved back one week. Also, although Emerson had scheduled C.
H. Goddard of Cincinnati to lecture before the lyceum on 31 January, Goddard at some point
apparently needed to reschedule, so Emerson scheduled Thoreau in that slot. Later,
however, Emerson reinstated Goodard to the slot, and Goddard lectured before the lyceum on
that date (MassLyc, p. 168-69).
Thoreau’s was the tenth in a course
of sixteen lectures before the Concord Lyceum that season. In his journal five days after
delivering the lecture he wrote:
Many will complain of my lectures that they are transcendental. "Can’t
understand them." "Would you have us return to the savage state?" etc.,
etc. A criticism true enough, it may be, from their point of view. But the fact is, the
earnest lecturer can speak only to his like, and the adapting of himself to his audience
is a mere compliment which he pays them. If you wish to know how I think, you must
endeavor to put yourself in my place. If you wish me to speak as if I were you, that is
another affair." (J, 7:197)
It would appear from this that "What Shall It Profit" was not entirely
successful in Concord.
Thoreau did not give another public
lecture in 1855. Nonetheless, the New-York Daily Tribune, in a 19 October 1855
article on the coming lecture season, included him in a list of forty-three
"Lecturers who have hitherto been most widely invited."
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: None known.
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 46 above. Using a pencil so he could later erase the marks, Thoreau tactfully drew
lines through at least two passages in the lecture that referred more or less explicitly
to some of his fellow townsmen. One of the two passages discusses a Concord milk-farmer
who kept in his house ten hired men, six children, a deaf wife, and his mother and father;
the other passage mentions another Concord farmer "who keeps twenty-eight
cows—whose hired man and boy rise daily at half past four in mid-winter, and milk the
cows before breakfast, which is at six o’clock by candlelight. . . ."2
Notes
1. Kenneth Walter
Cameron, The Massachusetts Lyceum during the American Rennaissance (Hartford:
Transcendental Books, 1969), p. 169. Hereafter cited in the text as MassLyc. In
addition to the manuscript notebook "Concord Lyceum, 1828-1859," which is at
MCo, Cameron’s volume contains the surviving records of the Lincoln Lyceum, the Salem
Lyceum, and the Lowell Institute of Boston. [Back to Text]
2. "What Shall It
Profit," in Dean, "Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without
Principle’ Lectures," p. 316. [Back to Text] |