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3 February 1857, Tuesday; ca. 7:30 p.m.
Fitchburg, Massachusetts; City Hall
"Walking, or the Wild"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: In his journal entries for
3 and 4 February 1857, Thoreau notes his lecture trip to Fitchburg and more than
implicitly compares path-bound Fitchburg townsmen and shore-bound Concordians to
uninspirable lecture audiences whose minds will not rise to the height of a spoken truth.
The entries read in part:
Feb. 3. To Fitchburg to lecture.
. . .
Though the snow was not deep, I noticed
that an unbroken snow-crust stretched around Fitchburg, and its several thousand
inhabitants had been confined so long to the narrow streets, some of them a track only six
feet wide. Hardly one individual had anywhere departed from this narrow walk and struck
out into the surrounding fields and hills. If I had had my cowhide boots, I should not
have confined myself to those narrow limits, but have climbed some of the hills. It is
surprising to go into a New England town in midwinter and find its five thousand
inhabitants all living thus on the limits, confined at most to their narrow moose-yard in
the snow. Scarcely here and there has a citizen stepped aside one foot to let a sled pass.
And almost as circumscribed is their summer life, going only from house to shop and back
to house again. If, Indian-like, one examined the dew or bended grass, he would be
surprised to discover how little trodden or frequented the surrounding fields were, to
discover perhaps large tracks wholly untrodden, which await, as it were, for some caravan
to assemble before any will traverse them. It is as if some vigilance committee had given
notice that if any should transgress those narrow limits he should be outlawed and his
blood should be upon his own head. You don’t see where the inhabitants get sufficient
exercise, unless they swing dumb-bells down cellar. Let a slight snow come and cover the
earth, and the tracks of men will show how little the woods and fields are frequented. . .
.
Feb. 4. . . .
Yet along that sled-track (vide the
3d) they will have their schools and lyceums and churches, like the snow-heaps crowded up
by the furrow, and consider themselves liberally educated, notwithstanding their narrow
views and range. And the bare track that leads to the next town and seaboard, only six
inches’ breadth of iron rails! and a one-eighth inch wire in the air!
I sometimes hear a prominent but
dull-witted worthy man say, or hear that he has said, rarely, that if it were not for his
firm belief in "an overruling power," or a "perfect Being," etc., etc.
But such poverty-stricken expressions only convince me of his habitual doubt and that he
is surprised into a transient belief. Such a man’s expression of faith, moving
solemnly in the traditional furrow, and casting out all free-thinking and living souls
with the rusty mould-board of his compassion or contempt, thinking that he has Moses and
all the prophets in his wake, discourages and saddens me as an expression of his narrow
and barren want of faith. I see that the infidels and skeptics have formed themselves into
churches and weekly gather together at the ringing of a bell.
Sometimes when, in a conversation or a
lecture, I have been grasping at, or even standing and reclining upon, the serene and
everlasting truths that underlie and support our vacillating life, I have seen my auditors
standing on their terra firma, the quaking earth, crowded together on their Lisbon
Quay, and compassionately or timidly watching my motions as if they were the antics of a
rope-dancer or mountebank pretending to walk on air; or here and there one creeping out
upon an overhanging but cracking bough, unwilling to drop to the adamantine floor beneath,
or perchance even venturing out a step or two, as if it were a dangerous kittly-bender,
timorously sounding as he goes. So the other day, as I stood on Walden, drinking at a
puddle on the ice, which was probably two feet thick, and thinking how lucky I was that I
had not got to cut through all that thickness, I was amused to see an Irish laborer on the
railroad, who had come down to drink, timidly tiptoeing toward me in his cowhide boots,
lifting them nearly two feet at each step and fairly trembling with fear, as if the ice
were already bending beneath his ponderous body and he were about to be engulfed.
"Why, my man," I called out to him, "this ice will bear a loaded train,
half a dozen locomotives side by side, a whole herd of oxen," suggesting whatever
would be a weighty argument with him. And so at last he fairly straightened up and
quenched his thirst. It was very ludicrous to me, who was thinking, by chance, what a
labor it would be to get at the water with an axe there and that I was lucky to find some
on the surface.
So, when I have been resting and quenching
my thirst on the eternal plains of truth, where rests the base of those beautiful columns
that sustain the heavens, I have been amused to see a traveller who had long confined
himself to the quaking shore, which was all covered with the traces of the deluge, come
timidly tiptoeing toward me, trembling in every limb.
I see the crowd of materialists gathered
together on their Lisbon Quay for safety, thinking it a terra firma.
Though the farmer has been all winter
teaming wood along the river, the timid citizen that buys it, but who has not stepped out
of the road, thinks it all kittly-benders there and warns his boys not to go near it. (J,
9:235-39)
Thoreau’s Fitchburg lecture was
the last in a season’s course of ten sponsored by the Fitchburg Athenaeum, a library
and cultural organization founded in 1852. Tickets for the series cost one dollar for men
and fifty cents for women, with single lecture admission priced at fifteen cents. By 1856
there were more than 150 members. The depression of 1857 ended the paid lecture series.1
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: On 11 February 1857, two days before Thoreau was to give his "Walking,
or the Wild" lecture in Worcester, the Worcester Daily Spy ran the following
anonymous item:
Henry D. Thoreau’s
Lecture.—Last week I had the privilege of hearing at Fitchburg a very remarkable
lecture from Henry D. Thoreau of Concord, Mass. Mr. Thoreau will, by invitation, repeat
this lecture at Brinley Hall next Friday evening. His subject is "The Wild," and
his aim is to set forth the claims of nature against civilization. This lecture contains
more genuine wit, wisdom, and poetry, than can be found in whole courses of lyceum
lectures. It is the deep, rich outpouring of the author’s life and genius, and not
something got up for the occasion. I do not believe literature furnishes an instance of a
greater nearness to narure [sic], of a more unreserved and successful devotion to
wisdom, than is found in this writer. It is almost as though nature herself spoke through
him. Let us, for once, anticipate a little, and not leave it for posterity alone to
adpreciate [sic] this man, who, like all the truly wise, does not press himself
upon our attention, but rather dreads popularity. His words will surely be remembered when
most of our literature is forgotten. Let us escape, if possible, for an hour, from the
conventionalisms, political, religious, and social, in which we are involved, from the
gossip of the street, the shop, and the newspaper, and give ourselves opportunity, at
least, to be refreshed and ennobled by this clear, strong voice from the wild.
Edmund A. Schofield asserts that, given this announcement’s style and tone, it
"could only have been the work of [H. G. O.] Blake," who also arranged the
Worcester lecture, according to Schofield.2
Schofield’s assertions are probably correct. Blake was an ardent supporter of Thoreau
and took advantage of any opportunity he had to promote Thoreau’s lecturing
activities. Also, Thoreau’s letter of 6 February 1857 to Blake indicates that Blake
almost certainly attended the Fitchburg lecture (C, p. 465). Whoever the author
was, most of the Daily Spy announcement was reprinted in the Fitchburg Sentinel
on 13 February, with the following preface: "The recent lecture by Mr. Thoreau before
the Athenaeum in this place, is referred to in complimentary terms by a citizen of
Worcester, in the columns of the Spy."
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: As late as
31 December 1856, Thoreau seems to have been obliged to read one of his other lectures,
not "Walking, or the Wild," in Fitchburg, for he wrote to Blake on that date,
"I carried that [lecture] which I call ‘Walking, or the Wild," to Amherst,
N.H. . . . and I am to read another at Fitchburg, February 3" (C, p. 461). But
all indications are that Thoreau did indeed read material from the second portion of his
"Walking, or the Wild" lecture at Fitchburg. Blake had heard Thoreau read a
significant portion of his "Walking, or the Wild" manuscript as a lecture in
Worcester on 31 May 1851 (see lecture 32 in the "Before Walden"
calendar). In a letter dated 6 February 1857, however, Thoreau wrote to Blake , "I
told [Theo] Brown that ["Walking, or the Wild"] had not been much altered since
I read it in Worcester, but now I think of it, much of it must have been new to you,
because, having since divided it into two, I am able to read what before I omitted" (C,
p. 465). For a description of the evolution of the "Walking, or the Wild"
manuscript, see lectures 31-32 and 40-41 in the "Before Walden" calendar,
and lectures 45, 52, and 54 above.
Notes
1. Doris Kirkpatrick, The
City and the River (Fitchburg, Mass.: Fitchburg Historical Society, 1971), p. 231. [Back to Text]
2. Edmund A. Schofield,
"Time Recovering Itself: E. Harlow Russell’s Thirty Years (and More) with Henry
D. Thoreau," Concord Saunterer, 17, no. 2 (August 1984), pp. 27, 44n70.
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