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22 February 1859, Tuesday; ca. 7:00 p.m.
Worcester, Massachusetts; H. G. O. Blake’s Parlors
"Autumnal Tints"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: In a 1 January 1859 letter
to H. G. O. Blake, Thoreau included a reference to his latest project: "My last
essay, on which I am still engaged, is called Autumnal Tints. I do not know how readable (i.e.,
by me to others) it will be" (C, p. 537). On 19 January, responding to an
invitation, Thoreau wrote to Blake: "As for the lecture, I shall be glad to come. I
cannot now say when, but I will let you know, I think within a week or ten days at most,
and will then leave you a week clear to make the arrangements in. I will bring something
else than ‘What shall it profit a Man?’ My father is very sick, and has been for
a long time, so that there is the more need of me at home. This occurs to me, even when
contemplating so short an excursion as to Worcester." He added, "I am expecting
daily that my father will die, therefore I cannot leave home at present. I will write you
again within ten days" (C, p. 540). Thoreau’s promised letter was finally
penned on 7 February, four days after his father’s death: "I will come and read
you an extract from ‘Autumnal Tints,’ on Tuesday the 15th, of this month, if
that is agreeable to you,—leaving here probably at noon. Perhaps you had better
acknowledge the receipt of this" (C, p. 542). On 12 February, however, Thoreau
mentioned, in a letter to Daniel Ricketson, "I am going to Worcester to read a parlor
lecture on the 22nd, and shall see Blake & Brown. What if you were to meet me there!
or go with me from here! You would see them to good advantage" (C, p.
547). Further relevant correspondence has not been recovered, but Thoreau, in any case,
did give his postponed "Autumnal Tints" lecture in Worcester on 22 February,
when he delivered it in Blake’s parlors, located either at Blake’s school at 1
Warren Block on Pearl Street or in his home at 3 Bowdoin Street. While reading the section
of the lecture dealing with the Scarlet Oak leaves, Thoreau displayed a "very large
& handsome one . . . on a white ground," which he said did him "great
service with the audience" (C, p. 637).
In his journal entry for 22 February, a
Tuesday, Thoreau wrote simply, "Go to Worcester to lecture in a parlor" (J,
11:453). That night he gave "Autumnal Tints," followed on Wednesday evening by a
second lecture, possibly on the Maine Woods. He left Blake’s Worcester home on
Thursday morning. Thoreau’s journal entry for 23 February, the second day of his
visit, says nothing of lecturing, reporting instead on a walk that day to Quinsigamond
Pond with Blake, "where was good skating yesterday, but this very pleasant and warm
day it is suddenly quite too soft." However, the swift and graceful gyrations of a
gentleman and lady skating on a hill-shaded portion of the pond reminded Thoreau of
"the circling of two winged insects in the air, or hawks receding and
approaching." He also noted the presence of bluebirds, which, he says, perhaps
"have not reached Concord yet." Fish, too, are recorded—a just-caught brook
pickerel from Quinsigamond, which he describes in detail to distinguish it from the common
pickerel, and little shiners caught for bait in nearby Bell Pond (J, 11:453-54).
In the 26 October 1896 Worcester
Telegram, an anonymous correspondent included these comments in an article on
Worcester’s early literary days:
His [Thoreau’s] humorous,
sarcastic, but ever entertaining talks, rather than lectures, were received with more
favor, but with perhaps even less comprehension [than Emerson’s]. . . . His close
intimacy with Emerson, however, rather tended to bring him into disfavor with those of the
church clique in the old Worcester, and it was not until the world outside of New England
began to discover in the countryman from Concord a new genius in the world of letters that
sentiment changed in his favor. . . .
Thoreau’s few visits to Worcester
were made generally at the invitation of his friends, the Browns, Chamberlains, Blakes,
John Wyman and Augustus Tucker, who formed the nucleus of what might have been called the
Literary Salon of the infant city of Worcester. His lectures were delivered principally in
city hall, Brinley hall (where the State Mutual building now stands), and in the drawing
room of his friend, Harrison Gray Otis Blake.
These were never well attended. If at the
earnest solicitations of his friends an audience of 100 people could be gotten together to
hear him, it was considered a compliment to him, and he was well satisfied. For these
lectures he asked nothing, only stipulating that his expenses should be paid. He, like
Alcott, cared nothing for money, and it was one of his proudest boasts that he had once
lived a year on an actual cash expenditure of $65.99. People could not understand him, and
in his secret consciousness he was inclined to be proud of the fact.
He made no effort whatever to pay regard
to the conventionalities. On his visits to Worcester he never troubled to bring a trunk or
even a traveling bag. His hostess would often be mortified, after his arrival, to find his
personal belongings reposing on the table in the hall tied up in a red bandanna, or in a
greasy sheet of brown paper.1
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Several responses to Thoreau’s lecture have survived, including that
of Thoreau himself, who wrote in his journal on 25 February, "All the criticism which
I got on my lecture on Autumnal Tints at Worcester on the 22nd was that I assumed that my
audience had not seen so much of them as they had. But after reading it I am more than
ever convinced that they have not seen much of them,—that there are very few persons
who do see much of nature" (J, 11:457). Judged by other recovered comments,
Thoreau’s sense of his reception may have been unduly pessimistic. Bronson Alcott
wrote in his diary on 24 February, "Thoreau has just read a couple of lectures here
in Blake’s parlours to a small company and to general admiration. Blake is still his
enthusiastic disciple and quotes his master’s words as oracles."2 Alcott, who may or may not have been there to hear
Thoreau’s lectures, also wrote in a 28 February letter to his wife, "Thoreau
left Blake’s last Thursday morning. He read two lectures in B.’s parlours, and
won many praises from his auditors. Mr. B. as true and devoted as ever."3
While Alcott was sometimes overly
charitable in his assessment of Thoreau’s popular reception, corroborating testimony
suggests that this was not one of those occasions. On 4 March 1859, Franklin Benjamin
Sanborn remarked in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "You missed hearing one
of the best lectures in not hearing Thoreau’s ‘Autumnal Tints’ at Worcester
‘tother night."4 One attendee, Sallie
Holley, an anti-slavery advocate and lecturer, wrote in a 28 February 1859 letter to one
Mrs. Porter of Woonsocket, Rhode Island:
This month we have spent with (when I
was not in surrounding villages lecturing) a very dear circle of friends in Worcester, who
have taken us to rare lectures, entertainments of music, pictures, libraries, skating
partiers, etc.
The last two evenings we had in Worcester,
we were at two parlour lectures given by Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, the author of that odd
book, Walden, or Life in the Woods. The first lecture was upon "Autumnal
Tints," and was a beautiful and, I doubt not, a faithful report of the colours of
leaves in October. Some of you may have read his "Chesuncook," in the Atlantic
Monthly; if so you can fancy how quaint and observing, and humorous withal, he is as
traveller- or excursionist-companion in wild solitudes. Several gentlemen, friends of his,
tell us much of their tour with him to the White Mountains last summer, of his grand talk
with their guide in "Tuckerman’s Ravine," where they had their camp. He
paid us the compliment of a nice long morning call after we heard him read his
"Autumnal Tints," and remembered our being once at his mother’s to tea, and
Miss Putnam’s looking over his herbarium with his sister.5
Caroline H. Dall, a leading feminist of
the day and the wife of Thoreau’s college classmate Charles Dall, also was there and
wrote in her journal on 22 February 1859, "At 1/2 past 7 went to Mr. Harry
Blake’s to hear Thoreau—read a paper on ‘autumnal tints.’ It was as
dear Miss Putnam said, a very charming report, but I did not carry away a very high idea
of Thoreau himself."6 Dall did not record the
basis for her less-than-high idea of Thoreau. Later, however, as a correspondent for the Buffalo
Daily Courier, she stated in an 1881 dispatch:
The pure sweet books of Thoreau are a great addition to our literature. When I read
them I always hear his own sweet sensitive voice and am conscious of the shyness that half
regrets they should be printed. The first time I ever saw Thoreau I heard him read one of
his "Autumn" papers in Harry Blake’s parlor in Worcester. If it is good to
read these things for one’s self, it was still better to hear him read them. Never
since have I been in the country at that season when his description of the royal ranks of
the purple poke berries and the steady beaming of the yellow hank weed on the hillside has
not risen in my mind. He fascinated every one of us, and yet he had been so hard to
persuade!7
One assumes that the reference to persuasion has to do with a perceived difficulty in
getting Thoreau to lecture in Worcester.
Caroline Dall gave a lecture of her own in
Concord in December of 1859. Thoreau, who attended only after remarking to Emerson that
women never have anything to say, corrected himself after hearing her speak. "But this
woman had something to say!" he reportedly admitted to his friend and mentor. Indeed,
apparently so impressed was he that he persuaded Dall to stay another day in Concord and
visit with his family (Days, p. 412). In a 26 July 1862 letter to Sophia Thoreau,
Dall said of Henry, who had died on 6 May, "His tongue—like a Damascus
blade—was hardly fit for ordinary use, but it shaped or severed at a blow—the
substances, which most weapons—do only tear." She added, "No
thinking would improve the words it wielded."8
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: This
lecture is the first fruit of at least two (and probably more) large natural history
projects that Thoreau worked on assiduously in his last years but did not live to
complete. He began his late natural history work, which was more scientifically oriented
than his earlier work, in the fall of 1851 when he "accidentally" but regularly
began recording in his journal the natural phenomena he observed during his walks. One of
the extant manuscripts that he used to compile data from his journal about "The
Flowering of Plants," for instance, reads "accidentally observed in ‘51,
with considerable care in ‘52. . . ."9
Like other of his lectures, "Autumnal Tints" is part of a larger project Thoreau
continued to work on for the remainder of his life. In several of his late natural history
manuscripts, Thoreau referred to this larger project as "The Fall of the Leaf,"
but because no one has yet studied all the late natural history mansucripts, it is not yet
clear if Thoreau kept that particular project separate or if he subsumed it into one of
his other projects, such as his Wild Fruits project. In any event, on 18 February
1862, just two days before submitting his "Autumnal Tints" manuscript to the
publishers Ticknor and Fields for publication as a two-part essay in the Atlantic
Monthly magazine, Thoreau requested that they return the manuscript to him "since
I have no duplicate, & what I send will be culled out from a very large imperfect
essay, whose integrity I wish to restore."10
Thoreau had responded to Ticknor and Fields’ initial inquiry about publishing certain
of his lectures on 11 February (C, pp. 635-36), so even though he was extremely
ill, he prepared his manuscript for publication in a very short time, which suggests that
the published essay retains much of the character of the lecture. See the
"Description of Topic" section of lecture 63 below for further evidence that the
lecture text closely resembled the published essay.
Notes
1. Reprinted as
"Early Worcester Literary Days: Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott Regarded as Just
Freaks," Concord Saunterer, 17, no. 2 (August 1984), pp. 4-5. [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, "Diary for
1859," entry of 24 February, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text]
3. Alcott, Letters,
p. 300. [Back to Text]
4. Quoted from the
manuscript of the letter, MB. [Back
to Text]
5. Sallie Holley, A
Life for Liberty, ed. John White Chadwick (New York: Putnam, 1899), p. 167. [Back to Text]
6. Quoted from Dall’s
manuscript journal, MHi. [Back to
Text]
7. Reprinted in Joseph
Slater, "Caroline Dall in Concord," Thoreau Society Bulletin, no. 62
(Winter 1958): 1. [Back to Text]
8. "Sophia
Thoreau’s Scrapbook: From the Collection of George L. Davenport, Jr.," ed.
Walter Harding, Thoreau Society Booklet, no. 20 (1964): 47. [Back to Text]
9. Quoted from the title
leaf of a twenty-four-leaf manuscript in the Berg Collection, NN. Most of the late natural
history manuscripts are in the Berg Collection, but many of them—particularly the
large charts or "calendars" he compiled in his last years—are at NNPM. [Back to Text]
10. Quoted from the
original manuscript, CU-SB. [Back to Text] |