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14 February 1860, Tuesday
Bedford, Massachusetts
"Wild Apples"
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NARRATIVE OF EVENT: In her diary entry for 14
February 1860, Abigail Alcott, Bronson’s wife, wrote, "Mr Alcott goes to
Bedford, with Mr Thoreau—"1 The account is
embellished somewhat in Bronson’s own diary entry for that date:
I ride with Thoreau to Bedford and hear
him read his lecture on Apples at the Lyceum. The company numbers a couple of hundred and
are pleased and surprised by it. Mr Hosmer curator, and [ ] once minister of the place
speak with us: and they invite me to come over and give them something in the way of
lecture or conversation and will arrange for me, perhaps for a Sunday meeting or more,
with a circle who spend the day together reading something good and conversing about it. I
tell them I will come and [speak?] in either way, give them a lecture before their Lyceum
or a Conversation on Sunday.
We ride home after more talking about
popular modes of teaching and especially of the Sounding Oracle the Lyceum now consulted
by all people and fast becoming the university of the land.2
ADVERTISEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND
RESPONSES: Although Thoreau apparently left no comment on his Bedford experience, his
journal entry for 13 February 1860, the day before the lecture, contains another in his
series of exasperated comments on lecture audiences (see, for example, his comments
recorded in lectures 55 and 61 above). If this entry was indeed penned on the thirteenth,
then it suggests his trepidation about going off once again to cast pearls before swine.
If, however, he wrote this indictment after the heading date, as was often the case, then
it perhaps indicates that his own perception of his Bedford reception was considerably
less sanguine than that of Alcott (see above). He wrote:
Always you have to contend with the
stupidity of men. It is like a stiff soil, a hard-pan. If you go deeper than usual, you
are sure to meet with a pan made harder even by the superficial cultivation. The stupid
you have always with you. Men are more obedient at first to words than ideas. They mind
names more than things. Read to them a lecture on "Education," naming that
subject, and they will think that they have heard something important, but call it
"Transcendentalism," and they will think it moonshine. Or halve your lecture,
and put a psalm at the beginning and a prayer at the end of it and read it from a pulpit,
and they will pronounce it good without thinking. (J, 13:145)
DESCRIPTION OF TOPIC: See
lecture 69 above.
Notes
1. Abigail Alcott, MS
diary, entry of 14 February 1860, MH (*59M-311). [Back to Text]
2. Alcott, MS "Diary
for 1860," entry of 14 February, MH (*59M-308). [Back to Text] |