Artemus Ward “lectured;” and he was right royally paid for acting the literary buffoon. He has had many imitators; and the damage that he and they have inflicted upon the institution of the lyceum is incalculable. The better class that once attended the lecture courses have been driven away in disgust, and among the remainder such a greed for inferior entertainments has been excited that lecture managers have become afraid to offer a first-class, old-fashioned course of lectures to the public patronage. Accordingly, one will find upon nearly every list, offered by the various committees and managers, the names of triflers and buffoons who are a constant disgrace to the lecturing guild, and a constantly degrading influence upon the public taste. Their popularity is usually exhausted by a single performance, but they rove from platform to platform, retailing their stale jokes, and doing their best and worst to destroy the institution to which they cling for a hearing and a living. ... Wit and humor are always good as condiments, but never as food. The stupidest book in the world is a book of jokes, and the stupidest man in the world is one who surrenders himself to the single purpose of making men laugh. ... When our lyceums ... at last become agents of buffoonery and low literary entertainments, they dishonor their early record and the idea which gave them birth. Let them banish triflers from the platform, and go back to the plan which gave them their original prosperity and influence. (Holland 1872, 489)

It is not I & my craft that des bankrupt & destroy the lecture societies, but it is Dr Holland himself & the other “first-class old fashioned” disseminators of “instruction” that do it. ... Dr. Holland says the buffoons charge so much for their services that they have are breaking up the lecture system by making the thing unbearably expensive. How can he talk so when with the memory of bleeding Jersey City in his mind, where he charged a hundred dollars and had only a hundred & fifty people in the house? I shudder to think what might have happened to that lyceum if I ‸if one or two “literary buffoons”‸ had not happened along in the nick of time and drummed up twenty-five hundred people ‸two or three thousand people‸ who were willing to be have their taste “degraded” but did not need any threadbare “instruction.” The real truth is, that the doctor & his people go about the country massacreing lecture associations, & the buffoons follow after and resurrect them. It sounds strangely enough to hear Dr. Holland ab accusing us of killing the lecture business. ... He moves through the lecture field a remorseless intellectual cholera; & wherever he goes—figuratively speaking,—“death & hell follow after.”

Dr. Holland’s plaintive complainings and thin ‸illogical‸ reasoning aside, what do these things most more probably betoken? Simply, that in the old ignorant times, people had ‸little or‸ nothing to read, & so they talked nothing but crops & the weather, & needed a little ‸tedious‸ miscellaneous “instruction;” even from rather but in these days when newspapers and free libraries cram everybody to suffocation with instruction on every possible subject, the thing their overburdened heads pine for is the wholesome relief ‸in the shape‸ of amusement, entertainment, care-conquering ‸-banishing‸ laughter—not a further stuffing at the hands of a blessed old perambulating sack of chloroform. ... But ‸Dr.‸ Holland’s day has gone by. Holland, to speak candidly & without malice or any shade of ill feeling, is the very incarnation of the Commonplace. Now that That is to say, when he is on the platform., or in the editorial chair. ‸spelling out his manuscript.‸ Now that will not do in these vigorous ‸progressive &‸ exacting times. Why will he not take a seat peaceably in the rear, along with the rest of the condemned mediocre instructors, & stop wailing?

And just to glorify myself & the other buffoons, & just to make him feel how unjust he is toward us when he says we are killing the lecture business, I will state here that I am one of two “literary buffoons” who were a few days since offered $10,000 apiece to lecture one month, or $5,000 apiece to lecture twelve nights. The other buffoon has accepted, I believe, but I—what sacrifice do you suppose I am about to make? ‸am I about to make?‸ Anxious as I am to accept, & t Tempting as the offer is, I hereby withdraw totally from the field ‸(declining in good earnest,)‸ & tender this splendid month’s work to the Raw-Head-&-Bloody-Bones of the lecture arena, Dr. Timothy Titcomb Holland, the Moral Instructor! There is a noble magnanimity in this act, if I do say it myself, that shouldn’t. (And I should think the ‸doctor‸ would sink into the earth for shame, after the way in which he has treated me & the other “literary triflers.”) Now the public shall see how that speculator will finish will come out with a lecturer of the only true & legitimate stamp. (SLC 1872, 10–19)