There is a wonderful anecdote about Oscar Wilde in Richard Ellmann's monumental biography of the Victorian wit, aesthete and playwright. In 1882-3, Wilde undertook a North American lecture tour, with the aim of bringing the gospel of beauty to the New World. A highlight of the tour was his stopover in Leadville, Colorado, where he went down a silver mine and later lectured the awe-struck miners on art history. What the miners made of this long-haired dandy in velvet breeches is hinted at in Wilde's own account: "I spoke to them of the early Florentines, and they slept as though no crime had ever stained the ravines of their mountain home." But he got their attention when, in deference to their trade, he read them passages from the autobiography of the Renaissance silversmith Benvenuto Cellini.
"I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me," Wilde wrote. "I explained that he had been dead some little time, which elicited the inquiry, 'Who shot him?' "
The gap between instructor and instructed in this case loomed very large, which is why the story is funny. Yet it was really just an extreme example of the gulf that must be bridged every day by would-be disseminators of knowledge or information. Now, as then, not much disseminating gets done if the intended recipients are baffled or asleep. It didn't matter terribly to Wilde, who passed through Leadville like a brilliant comet and had no stake in the aftereffects of his passage. It doesn't really matter to those with fixed but knowledgeable audiences: academics, opera singers, poets, scientists and the like. Even when they pitch something new or difficult, they can usually count on informed antagonists. But it matters a lot to those who try day in and day out to reach beyond the committed to the ignorant, the reluctant and the cynical. Teachers figure here, and politicians, and journalists (the daily newspaper kind, not the kind who write for specialist or technical journals). How is the gap to be crossed?