Chapter I (2)

And, in the _Christian Morals_ of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the following passage:--"He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself."

Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside landscape, little Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne enjoying the whole world in the hermitage of himself:--what a rebuke is offered by these images to those who fret and fume away the leisure that is granted them at all the waiting places of their lives!... These disgruntled travelers _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_ miss their privilege and duty of enjoying life merely because they miss the point that life is, in itself, enjoyable. They are so busy reading guide-books to the vague beyond that they shut their minds to all that may be going on about them, or within them, at way-stations. They close their eyes and ears to the immediate. They veto all perception of the here and now. But life itself is always here and now; and, truly to enjoy it, we must learn to look forever with unfaltering eyes into the bright face of immediacy.

* * * * *

And there is another point about railway junctions that reveals an important application to the larger journey of our life. A friend of mine, who is a great lover of painting, had occasion once (and only once) to change trains at Basle, in the course of a journey from Lucerne to Heidelberg. He had to wait two hours at this railway junction; and this time he pleasantly expended in eating many dishes at a restaurant, and amusing the lax porters by teaching them a method of economizing energy in shifting trunks. It should be noted that this friend of mine was not trying to "kill time;" for, like all genuine humanitarians, he of course regards that tragic process as the least excusable of murders. He was entirely happy for two hours in that railway station. But--having packed his guide-book in a trunk--it was not until he reached Darmstadt, some days later, that he discovered that several of the very greatest works of Holbein are now resident in Basle. The two hours that he had spent playing and eating might have been devoted to an examination of many masterpieces of that art which, more than any other, he had crossed the seas to seek. He has never yet been able to return to Basle; but for a sight of those lost portraits of the most honest and straightforward of all German painters, he would gladly sell his memories of both Lucerne and Heidelberg.

Here we have a record of a great disappointment that was occasioned merely by the common habit of despising railway junctions, and presuming them to be inevitably dull. But this same unfortunate presumption, applied to life at large, leads many people to overlook the nearness of some great adventure. Interrogate a thousand men, and you will find that none of them has first set eyes upon his greatest friend in the Mosque of Cordoba or in Trafalgar Square. Every adventure of lasting consequence has confronted all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or cranny of the world,--some place unknown to fame. Anybody is as likely to meet the woman who is destined to become his wife, at Essex Junction on a wintry night, as in the Parthenon by moonlight in the month of May. The most romantic places in the world are often those that promised, in advance, to be the least romantic.

Since this is so, how can anybody ever dare to shut his eyes to that incalculable imminency of adventure which environs him even when he is merely changing trains on some island-platform of the New York Subway? In our daily living we are never safe from destiny; and who can ever know in what vacuous and sedentary period of his experience he may suddenly be called upon to entertain an angel unawares? It is best to be prepared for anything, at any hour of our lives,--even at those moments that must, perforce, be "spent waiting at a railway junction."

MINOR USES OF THE MIDDLING RICH

To assert today that the rich are for the most part entirely harmless is to dare much, for the contrary opinion is greatly in favor. Such wholesale condemnation of the rich assumes a more general and a more specific form. They are said to be harmful to the body politic simply because they have more money than the average: their property has been wrongly taken from persons who have a better right to it, or is withheld from people who need it more. But aside from being constructively a moral detriment from the mere possession of wealth, the rich man may do specific harm through indulging his vices, maintaining an inordinate display, charging too much for his own services, crushing his weaker competitor, corrupting the legislature and the judiciary, finally by asserting flagrantly his right to what he erroneously deems to be his own. Such are the general and specific charges of modern anti-capitalism against wealth. Like many deep rooted convictions, these rest less on analysis of particular instances than upon axioms received without criticism. The word spoliation does yeoman service in covering with one broad blanket of prejudice the most diverse cases of wealth. But spoliation is assumed, not proved. My own conviction that most wealth is quite blameless, whether under the general or specific accusation, is based on no comprehensive axiom, but simply on the knowledge of a number of particular fortunes and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose as the champion of the race. But the method has the modest advantage of resting not on a priori definitions, but on inductions from actual experience; hence of being relatively scientific.

Before sketching the line of such an investigation, let me say that in logic and common sense there is no presumption against the wealthy person. Ever since civilization began and until yesterday it has been assumed that wealth was simply ability legitimately funded and transmitted. Even modern humanitarians, while dallying with the equation wealth = spoliation, have been unwilling wholly to relinquish the historic view of the case. I have always admired the courage with which Mr. Howells faced the situation in one of those charming essays for the Easy Chair of _Harper's_. Driving one night in a comfortable cab he was suddenly confronted by the long drawn out misery of the midnight bread line. For a moment the vision of these hungry fellow men overcame him. He felt guilty on his cushions, and possibly entertained some St. Martin-like project of dividing his swallowtail with the nearest unfortunate. Then common sense in the form of his companion came to his rescue. She remarked "Perhaps we are right and they are wrong." Why not? At any rate Mr. Howells was not permitted to condemn in a moment of compassion the career of thrift, industry and genius, that had led him from a printer's case to a premier position in American letters, or, more concretely, he received a domestic dispensation to cab it home in good conscience, though many were waiting in chilly discomfort for their gift of yesterday's bread. The why so and why not of this incident are my real subject. For Mr. Howells is merely a particularly conspicuous instance of the kind of prosperity I have in mind. We are all too much dazzled by the rare great fortunes. The newly rich have spectacular ways with them. By dint of frequently passing us in notorious circumstances, they give the impression of a throng. They are much in the papers, their steam yachts loom large on the waters, they divorce quickly and often, they buy the most egregious, old masters. By such more or less innocent ostentations, a handful stretches into a procession, much as a dozen sprightly supernumeraries will keep up an endless defile of Macduff's army on the tragic stage. Let us admit that some of the great wealth is more or less foolishly and harmfully spent; my subject is not bank accounts, but people; and very wealthy people constitute an almost negligible minority of the race. Their influence too is much less potent than is supposed. A slightly vulgarizing tendency proceeds from them, but in waves of decreasing intensity. Their vogue is chiefly a _succès de scandale_. Sensible people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing. He is not what a poor person means by a rich person. Ask your laundress who is rich in your neighborhood, and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry about next month's bills. True pragmatist, she sees that to be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes to be rich. Her classification ignores certain niceties, but corresponds roughly to the fact, and has the merit of corresponding to government decree. Rich people, since the income tax, are officially those who pay the tax but not the surtax. Families with an income not less than four thousand dollars nor more than twenty thousand comprise the harmless, middling rich. Let us once for all admit that in the surtaxed classes there are many cases of quite harmless wealth, while in the lower level of the rich, harmful wealth will sometimes be found. Such exceptions do not invalidate the general rule that all but a negligible fraction of the rich are included in the first class of income taxpayers--on from four to twenty thousand, that most of the property here held is blamelessly held in good hands--wealth that in no fair estimate can be regarded as harmful. In terms of British currency, our category of the middling rich would include the poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the lower middle class, and the upper middle class as a whole. This comparison is made not to apply an alien class system which holds very inadequately here in America, but simply to avow the difficulty of my task of apology. The bourgeoisie is equally suspect among radicals, reactionaries, and artists. My middling rich are nothing other than what an European essayist would quite brazenly call the _haute bourgeoisie_. It is quite a comprehensive class, made up chiefly of professional men, moderately successful merchants, manufacturers, and bankers with their more highly paid employees, but including also many artists, and teachers of all sorts. Incidentally it is an employing and borrowing class in various degrees, hence especially subject to the exactions of the labor union at one end, and of the great capitalist and the Trust at the other.

The general harmlessness of the wealth of this class rests upon the fact that it is in small part inherited, but mostly earned by individual effort, while such effort has usually been honestly and efficiently rendered and paid for at a moderate rate. In fact the amount of capacity that can be hired for the slightest rewards is simply amazing. It is the distinction of this class as compared both with the wage earning and the capitalist class--both of which agree in overvaluing their services and extorting payment on their own terms--that it respects its work more than it regards rewards. Consider the amount of general education and special training that go to make a capable school superintendent, or college professor; a good country doctor or clergyman--and it will be felt that no money is more honestly earned. This is equally true of many lawyers and magistrates, who are wise counsellors for an entire country side. It is no less true of hosts of small manufacturers who make a superior product with conscience. For the wealth, small enough it usually is, that is thus gained in positions of especial skill and confidence, absolutely no apology need be made. I sometimes wish that the Socialists for whom any degree of wealth means spoliation, would go a day's round with a country doctor, would take the pains to learn of the cases he treats for half his fee, for a nominal sum, or for nothing; would candidly reckon his normal fee against the long years of college, medical school and hospital, and against the service itself; would then deduct the actual expenses of the day, as represented by apparatus, motor, or horse service--I can only say that if such an investigator could in any way conceive that physician as a spoliator, because he earned twice as much as a master brick-layer or five times as much as a ditch digger--if, I say, before the actual fact, our Socialist investigator in any way grudges that day's earnings, his mental and emotional confusion is beyond ordinary remedy. And such a physician's earnings are merely typical of those of an entire class of devoted professional men.

We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in the country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most laborious means, and accumulated and transmitted by self-sacrificing thrift. A rich person in nine cases out of ten is merely a capable, careful, saving person, often, too, a person who conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of personal honor and a high standard of social obligation. We are too much dazzled by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who plays equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the sensational clergyman who has made full coinage of his charlatanism. All these types exist, and all are highly exceptional. Most rich persons are self-respecting, have given ample value received for their wealth, and have less reason to apologize for it than most poor folks have to apologize for their poverty.

Furthermore: for the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities makes for charm and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities produces an enormous amount of human waste among the wage earners and the aristocrats impartially. The great body of self-controlled, that is of reasonably socialized people, must be sought between these two extremes. In short the building up of ideals of discipline and of habits of efficiency and of good manners and of human respect is very largely the task of the middle classes. Whereas the breaking down of such ideals is, in the present posture of society, the avowed or unavowed intention of a considerable portion of laboring men and aristocrats. The scornful retort of the Socialist is at hand: "Of course the middle classes are shrewd enough to practice the virtues that pay." Into this familiar moral bog that there are as many kinds of morality as there are economic conditions of mankind, I do not consent to plunge. I need only say that the so-called middle class virtues would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a bourgeois. Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication that the _bourgeoisie_ has selfishly tried to keep its virtues to itself. On the contrary there is positive rejoicing in the middle classes over a workman who deigns to keep a contract, and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of paying a debt. In fine we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of our highly unpicturesque virtues than we are of our inconspicuous wealth.

So far from being in danger of suppression, we middling rich people are likely to last longer than the capitalists who exploit us in practice, and the workmen who exploit us on principle. Theoretically, and perhaps practically, the very rich are in danger of expropriation. Theoretically the course of invention may limit or almost abolish all but the higher grades of labor. The need of the more skilful sort of service in the professions, in manufacture, in agency of all sorts, is sure to persist. The socialists expect to get such service for much less than it at present brings, that is to make us poor and yet keep us working. Such a scheme must break down, not through the refusal of the middling rich to keep at work;--for I think there is loyalty enough to the work itself to keep most necessary activities going after a fashion, even under the most untoward conditions;--but because to make us poor is to destroy the conditions under which we can efficiently render a somewhat exceptional service. Our wealth is not an extraneous thing that can be readily added or taken away. It is our possibility of self-education and of professional improvement, it is the medium in which we can work, it is our hope of children. To take away our wealth is to maim us. There is nothing humiliating in such an avowal. It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one's life and work. As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to face the threat of a proletarian revolution as we harmless rich. It is the class that produces generals, explorers, inventors, statesmen. A social revolution with its stern attendant regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively undisciplined class of working people. The disciplined class of the middling rich is better prepared to meet such an eventuality. Accordingly it is no mere selfishness or complacency that leads the middling rich to oppose the pretensions of proletarianism on one side and of capitalism on the other. It is rather the assertion of sound middle class morality against two opposite yet somewhat allied forms of social immorality--the strength that exaggerates its claims, and the weakness that claims all the privileges of strength.

We are useful too as conserving certain valuable ideas. When I mention the idea of the right of private property, I expect to be laughed at by a large class of enthusiasts. Yet all of civilization has been built up on the distinction between _meum_ and _tuum_. Without this idea there is not the slightest inducement to persistent individual effort nor possibility of progress for the individual or for the race. The fruitful diversities, the germinative inequalities between men all depend on this right. And today the right to one's own is doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the guile of those in positions of financial trust. The strikers who offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill, and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay unearned dividends, are both undermining the right of property. Against such counsels of force and fraud, the representatives of the common sense and funded wisdom of mankind are the middling rich. It is an unromantic service--doubtless breaking other people's windows or scaling their bank accounts is much more thrilling--it is a public service obviously tinged with self-interest, but none the less a public service of high and timely importance. The business of keeping the sanity of the world intact as against the wilder expressions of social discontent, and the uglier expressions of personal envy and greed, may seem to lack zest and originality today. History may well take a different view of the matter. It would not be surprising to find a posthumous aureole of idealism conferred upon those who amid the trumpeting of money market messiahs, and the braying of self-appointed remodellers of the race, simply stood quietly on their own inherited rights and principles.

Such are some not wholly minor uses for the middling rich. Should they be abolished, many of the pleasanter facts and appearances of the world would disappear with them. The other day I whisked in one of their motor cars through miles of green Philadelphia suburbs dappled with pink magnolia trees and white fruit blossoms--everywhere charming houses, velvety lawns, tidy gardens. The establishing of a little paradise like that is of course a selfish enterprise--a mere meeting of the push and foresight of real estate operators with the thrift and sentiment of householders, yet it is an advantage inevitably shared, a benefit to the entire community, an example in reasonable working, living, and playing.

On the side of play we should especially miss these harmless rich. The sleek horses on a thousand bridle paths and meadows are theirs, the smaller winged craft that still protest against the pollution of the sea by the reek of coal and the stench of gasoline; of their furnishing are the graceful and widely shared spectacles not only of the minor yacht racing but of the field sports generally. They constitute our militia. The survival in the world of such gentler accomplishments as fencing, canoeing, and exploration rests with the middling rich. They write our books and plays, compose our music, paint our pictures, carve our statues. The pleasanter unconscious pageantry of our life is conducted by their sons and daughters. To be nice, to indulge in nice occupations, to express happiness--this is not even today a reproach to any one. Indeed if any approach to the dreamed socialized state ever be made, it will come less through regimentation than through imitation of those persons of middle condition who have managed to be reasonably faithful in their duties, and moderate in their pleasures. To keep a clean mind in a clean body is the prerogative of no class, but the lapses from this standard are unquestionably more frequent among the poor and the very rich.

It is instructive in this regard to compare with the newspapers that serve the middling rich, those that address the poor, and those that are owned in the interest of well understood capitalistic interests. The extremes of yellow journalism and of avowedly capitalistic journalism, meet in a preference for salacious or merely shocking news, and in a predilection for blatant, sophistical, or merely nugatory and time-serving editorial expressions. Between the two really allied types of newspapers are a few which exercise a decent censorship over questionable news, and habitually indulge in the luxury of sincere editorial opinion. There are some exceptions to the rule. In our own day we have seen a proletarian paper become a magnificent editorial organ, while somewhat illogically maintaining a random and sensational policy in its news columns. But generally the distinction is unmistakable. Imagine the plight of New York journalism if four papers, which I need not mention, ceased publication. It would mean a distinct and immediate cheapening of the mentality of the city. Then observe on any train who are reading these papers. It is plain enough what class among us makes decent journalism possible.

Much is to be said for the abolition of poverty, and something for the reduction of inordinate wealth. Poverty is being much reduced, and will be farther, the process being limited simply by the degree to which the poor will educate and discipline themselves. We shall never wholly do away with bad luck, bad inheritance, wild blood, laziness, and incapacity: so some poverty we shall always have, but much less than now, and less dire. The fact that the large class of middling rich has been evolved from a world where all began poor, is a promise of a future society where poverty shall be the exception. But such increase of the wealth of the world, and of the number of the virtually rich, will never be attained by the puerile method of expropriating the present holders of wealth. That would produce more poor people beyond doubt--but its effect in enriching the present poor would be inappreciable. You cannot change a man's character and capacity simply by giving him the wealth of another. In wholesale expropriations and bequests the experiment has been many times tried, and always with the same results. The wealth that could not be assimilated and administered has always left the receiver or grasper in all essentials poorer than he was before. Wealth is an attribute of personality. It is not interchangeable like the parts of a standardized machine. The futility of dispossessing the middling rich would be as marked as its immorality.

This essentially personal character of wealth must affect the views of those who would attack what are called the inordinate fortunes. I hold no brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In many cases I believe his wealth is as personal, assimilated and legitimate as is the average moderate fortune. In many cases too, I know that such gigantic wealth is in fact the product of unfair craft and favoritism, is to that extent unassimilated and illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes, I think a prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases the common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render, he would reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the benevolent enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene, medicine, which are founded and supported by great wealth. In our time The Rockefeller Institute will have stamped out that slow plague of the south, the hook worm. To the obvious retort that the government ought to do this sort of thing, the reply is equally obvious, that historically governments have not done this sort of thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown the way. Our prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich in particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the socialist indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires a statute of limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more trouble than the possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts, interest, and grudges cannot be indefinitely accumulated and extended. It is the entire disregard of this simple and generally admitted principle that has marred the socialist propaganda from the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred between classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may be clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman see clearly what his actual grievance and expectancy of redress are in his own day and time.

With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very rich will have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire's evident utility as the milch cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even of the anti-capitalistic stamp, to waver at the point where the cow threatens to dry up from over-milking. If the case, then, for utterly despoiling the harmful rich, is by no means clear, the prospect for the harmless rich may be regarded as fairly favorable. For the moment, caught between the headiness of working folk, the din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate activity, the lot of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable. But they seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy, cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the middling rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and it may even be better.

LECTURING AT CHAUTAUQUA

To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly, I must approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of view. Others, more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the Institution, have written the history of its development from small beginnings to its present impressive magnitude, have analyzed the theory of its intentions, and have expounded its extraordinary influence over what may be called the middle-class culture of our present-day America. It would be beyond the scope of my equipment to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list already issued by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of Chautauqua was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a surprised and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien thrust suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and, if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some sense of the human significance of this summer seat of earnest recreation may be suggested by a mere record of my individual reactions.

I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer morning, I suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at the Institution. I was a little disconcerted at the moment, because I was enjoying an amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was inclined to shudder at the thought of putting on a collar in July; but, after an hour or two, I managed to imagine that telegram as a Summons from the Great Unknown, and it was in a proper spirit of adventure that I flung together a few books, and climbed into the only available upper berth on a discomfortable train that rushed me westward.

In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out at Westfield, on Lake Erie,--a town that looked like the back-yard of civilization, with weeds growing in it. Thence a trolley car, climbing over heightening hills that became progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the entrance of what the cynical conductor called "The Holy City." A fence of insurmountable palings stretched away on either hand; and, at the little station, there were turn-stiles, through which pilgrims passed within. Most people pay money to obtain admittance; but I was met by a very affable young man from Dartmouth, whose business it was to welcome invited visitors, and by him I was steered officially through unopposing gates. I liked this young man for his cheerful clothes and smiling countenance; but I was rather appalled by the agglomeration of ram-shackle cottages through which we passed on our way to the hotel.

I say "the hotel," for the Chautauqua Settlement contains but one such institution. It carries the classic name of Athenæum; but the first view of it occasioned in my sensitive constitution a sinking of the heart. The edifice dates from the early-gingerbread period of architecture. It culminates in a horrifying cupola, and is colored a discountenancing brown. The first glimpse of it reminded me of the poems of A.H. Clough, whose chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough's life-work was a continual asking of the question, "Life being unbearable, why should I not die?"--while echo, that commonplace and sapient commentator, mildly answered, "Why?": and this was precisely the impression that I gathered from my initial vista of the Athenæum between trees.

On entering the hotel I was greeted over the desk (with what might be defined as a left-handed smile) by one of the leading students of the university with which I am associated as a teacher. He called out, "Front!" in the manner of an amateur who is amiably aping the professional, and assigned me to a scarcely comfortable room.

My first voluntary act in the Chautauqua Community was to take a swim. But the water was tepid, and brown, and tasteless, and unbuoyant; and I felt, rather oddly, as if I were swimming in a gigantic cup of tea. From this initial experience I proceeded, somewhat precipitately, to induce an analogy; and it seemed to me, at the time, as if I had forsaken the roar and tumble of the hoarse, tumultuous world, for the inland disassociated peace of an unaware and loitering backwater.

With hair still wet and still dishevelled, I was met by the Secretary of Instruction,--a man (as I discovered later) of wise and humorous perceptions. By him I was informed that, in an hour or so, I was to lecture, in the Hall of Philosophy, on (if I remember rightly) Edgar Allan Poe. I combed my hair, and tried to care for Poe, and made my way to the Hall of Philosophy. This turned out to be a Greek temple divested of its walls. An oaken roof, with pediments, was supported by Doric columns; and under the enlarged umbrella thus devised, about a thousand people were congregated to greet the new and unknown lecturer.

I honestly believe that that was the worst lecture I have ever imposed upon a suffering audience. I had lain awake all night, in an upper berth, on the hottest day of the year; I had found my swim in inland water unrefreshing; and, at the moment, I really cared no more for Edgar Allan Poe than I usually care for the sculptures of Bernini, the paintings of Bouguereau, or the base-ball playing of the St. Louis "Browns." This feeling was, of course, unfair to Poe, who is (with all his emptiness of content) an admirable artist; but I was tired at the time. It pained me exceedingly to listen, for an hour, to my own dull and unilluminated lecture. And yet (and here is the pathetic point that touched me deeply) I perceived gradually that the audience was listening not only attentively but eagerly. Those people really wanted to hear whatever the lecturer should say: and I wandered back to the depressing hotel with bowed head, actuated by a new resolve to tell them something worthy on the morrow.

That afternoon and evening I strolled about the summer settlement of Chautauqua; and (in view of my subsequent shift of attitude) I do not mind confessing that this first aspect of the community depressed me to a perilous melancholy. I beheld a landscape that reminded me of Wordsworth's Windermere, except that the lake was broader and the hills less high, deflowered and defamed by the huddled houses of the Chautauqua settlers. The lake was lovely; and, with this supreme adjective, I forbear from further effort at description. Upon the southern shore, a natural grove of noble and venerable trees had been invaded by a crowded horror of discomfortable tenements, thrown up by carpenters with a taste for machine-made architectural details, and colored a sickly green, an acid yellow, or an angry brown. The Chautauqua Settlement, which is surrounded by a fence of palings, covers only two or three square miles of territory; and, in the months of July and August, between fifteen and twenty thousand people are crowded into this constricted area. Hence a horror of unsightly dormitories, spawning unpredictable inhabitants upon the ambling, muddy lanes.

There have been, in the history of this Assembly, a few salutary fires,--as a result of which new buildings have been erected which are comparatively easy on the eyes. The Hall of Philosophy is really beautiful, and is nobly seated among memorable trees at the summit of a little hill. The Aula Christi tried to be beautiful, and failed; but at least the good intention is apparent. The Amphitheatre (which seats six or seven thousand auditors) is admirably adapted to its uses; and some of the more recent business buildings, like the Post Office, are inoffensive to the unexacting observer. A wooded peninsula, which is pleasantly laid out as a park, projects into the lake; and, at the point of this, has lately been erected a _campanile_ which is admirable in both color and proportion. Indeed, when a fanfaronnade of sunset is blown wide behind it, you suffer a sudden tinge of homesickness for Venice or Ravenna. It is good enough for that. But beside it is a helter-skelter wooden edifice which reminds you of Surf Avenue at Coney Island. Indeed, the Settlement as a whole exhibits still an overwhelmment of the unæsthetic, and appalls the eye of the new-comer from a more considerative world.

On the way back from the lovely _campanile_ to the hotel, I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two mud-puddles connected by a gutter. This monstrosity turned out to be a relief-map of Palestine. Little children, with uncultivated voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the insanitary Sea of Galilee.--Then I encountered a wooden edifice with castellated towers and machicolated battlements, which called itself (with a large label) the Men's Club; and from this I fled, with almost a sense of relief, to the hotel itself, now sprawling low and dark beneath its Boston-brown-bread cupola.

Thus my first impression of Chautauqua was one of melancholy and resentment. But, in the subsequent few days, this emotion was altered to one of impressible satiric mirth; and, subsequently still, it was changed again to an emotion of wondering and humble admiration. I had been assured at the outset, by one who had already tried it, that, if I stayed long enough, I should end up by liking Chautauqua; and this is precisely what happened to me before a week was out.

But meanwhile I laughed very hard for three days. The thing that made me laugh most was the unexpected experience of enduring the discomfiture of fame. Chautauqua is a constricted community; and any one who lectures there becomes, by that very fact, a famous person in this little backwater of the world, until he is supplanted (for fame is as fickle as a ballet-dancer) by the next new-comer to the platform. The Chautauqua Press publishes a daily paper, a weekly review, a monthly magazine and a quarterly; and these publications report your lectures, tell the story of your life, comment upon your views of this and that, advertise your books, and print your picture. Everybody knows you by sight, and stops you in the street to ask you questions. Thus, on your way to the Post Office, you are intercepted by some kindly soul who says: "I am Miss Terwilliger, from Montgomery, Alabama; and do you think that Bernard Shaw is really an immoral writer?" or, "I am Mrs. Winterbottom, of Muncie, Indiana; and where do you think I had better send my boy to school? He is rather a backward boy for his age--he was ten last April--but I really think that if, etc."

Then, when you return to the hotel, you observe that everybody is rocking vigorously on the veranda, and reading one of your books. This pleases you a little; for, though an actor may look his audience in the eyes, an author is seldom privileged to see his readers face to face. Indeed, he often wonders if anybody ever reads his writings, because he knows that his best friends never do. But very soon this tender sentiment is disrupted. There comes a sudden resurrection of the rocking-chair brigade, a rush of readers with uplifted fountain-pens, and a general request for the author's autograph upon the flyleaf of his volume. All of this is rather flattering; but afterward these gracious and well-meaning people begin to comment on your lectures, and tell you that you have made them see a great light. And then you find yourself embarrassed.

It is rather embarrassing to be embarrassed.

One enthusiastic lady, having told me her name and her address, assaulted me with the following commentary:--"I heard you lecture on Stevenson the other day; and ever since then I have been thinking how very much like Stevenson you are. And today I heard you lecture on Walt Whitman: and all afternoon I have been thinking how very much like Whitman you are. And that is rather puzzling--isn't it?--because Stevenson and Whitman weren't at all like each other,--were they?"

I smiled, and told the lady the simple truth; but I do not think she understood me. "Ah, madam," I said, "wait until you hear me lecture about Hawthorne...."

For (and now I am freely giving the whole game away) the secret of the art of lecturing is merely this:--on your way to the rostrum you contrive to fling yourself into complete sympathy with the man you are to talk about, so that, when you come to speak, you will give utterance to _his_ message, in terms that are suggestive of _his_ style. You must guard yourself from ever attempting to talk about anybody whom you have not (at some time or other) loved; and, at the moment, you should, for sheer affection, abandon your own personality in favor of his, so that you may become, as nearly as possible, the person whom it is your business to represent. Naturally, if you have any ear at all, your sentences will tend to fall into the rhythm of his style; and if you have any temperament (whatever that may be) your imagined mood will diffuse an ineluctable aroma of the author's personality.

This at least, is my own theory of lecturing; and, in the instance of my talk on Hawthorne, I seem to have carried it out successfully in practice. I must have attained a tone of sombre gray, and seemed for the moment a meditative Puritan under a shadowy and steepled hat; for, at the close of the lecture, a silvery-haired and sweet-faced woman asked me if I wouldn't be so kind as to lead the devotional service in the Baptist House that evening. I found myself abashed. But a previous engagement saved me; and I was able to retire, not without honor, though with some discomfiture.

This previous engagement was a steamboat ride upon the lake. When you want to give a sure-enough party at Chautauqua, you charter a steamboat and escape from the enclosure, having seduced a sufficient number of other people to come along and sing. On this particular evening, the party consisted of the Chautauqua School of Expression,--a bevy of about thirty young women who were having their speaking voices cultivated by an admired friend of mine who is one of the best readers in America; and they sang with real spirit, so soon as we had churned our way beyond remembrance of (I mean no disrespect) the Baptist House. But this boat-ride had a curious effect on the four or five male members of the party. We touched at a barbarous and outrageous settlement, named (if I remember rightly) Bemus Point; and hardly had the boat been docked before there ensued a hundred-yard dash for a pair of swinging doors behind which dazzled lights splashed gaudily on soapy mirrors. I did not really desire a drink at the time; but I took two, and the other men did likewise. I understood at once (for I must always philosophize a little) why excessive drinking is induced in prohibition states. Tell me that I may not laugh, and I wish at once to laugh my head off,--though I am at heart a holy person who loves Keats. This incongruous emotion must have been felt, under this or that influence of external inhibition, by everyone who is alive enough to like swimming, and Dante, and Weber and Fields, and Filipino Lippi, and the view of the valley underneath the sacred stones of Delphi.

Within the enclosure of Chautauqua one does not drink at all; and I infer that this regulation is well-advised. I base this inference upon my gradual discovery that all the regulations of this well-conducted Institution have been fashioned sanely to contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number. That is my final, critical opinion. But how we did dash for the swinging doors at Bemus Point!--we four or five simple-natured human beings who were not, in any considerable sense, drinking men at all.

Then the congregated School of Expression tripped ashore with nimble ankles; and there ensued a general dance at a pavilion where a tired boy maltreated a more tired piano, and one paid a dime before, or after, dancing. One does not dance at Chautauqua, even on moon-silvery summer evenings:--and again the regulation is right, because the serious-minded members of the community must have time to read the books of those who lecture there.

And this brings me to a consideration of the Chautauqua Sunday. On this day the gates are closed, and neither ingress nor egress is permitted. Once more I must admit that the regulation has been sensibly devised. If admittance were allowed on Sunday, the grounds would be overrun by picnickers from Buffalo, who would cast the shells of hard-boiled eggs into the inviting Sea of Galilee; and unless the officers are willing to let anybody in, they can devise no practicable way of letting anybody out. Besides, the people who are in already like to rest and meditate. But alas! (and at this point I think that I begin to disapprove) the row-boats and canoes are tied up at the dock, the tennis-courts are emptied, and the simple exercise of swimming is forbidden. This desuetude of natural and smiling recreation on a day intended for surcease of labor struck me (for I am in part an ancient Greek, in part a mediæval Florentine) as strangely irreligious. All day the organ rumbles in the Amphitheatre (and of this I approved, because I love the way in which an organ shakes you into sanctity), and many meetings are held in various sectarian houses, the mood of which is doubtless reverent--though all the while the rippling water beckons to the high and dry canoes, and a gathering of many-tinted clouds is summoned in the windy west to tingle with Olympian laughter and Universal song. How much more wisely (if I may talk in Greek terms for the moment) the gods take Sunday, than their followers on this forgetful earth!

But we must change the mood if I am to speak again of what amused me in the pagan days of my initiation at Chautauqua. Life, for instance, at the ginger-bread hotel amused me oddly. To one who lives in a metropolis throughout the working months, the map of eating at Chautauqua seems incongruous. Dinner is served in the middle of the day, at an hour when one is hardly encouraged to the thought of luncheon; and at six P.M. a sort of breakfast is set forth, which is denominated _Supper_. This Supper consists of fruit, followed by buckwheat cakes, followed by meat or eggs; and to eat one's way through it induces a curious sense of standing on one's head. After two days I discovered a remedy for this undesired dizziness. I turned the _menu_ upside down, and ordered a meal in the reverse order. The Supper itself was a success; but the waitress (who, in the winter, teaches school in Texas) disapproved of what she deemed my frivolous proceeding. Her eyes took on an inward look beneath the pedagogical eye-glasses; and there was a distinct furrowing of her forehead. Thereafter I did not dare to overturn the _menu_, but ate my way heroically backward. After all, our prandial prejudices are merely the result of custom. There is no real reason why stewed prunes should not be eaten at three A.M.

But this philosophical reflection reminds me that there is no such hour at Chautauqua. At ten P.M. a carol of sweet chimes is rung from the Italian _campanile_; and at that hour all good Chautauquans go to bed. If you are by profession (let us say) a writer, and are accustomed to be alive at midnight, you will find the witching hours sad. Vainly you will seek companionship, and will be reduced at last to reading the base-ball reports in the newspapers of Cleveland, Ohio.

At the Athenæum you are passed about, from meal to meal, like a one-card draw at poker. The hotel is haunted by Old Chautauquans, who vie with each other to receive you with traditional cordiality. The head-waitress steers you for luncheon (I mean Dinner) to one table, for Supper to another, and so on around the room from day to day. The process reminds you a little of the procedure at a progressive euchre party. At each meal you meet a new company of Old Chautauquans, and are expected to converse: but many (indeed most) of these people are humanly refreshing, and the experience is not so wearing as it sounds.

But you must not imagine from all that I have said that the life of the lecturer at Chautauqua is merely frivolous. Not at all. You get up very early, and proceed to Higgins Hall, a pleasant little edifice (named after the late Governor of New York State) set agreeably amid trees upon a rising knoll of verdure; and there you converse for a time about the Drama, and for another time about the Novel. In each of these two courses there were, perhaps, seventy or eighty students,--male and female, elderly and young. I found them much more eager than the classes I had been accustomed to in college, and at least as well prepared. They came from anywhere, and from any previous condition of servitude to the general cause of learning; but I found them apt, and interested, and alive.

Now and then it appeared that their sense of humor was a little less fantastic than my own; but I liked them very much, because they were so earnest and simple and human and (what is Whitman's adjective?) adhesive.

And now I come to the point that converted me finally to Chautauqua. I found myself, after a few days, liking the people very much. In the afternoons I talked in the Doric Temple about this man or that,--selected from my company of well-beloved friends among "the famous nations of the dead"; and the people came in hundreds and listened reverently--not, I am very glad to know, because of any trick I have of setting words together, but because of Stevenson and Whitman and the others, and what they meant by living steadfast lives amid the hurly-burly of this roaring world, and steering heroically by their stars. Some elderly matrons among the listeners brought their knitting with them and toiled with busy hands throughout the lecture; but they listened none the less attentively, and reduced me to a mood of humble wonderment.

For I have often wondered (and this is, perhaps, the most intimate of my confessions) how anybody can endure a lecture,--even a good lecture, for I am not thinking merely of my own. It is a passive exercise of which I am myself incapable. I, for one, have always found it very irksome--as Carlyle has phrased the experience--"to sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into." I always want to talk back, or rise and remark "But, on the other hand..."; and, before long, I find myself spiritually itching. This is, possibly, a reason why I prefer canoeing to listening to sermons. Yet these admirable Chautauquans submit themselves to this experience hour after hour, because they earnestly desire to discover some glimmering of "the best that has been known and thought in the world."

These fifteen or twenty thousand people have assembled for the pursuit of culture--a pursuit which the Hellenic-minded Matthew Arnold designated as the noblest in this life. But from this fact (and here the antithetic formula asserts itself) we must deduce an inference that they feel themselves to be uncultured. In this inference I found a taste of the pathetic. I discovered that many of the colonists at Chautauqua were men and women well along in life who had had no opportunities for early education. Their children, rising through the generations, had returned from the state universities of Texas or Ohio or Mississippi, talking of Browning, and the binominal theorem, and the survival of the fittest, and the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, and the _entassus_ of Ionic columns, and the doctrine of _laissez faire_; and now their elders had set out to endeavor to catch up with them. This discovery touched me with both reverence and pathos. An attempt at what may be termed, in the technical jargon of base-ball, a "delayed steal" of culture, seemed to me little likely to succeed. Culture, like wisdom, cannot be acquired: it cannot be passed, like a dollar bill, from one who has it to one who has it not. It must be absorbed, early in life, through birth or breeding, or be gathered undeliberately through experience. A child of five with a French governess will ask for his mug of milk with an easier Gallic grace than a man of eighty who has puzzled out the pronunciation from a text-book. There is, apparently, no remedy for this. Love the _Faerie Queene_ at twelve, or you will never really love it at seventy: or so, at least, it seems to me. And yet the desire to learn, in gray-haired men and women who in their youth were battling hard for a mere continuance of life itself, and founding homesteads in a book-less wilderness, moved me to a quick exhilaration.