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Page 42
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 Athen�um 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.
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