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 [pg 126]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-[pg 127]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 [pg 128]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.
Most of the people at Chautauqua come either from the south or from the middle west. They pronounce the English language either without any r at all, or with such excessive emphasis upon the r as to make up for the deficiency of their fellow-seekers. In other words, these people are really American, as opposed to cosmopolitan; and to live among them is—for a world-wandering adventurer—to learn a lesson in Americanism. Mr. Roosevelt once stated that Chautauqua is the most American institution in America; and this statement—like many others of his inspired platitudes—begins to seem meaningful upon reflection.
At one time or another I have drifted to many different corners of the world; but my residence at Chautauqua was my only experience of a democracy. In this community there are no special privileges. If the President of the Institution had wished to hear me lecture (he never did, in fact—though we used to play tennis together, at which game he proved himself easily the better man) he would [pg 129]have been required to come early and take his chance at getting a front seat; and once, when I ventured to attend a lecture by one of my colleagues, I found myself seated beside that very waitress in the Athenæum who had disapproved of my method of ordering a meal. All the exercises are open equally to anybody—first come, first served—and the boy who blacks your boots may turn out to be a Sophomore at Oberlin. Teachers in Texas high-schools sweep the floors or shave you, and the raucous newsboy is earning his way toward the University of Illinois. All this is a little bewildering at first; but in a day or two you grow to like it.
This free-for-all spirit that permeates Chautauqua reminds me to speak of the economic conduct of the Institution. The only charge—except in the case of certain special courses—is for admission to the grounds. The visitor pays fifty cents for a franchise of one day, and more for periods of greater length, until the ultimate charge of seven dollars and fifty cents for a season ticket is attained. On leaving the grounds, he has to show his ticket; and if it has expired he is taxed according to the term of his delinquent lingering. Once free of the grounds, he may avail himself of any of the privileges of the Assembly. Lectures, on an infinite variety of subjects, are delivered hour after hour; and a bulletin of these successive lectures is posted publicly and printed in the daily paper. Every evening an entertainment of some sort is given in the Amphitheatre, and this is eagerly attended by swarming thousands. The Institution owns all the land within the bounding palisades. Private cottages may be erected by individual builders on lots leased for ninety-nine years; but the Institution owns and operates the only hotel, and exercises an absolute empery over the issuance of franchises to necessary tradesmen. The revenue of the corporation is therefore rich; but all of it is expended in importing the best lecturers that may be obtained, and in furthering the general good of the general assembly. The [pg 130]entire system suggests the theoretic observation that an absolute democracy can be instituted and maintained only by an absolute monarchy. If all the people are to be free and equal, the government must have absolute control of all the revenue. Here is, perhaps, a principle for our presidential candidates to think about.