The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 by Various

V >> Various >> The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

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 mediaeval 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 Athenaeum 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.

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 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 Athenaeum 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
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.

But I do not wish to terminate this summer conversation on a serious note;
and I must revert, in closing, to some of the recreations at Chautauqua.
The first of these is tea. Every afternoon, from four to five o'clock, the
visitor lightly flits from tea to tea,--making his excuses to one hostess
in order to dash onward to another. This is rather hard upon the health,
because it requires the deglutition of innumerable potions. I have always
maintained that tea is an admirable entity if it be considered merely as a
time of day, but that it is insidious if it be considered as a beverage.
At Chautauqua, tea is not only an hour but a drink; and (though I am a
sympathetic soul) I can only say that those who like it like it. For my
part, I preferred the concoction sold at rustic soda-fountains, which is
known locally as a "Chautauqua highball,"--a ribald term devised by
college men who make up the by-no-means-despicable ball-team. This
beverage is compounded out of unfermented grape-juice and foaming
fizz-water; and, if it be taken absent-mindedly, seems to taste like
something.

But the standard recreation at Chautauqua is the habit of impromptu eating
in the open air. Every one invites you to go upon a picnic. You take a
steamer to some point upon the lake, or take a trolley to a wild and deep
ravine known by the somewhat unpoetic name of the Hog's Back; and then
everybody sits around and eats sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and
considers the occasion a debauch. This formality resembles great good
fun,--especially as there are girls who laugh, and play, and threaten to
disconcert you on the morrow when you solemnly arise to lecture on the
Religion of Emerson. But picnic-baskets out of doors are rather hard on
the digestion.

Perhaps I should record also, as a curious experience, that I was required
to appear as one of the guests of honor at a large reception. This meant
that I had to stand in line, with certain other marionettes, and shake
hands with an apparently endless procession of people who were themselves
as bored as were the guests of honor. I determined then and there that I
should never run for President,--not even in response to an irresistible
appeal from the populace. I had never suspected before that there could be
so many hands without the touch of nature in them. I shook hands
mechanically, chatting all the while with a humorous and human woman who
stood next to me in the line of the attacked--until suddenly I felt the
sensitive and tender grasp of a sure-enough hand, reminding me of friends
and one or two women it has been a holiness to know. My attention was
attracted by the thrill. I turned swiftly--and I looked upon a little bent
old woman who was blind. She had a voice, too, for she spoke to me ...
and,--well, I was very glad that I went to that reception.

And many other matters I remember fondly,--a certain lonely hill at
sunset, whence you looked over wide water to distant dream-enchanted
shores; the urbanity and humor of the wise directors of the Institution;
the manner of many young students who discerned an unadmitted sanctity
beneath the smiling conversations of those summer hours; my own last
lecture, on "The Importance of Enjoying Life"; the people who walked with
me to the station and whom I was sorry to leave; and the oddly-minded
student behind the desk of the hotel; and an old man from Kentucky who
cared about Walt Whitman after I had talked about his ministrations in the
army hospitals; and the trees, and the reverberating organ, and, beneath a
benison of midnight peace, the hushed moon-silvery surface of the lake. It
is, indeed, a memorable experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have
been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men.
Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall,
everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism
which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind
of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at
the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of
moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over
the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over
the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that
in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened.
Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special
significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a
_tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that
are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to
overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.
Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more
complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem
correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes
have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the
largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.

Only a year after the sinking of the _Titanic_ I was crossing the ocean,
and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed
not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the
waves. The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily
organized to take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood
for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the
rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold.
Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling
upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter
that reached me at intervals from the revelling on the other deck. Yet I
could not put out of my heart an apprehension of some luring treachery in
this scene of beauty--and certainly the world can offer nothing more
wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over a
smooth expanse of water. Was it not in such a calm as this that the
unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had shuddered,
and gone down, forever? I seemed to behold a symbol; and there came into
my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but are, I do not know just
why, a little ashamed of to-day:

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17