ng 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 pronunc