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.