Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy!  There had been spread before me the realization—­on a small, sample scale of course—­of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving:  security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia.  There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I could.

So I meditated.  And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment.  And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,—­the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger.

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.  But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear.  The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars.  But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on.  The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble.  Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still—­this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest.  At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place’s historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.

Such absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauqua’s flatness and lack of zest.

But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay?  It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right.  An irremediable flatness is coming over the world.  Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers’ conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro.  And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future