ers and poets; and to-day the lyceums
are served by a new species of broker, who ekes out the failing literary
material with the better entertainment of music and play-acting."

I am not sure whether the new species of broker is not better than the
old. So long as music and play-acting do not masquerade in the worn-out
duds of intellect, they do not inflict a serious injury upon the people.
It is culture, false and unashamed, that is the danger. For culture
is the vice of the intelligence. It stands to literature in the same
relation as hypocrisy stands to religion. A glib familiarity with names
does duty for knowledge. Men and women think it no shame to play the
parrot to lecturers, and to pretend an acquaintance with books whose
leaves they have never parted. They affect intellect, when at its best
it is curiosity which drives them to lecture hall or institute--at its
worst, a love of mental dram-drinking. To see manifest in a frock-coat
a poet or man of science whose name is printed in the newspapers fills
them with a fearful enthusiasm. To hear the commonplaces of literary
criticism delivered in a lofty tone of paradox persuades them to believe
that they also are among the erudite, and makes the sacrifice of time
and money as light as a wind-blown leaf. But their indiscretion is not
so trivial as it seems. Though every man and every woman has the right
to waste his time (or hers) as may seem good, something else besides
time is lost in the lecture hall. Sincerity also is squandered in the
grey, dim light of sham learning, and nobody can indulge in a mixed
orgie of "culture" without some sacrifice of honesty and truth.

Culture, of course, is not the monopoly of Boston. It has stretched its
long arm from end to end of the American continent. Wherever you go you
will hear, in tram or car, the facile gossip of literature. The whole
world seems familiar with great names, though the meaning of the names
escapes the vast majority. Now the earnest ones of the earth congregate
in vast tea-gardens of the intellect, such as Chautauqua. Now the
summer hotel is thought a fit place in which to pick up a smattering of
literature or science; and there is an uneasy feeling abroad that
what is commonly known as pleasure must not be unalloyed. The vice,
unhappily, is not unknown in England. A country which had the ingenuity
to call a penny reading "university extension," and to send its
missionaries into every town, cannot be held gu