hen 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 turn more and
more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's
or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may
still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan
enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that
are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an
enormous scale. _Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn_. Even
now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every
small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[P]

[P] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however,
only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems
everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.

With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward
Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on
the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my
senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I
had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at
life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the
spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the