harm in him. He was, as the common phrase has it, his own enemy. But he would be better employed in looking at a game of baseball than in playing with humane letters, and one cannot but regret that he should suffer thus profoundly from a vicious system. Another victim of culture comes to my mind. He, too, was from Boston, and as his intelligence was far deeper than the other one's, his unhappiness was the greater. I talked to him for a long day, and he had no conversation but of books. For him the visible world did not exist. The printed page was the beginning and the end of existence. He had read, if not wisely, at least voraciously, and he displayed a wide and profound acquaintance with modern biography. He had all the latest Lives at his finger-tips. He knew where all our great contemporaries lived, and who were their friends; he had attended lectures on every conceivable subject; withal he was of a high seriousness, which nothing could daunt. For him, as is but natural, the works of Mr. Arthur Benson held the last "message" of modern literature. He could not look upon books as mere instruments of pleasure or enjoyment. He wanted to extract from them that mysterious quality called "help" by the elect of the lecture hall; and without the smallest persuasion he told me which authors had "helped" him in his journey through the world. Shelley, of course, stood first on the list, then came Walt Whitman, and Pater was not far from the top. And there was nothing more strange in this apostle of aesthetics than his matter-of-fact air. His words were the words of a yearning spirit. His tone was the tone of a statistician. Had he really read the books of which he spoke? Did they really "help" him in the making of money, which was the purpose of his life, or did they minister to a mind diseased? I do not know. But I do know that there was a kind of pathos in his cold anxiety. Plainly he was a man of quick perception and alert intelligence. And he seemed to have wasted a vast amount of time in acquiring a jargon which certainly was not his own, and in attaching to books a meaning and purpose which they have never possessed.
Such are two widely different products of the lecture hall, and it is impossible not to see that, widely as their temperaments differ, they have been pushed through the same mill. And thus we arrive at the worst vice of enforced culture. Culture is, like the overhead railroad, a mere saviour of time. It is the tramway of knowledge which compels all men to travel by the same car, whatever may be their ultimate destination. It possesses all the inconvenience of pleasures taken or duties performed in common. The knowledge which is sincere and valuable must be acquired by each man separately; it must correspond to the character and disposition of him who acquires it, or it is a thin disguise of vanity and idleness. To what, then, may we attribute this passion for the lecture hall? Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, and with the smallest exertion.
Above all, culture is the craving of an experimental age, and America no doubt will outgrow it domination. Even now Boston, its earliest slave, is shaking off the yoke; and it is taking refuge in the more modern cities of the West. Chicago is, I believe, its newest and vastest empire. There, where all is odd, it is well to be thought a "thinker." There, we are told, the elect believe it their duty "to reach and stimulate others." But wherever culture is found Strange things are done in its name, and the time may come when by the light of Chicago's brighter lamp Boston may seem to dwell in the outer darkness.
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