Part 10

Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages, over an old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt sleeves, the women in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses for tables, mats (we had not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for seats. The natural practice of bringing discarded furniture from home to furnish the cottages led to the only distinctive piece of Chautauqua furniture I recall—a long high-backed bench made from an old-fashioned four-post bedstead. There were few garrets in all the country about Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more such bedsteads. They had been hidden away when families could afford the new-styled quartered-oak or walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind had seen that by shortening the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width, using the headboard for a back, you had a commodious and, with cushions, a comfortable seat, even couch. They were scattered all over the place.

With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.

Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George, we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.”

Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community, laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center of democratic, Christian culture.

Dr. Vincent’s masterpiece, as I always thought, came in 1878 when he laid before his Chautauquans a plan which had been long simmering in his never quiet mind. He did this in the finest of what we call inspirational talks that I ever heard—at least it stirred me so deeply that I have never forgotten the face of the orator nor, more important, the upturned faces of his hearers. He announced a scheme for a four-year course of home reading under the direction of the Chautauqua management adapted to men and women who had missed a college education, but who felt a deep desire for knowledge and were willing to adopt any practical plan which would give them a college outlook. It was to be called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

Now this does not sound exciting; but as a matter of fact it was deeply exciting, for the speaker was pouring out his heart. He had never had a college education; he had never ceased to feel the lack of what he believed it would have given him. He had struggled to make up for his loss by persistent, systematic daily reading and study. Establishing the habit as a boy, he had never abandoned it. It had given him deep satisfaction, supplied, he thought, the college outlook. He believed there were thousands of men and women in the United States, scores, possibly hundreds, in his audience, who had been forced, as he had been, to sacrifice their early ambitions for education. They had hidden the hunger in their hearts where at times it still gnawed. He was offering them the same help he had found, and confidently, glowingly, he outlined the course of home reading which Dr. John H. Finley has so aptly named the American Adult Education Pioneer.

The uplifted faces all about me told the story, particularly the faces of the women of thirty or more. Women of that generation had had their natural desire for knowledge intensified by the Woman’s Rights movement, in which the strongest plank had been a demand for the opportunity for higher education. These women were now beyond the day when they could go to college, but here was something which they saw intuitively was practical.

The immediacy of their response was in a degree accounted for by their devotion to Dr. Vincent. I suppose most of the women who frequented Chautauqua were more or less in love with him, the worship a man of overflowing sentiment receives from the benches, but most of his audience would have preferred to die rather than reveal their secret passion.

Well, it was a great emotional experience with large and immediate practical results, for, before the summer session was over, eight thousand people had joined the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

They had joined, and they were buying the books chosen. The most important volume in that first year’s course was Green’s “Short History of the English People”—in my judgment the most important book save one that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle ever included, that exception being W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits.” The sudden demand for so large and expensive a volume as Green’s History, outside of regular trade channels, followed as it was by spectacular sales of other books from which neither publisher nor writer had expected anything out of the normal, set the whole publishing world agog, and naturally raised the question, “How are we to get in on this new market?”

There were many approaches, all legitimate enough so far as I know. I found a rather amusing proof of one not long ago in Marjorie Wiggin Prescott’s fine collection of manuscripts and rare books—a volume of Lew Wallace’s “Ben Hur” enriched by a letter to the publisher, signed by Mrs. Wallace and dated November 24, 1884. The letter, which is self-explanatory, is reproduced here with Mrs. Prescott’s permission.

Crawfordsville, Nov. 24, 1884.

Dear Sir

Because of inquiries of correspondents as to the number of wives Gen. Wallace has had, I have thought best to instruct you to add to the dedication of Ben-Hur, making it:

To The Wife of My Youth who still abides with me

This with Gen. Wallace’s consent.

Several literary clubs have made it a handbook for study in connection with Roman History. If by some means you could have it adopted by the Chautauqua Club, which numbers twenty thousand members, it might be worth while to try. Pardon the suggestion.

May I ask you to furnish me a report of the sales of Ben-Hur, year by year, from the beginning?

With high regard,

Very truly yours SUSAN E. WALLACE.

As the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle grew, there came increasing necessity of a steady sympathetic administration. To help in this task it was decided in 1880 to establish a monthly organ—The Chautauquan, it was to be called—in which portions of the required readings could be published more cheaply than in book form, and through which by counsel and suggestions the leaders could keep in closer touch with the readers—better meet their needs. Dr. Vincent was quick to sense weak places in the organization, and ingenious in devising ways to take care of them. It was to try out one of his devices that Dr. Flood was now asking my temporary help.

Here was the situation that had been uncovered—hundreds of those who had joined the great circle and bought its books were without dictionaries, encyclopaedias, explanatory helps of any kind, and they lived too far away—on the Plains, in the mountains, on distant farms—to reach libraries. Headquarters were inundated with questions: How do you pronounce this word, translate this phrase? Who was this man, this woman? What does this or that mean?

“Could not The Chautauquan take care of this difficulty,” suggested Dr. Vincent, “by annotating the portions of the various texts to be read in that particular month? Let some one try it out.”

As I happened to be the “some one” within reach when Dr. Flood received the suggestion, the attempt was put up to me—temporary trial, I was made to understand. Now I had known from childhood homes and towns where there were practically no books beyond the Bible and the children’s spellers. As books had always come after bread in our household I naturally pitied those who did not have them; so I undertook the notes with the determination to make them as helpful as I could.

To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar notes each month.

“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.

I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two weeks of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the microscope—that my future was in it, I did not dream.

But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered; Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for The Chautauquan, had them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had read the proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the world in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally, and when it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many Chautauqua readers who did not have books of reference, there were more that did and knew how to use them.