Part 1 — EDITOR’S OUTLOOK.

PUBLIC MEN IN LITERATURE.

Until recently Americans have had good grounds for complaining that their public servants were almost a minus quantity in literature. The complaint had an especially sharp edge in view of the fact that at an earlier period our Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and others, had been among the foremost writers of the country; and it was still further aggravated by the contrast we seemed to present to France, England, and Germany, where a public man is usually also a literary man. The rule in France is that an eminent politician is an author, and the most distinguished statesmen and princes have written books. Even Louis Napoleon wrote a book on Cæsar, and one of the best accounts of our late war is the stately volumes of Count de Paris. In England, the rule is the same. The queen herself takes pride in the books she has produced. John Bright is almost alone in having no literary tastes, but his speeches will long survive in the volumes they will fill. Disraeli and Gladstone, Bulwer and Macaulay, Fawcett and Dilke, are only a few contemporary names in along list of distinguished statesmen who have excelled as writers for periodicals and as producers of books. In this country, from about 1830 to 1880, our public men wrote little. Benton’s “Thirty Years,” Webster’s speeches, and Sumner’s orations, and some other less famous works, do indeed redeem the half century; but when we have said all that can be said in praise of exceptions, the rule seems to have been that an American politician was not a writer, and a phrase of contempt attributed to an eminent Senator expresses the feelings of our politicians against “them literary fellers” in a form which is full of a significance from which we prefer to turn away our ears. Too many of our public men have despised literature, and justified literature in returning the sentiment with interest.

We are entering upon a happier period. The American statesman is returning to authorship. It is a wholesome change. Mr. Blaine’s history will occur to many readers as an illustration. It is hardly less noteworthy that his late associate on the Republican ticket has written for The Chautauquan able papers on a public question which is a living issue. A very long list might be made of public men who are in good fame as writers. The witty S. S. Cox will at once occur to all our memories, and another eminent Democrat is said to be writing a history of his times. General Grant finds relief from the terrible strain of his financial misfortunes in writing the history of his battles. We have employed some of our most gifted authors as diplomats; as, for example, Motley, the historian, James Russell Lowell, the poet and literary critic, and George P. Marsh, the man of universal knowledge; but it may, probably will, come to pass that some of their stamp will more and more appear in our public life at home. We have kept poets, philosophers, and novelists alive by giving them clerkships in Custom Houses. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Howells, “Ik Marvel” (Donald G. Mitchell), and others, rose to the dignity of consulships. Francis Lieber was tolerated in a Custom House clerkship in New York. We are probably coming to the time when such men may be members of Congress and shape the legislation of the country. Literary men are usually the most practical of men; that they are dreamers of impossibilities is the strangest of our popular delusions. A few exceptions have been carelessly considered as making the rule for the class. The sort of practicality—tempered by philosophy—which the literary man brings to affairs is what our public life most needs. All clean knowledge is a light where it abides, and the value of unclean knowledge (such as some practical politicians boast themselves in), is a forlorn minus quantity.

The advantages to be anticipated from the increase of the literary spirit in our public men are too numerous to be here set forth in detail. A few suggestions must suffice for our present purpose. In the first place, public men are experts, and have therefore valuable knowledge to impart. We are all well aware that General Grant knows important things about his battles which other men do not know. It is equally true that any clerk in a department, or any member of Congress has an intimate acquaintance with many concernments of considerable moment. A man who has served ten years in Congress could instruct and please us all if he had the art of describing the methods of law making. It is not a pleasant fact that the writing of a book on “Congressional Government,” which is at once philosophical and entertaining, should have been left to a college professor; nor is it pleasant to feel that the author of this book, Professor Woodrow Wilson, is probably the last man whom Baltimore will think of sending to Congress. The men who see the meaning of things and connect them with principles, and align them with historical precedents, are needed in Congress to give it dignity and character. In short, we ought to send our best men to Congress, and we are approaching an era when “best men” will generally be possessed of literary tastes and habits. Our public life is rich in materials for useful books and entertaining novels. Most of these materials lie neglected because we send inferior men to our public work. Another distinct advantage will be found in the preservation of many bright men whom we send to Congress from rusting out of intellectual brightness and becoming mere political workers. The majority of men sent to Congress are college men; they have had some literary tastes and habits. They have often been journalists. The public opinion which hedges them in converts them into office hunters and office peddlers, and consumes their lives in routine and political anxiety, to the detriment of all generous and aspiring manhood. The man whose brain work, in periodicals and books, will secure his position before his constituents, is a man saved.

The change which is going on is mainly the work of the enterprising managers of periodicals. Most good literary work in our day first reaches the public in periodicals. Much excellent work is found only in periodicals. The editors have discovered that there is valuable matter to be had by encouraging public men to write. Our articles by General Logan, for example, contain a view of a great question which is best seen in all its aspects by a public man who has seen all sides of it in a Congressional committee. Many similar articles have in recent years appeared in literary periodicals. An invitation to present his views to the public through such a periodical as The Chautauquan is a challenge to candor and a stimulus to thoroughness. The work done educates the statesman while it informs the people. It creates an intelligent sympathy between public servants and those whom they serve. It carries on that form of education in which light and wisdom are put into the first place, while turgid bombast and self-seeking buncombe are rendered odious to the people whom they have deceived.

THE DECLINE OF SPIRITUALITY IN THE CHURCH.

Among the unpleasant reflections which the reading of Bishop Hurst’s “History of the Reformation” will be apt to awaken in many minds is that there has been a great decline in the spirituality of the church. In those days religious earnestness was at its maximum; we seem to be passing through a period when it is at a minimum. How far the seeming is accurate, it may not be easy to determine; but appearances are against the modern church. All our religious services lack in spirituality. The lack is in the sermon, the song, the prayer. Family religion has apparently little of the intense power of the former days. The conversation of Christians is less frequently on religious subjects. We are carefully weeding out of familiar speech the old references to Providence, Death and Judgment. We fall into silence when one among us introduces such themes. Religious feeling and expression have disappeared from the surface of our life in a most astonishing way. We are not made, the unconverted are not made, to feel the force and warmth of religious conviction. The sermons are logical, literary and cold; if there be warmth, it seems to be rather intellectual than religious. The more able religious editors complain that they can not get written for them articles which are at once readable and spiritual; while other editors condemn any articles of that type as savoring of a “dreary religiosity;” and others say that the expression of religious experience has “hopelessly gone into the keeping of cranks and weak-headed and morally-unsound persons.” One man says: “I can imagine nothing sweeter to hear than religious experience ought to be; but when I listen to it I hear either out-worn phrases or senseless fanaticism; and these have been driven from the respectable churches and are monopolized by ignorant egotists in the out-of-the-way corners of the country.”

A partial explanation of the facts lies in the statement just quoted. But it is very partial. Why should fanatical zeal kill genuine earnestness? If we think and feel earnestly in religion, why do we not talk of what is burning in our hearts, as the fathers did, in language of our own? A round of set phrases does denote vacancy of spirit, but the earnest spirit is not banished from our heart by the formalism of another’s speech. It may be pleaded for us that we are in a transition state; that the Reformation did develop a form of earnestness, and that our earnestness can not work in that harness and is reverently silent because appropriate speech is wanting. But why do not hundreds of ministers who have all gifts of intellect utter spiritual thought and emotion? Why are they forever dealing rather with opinions than facts of the spiritual life? We ask such questions in no censorious spirit; they are pressed home to many anxious hearts, and the wonder grows whether modern Christianity is tongueless respecting its experience because it is backslidden and even skeptical. We could frame, as has often been done, explanations; but we still doubt whether they really explain. The spiritual activity is of all inner motions the one least likely to lose all power to express itself.

It is true that a vast body of believers have the spirit of giving and of work. They make noble offerings, they teach the children in Sunday-schools, they make sacrifices of time and ease and money to carry on churches. In these things no former generation had so glorious a record. It is probably true that this vast body of believers contains as large a proportion as any Reformation body of persons who would die for their faith. It can not be said of such a body of persons that faith is not in it. Making all allowances for conventionality and religious fashion, there remains proof enough that the modern church believes. Nor can we doubt its spiritual poverty. It is poor in the divine life. This state of things can not last. We are in a condition where faith must fail if love does not come to the rescue. The greatest of all revivals may be at the door. The church wants nothing but vital godliness—experience of divine things. It has so much of zeal, benevolence, self-sacrifice, philanthropy, that we can not so much as hint at despair. Is it possible that some of our philanthropies are too consuming and exhaust us? If we will stop to think and take account of ourselves, we shall probably find that we lack spirituality because we do not want it. That discovery may be the one thing needed to arouse us to strenuous spiritual endeavor.

THE SHAKSPEREAN ANNIVERSARY.

The fourth century of Shakspere will be remembered either as the century of Shaksperean skepticism or as the one in which the play-actor was stripped of Bacon’s clothes and reduced to his proper condition of play-actor. That we can so much as entertain this latter thought proves that the skepticism has made considerable progress. We do not believe that Bacon wrote the Shaksperean plays; but we are obliged to pay to those who do believe it such respect as is paid to Strauss with his theory that Jesus is a mythical person. Another Shaksperean year is completed on the 23d of April, and its most significant event is an increase of skeptics. We are doubtless to have a thorough sifting of the facts and a large debate. No lover of the great dramas need regret the discussion. It will provoke the study of them and enlarge their fame. They are the great dramas of the world. No others equal them in breadth and fervor. Whatever stimulates the study of them must be useful to the higher forms of literature. One way of looking at the subject of the authorship of these plays is to regard the question as of no absolute importance. The plays are what they are, whoever wrote them; just as the Homeric poetry does not lose a line through the Homeric skepticism. It is an audacious thing to attack Shakspere as a wearer of another man’s clothes, after three centuries of his renown. He lived in the public eye. All London knew him. Some envied and sneered, but none doubted him until some three hundred years after his birth; if there were doubts they were so feeble that nothing came of them. Is it the function of the press and the reporter—making great and small seem alike—which has made Shaksperean skepticism almost respectable, if not entirely so? Whatever be the cause, “the news” spreads that Bacon wrote our Shaksperean works, and the debate is growing into bulk, if not into a serious concernment. We are not a bit touched with the skepticism; it seems to us unreasonable, beyond ordinary measure in unreason; and yet we must recognize the growth of the new theory of the authorship of our glorious drama.

The change next to the foregoing in importance which marks the fourth Shaksperean century is the new way in which the great mass of his admirers come to know and enjoy him. He has passed from the stage to the study, the parlor, the school-room. He is acted a little; he is read a great deal. In his first and second centuries he was known almost exclusively through the stage; in his third, the stage and the book divided about equally the office of making him known; in the fourth, Shaksperean acting has become insignificant in comparison with the general reading and teaching of Shakspere. His works are coming to be studied in all high schools, academies and colleges. Shakspere is in nearly all libraries, be they large or small. One may almost say that he is at home in nearly every house where English is read. There is hardly a town in the country which does not boast at least one well-established “Shakspere Club.” Year after year the members meet weekly to read and talk over the merits of the one writer who never tires them. The scholars of all lands know him in the printed page; all the great tongues have books of criticism in which he occupies a conspicuous place. One view of this transition from the stage to the study and the school is that Shakspere was always too large for the theater. It was in the largest sense impossible to act his plays. All acting narrowed and misrepresented him. The larger field of the book is his proper home. He gains by the liberty and healthfulness of the modern environment. The two changes which we note will bear on each other. Too many persons are coming to know what and how Shakspere wrote to permit any star-chamber of criticism to settle the authorship of these plays in darkness and secrecy; the power to form a judgment is being created in the minds of the great jury whose verdict will probably kill off the Shaksperean skepticism. We do not believe it will survive to 1964, the end of Shakspere’s fourth century.

ART IN THE UNITED STATES.

If it is possible for this nation to become artistic in tastes and habits, we shall not fail. There is no branch of special education more enthusiastically advocated and patronized. Of course the end in view will require more advocacy and more patronage—a great deal more—but we are doing so much that the necessary more will doubtless be done. It should be remembered too, that if blood tells in the matter of art culture we have no lack of blood drawn from the artistic nations. Flemings, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and even Greeks, come to New York in large numbers; and if Anglo-Saxon blood were condemned as unartistic by inevitable natural incapacity, we should still be able to produce great artists in abundance—if method, zeal, and patronage could do this thing. We will not prophesy; let us wait and see. It is understood, of course, that much, perhaps most of our art, is industrial. We need to educate a large corps of designers for useful goods, which are also ornamental; and this type of artist is so well rewarded when he displays inventive faculty that we are likely to surpass all other peoples in this department of work. It is not easy to separate completely in our thinking this branch of art from that which aims only at artistic pleasure. A design for goods may be perfect art, and satisfy all the requirements of the æsthetic sense. But it is obvious that decorative art is very close to industrial art in nature and purpose. And the purpose has always been condemned by high art, for it looks straight at the sale of the goods at good prices.

It is complained every year in New York, when the art exhibitions come on for criticism, that the pecuniary motive for work, and the avidity of artists for good sales, depress the imagination of the lovers of good work. In substance, then, our trouble as to art—that we are a commercial race—seems to get into the schools and infect their atmosphere. The evil is not that success is rewarded; but that success is not possible to an artist who thinks always of his reward. Art, like religion, requires a spirit of self-renunciation. Success in art is not possible to one who consumes his energy in thinking about the sale of his pictures. To become rich by art one must be first willing to starve to death in the service of art truth. We are not demanding such sacrifices; we are only suggesting that without the spirit of them the pure art of this country will not attain the eminence which our enthusiasm seeks to reach.

“Sordid treatment” of themes is inevitable in the sordid atmosphere which, we are told, is breathed in all our circles of art. Besides, the museums are founded by good natured people who are poor guides and directors and yet must control, because they are patrons. One art journal declares that enough energy has in the last five years been expended in behalf of art to have given it a firm establishment. It adds that most of this energy has been wasted. Art students and art teachers and art institutions and publications multiply, but they do not give us high art. We read this complaint and recall the story of the oil-king in western Pennsylvania who ordered the teacher of his daughter to “buy her a capacity, without regard to expense.” If art comes to us to stay it will come by a slow change of thought, feeling, and aspiration. It is probable that this change has begun; let us hope that it will ripen to a gracious and mellowed maturity. The art-life will find ample room in our hospitable civilization, if it can acquire the courage to live its own life and escape being a parasite on the robust body of our commercial life.