TEN YEARS OF CHAUTAUQUA.
This is the Chautauqua decennial year. Is it possible that it is ten years? So rapid has been the growth, so many and varied the ideas and features added from year to year, that we have not noted the flight of time. Not in the space of a single editorial can be cited the results of the first decade of Chautauqua history. It seems strange to remember that only ten years ago Chautauqua and Chautauqua Lake were comparatively unknown. Of the thousands who now, from north and south, east and west, annually flock hither, few had then even heard of its existence. It is not egotism, but only just to say that the lake owes its now national fame to the present Chautauqua of the lake.
The visitor of ten or even five years ago is struck with the changes in the physical aspect of the local Chautauqua. Then a few rude cottages and tents in the woods with undressed and unkept grounds, now a large village of beautiful summer homes. The unsightly tent has yielded to the one graceful and attractive, and tents and cottages are all ranged in comely streets. Ruts and gullies have been replaced with grades and lawns. Even the old Auditorium which was thought in former days to be without a rival of its kind, though still standing there in honor, has been compelled to yield precedence to the amphitheater of vaster proportions and better appointments. But the list is too long for recital. There is the grand Hotel Athenæum, said to rival any wood structure in the State, and equally superlative in every quality as a home for its guests; there too is the Oriental House, Model of Jerusalem, Hall of Philosophy, Children’s Temple, Tabernacle, and, if you listen a moment, there is sound of hammer and saw as the work of building and improving goes on rapidly as ever.
But if all this is of the local Chautauqua, what of the Chautauqua which is national—nay, more than national? Ten years ago from a very few of the neighboring States was gathered the first Sunday-school Assembly. To-day the methods and ideas of that and subsequent assemblies are being employed and taught by thousands of Sunday-school teachers throughout the Union. Then, the able and eloquent speakers that stood on the platform were heard only within the range of their vocal power, but now the pages of the Assembly Daily Herald catch their thoughts and send them to distances of hundreds and thousands of miles in all directions. The personnel of the Chautauqua platform, excellent as it was in the beginning, has been enhanced each year by others of the most distinguished thinkers, scholars and orators of this country and from beyond the waters.
We do not know how many dreamers there may have been, nor what their dreams, but certainly none of the thousands of enthusiastic visitors to Chautauqua in those days dreamed of the C. L. S. C. with tens of thousands of earnest students, of the School of Languages, Teachers’ Retreat, and School of Theology, with all their characteristics of power and inspiration.
Ten years of Chautauqua! Prolific mother, not alone of the above offspring, but of children resembling herself, and doing similar work at Lakeside, Lake Bluff, South Framingham, at Monterey, on the Pacific slope, at Monteagle, Tenn., and elsewhere. Only ten years! and yet the “Chautauqua Idea” has taken root, and is yielding its fruit of popular education in all the States and in the Territories. Ten years, and the meridian is not yet reached. Ten years are but a beginning in any work so far reaching, so broad in its scope as the work of Chautauqua. What has been done is but the starting point to what will be done. The years to follow have much to reveal in the maturity of the plans and principles now in operation, and of new ones yet to be inaugurated.
SOCIAL LIFE IN THE C. L. S. C.
The C. L. S. C. is becoming a great social power. From the first it has recognized that one of the great needs of the majority of the people is healthy, active companionship; that for such companionship people will undertake tasks for which they have otherwise little taste, and under its stimulus will do much good work. It has recognized that if the social life be kept clean and invigorating, there is no danger of any one sinking into idleness or vice. Its power for good lies in the fact that its method of work contains the very elements which are necessary for a pure, wholesome social life. In the first place it calls people together regularly and insures their intimate acquaintance. One of the great hindrances to cordial social intercourse is that people do not meet frequently and informally, so that they know each other well. We are prone to invest those with whom we have but a passing acquaintance with a dignity or knowledge so superior to our own that we are actually afraid of them. The local circle breaks this up. We learn to know our associates. No less important is it that the members of society take their rank according to merit. No other standard will be used in local circles. The ability to lead is the only quality which will give a member the leadership. The C. L. S. C. is veritably the People’s College, leveling all ranks.
The reason, we may say, for the flatness of social life in the ordinary town, is that the members have, or find, so little to think about. People will not gossip, nor be recklessly extravagant, nor indulge in insipid flirtations if they have wholesome subjects for thought. The course of reading furnishes topics of vigor and interest. The mind is kept active. The tone of the society is changed, because the members are thinking and are experiencing the pleasure of an interchange of ideas and knowledge. Their society life becomes a recreation, instead, as is so often the case, dissipation.