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.