Chautauqua Institution

“ So planned and so engineered, Chautauqua is the university of the common people, of the great middle class that constitute the strength and glory of every country, and especially of ours. Its numbers are prodigious, its extent is world wide. It sets a splendid example for all nations. It strikes the keynote for the education eventually of the whole human race. In our land it is destined to do more for the perpetuation of our free institutions than many another time-honored school or college that limits its benefits to some privileged class, sex, color or section. ”

“ It certainly is not too much to claim for literature that it is an interest broad enough in its range and reach of power to be called a general, if not a universal interest of civilized mankind.
We have next and last to consider the kind or quality of this expansive influence. As I have said, it is not to most men a material good. Only to those who live by literature, to those who make books, to our men and women of letters distinctively so-called, is literature a material interest. To the vast majority of us all, literature is chiefly a spiritual, an intellectual, a sentimental good. ”

“ The conduits of literature run everywhere. The current flows to every mind within the bounds of civilization. Men may not know this, but they share the blessing all the same without knowing it. There are, I suppose, plenty of people in New York, who, when they turn the faucet to their water-pipe, not once dream that the fountain which they see springing as if by magic under their touch, is a true river brought from forty miles away. But true river it is nevertheless. Certainly not one in a hundred thousand of New Yorkers has ever tasted of Croton river where it flows in its natural bed. ”

“ Perhaps one of the first attractions was the charm which the Hall and Grove never failed to exercise, a charm which always contributed to the success and enjoyment of Round-Tables, Vesper Services and Vigils. The rustling trees, the long rays of golden light, the fair vistas of sky and water and sun-lit foliage which one catches through the frame-work of white pillars produce that strong sympathy, that oneness with the life of nature which elevates the heart, invigorates the mind, and for the time, at least, raises one above mere earth life. ”

“ And were they not literature, those lullabies that quieted us in our cradle, the fairy tales that fed the fancy of our wondering childhood, the stories from the Bible that expanded our infant minds to embrace the idea of a God, of a Savior, of a future life, of heaven, and of hell? Those men seem not to know what their words mean; those men who talk of expunging literature, and bringing up the new generations of mankind on science. ”

“ The crown that is upon the brow of science is composed of stars, every one of which is a star from God’s own heavens, and the hieroglyphic roll she has in her hands, which we strive to read, is God’s own words, no less than the printed book, from which we study of his word and his works. Science and religion stand at the door of God’s great temple, beckoning with one hand to those who stand without, and with the other pointing to Him who sits upon the throne within. ”

“ Literature is a universal good. How many of you spend time in gazing heavenward at the sun? But you see by the light of the sun none the less. The sun lights the world in thousands and ten thousands of places where he does not directly shine. And literature is a sun. It blazes high in the heavens and spreads its beneficent illumination everywhere abroad among the haunts of civilized mankind. ”

“ Literature, as I understand her spirit, is catholic and generous. If I have myself any capacity of liberal love for human progress in whatever sphere, I have derived that capacity in no small degree from the inspiration of literature. I should wrong my own client, I should grieve her, I should earn rejection at her hands, if I stood here, or elsewhere, in the name of literature, to say aught, as if on her behalf, against a sister that she loves. For literature loves science, and will contentedly hear nothing to her harm. ”

“ Take away the light of literature from the world of mind—why, it would be like putting out the sun in the heavens. The very men who talk of such a vandalism, such an unspeakable, such an anachronistic vandalism, these very men would grope as in Cimmerian darkness. I will tell you what the effect would be like. It would be like suddenly annihilating all the civilized inhabitants of the world and endowing the unreclaimed savages of waste and wild with the powers and appliances that centuries of science have accumulated for the service of mankind. ”

“ But it is among the plants that we find the most beautiful occupants of the oak tree. The ivy climbs up its trunk, which affords admirable support for its myriads of little feet, and changes its glossy leaves, as it creeps higher and higher, from the deeply-cut angular pattern to the oval and pointed one; and at the top it waves its airy sprays among the oak leaves, and produces beside the acorns at the extremities of the branches, the light-green flowers that blossom only when the plant has nothing to cling to and must shift for itself ”

“ Now, it is scarcely necessary for me to point this to you who are pursuing both literature and science, that both of these develop the mind. Science as well as literature develops the soul and the spirit of man, the inner life. Science is teaching us to observe. It is teaching us other things, but that is all I wish to say to you this afternoon. It is teaching us to observe—how to use our eyes. It is astonishing how many men and women there are in this world who do not know how to use their eyes. Science is making us observant of the minuter as well as of the grander of God’s works. ”

“ Why, the fact is that literature is the very atmosphere, the intellectual atmosphere, in which we all, not some of us, but all of us, live and breathe and have our being. We drew in this air as soon as we began to think. Long before we could read for ourselves, before even we could listen understandingly to the reading of others, we felt unconsciously, but most really, and most profoundly, the effect, the beneficial effect of literature. ”

“ Literature is a drone and an idler. Science works and produces. Science has done for us all the things enumerated, with many things beside, too many for enumeration, in which literature has had no useful part at all. Literature is a fine gentleman, a fine lady, sitting by with folded hands, hands folded and too delicate, far too delicate, for any productive employment. We can get along without this ornament to our civilization—the delight, the luxury of a few, a burden which the many must drudge to support. ”

“ I am told that exactly because literature is not to all a good, but a good only to the select and favored few, because literature is aristocratic, not democratic; because it is a luxury, not a necessity; because it concerns not the average man, but the picked man, one in a thousand, not the thousand—exactly because of this, I am told, it is that literature has got to give way and let science, which is a universal interest, take its too long usurped place. ”

“ They give no shelter or support to any created thing. They suffice for themselves, and stand out clearly defined in their distinct and independent existence. The surface of the snow is barren; the chilly glacier has no communion with the mountain glen through which it passes. The clear, sharp-cut crystal harbors no stain from earth or sky to show its sympathy with the materials out of which it sprang. The marble rock, like the snow, does not invite the green things of the soil around it to share its existence with it, and give to and take from it an element of picturesqueness and beauty. ”

“ It teaches us not merely to observe with our eyes, but with our inward nature. We do not simply see works. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” You do not know a library because you know the names of the books that are printed on the backs of them, and you have not begun to know science because you have begun to gather a few isolated facts out of the heaven above, or the rocks beneath, or the trees. Not until you have learned what is in the books do you know literature; not until you know what is the truth that lies behind nature and palpitates within it, do you know science. ”

“ But of the two kinds of comfort one is a great deal closer to us, and a great deal more durable than the other. If I had to choose between them I should not hesitate a moment. I should say, give me a mind at ease. The mind is master after all. Who has not seen men and women stretched helpless and hopeless on the rack of bodily pain, but triumphing nevertheless into peace and joy? ”

“ For the scientists themselves, I acknowledge, for that comparatively small number of men who engage in the pursuits of science as a business of their life, science does much more. For these men science affords a means to vast enlargement and ennoblement of mind. The brilliant hypotheses, the bold speculations, the broad generalizations, the stimulating guesses, the expansive conceptions, with which science deals—what can be thought of more fitted to feed the imagination and reason of man and advance him to the strength and stature of angels than is such occupation of mind as these afford? ”

“ Leisure is a good to us when we use it well, not otherwise. It is not using leisure well to spend the time and the strength saved to us through science from the sordid demands of mere subsistence—getting, in accumulating appliances of pleasure. We may indeed accumulate the appliances so, but we shall never so accumulate the pleasure. God has planned it for us otherwise. Comfort turned into luxury ceases to be comfort. What then shall we do with our leisure when, at the gift of wealth through science, we have gained our leisure? ”

“ The huge patriarch, hoary with years, whose lifetime bridges across the whole history of England, allows the tiny imps of vegetation that are but of yesterday—the perpetual infants, so to speak, of plant life, freely to clamber over its roots and arms, and hang upon its rugged bosses which time has used so cruelly, reducing them almost to bone and muscle, their emerald bracelets of moss, their plumes of polypody ferns, and their rosettes of lichen, adorning the magnificent old grandfather of the woods with the ornaments of youth and beauty! ”

“ In other words, we palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of God, as if nature herself had lured us to our ruin; the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny insect and teaches the eye to protect itself against a mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards against the greatest danger to health and happiness. ”