Part 10

I believe this to be the reason why a love for books is so little considered among the modern qualifications of librarianship; it appears in acts, not in words; it cannot be ascertained by asking questions. He who protests that he has it must needs be an object of suspicion. And yet I venture to say that if any librarian has made a conspicuous success of his work, apart from the mere mechanics of it, he has achieved that success primarily and notably through love of books. This I assert to be the case down to the assistant of lowest grade.

To be good, work must be ungrudging. And though other things than love for one’s task may make one willing to do it and able to do it well, intelligent interest is always a prime factor in securing the best results.

And love of one’s work becomes a very simple matter when there is love of the subject matter of that work. Those who lament that they are doomed to drudgery should remember that drudgery is subjective. All work consists of a series of acts which taken apart from their relationships are unimportant and uninteresting, but which acquire importance and interest from those relationships. It is so also with sports. Think how childish are the mere acts of striking a ball with a racket or of kicking an inflated leather sphere over a cross-bar! Yet in their proper sequence with other acts they may be the object of the breathless interest or enthusiasm of thousands of spectators. And if this may be the case with a mere game, how much more so with an occupation that is part of the world’s life! To dip a brush in color and draw it across a canvas is a simple act, yet such acts in their sequence may produce a work of art. Here the workman understands the position and value of each act in the sequence; hence he is not apt to feel it as drudgery. Drudgery is work in which the elementary acts are performed unintelligently, with little or no appreciation of their position in the scheme of things, as when a day laborer toils at digging a hole in the ground without the slightest knowledge of its purpose, not caring, indeed, whether it is to be a post-hole or a grave. But to the man who is searching for buried treasure the digging ceases to be drudgery; he knows what he is about, and every shovelful as it is lifted brings him nearer to possible gold and gems. To change drudgery into interested labor, therefore, realize what you are doing; know its relation to what has gone before and what is to come; understand what it is you are working on and what you are working for. Learn to love that something; and all that you can do to shape it, to increase its usefulness and to bring it into new relationships will have a vivid interest to you.

What could be duller than the act of writing in a book, hour after hour, certain particulars regarding other books, the author’s name, the title, the publisher, the size, the price? But if you love those volumes, individually or generically, and if you realize that what you are doing is a necessary step in the work of making their contents accessible and useful--of leading others to love them as you have learned to do--then and only then, it seems to me, does such a task as accessioning become full of interest. And so it is with every one of the thousand acts that make up the daily work of a library assistant. I am saying nothing new; you know and we all know that the laborer who does his work well is he who does it con amore. The wage-earner may labor primarily to support himself and his family, but he will never really earn his living unless his work is of a kind that can command his whole-hearted interest--unless he likes it and takes pride in doing it well. This is why the love of books--an intelligent interest in literature and in the world’s written records--is so fundamental a necessity for a librarian.

It should be emphasized that one may love books even if some of the great masterpieces leave him cold, just as one may love humanity though Alexander and Cæsar, we will say, do not happen to stir his enthusiasm. One may even, in a way, love books when that love is expended on what is by nature ephemeral, so long as it is lovable and excellent. Perishability and excellence are not contraries by any means. Indeed, I heard a painter once, indignant because his art had been characterized as less permanent than sculpture, with implied derogation, assert that all beauty is of its nature perishable. If this be so, a thing of beauty, instead of being a joy forever, is a passing pleasure and the more evanescent as it nears perfection. This thesis could hardly be successfully maintained, and yet I conceive that it has in it an element of truth. There are critics who refuse to admire anything in art that has not in it the elements of permanency. A sunset they will acknowledge to be beautiful, though fleeting, but its artistic portrayal, they say, must be lasting. An idea, a passion, may be fine, even when forgotten in a moment, but if enshrined in literary form it must be worth preserving forever or they regard it as without value. These people are confusing mere durability with beauty. “Is anything that doesn’t last three years a book?” asks Mr. Carnegie. We might as well refuse to admire a flower because it fades over night, or turn from our daily food because it is incapable of retaining indefinitely its savor and nutritious qualities. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that a thing may possess beauty and usefulness in a high degree to-day and lose them both to-morrow. That is an excellent reason for discarding it then, but not for spurning it now. What is cast into the oven of oblivion to-morrow may to-day be arrayed, beyond all the glories of Solomon, in aptness of allusion and in fitness of application.

Much of the best that appears in the daily press is of this kind. Along with a good deal that is worthy of long life, there is a host of admirable material in the ephemeral paragraphs that we are accustomed to despise. We may despise them, but still we read; and nothing that is read with interested attention by fifty millions of people is really despicable. The average newspaper writer may well be content to toss off paragraphs for us; he need not care who constructs our leading editorials. The influence of the paragraph is incomparably the greater; it has the raciness of the soil, shrewd wit driven home with our native exaggeration and the sting of the epigram. And much of that which is bound between covers has this peculiar aroma of journalism--its fitness to-day, its staleness to-morrow. This sort of thing may be badly done or it may be well done--inconceivably apt, dainty and well-flavored. If it is of the best, why may we not love it, though it be to-morrow as flat as the sparkling wine without its gaseous brilliancy?

To those who have been accustomed to books from childhood, who have lived with them and among them, who constantly read them and read about them, they seem to be a part of the natural order of things. It is something of a shock then when we awake, as we all must occasionally, to the realization that to a very large proportion of our population, supposedly educated, they are a thing apart--pedantic, useless, silly; to be borne with during a few years of schooling and then cast aside; to be studied perfunctorily but never to be read. When the statistics of reading are analyzed I believe we shall be startled, not by the great increase in it, notable and indubitable as this is, but at the enormous amount of progress that still remains to be made before the use of books by our people indicates any real general interest in them and appreciation of them. An attitude toward books that is very general is indicated by a series of cartoons which has now been running for several years in a New York evening paper--a proof that its subject must strike a responsive chord, for the execution of the pictures is beneath contempt. It is entitled “Book-Taught Bilkins,” and it sets forth how on one occasion after another Bilkins relies on the information that he finds in a book--and meets with a disaster. This is a trifle, but it is one of those straws that tell which way the wind blows. A presumably intelligent man, a graduate of the public schools, occupying a position under the city, recently remarked to one of our library people that he spent his holidays usually at one of the nearby recreation parks. “Why don’t you go sometimes to one of the branches of the public library?” he was asked. He laughed and said, “I’ve never read a book yet, and I don’t think I’ll start now.” How many are there like him? We are educating them by thousands. They leave school with no interest in books, without the slightest appreciation of what books mean--certainly with no love for them. To these people books are but the vehicles and symbols of a hateful servitude. Perhaps this is inevitable; if it is, all that we can say is that far from “continuing the work of the schools,” as we are often told is our function, we may often have to undo a part of it, which consists in creating an attitude of hostility toward books and reading. Can this be done by those who do not appreciate and care for literature?

I do not want to be considered pessimistic. This lack of interest in books I believe to be noticeable largely because we have changed our whole attitude toward the relationship of literature to the people. Love for books used to be regarded as properly confined to a class; that the bulk of people did not care for literature was no more significant than the fact that they had never tasted paté de foie gras. Now we consider that every one ought to love books--and the fact that vast numbers of people do not, no longer seems natural to us. That these people are beginning to show an interest, and that the ranks of the indifferent are growing slowly less, I firmly believe; and it is my opinion that the public library is no inconsiderable factor in the change. Some, it is true, are beginning to care for books by caring for poor and trashy books. These, however, are on the right road; they are on their way up; it is our business not to despise them, but to help them up further. Can we do it without having ourselves a proper appreciation of what is good in books?

But can a love for books be taught? To those who have the aptitude for it, it certainly can. In other cases it cannot. To those who have it in them, however, appreciation for the beautiful may certainly be awakened by precept and example. I have in mind a farmer in the Virginia mountains, dwelling in a lovely region, but among a rural population without the slightest appreciation of the beauties of nature. This particular man had worked for years in and about a summer camp and had thus associated with people from the city whose appreciation of the fine prospects from cliff and summit was unusually keen. In time he actually came to feel such appreciation himself, and he would spend the whole of his rare holidays on a rocky peak 4000 feet above the sea, drinking in the beauties of the scene and eagerly pointing them out to his tousle-headed children, all of whom he took with him. None of that brood will cease to love nature, I am sure, and their lives will be sweeter and better for it. In like fashion, association with people who appreciate good books will awaken a similar love in many an unpromising mind. Mere contact with the books themselves may do it, and so our open shelves have brought it to thousands, but the additional influence of a sympathetic human mind will hasten it wonderfully. The busy assistant at the desk may have a chance to say but a single word. Shall that word relate to the mechanics of librarianship--the charging system, the application form, the shelf-arrangement--or shall it convey in some indefinable way the fact that here is a body of workers, personally interested in books and eager to arouse or foster such an interest in others?

But how may one tell whether the true love of books is in him? To detect it in another, as already noted, requires more than a brief acquaintance. But to test oneself is easier. What would the world be to you without books? Could you go on living your life, physically and mentally, even as you do now, if the whole great series, from big to little, from old to new, from the Bible and Shakespeare down to the latest novel, were utterly wiped away? If you can truthfully say that such a cataclysm would make no difference to you, then you certainly do not love books. If the loss of them, or of some part of them--even the least--would leave a void in your life, then you have that love in greater or less degree, in finer or coarser quality. Let us pity those who have it not. And as for you who have it, you surely have not only a fundamental qualification for librarianship, but that which will make, and does make, of you better men and women. Let us perfect ourselves in all the minutiæ of our profession, let us study how to elevate it and make it more effective, but let us not forget the book, without which it would have no existence. Possibly the librarian who reads is lost, but the librarian who has never read, or who, having read, has imbibed from reading no feeling toward books but those of dislike or indifference, is surely worse than lost--he has, so far as true librarianship goes, never existed.

THE LIBRARY AS THE EDUCATIONAL CENTER OF A TOWN

In using this expression it is not intended to imply that the library is, or should be, the only place in a town where educational processes are going on--perhaps not even the principal place. The center of a circle is not the whole circle; its area is zero, it is simply a point so related to other parts of the figure as to give it supreme importance. The center of a wheel, through which the axle passes, is not the whole wheel, but around it the whole wheel turns. So the educational functions of a town library, while they may not bulk large in a catalog, should be so related to those of other institutions in the community as to give it peculiar importance and authority.

It is not necessary here to remark that education is what its name implies--a drawing out, a development of potentialities. Because it is this, and only this, it will never make a Shakespeare or a Newton out of one who has it not “in him,” as the idiom so well runs, to become one or the other. Because it is this, there are men who do have in them potentialities of usefulness, perhaps even of greatness, but who for lack of it, die undeveloped; “mute” and “inglorious.”

From the moment when the new-born babe feels the contact of the outer world, through his organs of sense, that contact begins to develop his possibilities. Here education begins, and it ceases only with the stoppage of all functions at death. When it has gone on so far that a contact is established with other human minds, this development takes a special turn that differentiates it from any training that the lower animals receive--that makes it a link in the education of the race. Still further is this accentuated when the child begins to have access to the printed records of the race in the shape of books.

Books, or no books, his educational development goes on, at home, among his playmates, in his chosen work in shop, farm or office, but the use of books gives it a wider relationship--a broader outlook. This relation of our formal intellectual records to education which is emphasized especially during the period of attendance at school or college, makes a storehouse of books of peculiar value and importance to a community. Especially should the existence of such a collection direct the attention of every person in the community to the fact that the use of books to develop the mind and broaden the possibilities does not properly end with the close of the school life. It is the misfortune of the school, in too many instances, that its work engenders a hatred of books instead of a love for them. Play, we are told, is “work that you don’t have to do.” It is the merit of the library that there is no compulsion about its use. We dislike what is forced upon us, but the study which is the hardest of work in a school may become recreation when one is free to follow the line of inclination among the books of a well-made collection. In this way the post-scholastic education, if we may call it so, which lasts as long as the life, is kept in touch with the written records, instead of casting those records aside and proceeding haphazard wholly on so-called “practical” lines. The teachers express this, when they admit the public library at all into the educational pantheon, by saying that it may “continue the work of the school.” This is a one-sided way of looking at the matter--as one-sided as it would be to say that the function of the school is to prepare people for the use of the public library--a statement no less and no more true than the other. The proper way to put it is that the school and the library have closely related educational functions, both employing largely the written records of previous attainment, but the school concentrating its influence on a short period of peculiar susceptibility, with the aid of enforced personal discipline and exposition, while the library works without such opportunities, but also freed from these limitations. Thus the library uses books as a means of development, not with the aid of personal influence, but without taskmasters; not without discipline, but without compulsion. During the years of school attendance, it works with the school, and it recognizes the fact that its use is a habit best acquired early. This is the reason for our separate rooms for children, with their special collections and trained assistants, and also for our efforts to co-ordinate the child’s reading with his school work. We are not trying to set up a rival educational system, which by its superior attractiveness may divert the attention of the child from school; we are merely seeing that our young people may become accustomed to use books properly, to love them dearly and to look upon the place where they are housed as in some sense an intellectual refuge through life.

This closeness of contact with a public collection of books is largely a modern idea. In ancient times the safeguarding and preservation of the individual book was far more important than it is today. Greater public security, and especially the improvement in methods of duplication, have now made such care unnecessary, except in the case of volumes kept as curiosities, or for occasional use. The book that does the most for popular education is not kept behind bars, but sent out broadcast for free use, shortly perishing in the flesh to be reincarnated in fresh paper, type and binding. Sending out books for home use has added enormously to the educational value of the library and to the good done by books--to the number of points of contact of mind with mind. Along the same line has been the development of subsidiary centers of distribution--branch libraries, traveling libraries, delivery stations. All these have added to the tendency to look upon the public library as a center of municipal education. In many communities it is being looked to now as such a center in matters having no direct connection with books. It is a museum on a small scale; a lecture bureau; the maker, sometimes the publisher, of lists and bibliographies. In old times the local collector of minerals or of prints turned over his crystals or his pictures to the school; now, as likely as not, he gives them to the library. It is better that he should; for in the educational life of the individual, the school comes and goes, but the library goes on forever.

It is this capacity of the modern library to reach out beyond its own walls in many different directions that makes it proper for us to speak of it as a center. In a similar way the physicist speaks of centers of force. And as a body exerting attraction or repulsion--a magnetic pole, an electrified sphere, a gravitating particle--is surrounded by a field of force which is very real, though invisible, so there are invisible lines that connect such an intellectual center as the library with every interest in the community. We recognize this in our colloquial speech. Did you never hear of a network of branch libraries? Yet on a map they show merely a system of dots. The network is formed of the commingling fields of force, which together enmesh the community in a web of intellectual influences. And as an ordinary force has two aspects, so the influences radiating from our library centers are directed both from and toward them. The up-to-date library strikes out toward every member of the community and it strives to draw each one to itself. It sends its books into every home, its helpful aids to reading and to study, its library news and gossip in the local paper: but on the other hand, its cozy rooms, its well-stocked reference shelves, its willing and pleasant attendants exert on every man, woman and child in the community an intellectual attraction, and having let them taste of the delights it has to offer sends him out again as a willing missionary to lure in others. By such methods should the library strive to be a center of mental development in a community; by such methods is it succeeding, for no other center can vie with it in the universality of its appeal, whether we follow the individual from birth to death, or regard the various members of a community as they exist at one specified time.

But there is another sense in which the library should be and is able to serve as the intellectual center of a community. A community’s moral and intellectual status is not simply the sum of that of its component members. This is true of all aggregates where the components are interrelated in any way. In all such cases the properties of the whole depend, it is true, on the properties of the components, but not by simple addition. The taste of common salt is not the taste of sodium added to that of chlorine; the feelings, thoughts and acts of any aggregate of men may be quite different from those of the men taken individually. This is true whether the aggregate be simply a body of spectators in a theater, mutually related only by the fact of their common presence in the place, or an association, or the members of a municipal community. The human aggregate is in all cases less advanced than the individual; it is more primitive in its emotions, its morals, its acts. This might be expected, since the formal group, of whatever kind, began its evolution later than the individual. A community’s moral sense is thus less advanced than that of its members; it will lie, swindle and steal, when they would hesitate to do so; it will resort to violence sooner than they. Its intellectual ability is also less; its business transactions are looser; its appreciation of artistic values is inferior.

The education of a group of men, as a group, is thus something different from the education of its individual members. In the case of a loose group, such as an audience, it could not be attempted; with a group dwelling together and bound by ties of blood and common interest it is not only possible but quite worth while.

Of course it must be understood that whatever educates the individual also helps to educate the community; but when, as is almost always the case, the community lags behind, something may be done to bring its ideals, feelings and acts nearer to the individual standard, even without altering the latter.

Now we have already been reminded by Prof. Vincent of Chicago university that the library may act as the social memory; the town library should therefore be emphatically the municipal memory. And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. As the individual looks back with interest on his own personal history and refreshes his recollection by means of family portraits, old letters, diaries, scrapbooks and material of all kinds, so the community should retain consciousness of the continuity of its own history by keeping in the public library full records of similar import--files of all local publications, printed memorabilia of all kinds, material for local history, even to the point of imagined triviality; even private letters, when these bear in any way on the community life. The legal and political history, or, at last, its dry bones, is locked up in the official archives or the town or city; we need, in addition, an intellectual and social hall of records out of which the delver in local history may clothe this skeleton with flesh and blood.

A man with a memory has the basis for a mind and a conscience; so a community with this kind of a collective memory is much more ’apt than another to develop collective intelligence and collective morality. It may be asserted, not as a figure of speech, but as a cold fact, that a community whose citizens look back upon an honorable history with records preserved in an accessible place, ought to be much less likely to sanction a trolley steal or to wink-at official graft.

In a recent striking address, Prof. William James has called attention to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”--something to enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas represented by such phrases--catchwords, if you choose to call them so--as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness, civic duty--have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records, with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,” who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good, that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading, stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that contribute to individual and civic development.

The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?

The answers to these questions depend on the home, the church, the school--a score, perhaps, of minor civic societies. Let us at the very center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which, having as its basal object the collection, preservation and popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past, may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder on which the community may mount to still better things in the future. Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the public library? That will depend on what we choose to make of it--a mere pile of books to be turned over by the passerby, or a true center of municipal education.

THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR

“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days much else, including a selector and a distributor, his duties in the former capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his field in the latter. As the library’s audience becomes larger, as its educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more of the young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only five dollars’ worth from a stock worth a hundred, and it is unfair to say that he has “rejected” the unbought ninety-five dollars’ worth. Such a selection scarcely involves censorship, and we may cheerfully agree with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A man, we will say, is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose appearance on examination ensures their exclusion--some glaring misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner. These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library authority, whether librarian, book committee, or paid expert, points out the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book the function exercised is surely censorship.

May any general laws be laid down on this subject?