Part 24

Everyone who has had occasion to keep in touch with popular taste will tell you that the increased love for poetry shown in the publication of verse, the purchase of it, the study of it, the demand for it at public libraries, is nothing less than astounding. That this represents any sudden change in the public, I cannot believe. The public has always loved verse. The child chants it in his games; he drinks it in greedily at his mother’s knee. He begs for it, even when he cannot understand it, just for the joy of its rhythm, its lilt. But when the great poets go to the abodes of the gods, or to regions as far away in esthetics or metaphysics, for their subjects, they carry their product beyond public appeal. When our great verse is all remote and the familiar things are left to folk-lore and rag-time, then folk-lore and rag-time will monopolize public attention and fill the heart of the people. It is this feeling, on the part of many poets, that the familiar things of life are beneath their notice, that has made poetry so long unpopular. The feeling is quite unjustified. All the great elemental things are also among the most familiar--birth, death, love, grief, joy, in human experience: in the outer world, day and night, winter and summer, storm, wind and flood. And affiliated with these are all the little everyday things of which Riley sings--the bathing urchins, the ragged farm hand, the old tramp, the little orphan girl with her tales of fright, the rabbit under the railroad ties. When the modern reader first read in verse about such things there was a rush of red blood to the heart, with a recognition of the fact that verse had come down from Olympus to earth, and that after all, earth is where we live and that life and its emotions and events are both important and poetical.

I am not denying the poetry of romance, but we should remember that this too, has its roots in reality. Even the most imaginative works must be based, in the last analysis, on the real. Take for instance such works as Poe’s. Poe despised realism. His best work is about half imagination and half form. Yet when he succeeds in rousing in us the mingled emotions of fear and horror on which so many of his effects depend he is using for his purposes what was once a defensive mechanism of the human organism, causing it to shrink from and avoid the real things--wild beasts, enemies, the forces of nature--that were striving continually to overwhelm and destroy it. Without the survival of this defensive mechanism of fear and horror, Poe’s tales would have no dominion over the human mind. In fact, the main difference between what we call realism and romanticism is that while both have their relations with the real facts of life, the facts on which romanticism depends are unfamiliar, distant and distorted, while realism deals with that which is near at hand and familiar. Knights in armor, distressed damsels, donjon keeps and forests of spears were once as everyday affairs as aeroplanes are now, or gas attacks, or the British tanks. These all have in them the elements of romance; and when they too have passed, as God grant they may, they will doubtless take their place in the equipment of the poetical romanticist. Not these realities that pass, but those that are with us always, are the ones that inspire verse like Riley’s.

Those who love to study group-psychology, and who realize that we have in the motion-picture audience one of the most wonderful places to observe it that ever has been vouchsafed to mortals, may see every night the hold that this kind of realism has over the popular mind. Armed hosts may surge across the screen, volcanoes may belch and catastrophe may be piled on catastrophe. The eyes of the spectators may bulge and their mouths may gape, but they remain untouched. But let a little dog appear with his tongue out and his tail awag; let a small babe lie in its cradle and double up its tiny fists and yell, and at once you have evidence that the picture has penetrated the skin of the house and got down to the quick. Homely realities make an appeal that neither the knights in armor of the fourteenth century nor the tanks in armor of the twentieth are able to exert. Gilbert, who wrote many a truth in the guise of jest, never said a truer thing than when he made Bunthorne proclaim that in all Nature’s works “something poetic lurks”--

Even in Colocynth and Calomel.

That is the poet’s mission--to show us the poetry in the things that we had never looked upon as within poetry’s sphere. They are all doing it now--Noyes, Masefield and all the rest, and the public has risen at them as one man.

If James Whitcomb Riley were here today I should take him by the hand and say, “Beloved poet, you have known how to touch the great heart of the people quickly and deeply. That is what we must all do, if we are to succeed. We librarians must do it if our libraries are to be more than paper and glue and leather. Teach us the way.”

Our libraries are closer, far closer, to the people today than they were fifty years ago. They can never get as close as an individual voice like Riley’s, for they are a combination, not even a harmonious chorus, but a jumble of sounds from all regions and all ages. Yet we must not forget that in every instrument of music there is a potential mass of discord. The skilled player selects his tones and produces them in proper sequence and rhythm; and lo! a sweet melody! So the librarian may play upon his mass of books, selecting and grouping and bringing into correspondence his own tones and the receptive minds of his community, until every man sees in the library not a jumble but a harmony, not a promoter of intellectual confusion but a clarifier of ideas. In some such fashion it is allowed him to get close to the minds and hearts of his community as Riley did to his readers.

We are realizing today, we of the library world, that it is a poor instrument that yields but one tune, and a poor player who is able to produce only one. The librarians of the early days were of this kind; so were their libraries. The time they played was the tune of scholarship--a grand old melody enough, and yet with the right keyboard one may play not only fugues and chorals but the waltz and even the one-step. The scholar will find his refuge in this great building, but here also will be a multitude of functions undreamt of in the early library day--the selection of literature for children and their supervision while they use it, co-operation with the schools, the training of library workers, the publication of lists and other library aids, helpful cataloging and indexing, the provision of books and assistance for special classes, such as engineers, business men or teachers, a staff and facilities for all kinds of extension work, filling the space around the library as a magnet’s field of force surrounds its material body. A modern library is a city’s headquarters in its strife against ignorance and inefficiency; its working force is a general staff--books, ammunition for the fighter and food for the worker.

Of the poet I have said that his ability to gain the public ear and to reach the public heart is closely bound up with the portrayal of realities. This is true also of the library. Every step of its progress from a merely scholarly institution to a widely popular one has been marked by the introduction of more red blood, more real life, into its organism. The frequenter of the older library went there to find books on the pure sciences, on philosophy, in the drama, in poetry. These we of today in no wise neglect, but we entertain also those who look for books on plumbing, on the manufacture of hats, shoes and clothing, on salesmanship and cost accounting, on camping and fishing, on first aid to the injured, on the products of Sonoma county, California. Our assistants take over the telephone requests to furnish the population of Bulgaria, the average temperature of Nebraska in the month of June, plans for bungalows not to cost more than $1750, pictures of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, sixty picture postals of Baltimore for a reflectoscope lecture, a copy of a poem beginning “O beauteous day!” the address of the speaker’s uncle who left Salem, Massachusetts, for the West twenty-six years ago. Everyone of these queries throbs with the red blood of reality. Few of them would have been considered within the library’s scope fifty years ago. Books are written nowadays about all such subjects, whereas in the earlier day the knowledge of these things and the ability to write of them did not reside in the same person. So the library’s progress toward the realities is but the expression of that same progress in literature, using the word in its widest sense to signify all that may lurk between the covers of a book. The contemptuous name of biblia abiblia--books that are no books--which the earlier writers bestowed upon dictionaries, directories, indexes, lists and the like, is disregarded by the modern librarian. He prizes a list of all the grocers in the United States; he points with pride to his collection of hundreds of telephone directories; he has names galore in alphabetical array--indexes to places, persons, pictures, events and books. All these things are as much a part of his library as the Iliad of Homer or the dramas of Calderon.

But the librarian does not stop here. He conceives that it is his duty to deal not only with books but with what we may call adjuncts to books--things which may lead to books those who do not read--things that may interpret books to those who read but do not read understandingly or appreciatively. Some of our brothers beyond the sea have criticized us American librarians for the freedom--nay, the abandon--with which we have thrown ourselves into the search for such adjuncts and the zeal with which we have striven to make use of them. It has been our aim of late years, for instance, to make of the library a community center--to do everything that will cause its neighbors to feel that it is a place where they will be welcome, for whatever cause and that they may look to it for aid, sympathy and appreciation in whatever emergency. If the life of the community thus centers in the library, we have felt that the community cannot fail ultimately to take an interest in the library’s contents and in its primary function. The branch libraries in many of our cities are such local centers. Here one may find the neighbors round about holding an exhibition of needlework, the children dancing, the young men debating questions of the day, the women’s clubs discussing their programs, the local musical society rehearsing a cantata, Sunday schools preparing for a festival, the ward meeting of a political party. In one of our own branch libraries, in a well-to-do neighborhood, the librarian said to one of the young men at a social meeting, “I am curious to know why you come here. You could all afford, I know, to rent a larger and better hall; or you could meet in your own homes.” The young man looked at her with surprise, “Why,” he said, “we like this place. We all grew up in this library.” I confess that this anecdote sends a little thrill of satisfaction thru me every time I tell it. What could a librarian desire more than to have his neighborhood “grow up” in his library--to have the books as their roommates--to feel that they would rather be in that one spot than any other? On what a point of vantage does this place him! How much more readily will his neighbors listen to the good genius of a much-loved spot than to the keeper of a jail! Just here, of course, is the strong point of the so-called Gary system, which has so much in common with our modern library ideas. Whatever may be its faults, it at least makes of the school what we librarians have long sought to make of the library--a place that will be loved by its inmates instead of loathed. This once gained there is hardly any result that we may not bring about.

And now let us consider at least one thing more that we may gain from this intimate contact with the life of the community around us.

Formalism has been the death of art, of literature, of science, in many an age. It has atrophied an entire civilization, as it did in China. It paralyzed Egyptian art; it would have paralyzed Greek art, if the Greeks had not had the vitality to throw it off. Art, literature and science are never sufficient unto themselves. They must all drink continually at the fresh springs of reality. To move up to date with our metaphor, they must all get fresh current from the feeders of nature if the trolley wire is to be kept “live” and the motor running. Those perennial currents that Ampere conceived of as chasing themselves round and round the molecules of matter could keep going only in the absence of resistance, and that is something that we may imagine or talk about, but that does not really exist. Every electric current will stop unless a continuous electro-motive force is behind it; every river will dry up unless fed by living springs. All art, all literature, all science, will shrivel out of existence, or at any rate out of usefulness, if those who practice it think that all they have to do is to copy some trick, some method, some symptom perhaps of real genius, of their predecessors. Aristotle was a real scientist, tho his outlook was not ours. But those who kept on copying Aristotle for centuries and would not believe what they saw with their own eyes unless they could confirm it with a passage from his writings--they were no scientists at all. We have recovered from their formalism as Greek art recovered from the formalism of the lions of Mycenae.

Who shall say that James Whitcomb Riley did not do just this when he chose to abandon the stock in trade of the standard poets and put into verse what he saw about him here in Indiana? It is not beyond the possibilities, of course, that his own fresh point of view may one day succumb to formalism--that his little Orphant Annies and his raggedy men may become familiar to posterity through the work of a school of copyists who prefer to write about an Indiana that they never saw in a period when they never lived, instead of going themselves to the fresh inspiration of the realities about them. Now, of course, the current or the river of art or poetry must run a little while by itself; it cannot be all spring. Only, the fresh inspiration must not be delayed too long, lest the current or the river be dried.

In a recent article on current British novelists, one of our own most gifted writers, Mrs. Gerould, says with some truth that the stories of the younger realists in England--Compton Mackenzie, Oliver Onions, Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and their kin--are so similar in subject, treatment and style, that they might almost be interchangeable. She wittily develops the idea of a syndicate--the British Novelists, Limited--in which one writer is told to do the descriptions, another the character-drawing and a third the thrills. Mrs. Gerould is hardly fair here. These young men are almost the first writers in the English language to do just what they are accomplishing. They are by turns engrossing and boresome, but they are like the boy who has, all by himself, picked out a succession of chords on the piano. The harmony thrills him, but he is in danger of keeping it up so long that he will drive his hearers daft. When our British realists have over-worked their new vein, their sales will fall off and their publishers will see that fresh ore is brought to light ere more of their work reaches the public. How shall we ensure that this new ore shall be at hand--the jungle cleared so that there may be a fresh vista?

I may be taking too much upon my chosen profession; but I cannot help thinking that this is one of the tasks with which we librarians shall have to grapple. We have ourselves, as we have seen, come lately into more intimate touch with the realities about us. Can we not put into literature what we are taking from life and so act as the feeders that shall keep civilization from drying up or turning to stone? This is perhaps a startling idea. A book is a record. In the nature of things there is no progress in a record. And we are the keepers of the records of civilization; how then shall we be also founts of inspiration?

In this way; records stand, but the things that they record progress. We must go to the library to find out where humanity stands on the road and what lies before us. If our public comes to us naturally to read these records and if our writers know this and write for a public interested in reality, the library has done its part. Before this linkage can function truly, we must have authors who realize that there is a special library public and who write for it. We are told that the English publishers, before they accept a manuscript ask, “How many will the circulating libraries take?” They mean the great commercial subscription libraries like Mudie’s and Smith’s. The patronage of these libraries is more important to them than that of the public at large, or at any rate, they feel that they can rely upon it as an indication of what that of the public at large will be. There is a library public that they recognize and respect. We have nothing in the United States to correspond to Mudie’s and Smith’s. Our great circulating libraries are our free public libraries. Do authors or publishers or booksellers recognize the public library as a force to be reckoned with, either apart from other readers or as indicative of what other readers will think or do? I once made an investigation of this question and I was compelled to acknowledge, as I am still forced to admit, that there is no such recognition. Neither author nor publisher consciously does anything different, because there are public library readers, from what he would do, if all our public libraries were wiped off the face of the earth. My hope for the future lies in a justified suspicion that though neither is consciously affected, both do recognize the library public unconsciously and indirectly. Both would admit that their output has been affected by the great extension of the reading public and its consequent alteration in quality. A discussion of the exact effect would lead us too far afield. The point is that the literary product has been changed by a change in the numbers and quality of the reading public, and that this change has been brought about in no small degree by the establishment and popularity of public libraries. Possibly it is not too much to expect that this unconscious recognition will give place to a conscious one, and that the producers’ mutual influence bring each other into more frequent contact with reality.

Now, there may be some here who, wondering at my classification of the Hoosier poet, are saying to themselves, “Was Riley also among the Realists?” And I ask in turn, why has Realism come to connote a proportion of things that do not enter at all into the lives of most of us? We have all known and loved the old swimmin’ hole; how many of us are familiar with the man who commits suicide, not to end an intolerable situation, not in a frenzy of grief or remorse, but just to see what will happen? Yet when a Russian writes about such anomalies as this our critics say, “What wonderful realism!” If realism is anything, it must surely be real. There is morbidity in life; we cannot avoid it or overlook it. But is there anything in life that corresponds to ninety-nine per cent of morbidity? Not in my life, nor in yours. For you and for me, Riley is a realist. God forbid that he may ever be anything else.

There is something in the situation of this city in which we are assembled, that encourages men to look life straight in the face. Those who dwell amid rocky heights and caverns may be excused for looking behind them when they walk and for trembling at shadows. The sailor between whom and eternity there stands only a two-inch plank may live largely among unrealities. But the man of the open prairie, with God’s solid earth stretching away north, south, east and west, and God’s free air above and about him, stands firmly and sees clearly. What interests him is the present and its necessary relationships with the future, with only so much of the past as is able to consolidate these relationships and illumine them. Here, as one would expect, is growing up a school of representative artists, working some with the pen and others with the brush, whose aim and whose high privilege it is to record those relationships on canvas and on the printed page, each in his own fashion, of course, for a love for the outer realities can never do away with that supreme inner reality, a man’s own self that which looks out upon the world and sees that world through its own spectacles. It is the triumph of all art that faithfully as it may represent what it sees, its representations will still be, in large part, functions of the artist’s own mood, so that the same scene, the same event, portrayed by different writers or different painters, may arouse in us emotions as varied as joy, grief or mere restfulness. And of course, although we may praise James Whitcomb Riley portraying what he saw about him there would be little to praise if he were not at the same time portraying James Whitcomb Riley and if that portrayal were not worth while.

I like to think that what we librarians are doing is in some measure akin to the work of the artists of pen or brush, though perhaps in a secondary way. The writer interprets reality; we interpret the writers themselves. Here is a case where we cannot have too many middlemen, for each, instead of piling up cost to the consumer, piles up the value of the product. How many men could sit in a country churchyard at evening and see unaided what Gray saw? Gray in his Elegy records that churchyard and himself as well. But how many men does Gray fail to reach? How many, whom he would rejoice or comfort, never heard him? And to Gray, in this query, let us add the names of all the good and great in literature. Here is where the librarian steps in. He presents Gray and Gray’s fellow artists in words, to his public.

Years ago the library was merely a storehouse and the librarian the custodian thereof. Today the library is a magazine of dynamic force and the librarian is the man who exerts and directs it--who persuades the community that it needs books and then satisfies that need, instead of waiting for the self-realization which too often will never come. Does not the librarian in some fashion interpret life and nature to his public, through books in general, even as the writer interprets them through one particular book?

This may seem fantastic, but I like to think that it is true. The October air in these autumn days is full of megaphonic voices, each insisting on its right to be heard above all the others. We are urged to enlist in the British army, to buy Liberty bonds, to build huts for the Y.M.C.A. and the Knights of Columbus, to work for the Red Cross, to buy tobacco for the soldiers, and at the same time to support all our local charities and pay our club dues as usual, not neglecting to respond to the calls of the tax collector. We librarians have ourselves used the megaphone to some purpose, having as you know, raised a million dollars to establish and maintain camp libraries, giving our soldiers the same public library facilities that they enjoy at home.

But in the midst of all this distracting chorus let us not forget that our normal lives must function as usual, despite the abnormalities that surround and interpenetrate them. The opening of this noble library building and the character of this assembly are proofs that we intend to live as usual, even amid so much that is unusual.

I see no limit to the usefulness of this building and of the institution whose home it is to be. The house is new but its occupant has been long and favorably known to your citizens. Indianapolis has library traditions, and is what we librarians call a “good library town.” Your library has had good leadership and it is to continue, adding the force and freshness of the new to the strength and experience of the old. The memory of your dearly loved poet will be brought to the mind of each library user--by the children’s room that bears his name, by the land that he gave to enlarge its site, by this enduring portraiture--by a thousand and one things, none the less cogent for being intangible. I look to see this library, in the home city of James Whitcomb Riley, grow into a place in the public heart comparable with that which was attained by Riley himself. It should be loved for its broad minded humanity, for its sympathy with mankind, especially with little children, for its readiness to “rejoice with those that do rejoice and weep with those that weep,” for its quick response to the personal and spiritual needs of every reader, and above all for its firm hold on the realities of life and its appreciation of life as something that is lived on the farm, in the city street, in the office, the school and the club, not in the clouds, not in fog and mist, not with the improbable or the impossible. That it will do and be all these things we may be confident. Riley the well beloved is gone. His memory lives on; let it live with peculiar force and vividness in this library, in its attitude toward those whom it serves--in the affection which they in turn feel toward an institution that has long been, and will long continue to be a center of literary, civic and intellectual force in the city where Riley lived and wrote.

THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

The years immediately succeeding the great war are to witness great progress in team-work. The war is teaching us to get together, and it is impossible to believe that the lessons we are now learning will be suddenly and totally forgotten with the advent of peace. The world is full of institutions, associations, corporate bodies of all kinds, founded on a knowledge of what may be accomplished by the cooperation of individuals; but the cooperation of these bodies themselves, one with another, has been faulty until recently.

The public library is cooperative in its very essence. Its business is to help others. Were there no public for it to serve, its very necessity for existence would go. In the older days it merely sat with folded hands, ready to serve. Of later years it has become a compelling force, reaching out into the community by a thousand tendrils and attaching them to whatever individual, or body of individuals, seems to be in need--often without knowing it--of library service. The public library’s relations with the schools, with the business man, with the industries, with the military service--you will find these all discust over and over again, not only in the technical magazines devoted to library work, but in the public press.

And yet we look in vain for a discussion of the public library’s relations with the Church. Why is this? The Church itself is in the cooperative class with the library. It exists to help mankind. Without a humanity to help, and a humanity weak and fallible enough to need help, its mission would be over. In studying this question I find an unaccountable timidity on both sides. On the one hand, librarians and libraries seem to be shy of religion. They rarely purchase religious books in any systematic way. They are afraid of denominational literature, both books and periodicals, apparently on the ground that those presenting the view of one religious body might be objected to by other bodies. Some libraries refuse to subscribe for any denominational papers, but will accept them as gifts. Many libraries refuse to allow the holding of religious meetings in their buildings, probably for a similar reason.

On the other hand, the churches, as churches, seem often to ignore the existence of the public library, even when their members use it constantly. They maintain libraries of their own in their Sunday-schools, for their young people, and these libraries, I am sorry to say, are often far below standard! They rarely show interest in the public library’s collection of books, not seeming to care whether the library does or does not contain their own denominational literature.