Part 30

I well remember when, in the New York Public Library we used complacently to explain our failure to purchase Hungarian books for circulation by saying that there was no demand for them. But the time came when we put in a few hundred books in that tongue. At once it became evident that we needed not hundreds but thousands. Hungarians came to us from far distant parts of the city only to find empty shelves. This overwhelming demand had been present all the time; only it was latent. It lacked active expression, simply because our lack of Hungarian books was a well known fact. Since then when librarians tell me that their libraries have no books in Ruthenian, or on sanitary plumbing, no out-of-town directories or no prints for circulation, because “there is no demand for them”, I am inclined to smile. No matter how near you may be to dying of thirst, you will not be likely to visit an obviously dry sand-bank in search of water.

The intelligent search for these latent demands requires the kind of interested ability that I have already spoken of as one of the library’s chief needs. The library must keep on growing if it is to live. It must take on new functions, and when it assumes some new duty, some group in the community must exclaim “Of course! that is just what we have been wanting all the time”. And at the same time there will always be some outworn function that may be dropped off quietly to make room for the new.

Only the librarian must not mistake unintelligent imitation for initiative. Imitation in itself is unobjectionable. If what someone else has devised is obviously the very thing you have been looking for to solve your problem, you would only waste energy in trying to devise something else. But if you think you can create in your community a library as good, we will say, as Mr. Dana’s in Newark, or Mr. Brett’s in Cleveland or Mr. Jennings’ in Seattle, simply by copying every detail of those institutions, you are as foolish as if you thought you could make yourself look like your well-dressed friend simply by borrowing his clothes. The library must fit the community; also, in some respects, the librarian. I have recently visited Miss Hewins’ office in the Hartford Public Library. I think it is the most fascinating office a librarian ever occupied. But I certainly shall not go home to St. Louis and try to make mine look like it.

This warning applies particularly to the added functions of which we have been speaking above. They should be assumed in response to a demand--expressed or latent. The demand may be obvious and insistent in one library and non-existent in another. If you suspect a latent demand, experiment will generally reveal or disprove its existence, just as those few hundreds of Hungarian books brought out the demand for the present thousands. We have on the east side of our library a broad terrace, balustraded, elevated above the street, paved with brick and stone. It is shady on summer afternoons, and swept by the south breeze. What an ideal place to read in the open air, instead of in the stuffy building! We equipped it with tables and chairs, relaxed the rules to make it easy to take books and magazines there, did everything in our power to encourage terrace readers. The public press saw and approved. Everything worked well, except that nobody came! A failure, do you say? Not at all. We had tried our experiment, tested for our possible latent demand and found that there was none. We had asked our question and received our answer. There are no tables and chairs on that terrace to-day, but we are not discouraged: why should we be? A real experiment never fails: you always get your answer--yes or no. Of course if your experiment is a sham, and you have assumed that the answer is to be the one that you want, you may be disappointed.

It is always a pleasure to watch things grow, to be able to keep them on and guide their growth in useful directions. A library is no exception to the rule. Even growth in size--the simplest kind--has its satisfactions, but extension of service is still more interesting. It is well that there should be a little mystery between the librarian and his public--a consciousness of problems yet to solve, of service yet to be rendered. It is well that he should be on the lookout for latent demands--those hungers and thirsts that he knows must exist somewhere and that he is eager to satisfy; it is well that his community should regard the library as a place with opportunity and willingness for service yet unrevealed as a reservoir of favors yet unbestowed. This is a living relation, not one of mere juxtaposition. I never envied the kind of service that old Atlas did the world, in standing eternally with it on his shoulders. That was an image of dull, burdensome despair. How much better our modern vision of a spinning globe, circling through space, with all its brother and sister globes dancing around it! And however miraculous it seems, we know that whenever we get up and walk across the room there is a tiny adjustment of balance throughout the whole vast system. There are social balances, too, as well as celestial, and when the library puts out its foot to take a forward step, I believe that they all respond.

These things that libraries are doing have their part in the vast social adjustments in the midst of which we live. Some day a social historian will arise to describe them and set them in their place. I am frequently disappointed when I take up some book describing a movement or an application of energy in which I know that the library has borne a part, to find that its share has been absolutely without recognition; that the word “library” is not even in the copious index. We have been busy doing things--here in the seclusion of the library family we may say that they have been things worth the doing. Some day we, too, shall have our Homer or our Milton.

Let me remind you that this has all been illustrative of my principle that library service, like every other kind of mundane activity, is a phase of the eternal struggle between keeping still and getting somewhere else. At the close of a recent novel one of the most thoughtful of current English writers, Mr. J.D. Beresford, states the issue thus (I quote from memory): “Virtue is only continued effort; a boast of success is really a confession of failure”. Of course, continuance of effort, virtuous though it may be, will be of little avail without ability, intelligence, common-sense--at least a modicum of those qualities whose complete combination makes up that wholly impossible creature, the Perfect Librarian. Training will not give you these--the Almighty bestows them at our birth--but it will develop such as you have already--and none of us lacks all of them.

Keep on moving, then, and when you score a point, rejoice only because it proves that scoring is one of your possibilities, and that you are likely to score many others before your race is run.

LUCK IN THE LIBRARY

“It is better to be born lucky than rich”, says the old proverb. “Is he lucky?” Napoleon used to ask when anyone was recommended to him. Literature is full of allusions to luck; history is full of the belief in it and of the influence of that belief on the course of events. Do I believe in luck? Most assuredly, if you will allow me to frame my own definition. One of the most important and fascinating branches of modern mathematics--the theory of chances or probabilities, deals with what may be called luck, and with its laws. Chance, we are told, is “the totality of unconsidered causes”. When an event is conditioned entirely by chance we say that it came about by “luck”, though the unconsidered causes are there just the same. A tyrant, we will say, stakes his victim’s life on the cast of a die. Whether he perishes or not is solely a matter of good or bad “luck”. When a basket contains ten marbles, of which five are black and five are white we know that in the long run the number of black and white marbles drawn at random tends toward equality, and we express this by saying that the chance of drawing either black or white is one in two, or ½. Whether black or white appears at any single drawing is purely a matter of luck. In this sense, luck confronts us at every turn, and no one can deny its existence. Now let us go a little further. May chance happenings be affected by circumstances that have no apparent connection with them? Doubtless; but so far as they are they are no longer subject to the laws of chance. It is because we know this that we are able to study nature by experiment. If in a long series of drawings, from a basket containing an equal number of black and white marbles, we draw chiefly black, we recognize at once the fact that some cause, distinct from the mass of slight and unconsidered causes whose combined action we know as “chance”, is acting. We try at once to get at that cause by varying the conditions. If we find, for instance, that by plunging the hand deeper into the basket we get white balls as well as black, we conclude that the white balls were heavier and so settled to the bottom when the mass was shaken. So it may be that a particular series of happenings may be affected by locality, by personality or by season. So far as this is true, chance or “luck” has ceased to act and we must look for the cause. These, however, are precisely the circumstances in which many persons are accustomed to invoke a luck of higher grade and more potent qualities, a luck that clings to person, place, or time. If in a series of happenings more turn out to the advantage of a particular person than pure chance would warrant, he is said to be “lucky”. In other words, the necessity of assigning a cause is recognized, and it is easier to call this cause “luck” than to search for it and to identify it. I am not sure that we are right in objecting to this procedure. We do not object to lumping together the totality of unconsidered causes and calling them “chance”. It is legitimate to do so when it is impossible to discover and treat them separately. In like manner it may be considered proper to call a man “lucky” when the causes of his success evade detection, though we may be sure that they exist. It is in this sense that it is better to be born lucky than rich. This was what Napoleon meant, I have no doubt, by his question, “Is he lucky?” He might have said, “Is he uniformly successful, for reasons that do not lie on the surface? If so, we must assume the existence of causes, though we cannot detect them. Doubtless he will continue to succeed, even if we can not always tell why. That is the kind of man that I prefer.”

Just a little philology here may throw additional light on our subject. I have said that Napoleon’s question was, “Is he lucky?” Now of course Napoleon did not use these words, because they are English words, and he spoke in French. What he said, doubtless, was “Est-il heureux?” We translate heureux in two ways, “happy” and “fortunate”, but they are really the same, for happy means “of good hap”, or good fortune. When we say “by a happy chance”, we go back to this primitive meaning. The word heureux is derived by the French lexicographers from the Latin augurium, so that its basic meaning is “of good augury.” I think you will agree with me that there is something more here than mere chance. The augur’s business was to ascertain the will of the gods, and all through we have the idea of some impelling force that makes things turn out as they do. If this force, whatever it was, was on the side of the candidate, Napoleon wanted him.

As for our word “luck” itself, it is purely Teutonic and our lexicographers do not trace it beyond its earlier forms. It should be noted, however, that in many of these, as in the modern German glück, it means happiness as well as chance. This wide association of ideas may be taken to mean that happiness was regarded by our forefathers as always the sport of chance; but I prefer to regard it as an evidence that a life in which everything is for the best--where no mistakes are made and where all is fair sailing and successful outcome, is dependent on some fundamental cause.

These “lucky devils”, that we see all about us--the ones who “always fall right-side-up”--the men whose touch turns everything into gold--the college students who pass examinations because the questions happened to be the very ones they knew--all these are people whose “luck” can usually be depended on to last. It is all right to explain their success by calling them “lucky”, so long as we do not forget that this is merely a word to cloak our ignorance of the real causes.

The trouble is that this is what we do often forget. We have been forgetting it since the dawn of civilization, and we inherit our forgetfulness from the twilight of ignorance that preceded it. If the cause of a man’s success was not immediately apparent, he must, it was concluded, have effected it by magic or sorcery, or he was in league with the Devil, or Fortuna or some other goddess guided his hand. If he was a consistent failure, someone had hoodooed him, or blasted him with the evil eye, or worked upon him some magical charm, or the fickle goddess had turned her back on him. Nowadays we simply say “lucky dog!” or “unlucky dog!” and let it go at that; but the words carry with them the meaning that something occult is at work--a meaning quite as unreasonable as the specific supernatural causes assigned in earlier days, and possibly still more objectionable.

I am quite willing to recognize that Jones is “lucky”. His success is due to something that I can not detect; in fact, he seems to me rather an ordinary young man. He may possibly not understand, himself, why he gets ahead so fast. He may believe that there is something occult about it. Plenty of successful men have believed in their “stars” and trusted them, and this worked well until it encouraged them to be reckless. Luck and stars are all very well as symbols, but they will not perform impossibilities.

So far I have not openly mentioned the public library, but I have been thinking of it a good deal, and I hope that you have also. It is one of the beauties of public library work that the points at which it touches life in general are many. He who is given the honor of addressing librarians, as I am doing at present, may talk about pretty much what he pleases, when he begins, serene in the confidence that its application to library work will not only be reached in good time, but will even obtrude itself prematurely on his hearers.

In the first place, I believe we librarians should ponder that question of Napoleon’s--“Is he lucky?” and should make it part of our tests for employment and promotion, asking it in substance of the candidates themselves, of their sponsors and of the institutions where they gained their training and experience.

Extending Shakespeare a little, we may say with Cæsar, “Let me have men about me who are fat”--fat with achievement. Those who are lean and hungry with failure are not for me. Where the cause of achievement or failure is obvious, this attitude needs no defense. I believe that it is justifiable where the success or failure is generally attributed to “luck”. The general feeling that an “unlucky devil” will probably continue to be unlucky is founded on the idea that his ill luck is due to something more than chance. Whatever it is, it is something that we must and should reckon with, whether it is visible or not, even whether it is thinkable or not--certainly whether the person concerned is responsible for it or not. He may be in no sense responsible for his “bad luck” any more than he is for a physical defect such as blindness or one-leggedness; but all these things must be weighed in estimating the probable value of his work.

I am conscious that such an attitude as this may, in theory, do serious injustice to the man whose “ill luck” is really due to pure chance, just as in the case of the man who throws tails ten times in succession after betting on heads. Such a run as this may happen; it does happen in fact on an average once in 1024 trials. The fact that there are 1023 chances against it justifies us in neglecting to take it into account very seriously. I suppose that the chances against a man’s persistent “bad luck” being due to pure hazard are very many millions to one. I am not going to waste any tears over the injustice that I or you or anyone else might do in this way.

I once heard a man of great intelligence, the ex-president of a small college, firmly maintain that if one had a basketful of letters of the alphabet, written on cards, and dumped them all out on the floor, it was absolutely impossible that they should be found so arranged, we will say, as to spell out Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. Now such a happening is extremely unlikely, but the chance that it should occur can be calculated mathematically and expressed in figures. The arrangement in which “Paradise Lost” is spelled out, however, is no more unlikely than any other possible arrangement, and some one of these arrangements is bound to occur, no matter how unlikely any particular one is beforehand. No one of them, therefore is impossible, including Paradise Lost. But I admit that where chances are so adverse, we may use the word “impossibility” in a rough sense, and so I use it in asserting that it is impossible for persistent “bad luck” to be due to pure chance.

Just here we may consider whether a man may rise above ill-luck, may conquer it, may turn it into good fortune. The ancients evidently believed that he could; that is why they represented Fortuna’s wheel as turning. Its rotation may not only “lower the proud”, as Tennyson puts it, but may also elevate the humble--change a run of ill-luck into a “lucky strike”. The Psalmist ascribes both these functions to the Almighty himself. “Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles”. All this was occult to them of old time; it need be so to us only in the sense that occult means “hidden”. If the hidden causes of a man’s ill luck may be revealed to him, wholly or partially, by study, or even if he can make a plausible guess at them, and if he finds that they are within his control, he can of course mitigate them or perhaps abolish them. I greatly fear that in most cases of this kind they are beyond his regulation, either because they are congenital or because they are due to habits so ingrained that changing them is impossible. The very fact that he attributes his failures to “luck” shows that he has made some effort to get at the cause and has failed in that, as in other things. The use of the word “luck” enables him to keep his self-respect. It does not, however, make him a more valuable assistant, and his superiors must not fail to take it into account in an estimate of his work.

I believe that some inquiry into possible physical causes may repay us. Teachers tell us of cases where incredible stupidity turned out on examination to be due to deafness. I personally knew of a maid servant whose apparently idiotic actions were caused by near-sightedness. She did not know--poor girl--that her eyes were not perfectly normal. In all such cases treatment of the physical cause, if it is treatable--alters the “run of luck” at once. All of our libraries should have medical officers, as the New York Public Library has, and the members of the staff should be periodically inspected. There should be a rigid physical examination on entrance.

I ask you to consider, in this connection, the career of Ulysses S. Grant, which has always seemed to me one of the most remarkable in our history. As I walked down the Gravois Road in St. Louis the other day, along which Grant used to drive his loads of wood from the farm, to sell in the city, it seemed as if I could see the stumpy figure clad in its faded army overcoat seated on the load and urging his slow-going mules toward St. Louis, then far away. If there ever was a man who was “down and out”, it was Grant at this time. He had been uniformly “unlucky”. He had had his chance--a good one--and had passed it by. Opportunity, which we are falsely told knocks only once at a man’s door, had sounded her call and he had made no adequate response. A graduate of West Point, with creditable service in the Mexican War, with good connections by birth and marriage, here he was, living in a log cabin on a small farm, hauling wood to city customers. Yet just three years later this man’s name was the best known in the country and had gone around the world. He was a victorious general in command of armies. A few years more and he was President of the United States. He was uniformly “lucky”. His “luck had changed”. What made it change? I can not find that Grant the successful military commander was a different man in any way from Grant the farmer and teamster. He was supremely fitted for military command under a particular set of conditions. When those conditions arose, his genius took the line of least resistance. Such a career is not unique. We learn from it that ill luck may be simply negative--due, not to active causes that force one back, but simply to the absence of the conditions under which alone one may move forward. Vocational guidance may help us here--or it may not. It would not have helped Grant. If he could have been subjected to some miraculous series of tests that would have brought out the fact that, failure as he was, he could achieve brilliant success at the head of an army what would that have availed? There was no army for him, and there was no war in which it could fight. If the question “Is he lucky?” is to be answered “No--but he might become so, if he were at the head of the U. S. Steel Corporation”. I am afraid that the result would be the same as without that qualifying statement.

When a librarian was leaving a large field of endeavor to enter upon a still larger one, his office-boy, hearing some speculation regarding his successor, was heard to say, “I could hold down that job myself. I’ve watched everything he does and there isn’t a thing I couldn’t do”. What he had watched were the motions and they looked easy. But we should not laugh at this kind of confidence. An old stager said to me once “Oh, these young men! They think they can do it all; and the trouble is that sometimes they are right.” A young man is a neutral in luck. His good or bad fortune is yet to be revealed. The complete vocational test would be one that could tell whether the office boy were really fitted to be librarian, and if he were, would see that he ultimately became librarian. Now we must rely not only on the boy’s own ability to estimate his powers but on his fighting strength to realize his vision. And there is more to it than this. A worker may have the ability and may know that he has it, and yet he may distrust his own estimate and so fail to follow it up. This is one of the saddest varieties of “ill-luck”. We often hear it said “He can do that, if he would only realize it”. Too often, however, the man or the woman does realize it perfectly well; his self estimate of his powers may be quite high enough; it may even be too high. Talk with him and you may discover to your surprise that he thinks highly of himself. But at the critical moment he loses his nerve. Doubts arise in his mind. Is he, after all, as able to rise to the emergency as he has always thought himself? He hesitates; and he is lost. His “ill luck” has again been too much for him.

Somewhat similar to failures of this sort are those that arise from lack of initiative. Here I think our training is somewhat at fault. I can almost pick out at sight the library assistants whose training has been in schools where obedience has been the chief thing inculcated, the following of rules and formulas, the reverence for standards and authority. They are of the greatest value in certain positions, but they can not advance far. They are afraid to go beyond the beaten path--to take chances, not, as in the case just considered, because they distrust themselves or their judgment, but because they have been trained not to adventure. Now adventuring is the only way in which mankind has ever got anywhere. There are conditions in which chance-taking is criminal, as it usually is when much is staked for little. The engineer who risks the lives of a train-load of passengers in order that he may avoid losing a minute on schedule time, is a criminal chance-taker. He may have done it once before with success, and the belief that he is “lucky” may induce him to do it again. The trouble with the over-cautious worker is that because he feels that this kind of adventuring is wrong, it is also wrong for him to stake his personal comfort against a possible great advance in the quality of service that he is doing. Perhaps I have put it awkwardly. It is not so much personal comfort that is at stake, though that is an element, as the feeling that doing things well “in the way that we have always done them” is better than disorganizing them for the purpose of shuffling them into a better combination.

I have on more than one occasion, in Library School lectures, urged this point of view, and I have advised more stimulation to venturesomeness, less pointing out of old paths and more opportunities to break new ones. No one ever reached a new place by following an old path. The path-breakers may be “lucky” or “unlucky”. I agree that the “unlucky”--the congenital blunderers--ought to be kept out of the adventuring class--but how shall we tell who they are except by trying? I have thought, possibly without justification--that I have detected a slight attitude of disapproval on the part of Library School authorities when such advice as this has been given. “Let the student first learn the standards, to do things by rule, to obey authority--then he can branch out into initiative.” But can he? My fear, somewhat justified by experience, is that he can not. The standards must be taught. The rules must be known and followed, but if along with this there is no stimulation to initiative and the continual instilment of a feeling that progress depends on the divine curiosity of the explorer--we shall be training only routine workers and for our advances we shall have to depend on those whom we stigmatize as untrained. They will be the “lucky ones”.

Here are cases where luck is a function of attitudes of mind and may be reversed if a change can be made in that attitude. There are other such. Take for instance the case of the grouchy man--the man who has a quarrel with the world. He is sure that he is unlucky--and sure enough, he is! He does not expect to be advanced, and no one would think of advancing him. His attitude and its natural results react on each other until he becomes a confirmed misanthrope. Then there is the man without interest in what he is doing. Who would be so foolish as to intrust an important task to a man who, it is quite evident, does not care whether it is done well or ill, or whether it is done at all? These persons betray their lack of interest in ways that are familiar to us all. They utterly lack initiative, but for other reasons than the persons whose cases have been discussed above. They have no objections to adventure, but a venture presupposes interest. No one ever set out to find the North Pole who was utterly indifferent to its location or the character of its surroundings. All true success is built on a foundation of lively interest. Hence persons of this sort are peculiarly unlucky. They watch subordinates and newcomers pass them in the race, and they are perfectly certain that this is due to favoritism, or to luck. They themselves are unlucky, and of course they will always remain so, unless they can alter their neutral attitude.

In thinking over the lack of initiative of which I have complained above and the failure of our training to supply it, it occurs to me that we carry this lack over into our work. We are apt to complain of the difficulty of finding persons who are fitted for positions of command and responsibility. What do we do to elicit the qualities that make one fit for such posts?