Part 39

It may be objected that the great obviously includes the small, and that plans and methods which are good and suitable for the former need but to be reproduced in miniature for the latter. It is true, that, in many departments, the accident of size makes little or no difference in library economy; but in the administration of affairs, in the machinery of running, the director of a municipal library has many and accumulating cares, of which his less burdened rural brother need never feel the weight. Prof. John Fiske, some years ago, at the time when he was assistant librarian of Harvard University, very graphically described a portion of the perplexing duties which fall to the lot of even a university librarian, striving to correct the erroneous but too prevalent notion that such a position is a sinecure. He confined himself to an enumeration and description of the duties which are essentially professional, the multiplicity of details of the ordering, classifying, and cataloging of books. In this direction there is a difference only in amount between the greater and the less. But, in addition to all that Prof. Fiske described, a city librarian must needs oversee as well the thousand and one minutiae which go to make up the sum of a day's work in a circulating library. He must provide for the accurate identification and registration of his borrowers,--no light task when they number tens of thousands of the floating population of a western city, which has more active duties for her police than the following up of delinquent patrons of the public library. He must see to it that the thousands of books which flow over his counters are unerringly charged, and that tardy borrowers are warned of their remissness. These are but a few of the numberless details, many of which are trivial in the extreme, but which all go toward the making up of such a day's work as "none but he that feels it knows." As a machine increases in complications a constantly greater percentage of power is consumed in overcoming friction. This attention to the routine of daily work, which forms much of the severest, because least satisfying, work which a librarian does, may be compared to the friction of machinery; and just in the proportion that the power of his mind and the strength of his body are taxed in this direction, by just so much are they reduced for other duties, the importance of which is specially prominent in the minds not only of the profession, but of the public as well,--an actual knowledge of the books which the library buys, and the exertion of an active personal influence in raising the standard of literature which is drawn from the library.

It is precisely in this line of personal influence that there seem to me to be special encouragements to the librarians of small towns, that here, notwithstanding their limited resources, they have peculiar opportunities for attaining an almost ideal standard of excellence in the quality of their work.

It would be unjust to say that a city librarian actually works harder than his country brother. The duties of the former are mainly those of guiding, overseeing, and correcting the work of others. The latter, with his own hands and brain, does most of the work himself. It is as if the one were architect solely, and the other not only architect, but mason and carpenter as well. One of the severest trials of the lot of a city librarian, in the West at least, is that he must work through many assistants who are not only utterly lacking in any real love or enthusiasm for their work, but who are many times illy-educated as well. The remedy for this state of affairs is not likely to be found until our boards of trustees take for their careful consideration the reply of a certain irate domestic to her remonstrating mistress: "You can't expect a good cook and all the Christian virtues for two dollars a week!" If the necessities of the work do not require the employment of more than one, two, or, at most, three assistants, the subtle electric current of the librarian's own enthusiasm may suffer the subdivision without being utterly dissipated. He can actually do much of the work himself. He comes into contact with his clientage, which is not so large but that he may hope to become personally acquainted with many of them, and, learning their tastes and needs, easily become their trusted friend and guide. His catalog, too, is his own work, and it is perhaps safe to say that no one ever properly appreciates a catalog but its maker. Certainly no one else ever handles it with equal ease and intelligence.

I am afraid the catalog has never been made, and never will be, over which the ignorant and indolent will not be perplexed and deceived; and, after all is said, it is to the ignorant to whom the gospel of the public library is specially sent. If the cataloger himself is constantly at hand to explain intricacies, to supplement deficiencies, with his own perfect knowledge of his library, to answer even foolish and stumbling questioners patiently and intelligently, he may make the puzzling way of finding and getting a book so plain that "The wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein."

That this personal influence, when exerted, bears fruit, and that right soon, has been proved again and again. The following is from the last report of one of the largest libraries in the country: "The increasing public interest in the more scholarly books of the Library, and the large accession of visitors to the reference tables, are to be attributed partly to the Saturday-morning classes which have been conducted at the Library for the past four months." If such work makes so immediate and appreciable an impression upon a circulation which is numbered by hundreds of thousands, is there not a hopeful outlook, indeed, for small workers?

One has said that "A library is, after all, very much what its librarian makes it." There are too many conflicting individualities at work in a municipal library to make this, to any considerable extent, true; but in a small town or village the personal equation of the librarian may easily become the exponent of the power of the library.

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Dr. Talcott Williams, the orator of this occasion, Feb. 7, 1891, was at that time a journalist in Philadelphia. He has always been a welcome writer and speaker on literary themes.

Talcott Williams was born in Abeih, Turkey, July 20, 1849, the son of an American missionary. He graduated at Amherst in 1873 and in that year entered journalism, becoming later an editorial writer on several large dailies until 1912 when he was made director of the School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York City.

For the first and for the last time, the voices of men are heard in this place, dedicated to the more eloquent silence of books. Nowhere is man more and men less than in the library. In the presence of books individual learning pales. The scholar dies; the library lives. Yet only in part. In this bookish age, we fondly impute immortality to books. Nothing could be more false. Few books have the power of an endless life. Against these books of power stand a great multitude of books of use, which perish with the using. The vast mass of books, like the thoughts in our daily lives, sink into the background of the recollection of the race and furnish the soil from which fresh growths spring. Few there are who have written books of power. Not a score in all. Poets for the most part. High priests forever after the order of humanity, whose flaming message burns from age to age in the great tree of human existence, consuming and unconsumed. These books of power which live that humanity may not die, and books of use that die that others may live, divide literature between them. They constitute the warp and woof out of which the university weaves the higher education. In its last analysis a liberal training is the mastery of books of use and a glad yielding to the mastery of books of power.

Controversy over the classics, wrangling over Greek, vain jangling over required and elective courses--these are details. Direct contact between the growing minds of each generation and the great minds of the race--this is essential. We smile at the space given Confucius in Chinese education; the Koran in Mohammedan schools; but this is only a perversion of the sound instinct which everywhere puts the young to school to the teachers of the race. Unless your education does this, it stands where the electric telegraph did before its wires were grounded--its batteries and instruments, its poles and wires useless until they were in direct contact with the elemental source of electric energy in the earth itself. So-called and mis-called practical systems of education, realschulen, which omit these eternal realities of the race, find when they have stuffed their pupils with the facts of the day that they are still insulated from the thinkers of all time. Fortunately for us and for our education, these books of power exist in more than one language and are accessible through more than one channel of learning. Thanks to the matchless translation of the Bible, one incomparable group of books of power is taught in every Sunday-school, though I doubt if this will be held sufficient reason for neglecting their study in every university. Greek holds another group. But it is the pitiful pedant's plea to urge their study because Greek is difficult. It is not because Greek is Greek, but because Homer is Homer that Chapman "spake out loud and bold" of the solitary text-book which has held its own for 2500 years, and links, as may it forever link, this university with the school of Athens.

"Yet still your Homer, living, lasting, reigning, And proves how truth builds in poets feigning."

It is because these books of power hold the truth that makes men free, working thoughts that perish never, that they live when the tongues in which they speak are dead. Books of power which transmit the spiritual life of the race keep the self-same spirit through all the transmigrations of speech. The scriptures of the race, no less than the scriptures of religion, enjoy a pentecostal gift of tongues, and are heard by every man in his own language. Where such books are few in number, which a shelf or two will hold, there is a liberal education, and no elective course which permits their exclusion offers intellectual salvation. Some such books every race has found in its own literature as it reached the full stature of universal humanity, as our own English-speaking race, well-nigh within this generation, has discovered in adding Shakespeare to our general schooling. By the production of such books of power nations are justly measured. This is the wisdom which keepeth a city from destruction. The ship of state, however weighted with worldly wealth, moves a trackless keel through the waters of history unless some poet wings its course with "the proud, full sail of his great verse." We have all heard to-day from one whose lifelong devotion has raised him to the foremost rank of scholarship.

"Weave a circle around him thrice And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise."

The study of such books is possible without any aid or apparatus whatever; so near is the diviner of letters to every one of us. But the first office which the library discharges in a university is in providing the limitless and manifold interpretation which the ages have builded about these great books of power. Better than all other books as are the books of power when read without study, they are infinitely bettered by all study. The literature of interpretation is only second in value to the literature of inspiration. The study even of books of power tends to become scholastic, narrow, provincial, letterwise, and spiritually dead, unless it is quickened and corrected by the fruits of the entire field of critical science. For lack of this more than one sacred book has met a fate which makes one feel, as well kill a book as give it a good name. Even in the teaching of books of power--which of all teaching needs but a soul and the book to awake eternity--the scholar is saved from himself by the library. He learns that with all the inspired prophets of the race no scripture is of private interpretation, that only time unlocks the weaving of these deeper oracles of humanity, because they spake not of themselves, but for the spirit of man. Nor need we fear that they will be smothered by their interpretation. The mountains bear easily the weight of forests they uprear, and at the last and highest, no tree ascends above the snow-line of eternal thought.

But such ascents are as little the normal work of the university as of the road-builder. Its course lies chiefly along the broad highways of learning. Not books of power, but books of use, which sum first general, and then special and professional knowledge, occupy the greater portion of its time, just as the most saintly of mortals devotes more of his days to earning his living than to saving his soul. If the study of books of power is rendered more valuable by a library, the adequate teaching of books of use without one is impossible. Every text-book is a compromise between what is known and what can be taught. Two classes, I know, the publishers and the public, cherish the belief that there are text-books which sum current knowledge on this subject and that; but there are none. Every text-book is out of date the day after it goes to the printer, and the day before it gave out, not what is known, but the view of what is known then in vogue. It measures the advancing tides of learning by a gauge itself incessantly changing. We love to speak of authorities and standards. We delude ourselves. The whole field of letters and of learning is in a perpetual flux, whose only complete record is the library. We know that in science discovery succeeds discovery. There is nothing certain about a scientific book except that it will be wrong in five or ten years. Only now and then does some law-giver in science, some Newton or Darwin, descend the mount of discovery, bearing eternal and lasting laws of nature, writ by Nature's God. But in literature we dream of permanent reputation. Here, too, "Every century gives the last the lie." All the lesser priests of letters stand at shrines like that of Nemi and the Golden Bough,

"Beneath Aricia's trees, Where the ghastly priest doeth reign, The priest who slew the slayer And shall himself be slain,"

Every new book enters the arena about to die. The friendly verdict but deters fate; it does not avert it. The lesser criticism of letters must be done anew for every crop of readers, and in fifteen or twenty years most essays are left behind. The procession of novels passes almost as rapidly. Few are read for thirty years, no English novels have held a popular place for past half a century, and a decade before the centenary of Waverly it begins to be whispered that Scott is no longer read by the young. Every generation must have its own translations of the classics, or reprints of those which have been forgotten. Morals, philosophy, and religion must be rewritten for it. Even histories, which linger a little longer on the stage than all the rest, yield to inexorable change. It is barely a century since Gibbon launched his mighty fleet, freighted with the fall of empire. It has long ridden the seas, but I think we are all well aware that its masts are already low on the horizon. No one author, no one work, can longer satisfy the world for the story of ten centuries of the race. For most of us these changes do not exist. Unconsciously we go on down the stream with the favorites of our youth and forget that both are growing old together. If literature is to be taught as it is, and not as it seems, to take one pregnant illustration, true of all studies, teacher and taught must have instant and vital access to that great body of books to which in every subject a text-book is but a rude and makeshift guide. The present can only be understood by the past, and both are needed to prophesy of the future. When this library has been enlarged to the utmost bounds of our anticipation, it will still have its limits to the specialists--joints in its armor of learning. Even at the British Museum I was told and discovered that no man is long at work without wanting some book with which it is unprovided.

But if teaching requires this great array, much more does the wider work of the college professor. To look upon him as set only to teach, to hear recitations, is as narrow and barren a view of his work as to think of the farmer as only occupied in feeding his calves. If a university is in the highest sense to be a teaching body, it must cultivate knowledge as well as pupils. Its professors must do more than harvest the learning and teach the discoveries of other discoverers. They must produce and discover. The spirit of genius bloweth where it listeth, but those books of use which play their part in giving each generation its critical standards, its histories, and the results of research are born only in full libraries. If a university is deficient in them, the lack is apt to be in that laboratory of learning, its library. Unless a university is producing these, it is teaching only its matriculates when it ought to be teaching the public.

Much may be done, much accomplished, in the university without the library. Professional schools may multiply and grow, for in these men of professional learning supply the lack of books. It is even possible to carry on much research and produce valuable results along any narrow rising line of discovery in some science, which, like the coral, has but its growing edge alive, and for the rest is dead and under water. But if a university is to fill the whole round and play part in society, it must enjoy, employ, and extend the organized memory of man as represented in a great library. As the chief value of this lies, not in any view of its mere bulk and size, but in its relation to the recollection of the race, so the work of the university pivots on its ability to make vital the study of books of power, without which all learning and letters and science are but a vain show. Better, a thousand times better, the solitary study which brings men face to face with the spirit of man in these great movements than any university study which dwarfs to routine or degrades to mere rote these great works. For the object of all our study is not knowledge, but wisdom, and we move to dwindling ends if we search out all the secrets of matter and forget the secrets of the spirit. The great round of studies which make up the university, its libraries and laboratories, the accumulation of the past and the discovery of the future, these are each and all but the scaffolding by which the race rises to those conceptions of the Divine and the spiritual uttered and summed in its books of power. Listening to their teaching we may even learn that the ascent of man is more important than his descent, his future of more consequence than his origin--that it is his birth, and not his death, which is a sleep and a forgetting.

But books of use and books of power--the indiscriminate eulogy of books and reading has ceased to be possible even at the opening of a building dedicated to both. Their criticism has begun. Books are no longer the unique property of the scholar. We all buy books. Most of us read them. Many of you write them. The use of books is the one side of learning on which we all claim an opinion. Yet owned, read, written, or wholly laid aside in a busy life, the use of books, which each of us knows, is individual and personal. Standing to-day in the home of a collection which, we trust, is to be one of the larger libraries of learning, landmark, and lighthouse at once, recording the past and lighting the pathless future, this individual and personal use is inevitable before us, cramping and limiting our conception of the relations, the aims, and the ends of a great library. Its very beginnings about us raise a doubt as to the wisdom of these endless accumulations of print. The peril of the mere aggregate was, perhaps, never plainer than in these days, when the great glacier of democracy slides on, making high places low and low high--one would be glad to believe, preparing the pathway of a new lordship of learning, but one is fain to fear making easy the track and broad the road for an evil over-lordship of mediocrity in learning and in literature. Our own democracy we are assured, has ceased to read anything but fiction, and demands this, not book-meal, but piece-meal, in monthly, weekly, or even daily doses.

The vast book-stack of the modern library, in which volumes lose their individuality as completely as urns in a columbarium, and like them but too often hold naught but dead and forgotten dust, is far removed from the still air of delightful studies which we associate with our own loved libraries. "I seldom go there," says Emerson of the University Library he used, "without renewing my conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home." The ablest of American editors recently urged in the most brilliant of American newspapers that the Library of Congress should be reduced to a sound working collection of 50,000 volumes, and the rest of its treasures dissipated or stored. I have myself heard the suggestion in regard to this library, and from one of academic connection, that its future usefulness would be increased if its future bulk were restricted. Whether we listen to the philosopher, the editor, or the university trustee; whatever fanned and winnowed opinions we apply to the great threshing floor on whose round the feet of the ages slowly tread out the wheat from the chaff in the garnered harvest of human thought, the remnant will be small--measured by high thought or narrow utility. The mere mass of our libraries already overtaxes our utmost ability to classify, to catalogue, and to administer. As we watch their bulk grow, on whatever side of the great altar of learning we worship, our fears increase that these heaped offerings will stifle the sacred fire. This weighty weapon of letters forged by generations, this mighty armor and panoply of learning on whose myriad rivets so many hammers have rung, has outgrown the individual, and we begin to doubt its ultimate value to society.

Thus men ever err in their early thought on the new duties and fresh responsibilities created for men by associate man. In the field of organized life the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The body is more than an aggregate of cells. The soul wiser than all its faculties. A nation more puissant than any census of its citizens. Man more than men. The secret of this supremacy over the sterile synthesis of sense, the root and germ mastery over the mere mechanics of life, and the bald and barren arithmetic of existence, lies in the capacity to know the present and to remember the past--in consciousness, out of which conscience grows, and in memory, Mnemosyne, mother of all the Muses and parent of all learning. Rightly in all history do we measure the value of every human society to Humanity by its power to awake to its own existence and be aware of its own past. This is the

--"mystery in the soul of state Which hath an operation more divine Than breath or pen can give expression to--"

This exalts the microscopic municipalities of Greece. This abases the dumb millions of Asia. Our own articulate millions, deficient in much, have done most for the world, not by material development, but by demonstrating that 62,000,000 spread over a continent can enjoy a consciousness as constant, continuous, and complete as the handful of citizens in the market-place of a Greek city, less in population that the ward in which we stand, smaller in area than the open spaces about this University. This general capacity to think as one and remember as a whole differences modern societies from all the past, save that of Greece. This has brought the awakening of nations in this century, a mightier resurrection with power than the awakening of men in the sixteenth century. With the future awakening of man the work will be complete. Until it is, national consciousness and national memory, creating conscious national life, are the determining conditions of human progress. The problem which Greece solved by making its communities small, the modern world triumphantly meets by making them large and live. It secures this through the newspaper, the print of the present, which sets at one in consciousness vast masses of men which are set apart in space. For generations separated in time, the library, the print of the past, preserves for society the sacred oracles of memory. Misunderstood, misappreciated, placed in opposition, treated as antagonists, the editor assuring us that the newspaper has superseded the printed book, the librarian hesitating to cumber his shelves with the fugitive issues of the newspaper, these twin and vital organs in society still supplement and correlate each other.

The newspaper is the library of the moment, the library is the newspaper of all time. We open a newspaper to learn what we are as a nation. We enter a library to learn what we were. The revelations of neither are altogether satisfactory. We object to the library because it does not tell enough of the past. Too often we object to the newspaper because it tells too much of the present. The faults and shortcomings of the past, however plainly told, rouse no unpleasant sense of responsibility. In our own individual experience we have each of us had our private and personal quarrel with consciousness and memory for setting in too clear a light the sins and duties, the lacks and demands of the past and passing day. The revelation is no pleasanter when consciousness, memory and responsibility are social and national. Yet it is only by accepting both a complete social consciousness and a complete social memory that a society can be created whose ultimate end is the highest development of each of its individuals, whose service is the highest duty of all its members. Lavish margin of error in the newspaper too often leads us by some slain truth to ask with the soldier at Philippi:

"Messenger of error-- Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things they are not?--"

But like Cassius, the truth is self-slain and dies among its friends. It still remains true that the newspaper is oftener challenged for telling what is unpleasant than for recording what is untrue, and the refined and cultured soul, which objects to the newspaper because it reeks with the ill news of society for whose ills no man can avoid his just share of responsibility, but imitate the Pharaoh, who slew the messengers of evil and sunk in wilful ignorance to an ignoble grave.