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.