to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of
reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain
point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”--something to
enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James
tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and
morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas
represented by such phrases--catchwords, if you choose to call them
so--as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness,
civic duty--have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing
results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center
of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records,
with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in
just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,”
who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind
turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him
realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is
a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its
records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most
cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the
town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious
center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good,
that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and
leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from
trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading,
stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate
means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that
contribute to individual and civic development.
The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after
we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such
a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the
town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be
developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go
on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it
point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart
insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless
citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?
The answers to these questions depend on the home, the church, the
school--a score, perhaps, of minor civic societies. Let us at the very
center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which,
having as its basal object the collection, preservation and
popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past,
may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder
on which the community may mount to still better things in the future.
Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the
public library? That will depend on what we choose to make of it--a mere
pile of books to be turned over by the passerby, or a true center of
municipal education.
THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR[8]
“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust
upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a
censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his
care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days much else,
including a selector and a distributor, his duties in the former
capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his
field in the latter. As the library’s audience becomes larger, as its
educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more of the
young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more
imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed
upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only
five dollars’ worth from a stock worth a hundred, and it is unfair to
say that he has “rejected” the unbought ninety-five dollars’ worth. Such
a selection scarcely involves censorship, and we may cheerfully agree
with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not
called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A
man, we will say, is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory
incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty
million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will
say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause
of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our
library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose
appearance on examination ensures their exclusion--some glaring
misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner.
These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library
authority, whether librarian, book committee, or paid expert, points out
the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book the
function exercised is surely censorship.
May any general laws be laid down on this subject?
Let us admit at the outset that there is absolutely no book that may not
find its place on the shelves of some library and perform there its
appointed function. From this point of view every printed page is a
_document_, a record of something, material, as the French say, _pour
servir_; from a mass of such material neither falsity, immorality nor
indecency can exclude it. I do not speak at this time, therefore, of the
library as a storehouse of data for the scholar and the investigator,
but rather of the collection for the free use of the general public and
especially of collections intended for circulation. It is to these that
the censorship to which I have alluded may properly apply and upon these
it is generally exercised. I know of no more desirable classification of
books for our present purpose than the old three categories--the Good,
the True, and the Beautiful. Those books that we desire, we want because
they fall under one or more of these three heads--they must be morally
beneficial, contain accurate information or satisfy the esthetic sense
in its broadest meaning. Conversely we may exclude a book because it
lacks goodness, truth or beauty. We may thus reject it on one or more of
the three following grounds; badness--that is undesirable moral teaching
or effect; falsity--that is, mistakes, errors or misstatements of fact;
and ugliness--matter or manner offensive to our sense of beauty, fitness
or decency. The first and third qualities, badness and ugliness, are
often wrongly confounded, and as I desire therefore to speak of them
together, we will now take up the second, namely, falsity or lack of
truth. Strangely enough, among all reasons for excluding books this is
perhaps least often heard. Possibly this is because it applies only to
non-fiction, and apparently in the minds of many non-fiction is
desirable simply because it is what it is. Again, the application of
this test to any particular book can generally be made only by an
expert. The librarian needs no adviser to tell him whether or not a book
is immoral or indecent, but he cannot so easily ascertain whether the
statements in a work on history, science or travel are accurate. This
lack of expert knowledge is bad enough when inaccuracy or falsity of
statement is involuntary on the author’s part. But of late we have in
increasing numbers a class of books whose authors desire to deceive the
public--to make the reader take for authentic history, biography or
description what is at best historical fiction. Again, the increasing
desire to provide information for children and to interest the large
class of adults who are intellectually young but who still prefer truth
to fictitious narrative, has produced countless books in which the
writer has attempted to state facts, historical, scientific or
otherwise, in as simple, and at the same time as striking, language as
possible. Unfortunately, with some noteworthy exceptions, persons with
comprehensive knowledge of a subject are generally not able to present
it in the desired way. Co-operation is therefore necessary, and it is
not always properly or thoroughly carried out, even where the necessity
for it is realized. Proper co-operation between the expert and the
popularizer involves (1) the selection and statement of the facts by the
former; (2) their restatement and arrangement of the latter; and (3) the
revision of this arrangement by the former. It is this third process
that is often omitted even in serious cyclopedic work, and the result is
inaccuracy. Often, however, there is no cooperation at all; the writer
picks up his facts from what he considers reliable sources, puts them
into eminently readable shape, dwelling on what seem to him striking
features, heightening contrasts here and slurring over distinctions or
transitions there. This process produces what scientific men call
contemptuously “newspaper science,” and we have as well newspaper
history, newspaper sociology and so on. They fill the pages not only of
our daily press, but of our monthly magazines and of too many of the
books that stand on our library shelves. It is unfair to blame the
newspapers alone for their existence; in fact, some of the best simple
presentations of valuable information that we have appear in the daily
press. Then there are the text books. Any librarian who has ever tried
to select a few of the best of one kind--say elementary arithmetics--to
place on his shelves, knows that their name is legion and that
differences between them are largely confined to compilers’ names and
publishers’ imprints. In part they are subject to the same sources of
error as the popularized works and in addition to the temptation to
hasty, scamped or stolen work due to some publisher’s or teacher’s
cupidity. This catalog might be extended indefinitely, but even now we
begin to see the possibilities of rejection on the ground of falsity and
inaccuracy. I believe that the chief menace to the usefulness of the
public libraries lies, not as some believe in the reading of frankly
fictitious narrative, but in the use of false or misleading history,
biography, science and art. Not the crude or inartistic printing of toy
money, but the counterfeiting of real money, is a menace to the
circulating medium.
Against such debasement of the sterling coin of literature it is the
duty of the librarian to fight; and he cannot do it single-handed. Some
things he should and does know; he is able to tell whether the subject
matter is presented in such a way as to be of value to his readers; he
can tell whether the simple and better known facts of history and
science are correctly stated; he is often an authority in one or more
subjects in which he is competent to advise as an expert; but only the
ideal paragon, sometimes described but never yet incarnated, can qualify
simultaneously as an expert in all branches of science, philosophy, art
and literature. The librarian must have expert advisers.
Nor are these so difficult to obtain. The men who know are the very ones
that are interested in the library’s welfare and are likely to help it
without compensation. And in the smaller places where the variety and
extent of special knowledge is less comprehensive the ground covered by
the library’s collection is also less, and the advice that it needs is
simpler. The advice should if possible be personal and definite. No
amount of lists, I care not who prepares or annotates them, can take the
place of the friend at one’s elbow who is able and willing to give aid
just when and exactly where it is needed. As well might the world’s
rulers dismiss all their cabinet ministers and govern from textbooks on
law and ethics. The formula, the treatise, the bibliography--we must
still have all these, but they must be supplemented by personal advice.
And competent advisers exist, as I have said, in almost every place. The
local clergy on questions of religion, and often on others, too; the
school principal on history and economics, the organist on music, the
village doctor on science--some such men will always be found able and
glad to give advice on these subjects or some others; and the place is
small indeed that does not include one or two enthusiasts, collectors of
insects or minerals or antiquities, who have made themselves little
authorities on their pet hobbies and may possibly be the greatest or the
only living authorities on those local phases that particularly interest
the local librarian. It will do the librarian no harm to hunt these men
out and ask their aid; possibly his own horizon will broaden a little
with the task and his respect for the community in which he works will
grow as he performs it.
But what if two of our doctors disagree? Then follow the advice of both.
It might be disastrous for a patient to take two kinds of medicine, but
it can never hurt a library to contain books on both sides of a
question, whether it be one of historical fact, of religious dogma, or
of scientific theory. This may not be pressed too far; the following of
one side may be beneath our notice. It is not absolutely necessary, for
instance, for a small popular circulating library to contain works in
advocacy of the flatness of the earth or of the tenets of the angel
dancers of Hackensack; but it is essential that such a library should
make accessible to its readers the facts of the Reformation as stated by
both Catholic and Protestant writers, histories of the American Civil
War written from both the southern and northern standpoints, geological
works both asserting and denying the existence of a molten core in the
earth’s interior. An impartial book is hard to find; it is a thing of
value, but I am not sure that two partisan books, one on each side, with
the reader as judge, do not constitute a winning combination. Against
violent and personal polemics, of course, the librarian must set his
face. All such are candidates for rejection. It is fortunate for us in
this regard that we are supplying the needs of all creeds, all classes
and all schools. Each must and should have its own literature while each
protests against violent attacks on its own tenets. Such protests, while
often unjustified, are helping us to weed out our collections.
So much for deficiency in truth as a cause for rejection. Now let us
consider deficiency in goodness and deficiency in beauty; or stated
positively, badness and ugliness. These two things are confounded by
many of us. Is this because the great majority of librarians to-day are
of the sex that judges largely by intuition and often by instinctive
notions of beauty and fitness? To most women, I believe all ugliness is
sinful, and all sin is ugly. Now sin is morally ugly, without doubt, but
it may not be esthetically so. And goodness may be esthetically
repulsive. Badness and ugliness in books are both adequate grounds for
rejection, but they need not coexist. Some of the worst books are
artistically praiseworthy and would be well worth a place of honor on
our shelves if their beauty alone were to move us. On the other hand,
some books that are full of impropriety or even of indecency are
absolutely unimpeachable from a moral standpoint.
Shakespeare and the Bible are often indecent without being in the least
immoral. “Raffles” is in no wise indecent, but is dangerously immoral.
Bernard Shaw is often both indecent and immoral while at the same time
so astoundingly clever that we stand gaping at him with our mouths wide
open while he tosses down our throats the most unsavory things.
What, then, is the distinction between badness and ugliness? For our
present purpose I believe it to be this: badness depends on immutable
laws, while ugliness, at any rate that of the kind which concerns us
here, is a matter of convention. Virtue, with all due apologies to Mr.
Lecky and to many other eminent scholars, has certain standards that do
not vary with place or time. Let us grant that a given act may be good
to-day and bad to-morrow, good in Tasmania and bad in Pennsylvania; this
is beside the question. We have here to do with the classification of
this particular act in certain fixed categories that of themselves
remain bad or good. The act of cutting off a man’s head may be good if
the cutter is the public executioner, and bad if he be a private
citizen; one may shoot an attacking highwayman but not an innocent
friend. The reason for these differences, however, is that in one case
the killing is murder while in the other it is not; murder itself always
was and always will be bad.
Impropriety or indecency, on the other hand, is purely arbitrary.
Personally I am inclined to think this true of all beauty, but it is
unnecessary to obtrude this view here. Impropriety is a violation of
certain social customs, and although I should be the last to question
the observance of those customs, we must grant, I think, that they rest
on foundations quite other than those of right and wrong. In fact
decency, instead of being on the same plane with morality, comes nearer
to being properly ranked with those fixed categories mentioned above,
which are themselves always good or bad, but which may or may not
include a given act, according to circumstances. Murder is always bad,
but whether the taking of life is or is not murder depends on the
circumstances; it may depend entirely on motive. So indecency is always
bad, but whether a given act or object is or is not indecent depends on
circumstances; it may depend not only on motive but on locality or
environment. Objects and acts of the highest sanctity in one country may
be regarded as low and vulgar in another--the standard varies from class
to class, from one occupation to another; almost from family to family.
One may mention, in all innocence, that which may bring a blush to the
cheek of some listener, simply because of this instability of standard
in the matter of impropriety. To this class of things particularly
refers the celebrated dictum: “There is no thing in heaven or earth,
Horatio, but thinking makes it so.” This is unexceptionable Christian
Science, but it is not quite true. A higher authority than Shakespeare
has asserted that by thinking one cannot make a single hair white or
black; and this surely accords with the results of experience. Likewise
no one by thinking can make badness goodness or the reverse. But whether
a thing be improper or not depends entirely on thinking. Thinking makes
it so. It is improper for a Mohammedan woman to expose her face in
public because she thinks it is, and because that thought is an
ingrained part of her existence. But although the Persian sect of
Assassins thought with all their hearts that murder was good, it was
still very evil. Are we getting too far away from the censorship of
books? I think not. See the bearing of all this.
If a book is really bad--if it teaches that evil is good or that it
makes no difference--it ought to be rejected uncompromisingly, despite
the fact that it is void of impropriety or even artistically admirable.
But if it is morally unobjectionable and yet contains that which is
improper or indecent, it is then proper to inquire whether the degree
and kind of this indecency is such as to condemn it, particularly taking
into account the condition, the intelligence and the age of those who
would be likely to read it, and also the time and the readers for whom,
if it is an old book, its author originally wrote it. With increasing
civilization there are certain things that become more and more
indecent, and others that become less and less so, owing to the shifting
of points of view.
Let us now take up more specifically moral badness as a cause for
rejection. We occasionally meet people who hold that the mention of
anything morally bad in a book condemns it; while, on the other hand,
some would admit books whose atmosphere reeks with evil; whose bad
characters live bad lives and speak bad thoughts, so long as the writer
in his own person does not commend evil or teach that it is good. Both
these extremes are to be avoided. Surely we have outlived the idea that
innocence and ignorance are the same thing. “You can’t touch pitch,”
says the proverb, “and not be defiled.” Granted; yet we may look at
pitch, or any other dirt, and locate it, without harm; nay, we must do
so if we want to keep out of it. This is not saying that it is well to
seek out descriptions of evil, or to dwell on them, in a work of
fiction. Things necessary in the study of medicine, folk-lore or law may
be abhorrent in a narrative intended for amusement, although the advent
of the “problem” novel--the type of fiction in which the narrative form
is often merely the sugar coating for the pill--introduces confusion
here into any rule that we may lay down. But however foolish it is to
insist that the very existence of evil be concealed from readers of
fiction, since evil is a normal constituent of the world as we find it,
it is certainly fair to object to a dwelling upon evil phases of life to
such an extent that the resulting impression is a distortion of the
truth. This distortion may be so great as to make it proper to reject
the book wholly on the ground of falsity. A filling of the canvas with
lurid tints is apt to convey--or at any rate is often so done as to
convey--the idea that the existence of the evil that the writer depicts
is a matter of indifference. A man need not stop to assert his belief
that theft is wrong whenever he tells the story of a robbery, but it is
quite possible to tell a tale of theft in such a way as to leave an
impression that it is a venial offense and to weaken in the reader the
moral inhibition that must be his chief reliance in time of temptation.
And for “theft” here we may substitute any form of moral dereliction
that you may desire. One of the most potent vehicles of moral downfall
of any kind is the impression that “everybody does it”--that some
particular form of wrongdoing is well-nigh universal and is looked upon
with leniency by society in general. The man who steals from his
employer or who elopes with his neighbor’s wife is nine times out of ten
a willing convert to this view. A book that conveys such an idea is
really more dangerous than one which openly advocates wrong doing. There
can be little difference of opinion here. There may be more in regard to
the policy of telling the whole truth regarding a state of things that
is morally very bad. It may be fatal to a patient to let him know how
ill he is. And may it not also be injurious to a young man or a young
woman to expose the amount of evil that really lies before them in this
world? There is plausibility in this argument, but it is out of date.
There is much philosophy in the modern paradoxical slang phrase: “Cheer
up! the worst is yet to come!” And indeed if there is any superlative
badness ahead of us, it is better that we should know it, rather than
cultivate a false cheerfulness, based on misinformation, with the
certainty of disillusionment. The Egyptians were right when they set a
skeleton at their feasts. It was not to make the feasts gloomy, but to
make the skeleton a familiar object by association; to accustom the
feasters to think about death, how to avoid it as long as possible and
how to meet it when inevitable. We should therefore welcome the truth in
any book, unless it is that “half truth,” which the poet tells us is
“ever the blackest of lies,” or unless it is so stated as to violate the
canons of decency, in which case, as we have already seen, its rejection
must be based on different considerations entirely.