ourselves into a money-making institution on this count of publicity
alone. I believe that it would be profitable for publishers to pay us
for putting their books on our shelves. If we charged for the space we
are giving to trade catalogs, circulars and other publicity material the
issuers, I am sure, would not wait for us to ask for what they print. We
have been trying for several years to get framed pictures of St. Louis
industries to hang in our Business and Industrial Room. If we had asked
$50 per, for the privilege of using space on the walls of a public
institution I am sure we could have had it. But since we offer that
space absolutely free of charge--a sovereign for a shilling--we can’t
get what we want.
This is special publicity too, not general. There are some other cases
where something about a piece of special publicity makes it so valuable
to us that we display it, letting the advertiser get his advantage as a
side issue. Within the last few years we have put up boldly in our art
room, big glaring poster ads of beer, cigars and breakfast foods. How
much could one of you have extorted from an advertiser if you had made
him believe that you had some kind of a pull that would enable you to
placard his wares not on Smith’s fence or Jones’s barn, but actually on
the inside of the St. Louis Public Library? Now these posters were
displayed, of course, not as inducements to smoke Fatimas or to drink
Satanet, but because they were good and interesting commercial art. We
believe that more people see the art on the fences than that in the Art
Museum, and we want to do our part toward making it good. It has made
great strides of late, as I think you will acknowledge. But answer me
this: was not that valuable publicity for these products? Will not the
knowledge that similar publicity may await the manufacturer who gets out
a good poster, work out to the advantage of all concerned?
You know those articles in _System_, of course, telling what the writer
would do if he were an undertaker, or a druggist, or a farmer. Well, if
I were an ad-man I would get up an exhibition of St. Louis-made
commercial art, advertising St. Louis products, and offer it to the
Public Library. We will display it, our only condition in each case
being that it is artistically worth display. Your clients will have
their products advertised gratis, in a place where space could not be
bought for a million dollars a square foot. You will gain in reputation
as a man who puts over big things: we shall get an interesting display
of commercial art, and better than all else, an impulse will have been
given toward improved quality in the poster art of St. Louis. This is
only one instance of the fact, which I believe to be a fact, that there
is almost no kind of advertising that cannot be done in a live, modern
public library, if one only goes the right way about it. Many go about
it quite the wrong way, and do not succeed.
We do not assist Mrs. Smith to get piano pupils by placing on our
bulletin boards a scrawled announcement. We are not willing to
distribute by the million, small dodgers announcing that Jones’s
clothes-wringers are the best. We do not allow Robinson to lecture in
one of our assembly rooms in order to form a class in divine healing
from which he, and he alone, will profit.
Publicity furnished by us must be incidental, as I have said; or it must
be general, but I believe it to be all the more effective for this, and
I invite your attempts to make more frequent and better use of it in
such ways as I have suggested. Study the business and industrial
material in our Applied Science Room, or the commercial art material in
our Art Room. Examine the collection of travel folders on display in our
delivery hall. See our bulletin of daily attractions in St Louis,
entered months ahead when we can get the information--and see whether
you do not agree with me.
Now let me remind you that you are paying for all this service, whether
you make use of it or not. You are members of the best club in St.
Louis. I don’t mean the Advertising Men’s Club, good as that is; I mean
the Library Club. The taxgatherer collects the dues: if you are not a
taxpayer you pay just the same, the burden being passed along to you in
some of the many ways familiar to economists. The dues amount to about
three cents a month for each inhabitant of St. Louis--not excessive. The
club has the finest club house in the city, the most comfortable reading
and study rooms, the finest and most useful books, the most intelligent
and helpful attendants. You may have to belong to other clubs that you
do not use; this, at least it would be folly to neglect.
POETS, LIBRARIES AND REALITIES[17]
We are met to dedicate a temple of the Book on the birthday of a man who
did more than any other American, perhaps, to bring the book to the
hearts of the masses. All poetry, all song, begins with the people, in
the mouths of humble singers. Elaboration, refinement, unintelligent
imitation, carry them both away from popular appreciation, until finally
someone like James Whitcomb Riley brings them back. Great poetry is
always about familiar things. Homeric epics tell of the kind of fighting
that every Greek knew at first hand. The shepherds and shepherdesses of
the earliest pastorals were the everyday workers of the fields. It was
only at a later day the epic and pastoral grew artificial because the
poets did their best to keep them unchanged while the things of which
they told had passed away. Only when the poets forget the stilted
symbols which once were real and discover that they themselves are
surrounded by realities worthy of verse does poetry again become
popular. It is this phenomenon that we are witnessing today.
Everyone who has had occasion to keep in touch with popular taste will
tell you that the increased love for poetry shown in the publication of
verse, the purchase of it, the study of it, the demand for it at public
libraries, is nothing less than astounding. That this represents any
sudden change in the public, I cannot believe. The public has always
loved verse. The child chants it in his games; he drinks it in greedily
at his mother’s knee. He begs for it, even when he cannot understand it,
just for the joy of its rhythm, its lilt. But when the great poets go to
the abodes of the gods, or to regions as far away in esthetics or
metaphysics, for their subjects, they carry their product beyond public
appeal. When our great verse is all remote and the familiar things are
left to folk-lore and rag-time, then folk-lore and rag-time will
monopolize public attention and fill the heart of the people. It is this
feeling, on the part of many poets, that the familiar things of life are
beneath their notice, that has made poetry so long unpopular. The
feeling is quite unjustified. All the great elemental things are also
among the most familiar--birth, death, love, grief, joy, in human
experience: in the outer world, day and night, winter and summer, storm,
wind and flood. And affiliated with these are all the little everyday
things of which Riley sings--the bathing urchins, the ragged farm hand,
the old tramp, the little orphan girl with her tales of fright, the
rabbit under the railroad ties. When the modern reader first read in
verse about such things there was a rush of red blood to the heart, with
a recognition of the fact that verse had come down from Olympus to
earth, and that after all, earth is where we live and that life and its
emotions and events are both important and poetical.
I am not denying the poetry of romance, but we should remember that this
too, has its roots in reality. Even the most imaginative works must be
based, in the last analysis, on the real. Take for instance such works
as Poe’s. Poe despised realism. His best work is about half imagination
and half form. Yet when he succeeds in rousing in us the mingled
emotions of fear and horror on which so many of his effects depend he is
using for his purposes what was once a defensive mechanism of the human
organism, causing it to shrink from and avoid the real things--wild
beasts, enemies, the forces of nature--that were striving continually to
overwhelm and destroy it. Without the survival of this defensive
mechanism of fear and horror, Poe’s tales would have no dominion over
the human mind. In fact, the main difference between what we call
realism and romanticism is that while both have their relations with the
real facts of life, the facts on which romanticism depends are
unfamiliar, distant and distorted, while realism deals with that which
is near at hand and familiar. Knights in armor, distressed damsels,
donjon keeps and forests of spears were once as everyday affairs as
aeroplanes are now, or gas attacks, or the British tanks. These all have
in them the elements of romance; and when they too have passed, as God
grant they may, they will doubtless take their place in the equipment of
the poetical romanticist. Not these realities that pass, but those that
are with us always, are the ones that inspire verse like Riley’s.
Those who love to study group-psychology, and who realize that we have
in the motion-picture audience one of the most wonderful places to
observe it that ever has been vouchsafed to mortals, may see every night
the hold that this kind of realism has over the popular mind. Armed
hosts may surge across the screen, volcanoes may belch and catastrophe
may be piled on catastrophe. The eyes of the spectators may bulge and
their mouths may gape, but they remain untouched. But let a little dog
appear with his tongue out and his tail awag; let a small babe lie in
its cradle and double up its tiny fists and yell, and at once you have
evidence that the picture has penetrated the skin of the house and got
down to the quick. Homely realities make an appeal that neither the
knights in armor of the fourteenth century nor the tanks in armor of the
twentieth are able to exert. Gilbert, who wrote many a truth in the
guise of jest, never said a truer thing than when he made Bunthorne
proclaim that in all Nature’s works “something poetic lurks”--
Even in Colocynth and Calomel.
That is the poet’s mission--to show us the poetry in the things that we
had never looked upon as within poetry’s sphere. They are all doing it
now--Noyes, Masefield and all the rest, and the public has risen at them
as one man.
If James Whitcomb Riley were here today I should take him by the hand
and say, “Beloved poet, you have known how to touch the great heart of
the people quickly and deeply. That is what we must all do, if we are to
succeed. We librarians must do it if our libraries are to be more than
paper and glue and leather. Teach us the way.”
Our libraries are closer, far closer, to the people today than they were
fifty years ago. They can never get as close as an individual voice like
Riley’s, for they are a combination, not even a harmonious chorus, but a
jumble of sounds from all regions and all ages. Yet we must not forget
that in every instrument of music there is a potential mass of discord.
The skilled player selects his tones and produces them in proper
sequence and rhythm; and lo! a sweet melody! So the librarian may play
upon his mass of books, selecting and grouping and bringing into
correspondence his own tones and the receptive minds of his community,
until every man sees in the library not a jumble but a harmony, not a
promoter of intellectual confusion but a clarifier of ideas. In some
such fashion it is allowed him to get close to the minds and hearts of
his community as Riley did to his readers.
We are realizing today, we of the library world, that it is a poor
instrument that yields but one tune, and a poor player who is able to
produce only one. The librarians of the early days were of this kind; so
were their libraries. The time they played was the tune of
scholarship--a grand old melody enough, and yet with the right keyboard
one may play not only fugues and chorals but the waltz and even the
one-step. The scholar will find his refuge in this great building, but
here also will be a multitude of functions undreamt of in the early
library day--the selection of literature for children and their
supervision while they use it, co-operation with the schools, the
training of library workers, the publication of lists and other library
aids, helpful cataloging and indexing, the provision of books and
assistance for special classes, such as engineers, business men or
teachers, a staff and facilities for all kinds of extension work,
filling the space around the library as a magnet’s field of force
surrounds its material body. A modern library is a city’s headquarters
in its strife against ignorance and inefficiency; its working force is a
general staff--books, ammunition for the fighter and food for the
worker.
Of the poet I have said that his ability to gain the public ear and to
reach the public heart is closely bound up with the portrayal of
realities. This is true also of the library. Every step of its progress
from a merely scholarly institution to a widely popular one has been
marked by the introduction of more red blood, more real life, into its
organism. The frequenter of the older library went there to find books
on the pure sciences, on philosophy, in the drama, in poetry. These we
of today in no wise neglect, but we entertain also those who look for
books on plumbing, on the manufacture of hats, shoes and clothing, on
salesmanship and cost accounting, on camping and fishing, on first aid
to the injured, on the products of Sonoma county, California. Our
assistants take over the telephone requests to furnish the population of
Bulgaria, the average temperature of Nebraska in the month of June,
plans for bungalows not to cost more than $1750, pictures of the Winter
Palace in Petrograd, sixty picture postals of Baltimore for a
reflectoscope lecture, a copy of a poem beginning “O beauteous day!” the
address of the speaker’s uncle who left Salem, Massachusetts, for the
West twenty-six years ago. Everyone of these queries throbs with the red
blood of reality. Few of them would have been considered within the
library’s scope fifty years ago. Books are written nowadays about all
such subjects, whereas in the earlier day the knowledge of these things
and the ability to write of them did not reside in the same person. So
the library’s progress toward the realities is but the expression of
that same progress in literature, using the word in its widest sense to
signify all that may lurk between the covers of a book. The contemptuous
name of _biblia abiblia_--books that are no books--which the earlier
writers bestowed upon dictionaries, directories, indexes, lists and the
like, is disregarded by the modern librarian. He prizes a list of all
the grocers in the United States; he points with pride to his collection
of hundreds of telephone directories; he has names galore in
alphabetical array--indexes to places, persons, pictures, events and
books. All these things are as much a part of his library as the Iliad
of Homer or the dramas of Calderon.
But the librarian does not stop here. He conceives that it is his duty
to deal not only with books but with what we may call adjuncts to
books--things which may lead to books those who do not read--things that
may interpret books to those who read but do not read understandingly or
appreciatively. Some of our brothers beyond the sea have criticized us
American librarians for the freedom--nay, the abandon--with which we
have thrown ourselves into the search for such adjuncts and the zeal
with which we have striven to make use of them. It has been our aim of
late years, for instance, to make of the library a community center--to
do everything that will cause its neighbors to feel that it is a place
where they will be welcome, for whatever cause and that they may look to
it for aid, sympathy and appreciation in whatever emergency. If the life
of the community thus centers in the library, we have felt that the
community cannot fail ultimately to take an interest in the library’s
contents and in its primary function. The branch libraries in many of
our cities are such local centers. Here one may find the neighbors round
about holding an exhibition of needlework, the children dancing, the
young men debating questions of the day, the women’s clubs discussing
their programs, the local musical society rehearsing a cantata, Sunday
schools preparing for a festival, the ward meeting of a political party.
In one of our own branch libraries, in a well-to-do neighborhood, the
librarian said to one of the young men at a social meeting, “I am
curious to know why you come here. You could all afford, I know, to rent
a larger and better hall; or you could meet in your own homes.” The
young man looked at her with surprise, “Why,” he said, “we like this
place. We all grew up in this library.” I confess that this anecdote
sends a little thrill of satisfaction thru me every time I tell it.
What could a librarian desire more than to have his neighborhood “grow
up” in his library--to have the books as their roommates--to feel that
they would rather be in that one spot than any other? On what a point of
vantage does this place him! How much more readily will his neighbors
listen to the good genius of a much-loved spot than to the keeper of a
jail! Just here, of course, is the strong point of the so-called Gary
system, which has so much in common with our modern library ideas.
Whatever may be its faults, it at least makes of the school what we
librarians have long sought to make of the library--a place that will be
loved by its inmates instead of loathed. This once gained there is
hardly any result that we may not bring about.
And now let us consider at least one thing more that we may gain from
this intimate contact with the life of the community around us.
Formalism has been the death of art, of literature, of science, in many
an age. It has atrophied an entire civilization, as it did in China. It
paralyzed Egyptian art; it would have paralyzed Greek art, if the Greeks
had not had the vitality to throw it off. Art, literature and science
are never sufficient unto themselves. They must all drink continually at
the fresh springs of reality. To move up to date with our metaphor, they
must all get fresh current from the feeders of nature if the trolley
wire is to be kept “live” and the motor running. Those perennial
currents that Ampere conceived of as chasing themselves round and round
the molecules of matter could keep going only in the absence of
resistance, and that is something that we may imagine or talk about, but
that does not really exist. Every electric current will stop unless a
continuous electro-motive force is behind it; every river will dry up
unless fed by living springs. All art, all literature, all science, will
shrivel out of existence, or at any rate out of usefulness, if those who
practice it think that all they have to do is to copy some trick, some
method, some symptom perhaps of real genius, of their predecessors.
Aristotle was a real scientist, tho his outlook was not ours. But those
who kept on copying Aristotle for centuries and would not believe what
they saw with their own eyes unless they could confirm it with a passage
from his writings--they were no scientists at all. We have recovered
from their formalism as Greek art recovered from the formalism of the
lions of Mycenae.
Who shall say that James Whitcomb Riley did not do just this when he
chose to abandon the stock in trade of the standard poets and put into
verse what he saw about him here in Indiana? It is not beyond the
possibilities, of course, that his own fresh point of view may one day
succumb to formalism--that his little Orphant Annies and his raggedy men
may become familiar to posterity through the work of a school of
copyists who prefer to write about an Indiana that they never saw in a
period when they never lived, instead of going themselves to the fresh
inspiration of the realities about them. Now, of course, the current or
the river of art or poetry must run a little while by itself; it cannot
be all spring. Only, the fresh inspiration must not be delayed too long,
lest the current or the river be dried.
In a recent article on current British novelists, one of our own most
gifted writers, Mrs. Gerould, says with some truth that the stories of
the younger realists in England--Compton Mackenzie, Oliver Onions, Hugh
Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and their kin--are so similar in subject,
treatment and style, that they might almost be interchangeable. She
wittily develops the idea of a syndicate--the British Novelists,
Limited--in which one writer is told to do the descriptions, another the
character-drawing and a third the thrills. Mrs. Gerould is hardly fair
here. These young men are almost the first writers in the English
language to do just what they are accomplishing. They are by turns
engrossing and boresome, but they are like the boy who has, all by
himself, picked out a succession of chords on the piano. The harmony
thrills him, but he is in danger of keeping it up so long that he will
drive his hearers daft. When our British realists have over-worked their
new vein, their sales will fall off and their publishers will see that
fresh ore is brought to light ere more of their work reaches the public.
How shall we ensure that this new ore shall be at hand--the jungle
cleared so that there may be a fresh vista?
I may be taking too much upon my chosen profession; but I cannot help
thinking that this is one of the tasks with which we librarians shall
have to grapple. We have ourselves, as we have seen, come lately into
more intimate touch with the realities about us. Can we not put into
literature what we are taking from life and so act as the feeders that
shall keep civilization from drying up or turning to stone? This is
perhaps a startling idea. A book is a record. In the nature of things
there is no progress in a record. And we are the keepers of the records
of civilization; how then shall we be also founts of inspiration?
In this way; records stand, but the things that they record progress. We
must go to the library to find out where humanity stands on the road and
what lies before us. If our public comes to us naturally to read these
records and if our writers know this and write for a public interested
in reality, the library has done its part. Before this linkage can
function truly, we must have authors who realize that there is a
special library public and who write for it. We are told that the
English publishers, before they accept a manuscript ask, “How many will
the circulating libraries take?” They mean the great commercial
subscription libraries like Mudie’s and Smith’s. The patronage of these
libraries is more important to them than that of the public at large, or
at any rate, they feel that they can rely upon it as an indication of
what that of the public at large will be. There is a library public that
they recognize and respect. We have nothing in the United States to
correspond to Mudie’s and Smith’s. Our great circulating libraries are
our free public libraries. Do authors or publishers or booksellers
recognize the public library as a force to be reckoned with, either
apart from other readers or as indicative of what other readers will
think or do? I once made an investigation of this question and I was
compelled to acknowledge, as I am still forced to admit, that there is
no such recognition. Neither author nor publisher consciously does
anything different, because there are public library readers, from what
he would do, if all our public libraries were wiped off the face of the
earth. My hope for the future lies in a justified suspicion that though
neither is consciously affected, both do recognize the library public
unconsciously and indirectly. Both would admit that their output has
been affected by the great extension of the reading public and its
consequent alteration in quality. A discussion of the exact effect would
lead us too far afield. The point is that the literary product has been
changed by a change in the numbers and quality of the reading public,
and that this change has been brought about in no small degree by the
establishment and popularity of public libraries. Possibly it is not too
much to expect that this unconscious recognition will give place to a
conscious one, and that the producers’ mutual influence bring each other
into more frequent contact with reality.