precisely this way that it has taken on all its additional functions.
The old libraries lent no books. But home use of books seemed presently
desirable. After experimenting with separate institutions for this kind
of service, we have all come around to considering it a legitimate
function of the Public Library. Libraries gave no attention to children.
When this became necessary, another function was added. These and other
duties were very closely related to the library’s older functions. Soon
there was a further step, in making which the library took over services
whose connection with its primary business was not so clear. To draw an
example from what is most familiar to me at present, in the St. Louis
Public Library you will find a room for art exhibits, collections of
post-cards and textile fabrics, a card index to current lectures,
exhibitions and concerts, a public writing-room with free note-paper and
envelopes, a class of young women, studying, like yourselves, to be
librarians; meeting-places for all sorts of clubs and groups, civic,
educational, social, political and religious; a photographic copying
machine, placed at public disposal at the cost of operation; lunch-rooms
and rest-rooms for the staff; a garage, with automobiles in it, not to
speak of an extensive telephone switchboard, a paint-shop, a carpenter
shop, and a power-plant. Not one of these things, I believe, would you
have found in a large library fifty years ago, and yet they are probably
all, in one shape or another, to be found in all large modern American
libraries. They are extensions of function; in many cases it would be
hard to justify them on general principles. Why should a library allow
young people to dance, or men to hold a political meeting or the
neighbors to exhibit local products, in its building? Our English
friends hold that it is the height of absurdity to do so. Doubtless we
should be absurd if we should attempt to formulate a principle about
what cognate activities might properly be admitted to the library and
should include such things as these. But that is not the way in which it
all came about. There was some group of citizens, anxious to engage in
some activity, beneficial to themselves and to the community. They
wanted a place to meet. Church and school, for one reason or another,
real or imaginary, were out of the question, and they came to the
library. The Library had an unoccupied room, heated and lighted. It had
the choice of locking out citizens of the community that were supporting
it out of the public funds, or of admitting them. Put in this way the
library’s duty seems clear enough. But there is a step further still.
Some demands for help are so old that the knocking at the door has
passed out of the consciousness of both those who knock and those who
hear. In this case it becomes necessary for the library to undertake
what a recent scientific writer calls the “re-education of its attentive
control”. When an institution reaches the conclusion that it is doing
all that it can, or all that the community can properly ask of it, the
chances are that it is losing its ability to concentrate. Its duty is to
fix its attention on one element of community life after another and ask
itself whether it is not overlooking some really insistent demand for
help.
I well remember when, in the New York Public Library we used
complacently to explain our failure to purchase Hungarian books for
circulation by saying that there was no demand for them. But the time
came when we put in a few hundred books in that tongue. At once it
became evident that we needed not hundreds but thousands. Hungarians
came to us from far distant parts of the city only to find empty
shelves. This overwhelming demand had been present all the time; only it
was latent. It lacked active expression, simply because our lack of
Hungarian books was a well known fact. Since then when librarians tell
me that their libraries have no books in Ruthenian, or on sanitary
plumbing, no out-of-town directories or no prints for circulation,
because “there is no demand for them”, I am inclined to smile. No matter
how near you may be to dying of thirst, you will not be likely to visit
an obviously dry sand-bank in search of water.
The intelligent search for these latent demands requires the kind of
interested ability that I have already spoken of as one of the library’s
chief needs. The library must keep on growing if it is to live. It must
take on new functions, and when it assumes some new duty, some group in
the community must exclaim “Of course! that is just what we have been
wanting all the time”. And at the same time there will always be some
outworn function that may be dropped off quietly to make room for the
new.
Only the librarian must not mistake unintelligent imitation for
initiative. Imitation in itself is unobjectionable. If what someone else
has devised is obviously the very thing you have been looking for to
solve your problem, you would only waste energy in trying to devise
something else. But if you think you can create in your community a
library as good, we will say, as Mr. Dana’s in Newark, or Mr. Brett’s in
Cleveland or Mr. Jennings’ in Seattle, simply by copying every detail of
those institutions, you are as foolish as if you thought you could make
yourself look like your well-dressed friend simply by borrowing his
clothes. The library must fit the community; also, in some respects, the
librarian. I have recently visited Miss Hewins’ office in the Hartford
Public Library. I think it is the most fascinating office a librarian
ever occupied. But I certainly shall not go home to St. Louis and try to
make mine look like it.
This warning applies particularly to the added functions of which we
have been speaking above. They should be assumed in response to a
demand--expressed or latent. The demand may be obvious and insistent in
one library and non-existent in another. If you suspect a latent
demand, experiment will generally reveal or disprove its existence, just
as those few hundreds of Hungarian books brought out the demand for the
present thousands. We have on the east side of our library a broad
terrace, balustraded, elevated above the street, paved with brick and
stone. It is shady on summer afternoons, and swept by the south breeze.
What an ideal place to read in the open air, instead of in the stuffy
building! We equipped it with tables and chairs, relaxed the rules to
make it easy to take books and magazines there, did everything in our
power to encourage terrace readers. The public press saw and approved.
Everything worked well, except that nobody came! A failure, do you say?
Not at all. We had tried our experiment, tested for our possible latent
demand and found that there was none. We had asked our question and
received our answer. There are no tables and chairs on that terrace
to-day, but we are not discouraged: why should we be? A real experiment
never fails: you always get your answer--yes or no. Of course if your
experiment is a sham, and you have assumed that the answer is to be the
one that you want, you may be disappointed.
It is always a pleasure to watch things grow, to be able to keep them on
and guide their growth in useful directions. A library is no exception
to the rule. Even growth in size--the simplest kind--has its
satisfactions, but extension of service is still more interesting. It is
well that there should be a little mystery between the librarian and his
public--a consciousness of problems yet to solve, of service yet to be
rendered. It is well that he should be on the lookout for latent
demands--those hungers and thirsts that he knows must exist somewhere
and that he is eager to satisfy; it is well that his community should
regard the library as a place with opportunity and willingness for
service yet unrevealed as a reservoir of favors yet unbestowed. This is
a living relation, not one of mere juxtaposition. I never envied the
kind of service that old Atlas did the world, in standing eternally with
it on his shoulders. That was an image of dull, burdensome despair. How
much better our modern vision of a spinning globe, circling through
space, with all its brother and sister globes dancing around it! And
however miraculous it seems, we know that whenever we get up and walk
across the room there is a tiny adjustment of balance throughout the
whole vast system. There are social balances, too, as well as celestial,
and when the library puts out its foot to take a forward step, I believe
that they all respond.
These things that libraries are doing have their part in the vast social
adjustments in the midst of which we live. Some day a social historian
will arise to describe them and set them in their place. I am frequently
disappointed when I take up some book describing a movement or an
application of energy in which I know that the library has borne a part,
to find that its share has been absolutely without recognition; that the
word “library” is not even in the copious index. We have been busy doing
things--here in the seclusion of the library family we may say that they
have been things worth the doing. Some day we, too, shall have our Homer
or our Milton.
Let me remind you that this has all been illustrative of my principle
that library service, like every other kind of mundane activity, is a
phase of the eternal struggle between keeping still and getting
somewhere else. At the close of a recent novel one of the most
thoughtful of current English writers, Mr. J.D. Beresford, states the
issue thus (I quote from memory): “Virtue is only continued effort; a
boast of success is really a confession of failure”. Of course,
continuance of effort, virtuous though it may be, will be of little
avail without ability, intelligence, common-sense--at least a modicum of
those qualities whose complete combination makes up that wholly
impossible creature, the Perfect Librarian. Training will not give you
these--the Almighty bestows them at our birth--but it will develop such
as you have already--and none of us lacks all of them.
Keep on moving, then, and when you score a point, rejoice only because
it proves that scoring is one of your possibilities, and that you are
likely to score many others before your race is run.
LUCK IN THE LIBRARY
“It is better to be born lucky than rich”, says the old proverb. “Is he
lucky?” Napoleon used to ask when anyone was recommended to him.
Literature is full of allusions to luck; history is full of the belief
in it and of the influence of that belief on the course of events. Do I
believe in luck? Most assuredly, if you will allow me to frame my own
definition. One of the most important and fascinating branches of modern
mathematics--the theory of chances or probabilities, deals with what may
be called luck, and with its laws. Chance, we are told, is “the totality
of unconsidered causes”. When an event is conditioned entirely by chance
we say that it came about by “luck”, though the unconsidered causes are
there just the same. A tyrant, we will say, stakes his victim’s life on
the cast of a die. Whether he perishes or not is solely a matter of good
or bad “luck”. When a basket contains ten marbles, of which five are
black and five are white we know that in the long run the number of
black and white marbles drawn at random tends toward equality, and we
express this by saying that the chance of drawing either black or white
is one in two, or ½. Whether black or white appears at any single
drawing is purely a matter of luck. In this sense, luck confronts us at
every turn, and no one can deny its existence. Now let us go a little
further. May chance happenings be affected by circumstances that have no
apparent connection with them? Doubtless; but so far as they are they
are no longer subject to the laws of chance. It is because we know this
that we are able to study nature by experiment. If in a long series of
drawings, from a basket containing an equal number of black and white
marbles, we draw chiefly black, we recognize at once the fact that some
cause, distinct from the mass of slight and unconsidered causes whose
combined action we know as “chance”, is acting. We try at once to get at
that cause by varying the conditions. If we find, for instance, that by
plunging the hand deeper into the basket we get white balls as well as
black, we conclude that the white balls were heavier and so settled to
the bottom when the mass was shaken. So it may be that a particular
series of happenings may be affected by locality, by personality or by
season. So far as this is true, chance or “luck” has ceased to act and
we must look for the cause. These, however, are precisely the
circumstances in which many persons are accustomed to invoke a luck of
higher grade and more potent qualities, a luck that clings to person,
place, or time. If in a series of happenings more turn out to the
advantage of a particular person than pure chance would warrant, he is
said to be “lucky”. In other words, the necessity of assigning a cause
is recognized, and it is easier to call this cause “luck” than to search
for it and to identify it. I am not sure that we are right in objecting
to this procedure. We do not object to lumping together the totality of
unconsidered causes and calling them “chance”. It is legitimate to do so
when it is impossible to discover and treat them separately. In like
manner it may be considered proper to call a man “lucky” when the causes
of his success evade detection, though we may be sure that they exist.
It is in this sense that it is better to be born lucky than rich. This
was what Napoleon meant, I have no doubt, by his question, “Is he
lucky?” He might have said, “Is he uniformly successful, for reasons
that do not lie on the surface? If so, we must assume the existence of
causes, though we cannot detect them. Doubtless he will continue to
succeed, even if we can not always tell why. That is the kind of man
that I prefer.”
Just a little philology here may throw additional light on our subject.
I have said that Napoleon’s question was, “Is he lucky?” Now of course
Napoleon did not use these words, because they are English words, and he
spoke in French. What he said, doubtless, was “_Est-il heureux?_” We
translate _heureux_ in two ways, “happy” and “fortunate”, but they are
really the same, for happy means “of good hap”, or good fortune. When we
say “by a happy chance”, we go back to this primitive meaning. The word
_heureux_ is derived by the French lexicographers from the Latin
_augurium_, so that its basic meaning is “of good augury.” I think you
will agree with me that there is something more here than mere chance.
The augur’s business was to ascertain the will of the gods, and all
through we have the idea of some impelling force that makes things turn
out as they do. If this force, whatever it was, was on the side of the
candidate, Napoleon wanted him.
As for our word “luck” itself, it is purely Teutonic and our
lexicographers do not trace it beyond its earlier forms. It should be
noted, however, that in many of these, as in the modern German _glück_,
it means happiness as well as chance. This wide association of ideas may
be taken to mean that happiness was regarded by our forefathers as
always the sport of chance; but I prefer to regard it as an evidence
that a life in which everything is for the best--where no mistakes are
made and where all is fair sailing and successful outcome, is dependent
on some fundamental cause.
These “lucky devils”, that we see all about us--the ones who “always
fall right-side-up”--the men whose touch turns everything into gold--the
college students who pass examinations because the questions happened to
be the very ones they knew--all these are people whose “luck” can
usually be depended on to last. It is all right to explain their success
by calling them “lucky”, so long as we do not forget that this is merely
a word to cloak our ignorance of the real causes.
The trouble is that this is what we do often forget. We have been
forgetting it since the dawn of civilization, and we inherit our
forgetfulness from the twilight of ignorance that preceded it. If the
cause of a man’s success was not immediately apparent, he must, it was
concluded, have effected it by magic or sorcery, or he was in league
with the Devil, or Fortuna or some other goddess guided his hand. If he
was a consistent failure, someone had hoodooed him, or blasted him with
the evil eye, or worked upon him some magical charm, or the fickle
goddess had turned her back on him. Nowadays we simply say “lucky dog!”
or “unlucky dog!” and let it go at that; but the words carry with them
the meaning that something occult is at work--a meaning quite as
unreasonable as the specific supernatural causes assigned in earlier
days, and possibly still more objectionable.
I am quite willing to recognize that Jones is “lucky”. His success is
due to something that I can not detect; in fact, he seems to me rather
an ordinary young man. He may possibly not understand, himself, why he
gets ahead so fast. He may believe that there is something occult about
it. Plenty of successful men have believed in their “stars” and trusted
them, and this worked well until it encouraged them to be reckless. Luck
and stars are all very well as symbols, but they will not perform
impossibilities.
So far I have not openly mentioned the public library, but I have been
thinking of it a good deal, and I hope that you have also. It is one of
the beauties of public library work that the points at which it touches
life in general are many. He who is given the honor of addressing
librarians, as I am doing at present, may talk about pretty much what he
pleases, when he begins, serene in the confidence that its application
to library work will not only be reached in good time, but will even
obtrude itself prematurely on his hearers.
In the first place, I believe we librarians should ponder that question
of Napoleon’s--“Is he lucky?” and should make it part of our tests for
employment and promotion, asking it in substance of the candidates
themselves, of their sponsors and of the institutions where they gained
their training and experience.
Extending Shakespeare a little, we may say with Cæsar, “Let me have men
about me who are fat”--fat with achievement. Those who are lean and
hungry with failure are not for me. Where the cause of achievement or
failure is obvious, this attitude needs no defense. I believe that it is
justifiable where the success or failure is generally attributed to
“luck”. The general feeling that an “unlucky devil” will probably
continue to be unlucky is founded on the idea that his ill luck is due
to something more than chance. Whatever it is, it is something that we
must and should reckon with, whether it is visible or not, even whether
it is thinkable or not--certainly whether the person concerned is
responsible for it or not. He may be in no sense responsible for his
“bad luck” any more than he is for a physical defect such as blindness
or one-leggedness; but all these things must be weighed in estimating
the probable value of his work.
I am conscious that such an attitude as this may, in theory, do serious
injustice to the man whose “ill luck” is really due to pure chance, just
as in the case of the man who throws tails ten times in succession after
betting on heads. Such a run as this may happen; it does happen in fact
on an average once in 1024 trials. The fact that there are 1023 chances
against it justifies us in neglecting to take it into account very
seriously. I suppose that the chances against a man’s persistent “bad
luck” being due to pure hazard are very many millions to one. I am not
going to waste any tears over the injustice that I or you or anyone else
might do in _this_ way.
I once heard a man of great intelligence, the ex-president of a small
college, firmly maintain that if one had a basketful of letters of the
alphabet, written on cards, and dumped them all out on the floor, it was
absolutely impossible that they should be found so arranged, we will
say, as to spell out Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. Now such a happening is
extremely unlikely, but the chance that it should occur can be
calculated mathematically and expressed in figures. The arrangement in
which “Paradise Lost” is spelled out, however, is no more unlikely than
any other possible arrangement, and some one of these arrangements is
bound to occur, no matter how unlikely any particular one is beforehand.
No one of them, therefore is impossible, including Paradise Lost. But I
admit that where chances are so adverse, we may use the word
“impossibility” in a rough sense, and so I use it in asserting that it
is impossible for persistent “bad luck” to be due to pure chance.
Just here we may consider whether a man may rise above ill-luck, may
conquer it, may turn it into good fortune. The ancients evidently
believed that he could; that is why they represented Fortuna’s wheel as
turning. Its rotation may not only “lower the proud”, as Tennyson puts
it, but may also elevate the humble--change a run of ill-luck into a
“lucky strike”. The Psalmist ascribes both these functions to the
Almighty himself. “_Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles_”.
All this was occult to them of old time; it need be so to us only in the
sense that occult means “hidden”. If the hidden causes of a man’s ill
luck may be revealed to him, wholly or partially, by study, or even if
he can make a plausible guess at them, and if he finds that they are
within his control, he can of course mitigate them or perhaps abolish
them. I greatly fear that in most cases of this kind they are beyond his
regulation, either because they are congenital or because they are due
to habits so ingrained that changing them is impossible. The very fact
that he attributes his failures to “luck” shows that he has made some
effort to get at the cause and has failed in that, as in other things.
The use of the word “luck” enables him to keep his self-respect. It does
not, however, make him a more valuable assistant, and his superiors must
not fail to take it into account in an estimate of his work.
I believe that some inquiry into possible physical causes may repay us.
Teachers tell us of cases where incredible stupidity turned out on
examination to be due to deafness. I personally knew of a maid servant
whose apparently idiotic actions were caused by near-sightedness. She
did not know--poor girl--that her eyes were not perfectly normal. In
all such cases treatment of the physical cause, if it is
treatable--alters the “run of luck” at once. All of our libraries should
have medical officers, as the New York Public Library has, and the
members of the staff should be periodically inspected. There should be a
rigid physical examination on entrance.
I ask you to consider, in this connection, the career of Ulysses S.
Grant, which has always seemed to me one of the most remarkable in our
history. As I walked down the Gravois Road in St. Louis the other day,
along which Grant used to drive his loads of wood from the farm, to sell
in the city, it seemed as if I could see the stumpy figure clad in its
faded army overcoat seated on the load and urging his slow-going mules
toward St. Louis, then far away. If there ever was a man who was “down
and out”, it was Grant at this time. He had been uniformly “unlucky”. He
had had his chance--a good one--and had passed it by. Opportunity, which
we are falsely told knocks only once at a man’s door, had sounded her
call and he had made no adequate response. A graduate of West Point,
with creditable service in the Mexican War, with good connections by
birth and marriage, here he was, living in a log cabin on a small farm,
hauling wood to city customers. Yet just three years later this man’s
name was the best known in the country and had gone around the world. He
was a victorious general in command of armies. A few years more and he
was President of the United States. He was uniformly “lucky”. His “luck
had changed”. What made it change? I can not find that Grant the
successful military commander was a different man in any way from Grant
the farmer and teamster. He was supremely fitted for military command
under a particular set of conditions. When those conditions arose, his
genius took the line of least resistance. Such a career is not unique.
We learn from it that ill luck may be simply negative--due, not to
active causes that force one back, but simply to the absence of the
conditions under which alone one may move forward. Vocational guidance
may help us here--or it may not. It would not have helped Grant. If he
could have been subjected to some miraculous series of tests that would
have brought out the fact that, failure as he was, he could achieve
brilliant success at the head of an army what would that have availed?
There was no army for him, and there was no war in which it could fight.
If the question “Is he lucky?” is to be answered “No--but he might
become so, if he were at the head of the U. S. Steel Corporation”. I am
afraid that the result would be the same as without that qualifying
statement.
When a librarian was leaving a large field of endeavor to enter upon a
still larger one, his office-boy, hearing some speculation regarding his
successor, was heard to say, “I could hold down that job myself. I’ve
watched everything he does and there isn’t a thing I couldn’t do”. What
he had watched were the motions and they looked easy. But we should not
laugh at this kind of confidence. An old stager said to me once “Oh,
these young men! They think they can do it all; and the trouble is that
_sometimes they are right_.” A young man is a neutral in luck. His good
or bad fortune is yet to be revealed. The complete vocational test would
be one that could tell whether the office boy were really fitted to be
librarian, and if he were, would see that he ultimately became
librarian. Now we must rely not only on the boy’s own ability to
estimate his powers but on his fighting strength to realize his vision.
And there is more to it than this. A worker may have the ability and
may know that he has it, and yet he may distrust his own estimate and so
fail to follow it up. This is one of the saddest varieties of
“ill-luck”. We often hear it said “He can do that, if he would only
realize it”. Too often, however, the man or the woman does realize it
perfectly well; his self estimate of his powers may be quite high
enough; it may even be too high. Talk with him and you may discover to
your surprise that he thinks highly of himself. But at the critical
moment he loses his nerve. Doubts arise in his mind. Is he, after all,
as able to rise to the emergency as he has always thought himself? He
hesitates; and he is lost. His “ill luck” has again been too much for
him.