This paper and the two that follow it relate specifically to
reading as fostered by the public library and yet not
sufficiently to the provision of books to the public as a
definite library service to warrant postponing them to the
section relating to that branch of community service. They
have a somewhat academic or "literary flavor," and yet are
permeated not with the idea of "books for scholars" but with
that of "books for people"--the idea of reading as a
universal function--duty, pleasure and inspiration in
one--which is distinctly that of a socialized library. The
first paper is an address made by Lowell at the opening of
the new public library building at Chelsea, Mass., Dec. 22,
1885.
James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22,
1819, and graduated at Harvard in 1838, succeeding
Longfellow as professor of Literature there in 1855. He
edited _The North American Review_ in 1863-72, served as
U.S. minister to Spain in 1877-80 and to Great Britain in
1880-85. He died in Cambridge, Aug. 12, 1891.
"A few years ago my friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland, published a very
interesting volume which he called "The book-lover's euchiridion," the
handbook, that is to say, of those who love books. It was made up of
extracts from the writings of a great variety of distinguished men,
ancient and modern, in praise of books. It was a chorus of many voices
in many tongues, a hymn of gratitude and praise, full of such piety and
fervor as can be parelleled only in songs dedicated to the supreme
power, the supreme wisdom and the supreme love. Nay, there is a glow of
enthusiasm and sincerity in it which is often painfully wanting in those
other too commonly mechanical compositions. We feel at once that here it
is out of the fulness of the heart, yes, and of the head, too, that the
mouth speaketh. Here was none of that compulsory commonplace which is
wont to characterize those 'testimonials of celebrated authors,' by
means of which publishers sometimes strive to linger out the passages of
a hopeless book toward its _requiescat_ in oblivion. These utterances
which Mr. Ireland has gathered lovingly together are stamped with that
spontaneousness which is the mint mark of all sterling speech. It is
true that they are mostly, as is only natural, the utterances of
literary men, and there is a well-founded proverbial distrust of herring
that bear only the brand of the packer, and not that of the sworn
inspector. But to this objection a cynic might answer with the question,
'Are authors so prone, then, to praise the works of other people that we
are to doubt them when they do it un-asked?' Perhaps the wisest thing I
could have done to-night would have been to put upon the stand some of
the more weighty of this cloud of witnesses. But since your invitation
implied that I should myself say something, I will endeavor to set
before you a few of the commonplaces of the occasion, as they may be
modified by passing through my own mind, or by having made themselves
felt in my own experience.
The greater part of Mr. Ireland's witnesses testify to the comfort and
consolation they owe to books, to the refuge they have found in them
from sorrow or misfortune, to their friendship, never estranged and
outliving all others. This testimony they volunteered. Had they been
asked, they would have borne evidence as willingly to the higher and
more general uses of books in their service to the commonwealth, as well
as to the individual man. Consider, for example, how a single page of
Burke may emancipate the young student of politics from narrow views and
merely contemporaneous judgments. Our English ancestors, with that
common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most
engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says
that:
"When land and goods are gone and spent,
Then learning is most excellent";
and this is true, so far as it goes, though it goes, perhaps, hardly
far enough. The law also calls only the earth and what is immovably
attached to it _real_ property, but I am of opinion that those only are
real possessions which abide with a man after he has been stripped of
those others falsely so called, and which alone save him from seeming
and from being the miserable forked radish to which the bitter scorn of
Lear degraded every child of Adam. The riches of scholarship, the
benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are
beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited,
so they cannot be alienated. But they may be shared, they may be
distributed, and it is the object and office of a free public library to
perform these beneficial functions.
"Books," says Wordsworth, "are a real world," and he was thinking,
doubtless, of such books as are not merely the triumphs of pure
intellect, however supreme, but of those in which intellect infused with
the sense of beauty aims rather to produce delight than conviction, or,
if conviction, then through intuition rather than formal logic, and,
leaving what Donne wisely calls
"Unconscious things, matters of fact,"
to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal expression to the
abiding realities of the spiritual world for which the outward and
visible world serves at best but as the husk and symbol. Am I wrong in
using the word _realities_?--wrong in insisting on the distinction
between the real and the actual? in assuming for the ideal an existence
as absolute and self-subsistent as that which appeals to our
senses--nay, so often cheats them in the matter of fact? How very small
a part of the world we truly live in is represented by what speaks to us
through the senses when compared with that vast realm of the mind which
is peopled by memory and imagination, and with such shining inhabitants!
These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless
images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up
to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span,
yet infinite as space and time? And in what, I pray, are those we
gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains
his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than
the personages of fiction? Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet
as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? Does Cæsar, does Alaric, hold
existence by any other or stronger tenure than the Christian of Bunyan
or the Don Quixote of Cervantes or the Antigone of Sophocles? Is not the
history which is luminous because of an indwelling and perennial truth
to nature, because of that light which never was on land or sea, really
_more_ true, in the highest sense, than many a weary chronicle with
names, date, and place in which "an Amurath to Amurath succeeds"? Do we
know as much of any authentic Danish prince as of Hamlet?
But to come back a little nearer to Chelsea and the occasion that has
called us together. The founders of New England, if sometimes, when they
found it needful, an impracticable, were always a practical people.
Their first care, no doubt, was for an adequate supply of powder, and
they encouraged the manufacture of musket bullets by enacting that they
should pass as currency at a farthing each--a coinage nearer to its
nominal value, and not heavier than some with which we are familiar.
Their second care was that "good learning should not perish from among
us," and to this end they at once established the Latin School in
Boston, and soon after the college at Cambridge. The nucleus of this
was, as you all know, the bequest in money by John Harvard. Hardly less
important, however, was the legacy of his library, a collection of good
books, inconsiderable measured by the standard of to-day, but very
considerable then as the possession of a private person. From that
little acorn what an oak has sprung, and from its acorn again what a
vocal forest, as old Howell would have called it--old Howell, whom I
love to cite, because his name gave their title to the 'Essays of Elia,'
and is borne with slight variation by one of the most delightful of
modern authors! It was, in my judgment, those two foundations, more than
anything else, which gave to New England character its bent and to
Boston that literary supremacy which, I am told, she is in danger of
losing, but which she will not lose till she and all the world lose
Holmes.
The opening of a free public library, then, is a most important event
in the history of any town. A college training is an excellent thing;
but, after all, the better part of every man's education is that which
he gives himself, and it is for this that a good library should furnish
the opportunity and the means. I have sometimes thought that our public
schools undertook to teach too much, and that the older system, which
taught merely the three R's, and taught them well, leaving natural
selection to decide who should go farther, was the better. However this
may be, all that is primarily needful in order to use a library is the
ability to read. I say primarily, for there must also be the
inclination, and, after that, some guidance in reading well. Formerly
the duty of a librarian was considered too much that of a watchdog to
keep people as much as possible away from the books, and to hand these
over to his successor as little worn by use as he could. Librarians now,
it is pleasant to see, have a different notion of their trust, and are
in the habit of preparing for the direction of the inexperienced lists
of such books as they think best worth reading. Cataloging has also,
thanks in great measure to American librarians, become a science, and
catalogs, ceasing to be labyrinths without a clew, are furnished with
finger-posts at every turn. Subject catalogs again save the beginner a
vast deal of time and trouble, by supplying him for nothing with one at
least of the results of thorough scholarship, the knowing where to look
for what he wants. I do not mean by this that there is or can be any
short-cut to learning, but that there may be, and is, such a short-cut
to information that will make learning more easily accessible.
But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read
means? That it is the key that admits us to the whole world of thought
and fancy and imagination; to the company of saint and sage, of the
wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it
enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and
listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it
annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle
the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap
of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed and witness
unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London, accompanying Cæsar
on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his
fellow-conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. We
often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any
insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what
is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that
there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs
can be admitted for the asking--a society, too, which will not involve
them in ruinous expense and still more ruinous waste of time and health
and faculties?
Southey tells us that, in his walk, one stormy day, he met an old
woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark
that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in
her opinion, '_any_ weather was better than none!' I should be half
inclined to say that any reading was better than none, allaying the
crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that,
though 'all deacons are good, there's odds in deacons.' Among books,
certainly there is much variety of company, ranging from the best to the
worst, from Plato to Zola, and the first lesson in reading well is that
which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed
matter. The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put into
our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory? There is a
Wallachian legend which, like most of the figments of popular fancy, has
a moral in it. One Bakála, a good-for-nothing kind of fellow in his way,
having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to
God, is taken up into heaven. He finds the Almighty sitting in something
like the best room of a Wallachian peasant's cottage--there is always
something profoundly pathetic in the homeliness of the popular
imagination, forced, like the princess in the fairy tale, to weave its
semblance of gold tissue out of straw. On being asked what reward he
desires for the good service he has done, Bakála, who had always
passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half wornout
one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that
it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of pity at the
meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakála goes back to
earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his
reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue's
end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered
with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends,
and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is
subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in.
Cato's advice, _cum bonis ambula_, consort with the good, is quite as
true if we extend it to books, for they, too, insensibly give away their
own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon
upward or drag down. And it is certainly true that the material of
thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have
been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary,
and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A
man is known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not only
so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter
the infernal council room, but the soul, which God meant to be the
spacious chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might
commune together, shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the
meaner company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies
against our better selves. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of
the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that
characterizes them. They were scholars because they did not read so many
things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their
speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with
Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of
communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously
acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform
ourselves and cover the continent with a network of speaking wires to
inform us of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith
ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a
son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel
bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas! it is we
ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy
impertinences. It is we who, while we might each in his humble way be
helping our fellows into the right path, or adding one block to the
climbing spire of a fine soul, are willing to become mere sponges
saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip.
One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of
reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the
supreme books in whatever literature, or still better to choose some one
great author, and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as
all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you
will find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any
vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly
persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed
when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware.
For remember that there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for
the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the
attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim attention is
quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and
arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always
it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and
growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of
thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For
what we want is not learning, but knowledge--that is, the power to make
learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a
widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every
one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study,
or indeed for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these
should 'browse in a library,' as Dr. Johnson called it, 'to their
hearts' content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time may be
profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a "full man," as
Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson's memory, his power of
assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of
things. "Read not," says Lord Bacon, in his "Essay of Studies," "to
contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find
talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be
tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and
digested--that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be
read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and
with diligence and attention. _Some books also may be read by deputy._"
This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention
especially to the wise words with which the passage closes.
I have been speaking of such books as should be chosen for profitable
reading. A public library, of course, must be far wider in its scope. It
should contain something for all tastes, as well as the material for a
thorough grounding in all branches of knowledge. It should be rich in
books of reference, in encyclopædias, where one may learn without cost
of research what things are generally known. For it is far more useful
to know these than to know those that are _not_ generally known. Not to
know them is the defect of those half trained and therefore hasty men
who find a mare's nest on every branch of the tree of knowledge. A
library should contain ample stores of history, which, if it do not
always deserve the pompous title which Bolingbroke gave it, of
philosophy teaching by example, certainly teaches many things profitable
for us to know and lay to heart; teaches among other things how much of
the present is still held in mortmain by the past; teaches that, if
there be no controlling purpose, there is, at least, a sternly logical
sequence in human affairs, and that chance has but a trifling dominion
over them; teaches why things are and must be so and not otherwise;
teaches, perhaps, more than anything else, the value of personal
character as a chief factor in what used to be called destiny, for that
cause is strong which has not a multitude but one strong man behind it.
History is indeed mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces
home upon us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our own
private affairs are to the universe in general. History is clarified
experience, and yet how little do men profit by it--nay, how should we
expect it of those who so seldom are taught anything by their own!
Delusions, especially economical delusions, seem the only things that
have any chance of an earthly immortality. I would have plenty of
biography. It is no insignificant fact that eminent men have always
loved their Plutarch, since example, whether for emulation or avoidance,
is never so poignant as when presented to us in a striking personality.
Autobiographies are also instructive reading to the student of human
nature, though generally written by men who were more interesting to
themselves than to their fellow-men. I have been told that Emerson and
George Eliot agreed in thinking Rousseau's "Confessions" the most
interesting book they had ever read.
A public library should also have many and full shelves of political
economy, for the dismal science, as Carlyle called it, if it prove
nothing else, will go far toward proving that theory is the bird in the
bush, though she sing more sweetly than the nightingale, and that the
millennium will not hasten its coming in deference to the most
convincing string of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in
public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound distrust of social
panaceas.
I would have a public library abundant in translations of the best books
in all languages; for though no work of genius can be adequately
translated, because every word of it is permeated with what Milton calls
'the precious life blood of a master spirit,' which cannot be transfused
into the veins of the best translation, yet some acquaintance with
foreign and ancient literatures has the liberalizing effect of foreign
travel. He who travels by translation travels more hastily and
superficially, but brings home something that is worth having,
nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of
acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the
processes of our education.
In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may
at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a
wonder worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let
art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as the antithesis of
science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more
that her usefulness cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents. I
should be thankful if an every day laborer among us could have his mind
illumined, as those of Athens and of Florence had, with some image of
what is best in architecture, painting and sculpture to train his crude
perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see
the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us. For I
hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have
made our mechanics in some departments the best in the world may give us
the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope.
Voyages and travels I would also have, good store, especially the
earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed and men saw things
invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away
from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.
To wash down the dryer morsels that every library must necessarily
offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and
let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder
Dumas. The world of the imagination is not the world of abstraction and
nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by the
sense of the beauty that _is_ in man and the earth on which he dwells.
It is the realm of might be, our heaven of refuge from the shortcomings
and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well,
"The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."
Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery this splendid faculty
of sympathy with things that are a joy forever? For my part, I believe
that the love and study of works of imagination is of practical utility
in a country so profoundly material in its leading tendencies as ours.
The hunger after purely intellectual delights, the content with ideal
possessions, cannot but be good for us in maintaining a wholesome
balance of the character and of the faculties. I for one shall never be
persuaded, that Shakespeare left a less useful legacy to his countrymen
than Watt. We hold all the deepest, all the highest satisfactions of
life as tenants of imagination. Nature will keep up the supply of what
are called hard-headed people without our help, and, if it come to that,
there are other as good uses for heads as at the end of battering rams.
I know that there are many excellent people who object to the reading of
novels as a waste of time, if not as otherwise harmful. But I think they
are trying to outwit nature, who is sure to prove cunninger than they.
Look at children. One boy shall want a chest of tools and one a book,
and of those who want books one shall ask for a botany, another for a
romance. They will be sure to get what they want, and we are doing a
grave wrong to their morals by driving them to do things on the sly, to
steal that food which their constitution craves and which is wholesome
for them, instead of having it freely and frankly given them as the
wisest possible diet. If we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,
so neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite experiment. But we
may spoil the silk for its legitimate uses. I can conceive of no
healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott's novels or
Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found them very good reading
at least for one young man, for one middle-aged man, and for one who is
growing old. No, no; banish the Antiquary, banish Leather Stocking, and
banish all the world! Let us not go about to make life duller than it
is.
But I must shut the doors of my imaginary library, or I shall never
end. It is left for me to say a few words of fitting acknowledgment to
Mr. Fitz for his judicious and generous gift. It is always a pleasure to
me that I believe the custom of giving away money during their lifetime
(and there is nothing harder for most men to part with, except
prejudice) is more common with Americans than with any other people. It
is a still greater pleasure to see that the favorite direction of their
beneficence is toward the founding of colleges and libraries. My
observation has led me to believe that there is no country in which
wealth is so sensible of its obligations as our own. And, as most of our
rich men have risen from the ranks, may we not fairly attribute this
sympathy with their kind to the benign influence of democracy rightly
understood? My dear and honored friend, George William Curtis, told me
that he was sitting in front of the late Mr. Ezra Cornell in a
convention, where one of the speakers made a Latin quotation. Mr.
Cornell leaned forward and asked for a translation of it, which Mr.
Curtis gave him. Mr. Cornell thanked him, and added: "If I can help it,
no young man shall grow up in New York hereafter without the chance, at
least, of knowing what a Latin quotation means when he hears it." This
was the germ of Cornell University, and it found food for its roots in
that sympathy and thoughtfulness for others of which I just spoke. This
is the healthy side of that good nature which democracy tends to foster,
and which is so often harmful when it has its root in indolence or
indifference; especially harmful where our public affairs are concerned,
and where it is easiest, because there we are giving away what belongs
to other people. In this country it is as laudably easy to procure
signatures to a subscription paper as it is shamefully so to obtain them
for certificates of character and recommendations to office. And is not
this public spirit a natural evolution from that frame of mind in which
New England was colonized, and which found expression in these grave
words of Robinson and Brewster: "We are knit together as a body in a
most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation
of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold
ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good, and of the
whole." Let us never forget the deep and solemn import of these words.
The problem before us is to make a whole of our many discordant parts,
many foreign elements, and I know of no way in which this can better be
done than by providing a common system of education and a common door of
access to the best books by which that education may be continued,
broadened, and made fruitful. For it is certain that, whatever we do or
leave undone, those discordant parts and foreign elements are to be,
whether we will or no, members of that body which Robinson and Brewster
had in mind, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, for good or ill.
There is no way in which a man can build so secure and lasting a
monument for himself as in a public library. Upon that he may
confidently allow "Resurgam" to be carved, for through his good deed he
will rise again in the grateful remembrance and in the lifted and
broadened minds and fortified characters of generation after generation.
The pyramids may forget their builders, but memorials such as this have
longer memories.
Mr. Fitz has done his part in providing your library with a dwelling.
It will be for the citizens of Chelsea to provide it with worthy
habitants. So shall they, too, have a share in the noble eulogy of the
ancient wise man: "The teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they
that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever."