This address was delivered at the inauguration of the Free
Public Library, Madison, Wis., by Prof. James D. Butler.
James Davie Butler was born in Rutland, Vt., March 15, 1815,
and was graduated at Middlebury College, Vt., in 1836. He
entered the Congregational ministry, and held the chairs of
ancient languages in Wabash College, 1854-58 and the
University of Wisconsin, 1858-67, after which he devoted
himself to lecturing and writing until his death in Madison
in 1905.
My subject is "Libraries as Leaven," or the relation of libraries to the
increased diffusion of knowledge.
What is a Library? It is the knowledge of all brought within the reach
of each one. It is an expanded encyclopædia, or the books which are, or
ought to be, consulted in compiling a perfect encyclopædia.
Human knowledge--and hence the books in which it is treasured up--is
divided by some authors into forty departments. I have their names here
all written down--but I dare not read them. You would give no more
quarter to such a catalogue than the lover gave to the mercantile
inventory of his sweetheart's charms, when itemized as "two lips
indifferent red," "two gray eyes with lids to them," and so on.
But all these forty classes of knowledge ought to be represented in a
library, and the more largely the better. They should also mingle there
in due proportion, "parts into parts reciprocally shot, and all so
forming a harmonious whole." "If the whole body were an eye, where were
the hearing?"
I once lived in a town of a thousand families, where, through a legacy,
one copy of some single author was annually presented to each family.
But, with the same money, a thousand different works might have been
every year purchased, and all kept accessible by all the families. The
result would have been a feast as appetizing to all palates as the
miraculous manna which the rabbins tell us tasted to each Jew like that
particular dainty which he loved best.
It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through.
No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for
a man to read all the words in the daily _Tribune_. Nor will any
customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an assortment from which to
select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up
in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of
dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How
much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from
bibliothecal rubbish--or reading which had never been read. Hence even
Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an ass: "I have no need of you."
The wise thank God for fools. They get their living out of them, and
mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough.
Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even
in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the
deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee.
A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement,
catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and
which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable
lost in mid-ocean.
"Thus warlike arms in magazines we place,
All ranged in order and disposed with grace:
Not thus alone the curious eye to please,
But to be _found_, when need requires, with ease."
In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems
borrowed from Spanish hospitals, where patients are arranged according
to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has
more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux
of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult.
Chief Justice Story used to assert that no American could test the
accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an assertion
would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are
still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our
approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the
secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous
among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main
authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in
vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the
public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San
Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet
penetrated west of our Atlantic slope.
But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to
know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the
Pacific shore, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the
Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array
of bibliothecal catalogues.
Why will not our Centenary Women's Club buy our Free Library a Zosimus?
Free libraries, especially those maintained by public taxation, were
scarcely known before the last half of the nineteenth century. If in an
antiquarian mood, I could indeed bring forth curious details concerning
half a hundred in continental Europe, some of them running back several
centuries, but I forbear. The earliest British library law, similar to
ours in Wisconsin, dates from 1850. The earliest in Massachusetts--and I
suppose in America--was approved May 24, 1851. The first library opened
in consequence of this law was in New Bedford, March 3, 1853. The
grandest triumph under the Massachusetts law is in Boston. The free
library there stands to-day surpassed in volumes by only three or four
American libraries--say the Astor, Congress, and Harvard--while in
arrangement, architecture, and equipment it is pronounced by the most
enlightened foreigners unsurpassed by any library in the world.
Our legislature in 1872 empowered the mayors and councils in towns and
cities to lay an annual tax of one mill on a dollar of the assessed
valuation, for establishing and maintaining free libraries. This law
will bear good fruit. Yet it is a step backward from the act of 1859.
That act created a library fund by setting apart for that purpose
one-tenth of the school-fund income, and imposing a tax of one-tenth of
a mill on all property. The sum of $88,784.78 had been thus accumulated
when the war of 1861 broke out,--and the money was used for military
purposes. It ought to be refunded by the State, or United States, and
expended for its original object. The great superiority of the law of
1859 lies in its extending to rural districts,--and so leaving no hamlet
unvisited--while the maxim of the present law is, "Coals to Newcastle,
owls to Athens, apples to Alcinous. He that hath--to him shall be
given." It gives a library to Madison, where 40,000 volumes were already
within reach, but nothing at all to five and twenty other places in Dane
County, whose need of books is ten times greater. But libraries bring
forth after their kind, and free libraries, we may hope, will become
co-extensive with free schools.
Madison, to-day, in opening to all her sons and daughters a Free
Library, has outstripped every other municipality in the State. It is a
noble preëminence, and will do her honor to the end of the world.
The Madison Free Library, it may be reasonably hoped, will approximate
to the bibliothecal ideal. It starts with an inheritance of 3,308
volumes, accumulated during a score of years by the Madison Institute.
Its revenue is considerable, and it will grow in even pace with the
growth of the city. Nothing but Adam and Minerva was ever born of full
stature. The tax now assessed for it would impoverish no man till after
the lapse of thrice three thousand years. It was limited to less than a
third of what the law allows because we make the entering edge of a
wedge thin, and would learn wisdom from Satan who never makes his
temptations so bad at the beginning as at the end. Is is only the first
step that costs. The Free Library will be ready for windfalls, and so
surely as history repeats itself, they will pour cornucopias into its
lap. Of the million volumes in the British Museum, two out of every five
were gifts. No wonder. Book-gatherers abhor the breaking up of their
collections as we do the dissolution of the Union, or as abolitionists
did the snapping of family ties by slave-traders. Lest what they have
joined together shall be put asunder, they rejoice to lay up their
treasures in an institution which shall never die. Accordingly, in
tracing the origin of one hundred and eighty libraries in continental
Europe, it has been discovered that all of them, except sixteen, were
presented to the municipalities by book-lovers.
Experience this side the Atlantic is thus far equally encouraging. I
will notice a single specimen. The Boston Free Library is mainly
contributed by individuals. One thousand volumes were given by Everett;
2,300 by Bowditch; 11,360 by Theodore Parker; 26,000 by Joshua Bates;
11,899 by the Old South Church, and those of greater rarity than any
other equal number of volumes. Then Ticknor and Prescott bestowed the
best Spanish library ever gathered by private men, and Wheelwright one
scarcely inferior, relating to South America. Of pecuniary benefactions,
I will only mention $10,000 from Lawrence, $30,000 from Phillips, and
$50,000 from Bates. But legacies to the Free Library have become so
common that we may confidently expect that, if any Bostonian shall die
and bequeath it nothing, the courts will decide the neglect of the
Library to be conclusive proof of insanity, and so will nullify his
will! On the whole, we cannot be too sanguine concerning the prospective
progress of our book-feast for the million.
But a library, however perfect, and though freely open to all the world,
may be a light shining in a darkness which comprehendeth it not. Many
years ago, I was a student in such a library at Rome. It was larger than
any one in America at that time, and offered the best of all its stores
daily to everybody, and that without charge. Yet it was well-nigh a
solitude. The reason was obvious. My walk thither was through a gauntlet
of beggar-boys, and I once took with me an Italian primer, and cried out
that I would give something to any boy who could read. I held it up
before nineteen in succession, but no one could spell out a line. They
had eschewed not only writing as tempting to forgery, but reading also
as a black art. Had they been giants they could,--like the barbarians
who sacked Rome,--ruin, but not relish, the nectared sweets of books. To
them the collective wisdom of the world was as sunshine to the blind, or
as smoke in the nursery riddle,--"roomful, houseful, can't catch a
handful!"
"Or like gospel pearls which pigs neglect
When pigs have that opportunity."
But in regard to _our_ Free Library, I have better hopes, and beg your
leave to show _what use_, in my judgment, will be made of it. It will be
resorted to for _amusement_. Some will flit through it in the spirit of
the Viennese, who turn their central cathedral into a thoroughfare on
promenades and business walks. But such visitors will learn something in
glancing at the backs of books. Books, as well as men, have a
physiognomy. Here, as elsewhere, the admirers of Shakespeare will take
out his plays, return them with the leaves uncut, and then insist that
booksellers be instructed if Mr. Shakespeare writes any new book, to
forward it without further orders. Many will have no eyes except for the
volumes of _fiction_, and sometimes will rather run through these than
read them. Novels are a sort of cake, which, if eaten alone, is prone to
make mental dyspeptics. Yet most novel-readers will gain some profit
from our library. Some of them will here acquire a facility in reading
which for lack of practice has hitherto been unknown to them. No one has
really learned to read, until he has read to learn. Their interest in
stories will beguile the toil of becoming _ready_ readers, and their
range of reading will naturally widen. But if it does not, they may
learn much. Every good fiction is _true_, if not to particular fact yet
to general principles, to natural scenery, to human nature, to the ways
of human life, manners, customs, the very age and body of the time. Even
Tom Moore declares that "his chief work of fiction is founded on a long
and labourious collection of facts." Again, when worn out by work, when
care-crazed, and nerves are unstrung, who has not found in fiction--the
balm of hurt minds--a recreation, a city of refuge, a restorative.
"Cups that cheer but not inebriate?"
In this way our free library will be a new pleasure, and the founder of
it deserves the reward offered by the Sicilian tyrant, for such an
invention. Work was never so monotonous as now; accordingly, play ought
to be more than ever amusing. The Kilkenny cats, who devoured each other
all but the tails, left one orphan kitten which began to eat up itself,
but catching sight of a mouse was diverted from suicide. There is among
us more than one disconsolate kitten now destroying himself, who will in
our free feast of fiction espy a mouse which will reconcile him to life,
and save him from himself. The rationale of this solace is indicated
after a forcible, though rather a homely fashion, in the Chinese saying:
"A dog chasing game does not mind the fleas which he _barks_ at while he
lies in his kennel." "The labour we delight in physics pain."
Again, in all great works of fiction the purpose is, while not
o'erstepping the modesty of nature, to show virtue her own feature, and
scorn her own image. Who can count the admirers of Scott and Dickens
that have learned from their portraitures moral lessons so well as never
to forget them;--to loathe the mean and aspire to the noble;--to shun
evil and cleave to good--in spite of temptations to one and from the
other?
But, after all, our book-treasury will only now and then bestow its best
gifts on those who resort to it merely for pleasure. To most visitors of
this class it must remain no more than a telescope to a child, something
to play with rather than to look through. Accordingly, they no more
exhaust the capacities of books than the Irish made full proof of
potatoes while they cooked only the balls and left the tubers to rot in
the ground.
But the Free Library will be resorted to for _instruction_. Few will
always hold the amusing button so close to their eyes that it will hide
the instructive sun. From the start it will be superior to every private
collection in the city, and its superiority will increase. Accordingly,
professional men will come thither to inform themselves either each in
his own specialty, or sallying on excursions from their home fields.
Besides the time-honoured and traditional three professions, editors and
teachers will be there, learning how to answer the hard questions of
pupils and subscribers. Each of these professionals will more or less
make known what he learns. The bibliothecal odor will be as plain upon
them as a certain other odor is upon those who emerge from the
smoking-car or saloon. "Dispensing native perfumes they whisper whence
they stole those balmy spoils." But the bibliothecal leaven will leaven
the community more _directly_.
God has set geniuses as great lights in the firmament to give light and
delight as well on the earth. The circuit of such suns is unto the ends
of the heaven, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. More and
more pervasive is their influence, like the spring-time, which leaves no
corner of the land untouched. In a library every man will recognize some
supreme author transfiguring whatever he touches,--crystallizing into
diamonds by wit, turning to gold with poetry, and glorifying as with
tongues of angels by eloquence, and whom he hence worships as Scotchmen
do Burns and as all the world does Shakespeare. Less and less do men
entertain angels unawares, more and more are they ashamed to know the
world's books only by name. Nobody now asks concerning Paradise Lost,
"What does it prove?"
Moreover, the Free Library will be patronized by the people in quest of
answers to multitudinous questions. Newspapers, whether in its
reading-room or out of it, will rouse in many directions a curiosity
they cannot satisfy, and so will urge to the library. There is a story
that an Englishman in a London library, after looking through an atlas,
said to a friend, "Help me find _Umbrage_ on the map! I read in my
gazette that the French have taken _Umbrage_. What a good-for-nothing
minister is ours--to leave _Umbrage_ so poorly defended that the French
could take it." That John Bull discovered in the library either
_umbrage_, or what was better for him--his own ignorance and the way to
remove it, "taking umbrage" against himself. His gazette probably
brought the same earnest inquirer to the library for _history_ as well
as for geography. A daily paper, which is the history of the world for
one day, leads backward, as a stream carries our thoughts to its
fountain. Whoever repairs to a library with one historical query will be
likely to repeat his visit, since newspapers, in the light of history,
will become more significant as the last chapter in a novel is more
interesting to those who have read the previous chapters, and so often
leads one back to them. Again, discussions are always arising, not
merely in formal debates, but as we sit in the house and walk by the
way. Some carry them on by assertions and counter-assertions--a strong
will and a strong won't--equally positive and ignorant, discussing and
sometimes leaving off the _dis_, till like Milton's devils they find no
end, in wandering mazes lost. Too often "It comes to pass that a
terrible oath, with a swaggering accent twanged off, gives an opinion
more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned it." Others
back up their opinions by _wagers_, in spite of a lurking feeling that
"Bets are the blockhead's argument,--
The only logic he can vent,
His minor and his major.--
'Tis to confess your head a worse
Investigator than your purse,
To reason with a wager."
But where standard books are at hand, investigation will often either
take the place of disputation, or bring strife to a speedy end.
Let us hope those here seeking props for their arguments will never be
those jealous lovers of books who cannot use them without using them up,
or who spirit them away for themselves alone. Such abductors have
sometimes infested the libraries in the Capitol. Their thefts can be
justified only by that casuistry which holds stealing the relics of
saints for a pious fraud. But in truth the more holy the saint, the more
heinous the sacrilege of what Hood calls _Book_-aneering.
Moreover, every _lecture_ delivered in the city will send some
investigators to the library, that they may confute, or confirm, or
amplify its teachings. A lecture that pops will not be as surely
_popular_ as formerly, if the library shall evince that what is true in
it is not new, and that what is new is not true, or that the speaker
draws on imaginations for facts and on facts for imaginations.
Every meeting of our Women's Centennial Club will start inquiries which
cannot be answered without recourse to the library.
It is certain that books of _travel_ will here be largely consulted.
Some of us purpose to go abroad. Such will read beforehand in order to
add a precious seeing to their eyes. They would dislike to have their
experiences those of a lady who when asked what she saw in Rome answered
"dirt," or of the London barber who at the coronation of Napoleon
remembered nothing except that the Emperor was well shaved, or of the
Bostonian fresh from the West who, when called on for his opinion of
Madison, said it would be a pretty fair Massachusetts village if it were
not spoiled by so many fresh water ponds around it. Others among us have
travelled already, and we shall be studious in the library that we may
ascertain what we ought to have seen--but did not, or the meaning of
what we did see, but which was Greek to us. The Shah of Persia noted in
his journal that of all the fine things in Europe the finest to his mind
was a show of wax work. His library would teach him better, and would
not laugh at him, as we do. A Vermont friend of mine, after his trip to
London, when asked whether he saw Westminster Abbey, confessed that he
did not, but added that Westminster Abbey was out of town at the time of
his visit. If he had free course in our library he would hardly excuse
himself in that way again. Soon after crossing the Mississippi at
Burlington, I heard a New York merchant, bound for California,
remarking: "How much geography one learns in travelling. Here is
Burlington. I always thought it in Illinois, but now I find it is in
Missouri." Library-reading may by this time have added insight to his
sight, and convicted him of the blunder which I suffered to pass
uncorrected, though we chatted 100 miles together. There are others of
us who, on hearing a traveller's tales, are curious to examine how far
we, like the old prophet, should count the way-faring man a fool, and
how far he uses his license to lie. Hence they will read that they may
make up their minds whether all MARK TWAIN'S caricatures have the ring
of truth.
A German table d'hote of twenty courses will surfeit a careless diner
before it is half over, and yet fail to afford him either what he likes
best or what he should like best. Hence it compels guests to a careful
choice what they will partake of and what refuse of the blessing there
is no room to receive in its fulness. A similar influence will be
exerted by the free library where we fall into the embarassment of
riches. We shall be driven to select from its bill of fare, that is the
catalogue, that fraction which we can enjoy most and which will profit
us most.
"Taste after taste upheld by kindliest change."
Some persons, when they survey a library and perceive that they can
never read the hundredth part of its volumes, will be attracted to those
works which teach "what to read," or open a panoramic outlook on the
diversified regions of the bookish world.
"Of all the best of man's best knowledges,
The contents, indexes and title-pages,
Through all past, present, and succeeding ages."
Unless we thus liberalize our views we are likely to vegetate, like the
rhubarb pie plant, under a barrel, and see the world only through its
bunghole. Ignorant of bibliographical guides and hence at a loss how to
estimate books, the steward of a British nobleman sold as rubbish all
volumes in the library which lacked _covers_. One of those thus disposed
of, and bought by a pedlar for nine pence, proved to be the very
earliest issue of the British press, snapped up by the British museum
for £80, and could not now be bought for ten times that sum. In regard
to the _intrinsic_ value of books blunders more egregious are daily
made. Libraries were never so needful as now, for libraries and life
never lay so close to one another as now. Our familiar sights lead to
interest in recondite knowledge. Photography, gas, the locomotive,
kerosene, yes, every match that lights it, provokes questions in
chemistry, or philosophy, which not every library can answer. No one can
gaze at the dome of our Capitol without naturally falling into
architectural inquiries which draw him through a world of books that
expose the nakedness of his ignorance, yet never put him to open shame.
But the truth is too palpable to dwell on that in our day life touches
libraries at every point.
In all libraries there are readers whose emblem is dead fish who follow
the stream, but thanks to various accidents, some of this class, ceasing
to be passive recipients, begin to investigate as active seekers. They
at once rise to a higher mental plane. The contrast between active
seekers and passive recipients is analogous to that between the
mountaineers and the maritime aborigines of California. The mountaineers
lived on grizzly bears--food which it was impossible to seize without
tasking their energies to the utmost. But tasking trains. The maritimes
lived on salmon, which were so abundant and so tame that they could be
caught by fishers who lay basking in the sun. But basking enervates.
Naturally enough no Indians are superior to the mountaineers who are
active seekers, nor yet inferior to the maritimes, who are passive
recipients. What investigators seek they will not find at once; they may
never find it. But they are sure to discover something better, so that
they will say with LESSING, in the library at Wolfenbuttel, "Were God to
hold truth in one hand and search in the other, and give me my choice, I
would say: Give me seeking without finding, rather than finding without
seeking!"
"All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed."
Courtship once over, the novel ends.
In the library where LESSING was made librarian--not that he might serve
the library, but that the library might serve him--I took in my hand
with reverence the inkstand out of which he distilled the essence of a
thousand books, and reformed German literature as radically as LUTHER
had reformed German religion.
All truths being inter-dependent, every road will lead to the end of the
world, and so while studying one subject a man becomes interested in
others, and his range of inquiry expands. When he kindles one dry stick,
many green ones will catch, and his brightest blazes are lit up by
unexpected sparks. One quickly learns to love hunting, and before
working up many topics, he forms an investigating habit which will
perpetuate itself. Thus while seeking an oyster, he finds a pearl, like
SAUL who sought asses and found a kingdom. Henceforth he reads more by
subjects, each a cord to string pearls on, than by volumes, for he feels
that,
"Unless to some particular end designed,
Reading is but a specious trifling of the mind,
And then, like ill-digested food,
To humors turns and not to blood."
But less and less of that sort is his reading, though it range through
all time, and tax all the world. Such an inquirer will live longer than
METHUSELAH, for he will have more thoughts, yet he will wish each of his
minutes was a millenary. He will read with an appetite growing as long
as he lives; indeed reading will help him to live longer. A thousand
such readers feel what one has spoken out, saying:
"In a library I was thrown, instead of worse society, into the company
of poets, philosophers and sages--to me good angels and ministers of
grace. From these silent instructors who often do more than fathers for
our interests, from these delightful associates I learned something of
the divine and more of the human religion. They were my interpreters in
the House Beautiful of God, and my guides among the Delectable Mountains
of Nature,
Blessing be with them and eternal praise,
Who gave me nobler loves and nobler cares."
Pre-eminently to the _young_ will the myriad-minded library be an oracle
in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we
of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various
studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more
questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new _key_ to
the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy
for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the
library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they
get jack knives they take to whittling. The public schools then find in
free libraries their fitting supplement, and complement. Schools without
libraries feed a prisoner with salted viands and then tantalize his
thirst with pitchers and bottles, all empty. The free school and the
free library will join hands like husband and wife in a well-matched
marriage.
"He is the half-part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him;
But two such silver currents when they join,
Do glorify the banks that bind them in.
Each befits the other, as ALEXANDER said concerning the finest poem and
the most costly casket in the world when he enshrined the Iliad in the
Persian box of gold and gems. Both are lotteries where tickets cost
nothing and everybody may draw all the prizes.
In addition to this, the free library will be to some nothing less than
an _inspiration_. _To some_--I wish I could say _to all_, but alas, it
is only an "elect few" whom the library can inspire. Spectacles are
invaluable,--but only to those who have eyes. One Sultan never wore a
shirt that had not every word of the Koran written on it yet absorbed
little piety. AARON'S excuse for making only a golden calf was, that the
Jews did not bring him gold enough to make an ox. The cherubim who know
most can never equal the seraphim who love most. An ugly and stupid man,
walking with a lady on each arm, boasts that he is between wit and
beauty, but may not imbibe one particle of either.
To some, however, a free library will make up for the lack of a liberal
education. More than that. It will furnish such an education every jot
and tittle of it, and that, in some sense, better than was ever bestowed
in a college, because acquired in the face of greater difficulties.
Libraries have often vouchsafed this priceless boon. That in Salem did
to BOWDITCH, the mathematician, in the last century, and to WHIPPLE, the
essayist, in this. The Edinburgh library made HUME an historian. Another
was inspiration to COBBETT. So was that of the Erfurt convent to LUTHER.
"It had purchased," says his biographer, "at heavy cost, several Latin
Bibles just printed for the first time in the neighboring city of Mainz.
When he first opened one of these tomes his eyes fell on the story of
HANNAH and SAMUEL. "O, God," he murmured, "could I have one of these
books I would seek no other worldly treasure." A great revolution then
took place in his soul. His happiest hours were in the library.
Concerning such a scholar--
"We cannot say: ''Tis pity
He lacks instructions,' for he seems a master
To most that teach."
The influence of ancient Libraries on classical writers is manifest from
their quotations. PLUTARCH'S have been traced to 250 authors. PLINY'S to
2,000 works. Classical Libraries preserved in Constantinople, so long as
studied, made there a Goshen of light in the Dark Ages, and when carried
to Italy proved a Promethean spark to kindle occidental culture anew. It
is well known that inventions are oftenest struck out in the Patent
Office, the grand store-house of inventions. In the world of mind, as
well as of matter, new ideas are suggested where old ideas most
congregate, or are most communed with. According to CHAUCER,
"Out of old fields, as man saith,
Cometh all the new corn from year to year,
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all the new science that men lear."
The idea of writing the "Life of COLUMBUS" first darted into the mind
of IRVING, when, in Madrid, he found himself surrounded by an unrivaled
magazine of materials made ready to his hand, and for which the world
had been ransacked. Thus the sight of means to make good books makes
good books made.
Not only those volumes which compose the body of literature, but those
finer essences which form its soul,--the literature of power,--stamped
in Nature's mint of ecstasy--are marked all over with proofs of
familiarity with the best that had been achieved,--each in its own
department. Nobody has hesitated thus to affirm concerning VIRGIL,
DANTE, TASSO, MILTON. But it is commonly said that SHAKESPEARE was
_ignorant_. The truth is that no ignorant man, no ordinary, scholar can
understand his allusions, historical, romantic, classical, or those to
art, science, nationalities, customs--or even his words. He could get
more from a Library in a day than most men in a life-time, but he needed
it still.
In speaking of SHAKESPEARE, I mean the man who wrote the Plays reputed
his, no matter whether that author was BACON, or JOHN SMITH, or even our
townsman GEORGE B.
We ought to say that SHAKESPEARE was a universal man,--because he was
heir of all ages,--and his was universal knowledge, a knowledge which
neither can we fathom nor could he find without a library.
His peculiarity was ability to discern the immortal part of books, or to
stamp what were otherwise perishable with his own immortality. Whoever
can do much without tools, can do more with them. Accordingly men do
their broken weapons rather use than their bare hands. Whoever can do
much without a library, can do more with a library. DAVID did much with
a sling, but more with better arms, and builded an armory on which there
hung a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.
If then there be among us any one person endued with any spark of
Shakespearian or other genius he will find it kindling to a flame
through contact in this library with similar celestial fires. To such a
"meeting soul!" as MILTON calls it,--the library will prove a better
bonanza than has been prospected in our States of silver and gold.
Though having nothing he shall possess all things,--infinite riches in a
little room.
Thus our Free Library will amuse, and instruct, and inspire. Over its
entrance I seem to read as on the front of the oldest in the world, the
inscription, "The healing of the soul," or the words of FRANKLIN to his
namesake town, "I give you books instead of a bell, sense rather than
sound." Let it have free course for a generation, calling to culture as
ceaselessly as a standing army calls to war, and this community will say
with SENECA, "Leisure without books and letters is mental death and
burial."
The first public library in Ohio--just two years younger than the
State--was founded in Ames. It was bought by hunters who threw together
a lot of raccoon skins, sent them in a sleigh by one of their number to
Boston and there bartered them for books. They soon hunted Greek as
zealously as game, and while Ames remained a hamlet ten of them, or
their children, were among the early graduates of the State University.
The influences of a library are _cumulative_, and sometimes become
manifest only after a long lapse of ages. The cuniform library of
Assyrian bricks, dating from pre-historic periods, burned up, buried and
forgotten just now emerges from its grave speaking in a voice heard
round the world, and no less authoritative than a second book of
Genesis. From its shelves more centuries look down upon us than upon
NAPOLEON at the Pyramids.
Libraries are hemmed in by no lines of State, nation, race, language,
religion or century. Their field is the world. But ours is the
cosmopolitan age, and we are pre-eminently the cosmopolitan people. More
than any other people, then must we feel the need of libraries, which
are, of all institutions, the most cosmopolitan. Hence they will benefit
us most.
Considerations like these demonstrate that free libraries tend to
_equality_ and _fraternity_. They are free lunches, crying to all: "Cut,
and come again!" As we all have equal rights at the polls and in court,
so have we in the free library. In church we each secure a blessing in
proportion to our capacity; so can we in the library. In both blessed
are they who hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled. In public
schools all can enjoy the best of teaching without money and without
price; so can they in the free library. Free libraries will create an
aristocracy--one open to talent and toil, but to nothing else; the
aristocracy of knowledge. Where street cars have been introduced, half
the private carriages are soon given up, so the establishment of free
libraries will lead many to refrain from large domestic collections as
superfluous, and to the transfer of many a private library to the public
shelves, where they will not only do more good, but will be better cared
for, better arranged, and more accessible than they now are even to
their owners. One millionaire as we walked into his library, said with a
sigh: "See how many gaps there are in my shelves! Five hundred of my
books are missing, lent and lost." "Lost!" cried I, half in joke, "say
rather found! lost to you, but found each by some one who will make the
most of them. Would to heaven these 5,000 were lost in the same way,
lost by you who have no time nor care for them, found by those who have
both. Nobody could steal them from you, but at most only from moths and
worms, dust and mould." Rich men who have bought libraries as luxuries
will learn that the way to save them is to lose them, and that their
books serve them best when deposited in free libraries.
Many varieties of _sham_ equality result from outside pressure. In
Venetian gondolas all awnings are required to be black that no one may
outshine his neighbor. Under the first republic the French proscribed
all titles but citizen, and citizeness, which they gave to everybody.
Communists would make all men's shares in property equal. Endeavors of
this sort not only fail, but prove suicidal like the impetuous Irishman,
insisting that one man is as good as another, and _a great dey better
too_. The influence of Free Libraries, however is toward genuine and not
merely visible equality. Thanks to them the most expensive luxury of the
rich becomes the daily food of the poor, and the tree of knowledge no
more bears forbidden fruit. A volume which I can draw out of a library
at will is worth as much to me as if I owned it. In fact, though my
private library is not small, the books I read are more often borrowed
than my own.
If I take out books from a library, I am doubly spurred to to make their
contents my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than
to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what
book we borrow.
FRANKLIN tells us that "he often sat up reading, the greater part of
the night, when a book borrowed (he means _stolen_) from booksellers in
the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found
missing." In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become
alike _inside_, in real communion with great authors, in information,
taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,--accomplishments which cannot
be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his
fellows. Men will still differ by God, not by man. What then is the Free
Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?
When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom
to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing.
But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and
say; "These are our jewels." Not tombs, but living shrines that on the
living still work miracles,--the shrines where all the relics of the
saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the
dumb speak--the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits
from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is
"Made porous to receive
And drink the liquid light, firm to retain
Its gathered beams, great palace now of light,
Hither as to a fountain countless stars
Repairing in their golden urns draw light."
Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and
University parks are without.
A library,--the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men
who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;--reminds me of that fresco
by RAPHAEL, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces,
popularly styled "The School of Athens," and which I hope to see hung up
as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some
one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every
variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical
man, like FRANKLIN'S Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his
tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of
a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the
celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. SOCRATES, with sly
humor, is humbling the self-sufficient ALCIBIADES that he may rouse him
to loftier aspirations. PYTHAGORAS is writing among disciples, one of
whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the
temple, appear ARISTOTLE, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to
the earth, and PLATO, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand
uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for God. The culture
proffered in such a School of Athens, as RAPHAEL painted--and as an
ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle
of architecture, the dome,--which is well said to unite clustered arches
and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the
earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in
air, and looking to the stars.
"Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime."