A few books in a small town may exert as much influence as
many books in a large one; and the personal influence of
their custodian and administrator may count for more. An
early statement placing emphasis on this fact by Miss West
of the Milwaukee Public Library (now Mrs. Henry L.
Elmendorf) appears in the subjoined paper read at the
Buffalo Conference of the American Library Association in
1883.
Theresa West Elmendorf, who as the writer of this paper was
Theresa Hubbell West, was born at Pardieville, Wis., Nov. 1,
1855, educated in Milwaukee and served on the staff of the
public library of that city, being deputy librarian in
1880-92 and librarian in 1892-96. In that year she married
Henry L. Elmendorf, then librarian of the Buffalo Public
Library, and since his death in 1906 she has been
vice-librarian there. In 1911 she was chosen president of
the American Library Association--the first woman to hold
this office.
There is still, as in the days when the story of the "wicked and
slothful servant," who contemptuously hid his one talent in a napkin,
was told, something discouraging in the sight of incomparably greater
opportunities than our own in the hands of another.
The librarian of a small town or village may not cherish the envy of
the man in the parable in his heart, and yet feel a certain depression,
a sense that the small things he is striving--perhaps with all his
might--to accomplish amount to very little, as he listens to plans for
the construction of a building which will commodiously and conveniently
house two millions of books; as he ponders over a printed scheme which
will intelligently order upon the shelves a hundred thousand volumes,
and is yet so flexible, so elastic, that this number may be indefinitely
increased with no confusion, no necessity for rearrangement; as he sees
a method of charging which has been slowly evolved to meet the
ever-varying, ever-increasing needs of a circulation whose daily issues
are counted by thousands.
Possibly this feeling has something to do with the small representation
in this Association of the hundreds of lesser libraries which are
scattered through the land. Whether it has, or not, the fact of this
meagre representation remains, and remains to be regretted. That such a
state of things is to be deprecated by the society goes without saying.
Every new member, in one way or another, brings an added power and
influence, which is by no means always to be measured by the size of the
library which he represents, or the active part he bears in the
deliberations. He may even be utterly silent, and yet an actual force;
for no speaker fails to feel the inspiration which radiates from an
attentive and enthusiastic listener. In ordinary society the
accomplishment of being "a good listener" is one of the most enduring of
charms. It does not lose its power among librarians. The prosperity of a
paper as truly as a jest's "lies in the ear of him that hears it, never
in the tongue of him that makes it."
To ask these unattached librarians, if perhaps an echo may reach them,
to consider whether their isolation from their profession is not only a
deprivation to themselves which they can illy afford, but a retarding of
the progress of the true library spirit as well, and to suggest a
thought which may possibly prove a stimulus to counteract the
discouragement and depression before spoken of, is all that I have even
hoped to accomplish in the few words which have, somewhat too
ambitiously, been called a paper on "The usefulness of libraries in
small towns."
In regard to the interest and profit of these meetings to the lesser
libraries, I have heard it asserted, and it is, I think, true, that the
papers and discussions were almost exclusively directed to the
consideration of the aims, methods, and needs of great libraries. If the
fact needs explanation, or justification, an ample one is found in the
register of the names of the composing members, with their positions.
That there would be a ready and cordial response to any general call for
the discussion of topics specially pertinent to small libraries is not
to be doubted. Over the editorial columns of one of our most-used
periodicals runs the legend, "Every man is a debtor to his profession."
It was a most wise choice of mottoes by our friend, the editor and
publisher, for in no profession is it more true than in our own. The
constant missionary work which Boston and Chicago, and indeed every
library of any repute in the country, has done and is doing, is proof
enough that the obligation is appreciated. If the smaller libraries want
the discussion of simpler, less technical methods, they have, probably,
but to ask.
It may be objected that the great obviously includes the small, and
that plans and methods which are good and suitable for the former need
but to be reproduced in miniature for the latter. It is true, that, in
many departments, the accident of size makes little or no difference in
library economy; but in the administration of affairs, in the machinery
of running, the director of a municipal library has many and
accumulating cares, of which his less burdened rural brother need never
feel the weight. Prof. John Fiske, some years ago, at the time when he
was assistant librarian of Harvard University, very graphically
described a portion of the perplexing duties which fall to the lot of
even a university librarian, striving to correct the erroneous but too
prevalent notion that such a position is a sinecure. He confined himself
to an enumeration and description of the duties which are essentially
professional, the multiplicity of details of the ordering, classifying,
and cataloging of books. In this direction there is a difference only in
amount between the greater and the less. But, in addition to all that
Prof. Fiske described, a city librarian must needs oversee as well the
thousand and one minutiae which go to make up the sum of a day's work in
a circulating library. He must provide for the accurate identification
and registration of his borrowers,--no light task when they number tens
of thousands of the floating population of a western city, which has
more active duties for her police than the following up of delinquent
patrons of the public library. He must see to it that the thousands of
books which flow over his counters are unerringly charged, and that
tardy borrowers are warned of their remissness. These are but a few of
the numberless details, many of which are trivial in the extreme, but
which all go toward the making up of such a day's work as "none but he
that feels it knows." As a machine increases in complications a
constantly greater percentage of power is consumed in overcoming
friction. This attention to the routine of daily work, which forms much
of the severest, because least satisfying, work which a librarian does,
may be compared to the friction of machinery; and just in the proportion
that the power of his mind and the strength of his body are taxed in
this direction, by just so much are they reduced for other duties, the
importance of which is specially prominent in the minds not only of the
profession, but of the public as well,--an actual knowledge of the books
which the library buys, and the exertion of an active personal influence
in raising the standard of literature which is drawn from the library.
It is precisely in this line of personal influence that there seem to me
to be special encouragements to the librarians of small towns, that
here, notwithstanding their limited resources, they have peculiar
opportunities for attaining an almost ideal standard of excellence in
the quality of their work.
It would be unjust to say that a city librarian actually works harder
than his country brother. The duties of the former are mainly those of
guiding, overseeing, and correcting the work of others. The latter, with
his own hands and brain, does most of the work himself. It is as if the
one were architect solely, and the other not only architect, but mason
and carpenter as well. One of the severest trials of the lot of a city
librarian, in the West at least, is that he must work through many
assistants who are not only utterly lacking in any real love or
enthusiasm for their work, but who are many times illy-educated as well.
The remedy for this state of affairs is not likely to be found until our
boards of trustees take for their careful consideration the reply of a
certain irate domestic to her remonstrating mistress: "You can't expect
a good cook and all the Christian virtues for two dollars a week!" If
the necessities of the work do not require the employment of more than
one, two, or, at most, three assistants, the subtle electric current of
the librarian's own enthusiasm may suffer the subdivision without being
utterly dissipated. He can actually do much of the work himself. He
comes into contact with his clientage, which is not so large but that he
may hope to become personally acquainted with many of them, and,
learning their tastes and needs, easily become their trusted friend and
guide. His catalog, too, is his own work, and it is perhaps safe to say
that no one ever properly appreciates a catalog but its maker. Certainly
no one else ever handles it with equal ease and intelligence.
I am afraid the catalog has never been made, and never will be, over
which the ignorant and indolent will not be perplexed and deceived; and,
after all is said, it is to the ignorant to whom the gospel of the
public library is specially sent. If the cataloger himself is constantly
at hand to explain intricacies, to supplement deficiencies, with his own
perfect knowledge of his library, to answer even foolish and stumbling
questioners patiently and intelligently, he may make the puzzling way of
finding and getting a book so plain that "The wayfaring man, though a
fool, need not err therein."
That this personal influence, when exerted, bears fruit, and that right
soon, has been proved again and again. The following is from the last
report of one of the largest libraries in the country: "The increasing
public interest in the more scholarly books of the Library, and the
large accession of visitors to the reference tables, are to be
attributed partly to the Saturday-morning classes which have been
conducted at the Library for the past four months." If such work makes
so immediate and appreciable an impression upon a circulation which is
numbered by hundreds of thousands, is there not a hopeful outlook,
indeed, for small workers?
One has said that "A library is, after all, very much what its
librarian makes it." There are too many conflicting individualities at
work in a municipal library to make this, to any considerable extent,
true; but in a small town or village the personal equation of the
librarian may easily become the exponent of the power of the library.
ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
PENNSYLVANIA
Dr. Talcott Williams, the orator of this occasion, Feb. 7,
1891, was at that time a journalist in Philadelphia. He has
always been a welcome writer and speaker on literary themes.
Talcott Williams was born in Abeih, Turkey, July 20, 1849,
the son of an American missionary. He graduated at Amherst
in 1873 and in that year entered journalism, becoming later
an editorial writer on several large dailies until 1912 when
he was made director of the School of Journalism of Columbia
University, New York City.
For the first and for the last time, the voices of men are heard in
this place, dedicated to the more eloquent silence of books. Nowhere is
man more and men less than in the library. In the presence of books
individual learning pales. The scholar dies; the library lives. Yet only
in part. In this bookish age, we fondly impute immortality to books.
Nothing could be more false. Few books have the power of an endless
life. Against these books of power stand a great multitude of books of
use, which perish with the using. The vast mass of books, like the
thoughts in our daily lives, sink into the background of the
recollection of the race and furnish the soil from which fresh growths
spring. Few there are who have written books of power. Not a score in
all. Poets for the most part. High priests forever after the order of
humanity, whose flaming message burns from age to age in the great tree
of human existence, consuming and unconsumed. These books of power which
live that humanity may not die, and books of use that die that others
may live, divide literature between them. They constitute the warp and
woof out of which the university weaves the higher education. In its
last analysis a liberal training is the mastery of books of use and a
glad yielding to the mastery of books of power.
Controversy over the classics, wrangling over Greek, vain jangling over
required and elective courses--these are details. Direct contact between
the growing minds of each generation and the great minds of the
race--this is essential. We smile at the space given Confucius in
Chinese education; the Koran in Mohammedan schools; but this is only a
perversion of the sound instinct which everywhere puts the young to
school to the teachers of the race. Unless your education does this, it
stands where the electric telegraph did before its wires were
grounded--its batteries and instruments, its poles and wires useless
until they were in direct contact with the elemental source of electric
energy in the earth itself. So-called and mis-called practical systems
of education, _realschulen_, which omit these eternal realities of the
race, find when they have stuffed their pupils with the facts of the day
that they are still insulated from the thinkers of all time. Fortunately
for us and for our education, these books of power exist in more than
one language and are accessible through more than one channel of
learning. Thanks to the matchless translation of the Bible, one
incomparable group of books of power is taught in every Sunday-school,
though I doubt if this will be held sufficient reason for neglecting
their study in every university. Greek holds another group. But it is
the pitiful pedant's plea to urge their study because Greek is
difficult. It is not because Greek is Greek, but because Homer is Homer
that Chapman "spake out loud and bold" of the solitary text-book which
has held its own for 2500 years, and links, as may it forever link, this
university with the school of Athens.
"Yet still your Homer, living, lasting, reigning,
And proves how truth builds in poets feigning."
It is because these books of power hold the truth that makes men free,
working thoughts that perish never, that they live when the tongues in
which they speak are dead. Books of power which transmit the spiritual
life of the race keep the self-same spirit through all the
transmigrations of speech. The scriptures of the race, no less than the
scriptures of religion, enjoy a pentecostal gift of tongues, and are
heard by every man in his own language. Where such books are few in
number, which a shelf or two will hold, there is a liberal education,
and no elective course which permits their exclusion offers intellectual
salvation. Some such books every race has found in its own literature as
it reached the full stature of universal humanity, as our own
English-speaking race, well-nigh within this generation, has discovered
in adding Shakespeare to our general schooling. By the production of
such books of power nations are justly measured. This is the wisdom
which keepeth a city from destruction. The ship of state, however
weighted with worldly wealth, moves a trackless keel through the waters
of history unless some poet wings its course with "the proud, full sail
of his great verse." We have all heard to-day from one whose lifelong
devotion has raised him to the foremost rank of scholarship.
"Weave a circle around him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
The study of such books is possible without any aid or apparatus
whatever; so near is the diviner of letters to every one of us. But the
first office which the library discharges in a university is in
providing the limitless and manifold interpretation which the ages have
builded about these great books of power. Better than all other books as
are the books of power when read without study, they are infinitely
bettered by all study. The literature of interpretation is only second
in value to the literature of inspiration. The study even of books of
power tends to become scholastic, narrow, provincial, letterwise, and
spiritually dead, unless it is quickened and corrected by the fruits of
the entire field of critical science. For lack of this more than one
sacred book has met a fate which makes one feel, as well kill a book as
give it a good name. Even in the teaching of books of power--which of
all teaching needs but a soul and the book to awake eternity--the
scholar is saved from himself by the library. He learns that with all
the inspired prophets of the race no scripture is of private
interpretation, that only time unlocks the weaving of these deeper
oracles of humanity, because they spake not of themselves, but for the
spirit of man. Nor need we fear that they will be smothered by their
interpretation. The mountains bear easily the weight of forests they
uprear, and at the last and highest, no tree ascends above the snow-line
of eternal thought.
But such ascents are as little the normal work of the university as of
the road-builder. Its course lies chiefly along the broad highways of
learning. Not books of power, but books of use, which sum first general,
and then special and professional knowledge, occupy the greater portion
of its time, just as the most saintly of mortals devotes more of his
days to earning his living than to saving his soul. If the study of
books of power is rendered more valuable by a library, the adequate
teaching of books of use without one is impossible. Every text-book is a
compromise between what is known and what can be taught. Two classes, I
know, the publishers and the public, cherish the belief that there are
text-books which sum current knowledge on this subject and that; but
there are none. Every text-book is out of date the day after it goes to
the printer, and the day before it gave out, not what is known, but the
view of what is known then in vogue. It measures the advancing tides of
learning by a gauge itself incessantly changing. We love to speak of
authorities and standards. We delude ourselves. The whole field of
letters and of learning is in a perpetual flux, whose only complete
record is the library. We know that in science discovery succeeds
discovery. There is nothing certain about a scientific book except that
it will be wrong in five or ten years. Only now and then does some
law-giver in science, some Newton or Darwin, descend the mount of
discovery, bearing eternal and lasting laws of nature, writ by Nature's
God. But in literature we dream of permanent reputation. Here, too,
"Every century gives the last the lie." All the lesser priests of
letters stand at shrines like that of Nemi and the Golden Bough,
"Beneath Aricia's trees,
Where the ghastly priest doeth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain,"
Every new book enters the arena about to die. The friendly verdict but
deters fate; it does not avert it. The lesser criticism of letters must
be done anew for every crop of readers, and in fifteen or twenty years
most essays are left behind. The procession of novels passes almost as
rapidly. Few are read for thirty years, no English novels have held a
popular place for past half a century, and a decade before the centenary
of Waverly it begins to be whispered that Scott is no longer read by the
young. Every generation must have its own translations of the classics,
or reprints of those which have been forgotten. Morals, philosophy, and
religion must be rewritten for it. Even histories, which linger a little
longer on the stage than all the rest, yield to inexorable change. It is
barely a century since Gibbon launched his mighty fleet, freighted with
the fall of empire. It has long ridden the seas, but I think we are all
well aware that its masts are already low on the horizon. No one author,
no one work, can longer satisfy the world for the story of ten centuries
of the race. For most of us these changes do not exist. Unconsciously we
go on down the stream with the favorites of our youth and forget that
both are growing old together. If literature is to be taught as it is,
and not as it seems, to take one pregnant illustration, true of all
studies, teacher and taught must have instant and vital access to that
great body of books to which in every subject a text-book is but a rude
and makeshift guide. The present can only be understood by the past, and
both are needed to prophesy of the future. When this library has been
enlarged to the utmost bounds of our anticipation, it will still have
its limits to the specialists--joints in its armor of learning. Even at
the British Museum I was told and discovered that no man is long at work
without wanting some book with which it is unprovided.
But if teaching requires this great array, much more does the wider
work of the college professor. To look upon him as set only to teach, to
hear recitations, is as narrow and barren a view of his work as to think
of the farmer as only occupied in feeding his calves. If a university is
in the highest sense to be a teaching body, it must cultivate knowledge
as well as pupils. Its professors must do more than harvest the learning
and teach the discoveries of other discoverers. They must produce and
discover. The spirit of genius bloweth where it listeth, but those books
of use which play their part in giving each generation its critical
standards, its histories, and the results of research are born only in
full libraries. If a university is deficient in them, the lack is apt to
be in that laboratory of learning, its library. Unless a university is
producing these, it is teaching only its matriculates when it ought to
be teaching the public.
Much may be done, much accomplished, in the university without the
library. Professional schools may multiply and grow, for in these men of
professional learning supply the lack of books. It is even possible to
carry on much research and produce valuable results along any narrow
rising line of discovery in some science, which, like the coral, has but
its growing edge alive, and for the rest is dead and under water. But if
a university is to fill the whole round and play part in society, it
must enjoy, employ, and extend the organized memory of man as
represented in a great library. As the chief value of this lies, not in
any view of its mere bulk and size, but in its relation to the
recollection of the race, so the work of the university pivots on its
ability to make vital the study of books of power, without which all
learning and letters and science are but a vain show. Better, a thousand
times better, the solitary study which brings men face to face with the
spirit of man in these great movements than any university study which
dwarfs to routine or degrades to mere rote these great works. For the
object of all our study is not knowledge, but wisdom, and we move to
dwindling ends if we search out all the secrets of matter and forget the
secrets of the spirit. The great round of studies which make up the
university, its libraries and laboratories, the accumulation of the past
and the discovery of the future, these are each and all but the
scaffolding by which the race rises to those conceptions of the Divine
and the spiritual uttered and summed in its books of power. Listening to
their teaching we may even learn that the ascent of man is more
important than his descent, his future of more consequence than his
origin--that it is his birth, and not his death, which is a sleep and a
forgetting.
But books of use and books of power--the indiscriminate eulogy of books
and reading has ceased to be possible even at the opening of a building
dedicated to both. Their criticism has begun. Books are no longer the
unique property of the scholar. We all buy books. Most of us read them.
Many of you write them. The use of books is the one side of learning on
which we all claim an opinion. Yet owned, read, written, or wholly laid
aside in a busy life, the use of books, which each of us knows, is
individual and personal. Standing to-day in the home of a collection
which, we trust, is to be one of the larger libraries of learning,
landmark, and lighthouse at once, recording the past and lighting the
pathless future, this individual and personal use is inevitable before
us, cramping and limiting our conception of the relations, the aims, and
the ends of a great library. Its very beginnings about us raise a doubt
as to the wisdom of these endless accumulations of print. The peril of
the mere aggregate was, perhaps, never plainer than in these days, when
the great glacier of democracy slides on, making high places low and low
high--one would be glad to believe, preparing the pathway of a new
lordship of learning, but one is fain to fear making easy the track and
broad the road for an evil over-lordship of mediocrity in learning and
in literature. Our own democracy we are assured, has ceased to read
anything but fiction, and demands this, not book-meal, but piece-meal,
in monthly, weekly, or even daily doses.
The vast book-stack of the modern library, in which volumes lose their
individuality as completely as urns in a columbarium, and like them but
too often hold naught but dead and forgotten dust, is far removed from
the still air of delightful studies which we associate with our own
loved libraries. "I seldom go there," says Emerson of the University
Library he used, "without renewing my conviction that the best of it all
is already within the four walls of my study at home." The ablest of
American editors recently urged in the most brilliant of American
newspapers that the Library of Congress should be reduced to a sound
working collection of 50,000 volumes, and the rest of its treasures
dissipated or stored. I have myself heard the suggestion in regard to
this library, and from one of academic connection, that its future
usefulness would be increased if its future bulk were restricted.
Whether we listen to the philosopher, the editor, or the university
trustee; whatever fanned and winnowed opinions we apply to the great
threshing floor on whose round the feet of the ages slowly tread out the
wheat from the chaff in the garnered harvest of human thought, the
remnant will be small--measured by high thought or narrow utility. The
mere mass of our libraries already overtaxes our utmost ability to
classify, to catalogue, and to administer. As we watch their bulk grow,
on whatever side of the great altar of learning we worship, our fears
increase that these heaped offerings will stifle the sacred fire. This
weighty weapon of letters forged by generations, this mighty armor and
panoply of learning on whose myriad rivets so many hammers have rung,
has outgrown the individual, and we begin to doubt its ultimate value to
society.
Thus men ever err in their early thought on the new duties and fresh
responsibilities created for men by associate man. In the field of
organized life the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.
The body is more than an aggregate of cells. The soul wiser than all its
faculties. A nation more puissant than any census of its citizens. Man
more than men. The secret of this supremacy over the sterile synthesis
of sense, the root and germ mastery over the mere mechanics of life, and
the bald and barren arithmetic of existence, lies in the capacity to
know the present and to remember the past--in consciousness, out of
which conscience grows, and in memory, Mnemosyne, mother of all the
Muses and parent of all learning. Rightly in all history do we measure
the value of every human society to Humanity by its power to awake to
its own existence and be aware of its own past. This is the
--"mystery in the soul of state
Which hath an operation more divine
Than breath or pen can give expression to--"
This exalts the microscopic municipalities of Greece. This abases the
dumb millions of Asia. Our own articulate millions, deficient in much,
have done most for the world, not by material development, but by
demonstrating that 62,000,000 spread over a continent can enjoy a
consciousness as constant, continuous, and complete as the handful of
citizens in the market-place of a Greek city, less in population that
the ward in which we stand, smaller in area than the open spaces about
this University. This general capacity to think as one and remember as a
whole differences modern societies from all the past, save that of
Greece. This has brought the awakening of nations in this century, a
mightier resurrection with power than the awakening of men in the
sixteenth century. With the future awakening of man the work will be
complete. Until it is, national consciousness and national memory,
creating conscious national life, are the determining conditions of
human progress. The problem which Greece solved by making its
communities small, the modern world triumphantly meets by making them
large and live. It secures this through the newspaper, the print of the
present, which sets at one in consciousness vast masses of men which are
set apart in space. For generations separated in time, the library, the
print of the past, preserves for society the sacred oracles of memory.
Misunderstood, misappreciated, placed in opposition, treated as
antagonists, the editor assuring us that the newspaper has superseded
the printed book, the librarian hesitating to cumber his shelves with
the fugitive issues of the newspaper, these twin and vital organs in
society still supplement and correlate each other.
The newspaper is the library of the moment, the library is the newspaper
of all time. We open a newspaper to learn what we are as a nation. We
enter a library to learn what we were. The revelations of neither are
altogether satisfactory. We object to the library because it does not
tell enough of the past. Too often we object to the newspaper because it
tells too much of the present. The faults and shortcomings of the past,
however plainly told, rouse no unpleasant sense of responsibility. In
our own individual experience we have each of us had our private and
personal quarrel with consciousness and memory for setting in too clear
a light the sins and duties, the lacks and demands of the past and
passing day. The revelation is no pleasanter when consciousness, memory
and responsibility are social and national. Yet it is only by accepting
both a complete social consciousness and a complete social memory that a
society can be created whose ultimate end is the highest development of
each of its individuals, whose service is the highest duty of all its
members. Lavish margin of error in the newspaper too often leads us by
some slain truth to ask with the soldier at Philippi:
"Messenger of error--
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things they are not?--"
But like Cassius, the truth is self-slain and dies among its friends.
It still remains true that the newspaper is oftener challenged for
telling what is unpleasant than for recording what is untrue, and the
refined and cultured soul, which objects to the newspaper because it
reeks with the ill news of society for whose ills no man can avoid his
just share of responsibility, but imitate the Pharaoh, who slew the
messengers of evil and sunk in wilful ignorance to an ignoble grave.
The nation which lives by the newspaper will lose touch with the past.
The nation which lives in the library will want knowledge of the
present. We know all too much as Americans of the peril of thinking by
the newspapers. German thought has run in the seclusive channel of the
academic library to the lack and loss of civic consciousness. Germany
was the last of modern states to act as a people. We were the first, the
balance and connection between the newspaper and the library, news and
liberal letters, the reporter and the professor, cuts up by the roots
the frequent conception of the library as a place occult, withheld,
untrod; shut apart from practical ends, the grant of society to the
scholar--useful to letters, useless to life. This "idol of the
market-place" falls to pieces confronted by the facts of social
structure. As well might the brain be held silent, the voice of memory
dumb, the light of consciousness in darkness by the side of the brute
mechanical forces of the body; silence, seclusion, separation from the
active life of society, these may be for the exchange and the
market-place, the railroad and the factory, vast, dumb mechanic
processes which perish in producing, but not for the library--not here,
not here. These walls ring with war. They sound with the conflicts of
the race. Here, rather than in any arsenal is heard
--"the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own."
Thus much for the library in organized society. Long since have we
known of books as the counsellors and comforters of men. To us all they
have been teachers, to each of us companions. That great majority,
greater in wisdom no less than in number, in which by the iron decrees
of fate so many are called and so few are chosen to lasting immortality,
holds all of whom living the world was not worthy, but of whom dead it
slowly seeks to be. Here and here alone in all shapes and forms, we
build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers crucified and here
doubtless our children will build the sepulchres of those who in our day
are despised and afflicted of men for the truth's sake. In joy and in
grief, in life and in death some book supports, sustains, and soothes
each of us, and in this library the very light has been trained to teach
us at every window and door that we might enter it to pass within the
presence of the mighty dead, to enjoy the companionship of that great
company no man can number of wise men made perfect by time.
But to the seeing eye and the hearing ear, awake and attentive to all
that a library is, not for men but for man, not for individuals but for
the race, a greater than Solomon is here, and a mightier shape fills
these halls and looks down from these shelves than all the trooped and
illustrious dead. These books, shelf on shelf, these volumes, which fit
subject by subject into the storied arch of human knowledge, resting one
side on metaphysics and the other on history, the science of mind and
the science of man, seem existent human memory. The complete library
would round and fill the record of the race. At best, we have but a
beggarly fragment. If a single copy of each of the 13,000,000 volumes
which dropped from the press in 450 years were by some glad miracle
multiplying knowledge gathered in one place, human memory would be
unbroken for this short span of its long stay on the globe. Of
13,000,000 but 1,000,000 rest in the largest library on earth in
Bloomsbury Square, and not a half are gathered in all known libraries.
But such as it is, large or small complete or incomplete, a great
library to its capacity gives, as this has begun to do, the only measure
we have of the recollection of the race. Here we stand face to face not
with men or nations, race or people, but with man. Blindly our humanity
still struggles to shape its thought, dumb, inarticulate, unconscious,
travelling in darkness and laboring in pain, century by century, and
generation by generation, in the slow pilgrimage toward the conscious
and consecration before it. The thunder of its power who shall know? Who
shall sound its depths or scale its heights? Who shall know it in all
its compass and sound, measure the confines thereof or prophesy its far
final coming? These are all hid in the inscrutable decrees of God from
the sight of men, but here, here and in places like this there rises
before us like an exhalation of the past in these volumes, in this
library, the majestic and visible memory of man.
Rightly here, as in that larger treasure house in London, have we
gathered museum and library under the same roof. These shapeless
fragments worked by the early cunning of savage man, these inscribed
marbles and sculptured slabs, these tablets and relics of another and a
distant life, these all, each in its place, play their part in the
recorded memory of the race. Out of every fragment from every book
shines this Ancient of Days, who before Abraham was and after us shall
be. Who and what are we, creatures of a day, toilers of an hour, to be
measuring by our experience the metes and bounds in the manifestations
of his mighty memory. Rather let our labor be given to render complete
and to transmit unbroken our share in this great heritage by preserving
the universal printed record of the life about us. The librarian falling
far short of the honor and amplitude of his office, standing between the
living past and the slowly dying life of the present, now and then
apologizes for saving every empty volume, because none but prescient
omniscience can tell which of 10,000 titles will be demanded by some
solitary reader a century hence. How petty the plea, how narrow the
argument, how infinitesimal the claims of this distant reader who after
all may never appear! But how simple, how sufficient, how adequate
becomes the reason for the preservation of every volume when we remember
that it, too, is a part of this vast image of human memory seated by the
slow river of time, more vocal than that of Memnon, older and younger,
and with every fresh sunburst of genius breaking into fresh song!
In high reason has our own Historical Society gathered every volume
which fell in this State and city from the press of the last century.
Only thus can the span of human memory be set forth without a single
forgetful flaw. If the like effort is made here to fill a like
responsibility for the passing moment to the future, it is possible that
the Historical Society of another century will not find it necessary to
pay $700 for an almanac which might once have been had for a penny, and
yet how grievous the gap in the continuous and social memory of this our
city if the solitary copy left of Bradford's Almanac, the first product
of our press, had not found a secure resting-place.
A great library, therefore, does not merely transmit the memory of the
past; it is daily providing memory for the future, safe preserved
"against the wreckful siege of battering days." For the individual no
worse hap can fall than loss of memory. All other powers may remain.
This lost, all are worthless. Stripped of memory, the soul has no future
and no past, naught save an infructuose now. Nor less, the race. The
destruction of the Alexandrian Library, whether with Abulfaraj we
attribute it to the intelligent Moslem, or with Gibbon to the ignorant
monk, was not the loss of so many books and parchments. It was the
paralysis of a great lobe of human memory, fatal lesion had fallen on
the localized organ of recollection in the brain of humanity. If we had
the 200 plays of Aeschylus, the 160 of Sophocles, the last books of
Livy, the missing annals of Tacitus, which this library held, the
stature of these writers would not be increased. Like the greater peaks
of every chain they already rise as they recede. It is only the
foot-hill that needs bulk. These, and lost books like them, would fill
for us the full measures of classic memory. As library after library
perished and book after book shared the fate of those fathered by
Ptolemy, the wreck and loss of human memory went on. The ages that we
call dark lacked not in men of action. Those ages of faith had their men
of thought matching any before or after. They laid for us the
foundations of a civil liberty more indestructible than that of Rome.
The piers of that great arch of law along which our rights daily travel
in safety were built by them. Their architecture and their sculpture
equals any. Their knowledge of the earth, as a whole, was immeasureably
in advance of classic conception. They furnished in Dante one of the two
or three poets for all time, and in the Roman Church they gave the race
a creation and conception of whose future it would be a rash man who
ventured to say that it was destined to be less than its past, imperial
as its history has been. These ages were dark, not from lack of light
and of leading, but from lack of memory. The ages had lost touch of the
elbow in their march through the dark defile of time. The Renaissance
was less the revival of human knowledge than the recovery of human
memory. Age was joined again to age in the unbroken sequence of
continuous recollection, and Greece laid her hands to transmit an
Apostolic succession of memory on the bowed and studious head of the
modern world.
To play its part in transmitting and preserving human memory this
library is tonight opened and dedicated. Our Library Committee, and you,
sir, its head, who have shown us that whole libraries of comment may be
condensed into a volume by your magic alembic, providing for criticism a
new instrument of precision akin to the measurements and the analysis of
the exact science--you, sir, in the loving care you have given this
building, have not been providing a retreat for scholars; you have built
and fashioned here another refuge and stronghold, fortified
"Against confounding Age's cruel knife
That he shall never cut from memory."
The architect of this building has not wrought in mere brick and stone;
he has added to those shrines and centres of human memory to which its
treasures gravitate for their security and convenience. This university,
in receiving this building from its Finance Committee, which has raised
its cost, and whose head first suggested its erection, is placed in a
position where it can discharge not only the first duty of a university,
to which it has always been true, of thinking for the community, but the
second, which is like unto it, of remembering for society.