When at times it happens to me that I ’gin to be aweary of the sun, and
to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core—just because,
perhaps, I can’t afford Melampus Brown’s last volume of poems in large
paper, but must perforce condescend upon the two-and-sixpenny edition
for the million—then I bring myself to a right temper by recalling to
memory a sight which now and again in old days would touch the heart of
me to a happier pulsation. In the long, dark winter evenings, outside
some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest into the chilly
street, I would see some lad—sometimes even a girl—book in hand,
heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and straining eyes, careless
of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil behind them and about,
their happy spirits far in an enchanted world: till the ruthless
shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter
reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers. “My brother!” or “My
sister!” I would cry inwardly, feeling the link that bound us together.
They possessed, for the hour, the two gifts most precious to the
student—light and solitude: the true solitude of the roaring street.
Somehow this vision rarely greets me now. Probably the Free Libraries
have supplanted the flickering shop lights; and every lad and lass can
enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon “in luxury’s
sofa-lap of leather”; and of course this boon is appreciated and
profited by, and we shall see the divine results in a year or two. And
yet sometimes, like the dear old Baron in the “Red Lamp,” “I wonder?”
For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely
wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the
feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these
other readers, “all silent and all damned,” combine to set up a nervous
irritation fatal to quiet study. Had I to choose, I would prefer the
windy street. And possibly others have found that the removal of checks
and obstacles makes the path which leads to the divine mountain-tops
less tempting, now that it is less rugged. So full of human nature are
we all—still—despite the Radical missionaries that labour in the
vineyard. Before the National Gallery was extended and rearranged,
there was a little “St Catherine” by Pinturicchio that possessed my
undivided affections. In those days she hung near the floor, so that
those who would worship must grovel; and little I grudged it. Whenever
I found myself near Trafalgar Square with five minutes to spare I used
to turn in and sit on the floor before the object of my love, till
gently but firmly replaced on my legs by the attendant. She hangs on
the line now, in the grand new room; but I never go to see her. Somehow
she is not my “St Catherine” of old. Doubtless Free Libraries affect
many students in the same way: on the same principle as that now
generally accepted—that it is the restrictions placed on vice by our
social code which make its pursuit so peculiarly agreeable.
But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for,
it remains a question whether the type of mind that a generation or two
of Free Libraries will evolve is or is not the one that the world most
desiderates; and whether the spare reading and consequent fertile
thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive
of sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the
free run of these grocers’ shops to omnivorous appetites (and all young
readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared. Of
all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer’s boy of
letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
scores.
But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation may
be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would appear
that the patrons of these libraries are confining their reading, with a
charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed they cannot do
better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a good novel, not
the least merit of which is that it induces a state of passive,
unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go out and put
the world right. Next to fairy tales—the original world-fiction—our
modern novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it
has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or
ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the
Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in
training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the
objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead
discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of
wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.