It is amid conditions that call for heroic effort that the public
library of today must do its work with children. There are not wanting
critics who decry some present-day tendencies. They saw that when
librarians seek the children in their homes to form groups of readers,
they encroach upon the domain of the settlement worker. They complain
that the story hour, now so widely developed, is an invasion of the
kindergarten; they view with alarm the use of the stereo-scope and
stereopticon as being outside the legitimate domain of the institution.
Perhaps they are right, and perhaps they are wrong; maybe they are both
right and wrong. If the purposes sought by these means were adequately
ministered to from other sources, it may well be questioned whether the
library would be justified in adopting these methods. In the admitted
lack of agencies to meet these conditions, the children's librarian may
find satisfaction in the results obtained, even if some folks' notions
of legitimate library work are sadly jolted, as in the time to come
they will certainly have to be modified. At best, the library and all
allied agencies are struggling against tremendous odds in counteracting
subtle influences for evil and open influences that breed coarseness
and vulgarity. To operate a moving-picture show within the sacred
precincts of a library may be counter to the accepted view of the
fitness of things, but those who have visited the children's department
of the Cincinnati Public Library will recall with a glow of pleasure
the sight of the interested group of children awaiting each his turn
at the machine to go on a tarry-at-home journey to Switzerland and
France and other countries over-sea. Would the critics prefer to have
the children glue their faces to the glass in the vulgar and suggestive
shows of the penny arcade? The craving for novelty and amusement will
not be denied. The instinct for dramatic action is inherent. It is said
that there are 5,000 penny arcades and nickelodeons in New York City
alone, with an average daily attendance of 300,000 children, and scarce
a hamlet in all this wide country that does not foster one or two of
them, a large proportion of them supplied with pictures of doubtful
propriety.
The average penny arcade is closely linked with the Sunday comic
supplement and the yellow-backed pamphlet in the vulgarization and
decadence that threatens to overwhelm the youth of the country. Parents
who would be horrified to note in the hands of their children any
specimen of dime novel literature, complacently turn over to them on
Sunday morning the sheet splashed with daubs of red and yellow and
green that serve to render attractive the accompanying pictures and
their slangy explanations. The Sunday comic supplement has done more
to debase and to brutalize what is fine in boys and girls, to debauch
their sense of fairness, to blunt their ideas as to what is manly
and fair, to deaden their respect for age and authority, to prevent
such aesthetic sense as they may have had, than can be counteracted
by all the attempts being made by school, church, museum and library
to stimulate a taste for better things. There is no escape from these
colored atrocities. Millions enter the households weekly, they are
scattered broadcast in parks and on the streets, they are left upon the
seats of railway trains and street cars--they are everywhere. Parental
effort is powerless. In a few households they are ruthlessly barred,
but the neighbors' children are willing to share without demur. In an
address before the American Playgrounds Congress, recently held in New
York City, Miss Maud Summers uttered a warning against this pernicious
fostering of deceit, cunning, and disrespect for age.
"The child of sensible parents will not see or know about them,"
Mr. Lindsay Swift wrote in a contribution to _The Printing Art_ two
years ago, "but the child of the street, the child of the indifferent
household, will warm to them like a cat to the back of the stove. There
are certain negative results that parents have a right to expect from
every educative force which is brought to bear on their children; that
these children shall not be deliberately taught disrespect for old
age or for physical infirmities and deformities; that they shall not
learn to cherish contempt for other races or religions than their own;
that they shall not take satisfaction in the tormenting of animals
or weaklings--in short, that they shall not acquire an habitually
cynical and unsportsmanlike attitude of mind. A morbid gloating over
the deficiencies and humiliations of our neighbors is pretty sure to
develop vulgarity and a lax moral fibre in ourselves; for vulgarity of
mind and manners seems to me to be primarily a lack of restraint in
thought, feeling, and expression regarding those tendencies which every
civilized man and race is striving to modify or to conquer."
Doubtless, when first this medium for purveying humor was devised, the
tendencies now so apparent were minimized. There were, in some of the
earlier attempts, real humor and some skill of pencil, but the pictures
have degenerated until they cry aloud for suppression.
There need be no apology for the story hour. A good story well told
makes for pleasure, makes for morals, makes for intellectual growth.
Most librarians defend it on the ground that the telling of the story
leads to the reading of books on related topics. To my mind, no such
defense or even explanation is needed. The story, if well chosen
and fittingly told, justifies the teller and the tale. It is a moot
question in educational circles whether the ear is a better medium for
receiving impressions than is the eye. Some school-masters aver that
there are ear-minded children and there are eye-minded children. A
good story, well told, is worthy of being counted in the circulation
statistics as many times as there are children to hear it, and far
worthier to so figure than many a book that is taken out on a card
and leaves as faint and as durable an impression on the reader's mind
as footsteps on the shifting sand. And the more the storyteller can
lead back the mind of childhood to the heart of childhood, the tales
of wonder and of myth that grew to fulness when the race was young,
the greater the service and the more fruitful in giving the listener
something that will endure.
Neither is there need for apology in the exploitation of home library
groups. At best, these can but partially counteract the flood of cheap
and decadent literature of the most depraved character that circulates
secretly among boys and girls. In Buffalo, recently, the public library
has found among the people of foreign birth a mass of material in
circulation whose bad quality has surprised even the librarians. The
home groups that are being formed in some of the larger cities find
an opening wedge among people of foreign birth whose reading has been
practically confined to stuff of this sort. The reports from Germany
would hardly seem credible were they not vouched for by the Durer
Union, whose campaign against the growing tendency to read trashy
literature has unearthed these facts. In a statement issued by its
secretary, the astounding declaration is made that 8,000 established
booksellers and 30,000 peddlers were engaged in selling sensational
serials and books containing complete tales of a very low order.
No fewer than 750,000 of these wretched stories have been sold in the
course of a single year. They are hawked from house to house, from
factory to factory, outside schools, and among the peasants on every
farm throughout the empire. The peddlers nearly always enter by the
back door or the kitchen stairs. Servant girls and ignorant peasantry
are the most fruitful customers, but it is asserted by municipal
officials that even people who are in receipt of poor relief often
deprive themselves of necessities in order to save two cents for a vile
rehash of the sensationally embellished details of a notorious crime.
The extent of the literature of the streets obtainable in this country
is little appreciated. An investigation, instituted several years
ago by the Library Commission of one of the Middle West states,
demonstrated the existence of tons of it on the upper and back-row
shelves of news stands in all the larger cities, and in many of the
villages and hamlets as well.
The desire to show a large circulation has made many librarians
yield to the tyranny of statistics, and some errors of library
administration are attributable to this cause. While it is undoubtedly
true that the chief function of the library is to distribute as
many wholesome books as possible, among the people, the totals of
circulation are of vastly inferior importance to some facts that are
not susceptible of being arranged in statistical uniform. And this is
more particularly true of children's reading. It is less a question
of how many books are read than what books are read and by whom they
are read. It may well be urged that there is greater importance in the
quality of the circulation than in the size of it--not how many, but
how good, should be the earnest inquiry. It may well be doubted whether
some children do not read more books than they can well assimilate.
They are mentally profited about as much as their physical condition
is nourished when they quaff quantities of soda water. They become
troubled with mental dyspepsia.
Another criticism that is pertinent applies to book selection. There
are too many books written especially for children. There are more
titles in the average collection of children's books than the librarian
ought to purchase. There are too many books that are negative in
quality--pleasantly enough flavored, not harmful in tone, authentic
as to facts, but colorless. There are usually too few of the world's
enduring books--classics--and too many editions edited especially for
children. Some of the children's catalogues are of appalling size. Here
there is abundant need of excision. Five hundred titles, judiciously
chosen and plentifully duplicated, would meet the need of most
libraries, and would immeasurably raise the standard of reading. Much
might be ascertained by an analysis of the individual cards of juvenile
patrons--a sort of laboratory experiment.
There is need for greater co-operation between teachers and librarians.
There are tendencies in teaching that are strangling rather than
imparting the love of fine literature. It is no longer sufficient
to give to the reader the music of lyric, the stir of epic--poetry
must serve as an exercise in grammar. It is not sufficient that from
virile prose the reader may obtain the glow of the writer's fancy
or thought--it must do duty as a bit of sentence construction, or a
companion piece to a lesson in geography or, perhaps, of history. We
are told that poetry is dead. Who killed it? and how long would it take
to do the like for prose?
Whatever of criticism as to plan and method may be rightfully made
against public library work with children, the earnestness that
underlies it all will, in the end, serve to eliminate the real causes
for such criticism. Its meaning will unfold as time goes on--the first
children's room opened in a public library dates back not much more
than a dozen years. In the almonry of Westminster, three and one-half
centuries ago, William Caxton chose carefully for his printing press,
with deep reverence in his heart for the white souls upon which his
characters would be printed as surely as upon the white paper before
him. And with that same thought and care will be sifted, in the work
that is being carried on now, the printed page that helps to mould and
build the character of the newer generations.