“Criticism,” says Matthew Arnold, “must maintain its independence of
the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the
practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere
of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.” Still, not for a
moment are we able to lose sight of the active working conditions of
the library. Speculation as to the functions of such an institution in
a community may lead to the formulation of certain ideals which are to
guide the practical machinery in the future. But, on the instant, there
is the urgent necessity of supply and demand; the theorist must cope
with the actual reader calling for a book.
It is, however, only proper to expect that human activity be directed,
not along the lines of least resistance, but along the lines of best
results. This infers that the library, as an institution, fully
recognises that it has a function to perform in society, and that it
will strive, in its several capacities, so to unify its activities that
it will become a force as well as a convenience.
Through pleasure, we would train the child to future usefulness;
physically we would let him find expression for all his surplus energy;
but as a reader, we would so far guide him that none of his mental
energy will go to waste. Intellectually, a boy or a girl should not be
given what one library called “leisure hour reading”; a book should not
mean, for either, a vehicle for frittering the time away, but their
training should lead to the finding of “tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
An essential purpose is a most important element in the future history
of children’s rooms, and at the present initial stage it were unwise
to criticise the methods by which the library is trying to state this
purpose in definite terms. But whether we regard its activity in the
direction of the home, the school, the settlement, or the city at
large, we may safely claim that its main duty in all directions is
to supply the best books to be had on any stated line. And herein we
discover the connection that ought to exist between our schools as
educational, and our libraries as cultural centres. In Buffalo, Mr.
Melvil Dewey, during an address given to teachers, said:
“By law, the children are put under your influence in their earlier
years, when, if ever, they can be taught to love good books so well
that in all their lives thereafter they will seize on every opportunity
to read them. If the librarians, with their wing of the educational
army, can select and catalogue and provide free of cost the best on
every subject, the schoolmen, with their wing and with their immensely
larger resources both of money and men--and still better, of devoted
women--must send out from the schools, year by year, boys and girls
who will be lifelong patrons of the public library, and will, in due
time, help to send their own children along the paths which have proved
for them so profitable and pleasant; ... but its great work should be
the partial recognition that education is no longer for youth and for
a limited course, in a school to which they give most of their time,
but that it is really a matter for adults as well as youth, for life
and not for the course, to be carried on at home as well as in the
schools, and to be taken up in the hours or minutes of leisure, as the
proper accompaniment of their regular business or labour. This means
that education must be carried on by means of reading, and that, if
the librarians are to furnish the books and give all necessary help in
their proper field, the schools must furnish the readers.”
It is, therefore, the supreme function of a supervisor of school
libraries to reconcile culture with knowledge-getting--taste and desire
with mental training--quite as much as it is his official duty to
furnish supplementary books for the class-rooms. In fact, the former
should become his chief business, for in the other capacity he slightly
encroaches upon, rather than aids--duplicates in expense, rather than
enforces by supplying a need--the work being done by the neighbourhood
library.
Between the school and the library there should thus be a reciprocal
interchange of courtesies, the sum total of which tends toward
culture.[53] For the child is the potential man, and in our reading,
despite the opportunities for education, we are not made to understand,
at the early age when habits are most readily formed, the real import
of the sustaining power of art.
The reading of novels is a delightful recreation; it is not the reading
which should be questioned; it is the power to stop. Periods of rest
are a psychological necessity, but it is the power of returning from
the side issue to the life issue, which, in so many cases, is the
missing element. The literature that does nothing more than amuse is
not the literature which, in future days, one is to fall back on as a
maintaining force. Browning cries out:
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.
The man of culture is something more than an upstart; his is a slow but
a steady growth; the smallest star that burns into the night is one
whose rays have taken years to reach the earth. Out of the varied but
unified elements, the personality evolves its view of life; it may not
necessarily be a life among books; Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare
the poet are contradictions. The sustaining force in literature is no
protector in the sense that it shields us from some impending danger.
It settles behind us, pushes us, heart and soul, with a burning
resolution, through the darkest night. The cultured man finds himself
clinging to the sunnier side of doubt, not because Tennyson advises it,
but because it has become part of his philosophy; he falls back upon a
part of himself developed by literature.
Our neighbour is but a composite picture of numberless developments,
all working toward a definite goal. We call him the cultured man. Our
neighbour is one who tries to show us as many pictures of himself,
working in different directions, as he thinks will clothe him in a
mist of thought. We call him the dilettante. Dilettanteism does not
sustain; we either have to be perfectly honest with ourselves, or else
be discovered by others in the end.
The habit of association with good books is, therefore, one which
our school systems need to inculcate. The supervisor of class-room
libraries should strive to supplement the text-book with something that
is not a text-book; the outlines of history should be strengthened
by _bona fide_ biography instead of by the hybrid type of fiction. A
committee in Germany, after working some years over the recommendations
of books for children, finally printed a list of 637 volumes--calling
attention to a weakness in travel, popular science, and biography. This
condition is as true in England and America; and one of the causes
for the deficiency may be accounted for by the substitution of the
text-book style for the dignified narrative. The writer of juvenile
books, other than fiction, has not realised, up to the present time,
that the direct treatment is capable of being understood by young
people.
Conscious of this weakness, the librarian in time will banish from
the circulating shelves the text-book, _per se_; and the school child
should be prepared to meet the change. If he is given instruction in
the uses of a dictionary,[54] and of a card catalogue; if he is trained
by degrees to hunt up references--he should as well be familiarized
with the transition from text-book to authority, from selection to
source, from part to whole. From the mere usefulness of books he should
be taught the attractive power of books. This, it would seem, is one of
the fundamental relations existing between the library and the school.
With the increase of facilities, with the specialised consideration
paid to children’s reading by librarian and by teacher, there arises
the factor of the parent in connection with the two. What part, in
the general plan, does the home occupy? It furnishes the scholar;
it furnishes the reader. In private instruction, it may dictate
what shall be taught to the boy or girl; in public instruction, the
individual becomes part of the system. The home may purchase books
for the particular taste of this child or of that, but the public
library must attend to _all_ demands. Because of its democratic
mission, it partially discourages the private ownership of books by
the average person. Therefore, in most essentials, the State furnishes
the means of instruction and indicates what that instruction shall be
in its elementary stages; the State likewise supports the library, a
repository where the regulation and censorship are minimised as far as
the reader is concerned.
Let us acknowledge the peculiar social and economic conditions that
conduce to deprive the home of the means or of the time to give to
the proper training of children: the crowded tenement, the isolated
mountain cabin are alike in this denial. But the school and the library
are counteracting the deficiency. The mental condition in the tenement
is more in a state of ferment than in the mountains; the second
generation of the ignorant emigrant in New York or Chicago or Cleveland
or Pittsburg is far more fortunate than the new generation peopling our
Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Yet the school and the library are
penetrating the dense maze--they are defying isolation, and we will
doubtless discover, before long, that the stagnation throughout the
Tennessee ranges, and bordering the northern line of the Shenandoah
Valley, has beneath it a great potential future of intellectual
development. Until the social settlement passes through its
experimental stage,--perhaps its very existence is dependent upon its
experimental character--it were not safe to speculate on how largely it
will aid in making the home so far independent of consuming necessity
that it will respect the refinements of life, and will recognise that,
in so doing, each individual raises his own self-respect. Should
the settlement accomplish this, however little, it will justify its
existence.
The home, none the less, remains a factor, and its responsibility is
none the less urgent. The story hour is one of its legacies from the
past, and through it, the parent should cater wisely to a child’s
desire for a tale. If the library is also adopting the same means,
this in no way should relieve the parent of the prerogative; it should
only afford her an opportunity of improving upon her own idea as to
how a story should be told. Home influence should direct this juvenile
desire, this individual taste; for no one has the close knowledge of a
boy or girl possessed by the father or mother.
The habit of good reading, mentioned before, should be the joint
product of the library, the school, and the home. Yet, in many
instances, the library card of the child is of small consideration to
the parent. This is more likely due to indifference than to an absolute
confidence in the library’s effort to bring juvenile readers in contact
with the best books. The woman’s club that will study the problem
of children’s reading, as sedulously as it analyses the pathologic
significance of Ibsen’s heroines, will be rendering a service to the
library, as well as fitting its members to pass some judgment on the
publisher’s yearly output of juvenile books.