of an expert supervisor.
(2) The traveling library office.
(3) The division of school work, with an assistant in each branch, under
skilled headquarters superintendence.
When our plans, which are already in good working order, are completely
carried out, we shall be able to guarantee to every child guidance in his
reading up to and thru his school course, with direction in a line of
influence that will make him a user of books thruout his life and create
in him a feeling of attachment to the public library as the home and
dispenser of books and as a permanent intellectual refuge from care,
trouble, and material things in general, as well as a mine of information
on all subjects that may benefit or interest him.
Some of the obstacles to the immediate realization of our plans in full
may be briefly stated as follows:
(1) Lack of sufficient funds. With more money we could buy more books, pay
higher salaries, and employ more persons. The assistants in charge of
children's rooms should be women of the highest culture and ability, and
it is difficult to secure proper persons at our present salaries.
Assistants in charge of school work must be persons of tact and quickness
of perception, and they should have no other work to do; whereas at
present we are obliged to give this work to library assistants in addition
to their ordinary routine duties, to avoid increasing our staff by about
forty assistants, which our appropriation does not permit.
(2) Misunderstanding on the part of the public, and also to some extent on
the part of teachers, of our aims, ability, and attitude. This I am glad
to say is continually lessening. We can scarcely expect that each of our
five hundred assistants should be thoroly imbued with the spirit of
helpfulness toward the schools or even that they should perfectly
understand what we desire and aim to do. Nor can we expect that our wish
to aid should be appreciated by every one of fifty thousand teachers or a
million parents. This will come in time.
(3) A low standard of honesty on the part of certain users of the library.
It is somewhat disheartening to those who are laboring to do a public
service to find that some of those whom they are striving to benefit, look
upon them merely as easy game. To prevent this and at the same time to
withstand those who urge that such misuse of the library should be met by
the withdrawal of present privileges and facilities uses up energy that
might otherwise be directed toward the improvement of our service. Now,
like the intoxicated man, we sometimes refuse invitations to advance
because it is "all we can do to stay where we are." Here is an opportunity
for all the selective influences that we may bring to bear, and
unfortunately the library can have but little part in these.
Have I wandered too far from my theme? The good that a public library may
do, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may assume
in a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which it
is administered and the resources at its disposal. Its public services may
be various, but probably there is no place in which it may be of more
value than side by side with the public school; and I venture to think
that this is the case largely because education to be complete must select
as well as train, must compel the fit to step forward and the unfit to
retire, and must do this, not only at the outset of a course of training
but continuously thruout its duration. We speak of a student being "put
thru the mill," and we must not forget that a mill not only grinds and
stamps into shape but also sifts and selects. A finished product of a
given grade is always such not only by virtue of formation and adaptation
but also by virtue of selection. In human training one of the most potent
of these selective agencies is the individual will, and to train that will
and make it effective in the right direction there is nothing better than
constant association with the records of past aims and past achievements.
This must be my excuse for saying so much of libraries in general, and of
one library in particular, in an address on what I have ventured to give
the name of Selective Education.
THE USES OF FICTION[2]
[2] Read before the American Library Association, Asheville
Conference, May 28, 1907.
Literature is becoming daily more of a dynamic and less of a static
phenomenon. In other days the great body of written records remained more
or less stable and with its attendant body of tradition did its work by a
sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneath
it--on a special class peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we have
added to this effect that of a moving multitude of more or less ephemeral
books, which appear, do their work, and pass on out of sight. They are
light, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and ease
with which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less and
less limited to a class, and more and more familiar to the masses. The
book nowadays is in motion. Even the classics, the favorites of other
days, have left their musty shelves and are moving out among the people.
Where one man knew and loved Shakespeare a century ago, a thousand know
and love him to-day. The literary blood is circulating and in so doing is
giving life to the body politic. In thus wearing itself out the book is
creating a public appreciation that makes itself felt in a demand for
reprinting, hence worthy books are surer of perpetuation in this swirling
current than they were in the old time reservoir. But besides these books
whose literary life is continuous, though their paper and binding may wear
out, there are other books that vanish utterly. By the time that the
material part of them needs renewing, the book itself has done its work.
Its value at that moment is not enough, or is not sufficiently
appreciated, to warrant reprinting. It drops out of sight and its place is
taken by another, fresh from the press. This part of our moving literature
is what is called ephemeral, and properly so; but no stigma necessarily
attaches to the name. In the first place, it is impossible to draw a line
between the ephemeral and the durable. "One storm in the world's history
has never cleared off," said the wit--"the one we are having now." Yet the
conditions of to-day, literary as well as meteorological, are not
necessarily lasting.
We are accustomed to regard what we call standard literature as
necessarily the standard of innumerable centuries to come, forgetful of
the fact that other so-called standards have "had their day and ceased to
be." Some literature lasts a century, some a year, some a week; where
shall we draw the line below which all must be condemned as ephemeral? Is
it not possible that all literary work that quickly achieves a useful
purpose and having achieved it passes at once out of sight, may really
count for as much as one that takes the course of years to produce its
slow results? The most ephemeral of all our literary productions--the
daily paper--is incalculably the most influential, and its influence
largely depends on this dynamic quality that has been noted--the
penetrative power of a thing of light weight moving at a high speed. And
this penetrative power effective literature must have to-day on account of
the vastly increased mass of modern readers.
Reading is no longer confined to a class, it is well-nigh universal, in
our own country, at least. And the habit of mind of the thoughtful and
intent reader is not an affair of one generation but of many. New readers
are young readers, and they have the characteristics of intellectual
youth.
Narrative--the recapitulation of one's own or someone else's experience,
the telling of a story--is the earliest form in which artistic effort of
any kind is appreciated. The pictorial art that appeals to the young or
the ignorant is the kind that tells a story--perhaps historical painting
on enormous canvasses, perhaps the small genre picture, possibly something
symbolic or mythological; but at any rate it must embody a narrative,
whether it is that of the signing of a treaty, a charge of dragoons, a
declaration of love or the feeding of chickens. The same is true of music.
The popular song tells something, almost without exception. Even in
instrumental music, outside of dance rhythms, whose suggestion of the
delights of bodily motion is a reason of their popularity, the beginner
likes program music of some kind, or at least its suggestion. So it is in
literature. With those who are intellectually young, whether young in
years or not, the narrative form of expression is all in all. It is, of
course, in all the arts, a most important mode, even in advanced stages of
development. We shall never be able to do without narrative in painting,
sculpture, music and poetry; but wherever, in a given community, the
preference for this form of expression in any art is excessive, we may be
sure that appreciation of that form of art is newly aroused. This is an
interesting symptom and a good sign. To be sure, apparent intellectual
youth may be the result of intellectual decadence; there is a second as
well as a first childhood, but it is not difficult to distinguish between
them. In general, if a large proportion of those in a community who like
to look at pictures, prefer such as "tell a story," this fact, if the
number of the appreciative is at the same time increasing, means a newly
stimulated interest in art. And similarly, if a large proportion of those
persons who enjoy reading prefer the narrative forms of literature, while
at the same time their total numbers are on the increase, this surely
indicates a newly aroused interest in books. And this is precisely the
situation in which we find ourselves to-day. A very large proportion of
the literature that we circulate is in narrative form--how large a
proportion I daresay few of us realize. Not only all the fiction, adult
and juvenile, but all the history, biography and travel, a large
proportion of literature and periodicals, some of the sciences, including
all reports of original research, and a lesser proportion of the arts,
philosophy and religion, are in this form. It may be interesting to
estimate the percentage of narrative circulated by a large public library,
and I have attempted this in the case of the New York public library for
the year ending July 1, 1906.
Class Per cent. Estimated per
Fiction cent. of narrative
Juvenile 26
Adult 32 ........... 58 58
History ................. 6 6
Biography ............... 3 3
Travel .................. 3 3
Literature .............. 7 3
Periodicals ............. 4 2
Sciences ................ 9 3
Arts .................... 3 1
Philos. & Relig. ........ 2 1
Foreign ................. 5 4
--- --
100 84
In other words, if my estimates are not too much out of the way--and I
have tried to be conservative--only 16 per cent. of our whole circulation,
and 38 per cent. of our non-fiction, is non-narrative, despite the fact
that our total fiction percentage is low.
I attach little importance in this regard to any distinction between true
and fictitious narrative, people who read novels do not enjoy them simply
because the subject matter is untrue. They enjoy the books because they
are interesting. In fact, in most good fiction, little beside the actual
sequence of the events in the plot and the names of the characters is
untrue. The delineation of character, the descriptions of places and
events and the statements of fact are intended to be true, and the further
they depart from truth the less enjoyable they are. Indeed, when one looks
closely into the matter, the dividing line between what we call truth and
fiction in narrative grows more and more hazy.
In pictorial art we do not attempt to make it at all. Our museums do not
classify their pictures into true and imaginary. Our novels contain so
much truth and our other narrative works so much fiction, that it is
almost as difficult to draw the line in the literary as it is in the
pictorial arts. And in any case objections to a work of fiction, as well
as commendations, must be based on considerations apart from this
classification.
To represent a fictitious story as real or an imaginary portrait as a true
one is, of course, a fault, but the story and the portrait may both be of
the highest excellence when the subjects are wholly imaginary. It should
be noted that the crime of false representation, when committed with
success, removes a work from library classification as fiction and places
it in one of the other classes. Indeed, it is probable that much more
lasting harm is done by false non-fiction than by fiction. The reader,
provided he uses literature temperately, has much less need to beware of
the novel, which he reads frankly for entertainment, than of the history
full of "things that are not so," of the biased biography, of science
"popularized" out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories in
sociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading as
philosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers and
pseudo-naturalists.
In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate.
One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result is
the same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction. One may
thus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics--the
mathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he does
exist--and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is
that fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have to warn
the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any more
than we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears,
or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fiction
has the fatal gift of being too entertaining. The novel-writer must be
interesting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not often
regard it as necessary--unless he happens to be a Frenchman.
But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit
that the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least in
so far as he deals with the adult reader. We furnish parks and playgrounds
for our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful,
but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess--that a man
may not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels
that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent in
supporting his family. So in the library we may and do see that harmful
literature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books which
are not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess.
I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude about
the large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises from
our misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon the
attention in a state of society where public education and public taste
are on the increase. In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven in
different departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities;
so that discrepancies frequently present themselves. We may observe, for
instance, a quietly and tastefully dressed woman reading, we will say,
Laura Jean Libbey. We are disconcerted, and the effect is depressing. But
the discrepancy may arise in either of two ways. If we have here a person
formerly possessing good taste both in dress and reading, whose taste in
the latter regard has deteriorated, we certainly have cause for sadness;
but if, as is much more likely, we have one who had formerly bad taste of
both kinds and whose taste in dress has improved, we should rather
rejoice. The argument is the same whether the change has taken place in
the same generation or in more than one. Our masses are moving upward and
the progress along the more material lines is often more rapid than in
matters of the intellect. Or, on the contrary, intellectual progress may
be in advance of manners. Such discrepancies are frequently commented upon
by foreign travelers in the United States, who almost invariably
misinterpret them in the same way. Can we blame them, when we make the
same mistake ourselves? M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book "En
Amerique," notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educated
persons among us. He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of a
certain clergyman. His thought is evidently, "How shocking that a
clergyman should act in this way!" But we might also put it: "How
admirable that professional education in this country is so easily
obtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it!
How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed in
doing so!" These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorse
neither of them. But when I find that on the upper west side of New York,
where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives and
daughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale of
living is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I do
not say, as I am tempted to do "How surprising and how discouraging that
persons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, and
that not of the highest grade!" I say rather: "What an evidence it is of
our great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mental
development, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature,
are living in such comfort or even luxury!"
Is not this the right way to look at it? I confess that I can see no
reason for despairing of the American people because it reads more fiction
than it used to read, so long as this is for the same reason that a ten
year old boy reads more stories than a baby. Intellectual youth is at
least an advance over mental infancy so long as it is first childhood--not
second. It is undoubtedly our duty, as it is our pleasure, to help these
people to grow, but we cannot force them, and should not try. Complete
growth may take several generations. And even when full stature has been
obtained, literature in its narrative modes, though not so exclusively as
now, will still be loved and read. Romance will always serve as the
dessert in the feast of reason--and we should recollect that sugar is now
highly regarded as a food. It is a producer of energy in easily available
form, and, thinking on some such novels as "Uncle Tom," "Die Waffen
nieder" and shall we say "The jungle"? we realize that this thing is a
parable, which the despiser of fiction may well read as he runs.
THE VALUE OF ASSOCIATION[3]
[3] An address delivered before the Library Associations of Iowa,
Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio, October 9-18, 1907.
Man is a gregarious animal; he cannot think, act, or even exist except in
certain relations to others of his kind. For a complete description of
those relations we must go to a treatise on sociology; our present subject
is a very brief consideration of certain groups of individuals, natural or
voluntary, and the application of the laws that govern such groups to the
voluntary associations with which we are all familiar in library work. Men
have joined together to effect certain things that they could not
accomplish singly, ever since two savages found that they could lift a
heavy log or stone together, when neither one could manage it alone. Until
recently the psychology of human groups has received little study. Le Bon,
in his book on "The Crowd," gives the modern treatment of it. A group of
persons does not think and act precisely as each of its component
individuals would think or act. The very act of association, loose as it
may be, introduces a new factor. Even the two savages lifting the log do
not work together precisely as either would have worked singly. Their
co-operation affects their activity; and both thought and action may
likewise be affected in larger groupings even by the mere proximity of the
individuals of the group, where there is no stronger bond.
But although the spirit that collectively animates a group of men cannot
be calculated by taking an arithmetical sum, it does depend on that
possessed by each individual in the group, and more particularly on what
is common to them all and on the nature of the bonds that connect them.
Even a chance group of persons previously unconnected and unrelated is
bound together by feelings common to all humanity and may be appealed to
collectively on such grounds. The haphazard street crowd thrills with
horror at the sight of a baby toddling in front of a trolley-car and
shouts with joy when the motorman stops just in time. But the same crowd,
if composed of newly-arrived Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, would fail
utterly to respond to some patriotic appeal that might move an American
crowd profoundly. You may sway a Methodist congregation with a tale of
John Wesley that would leave Presbyterians or Episcopalians cold. Try a
Yale mob with "Boola" and then play the same tune at Princeton, and watch
the effect.
Thus, the more carefully our group is selected the more particular and
definite are the motives that we can bring to bear in it, and the more
powerful will its activities be along its own special lines. The mob in
the street may be roused by working on elemental passions--so roused it
will kill or burn, but you cannot excite in it enthusiasm for Dante's
Inferno, or induce it to contribute money or labor toward the preparation
of a new annotated edition. To get such enthusiasm and stimulate such
action you must work upon a body of men selected and brought together for
this very purpose.
Besides this, we must draw a distinction between natural and artificial
groups. The group brought together by natural causes and not by man's
contriving is generally lower in the scale of civilization when it acts
collectively than any one of its components. This is the case with a mob,
a tribe, even a municipal group. But an artificial or selected group,
where the grouping is for a purpose and has been specially effected with
that end in view may act more intelligently, and be, so far as its special
activities are concerned, more advanced in the scale of progress than its
components as individuals. There is the same difference as between a man's
hand and a delicate tool. The former is the result of physical evolution
only; the latter of evolution into which the brain of man has entered as a
factor. The tool is not as good for "all round" use as the hand; but to
accomplish its particular object it is immeasurably superior.