knowing that at sight of it followers will flock around him. When you drop
a tiny crystal into a solution, the atoms all rush to it naturally: there
is no effort or compulsion except that of the aptitudes that their Creator
has implanted in them. So it is with all centers, business or religious or
social. No one instituted a campaign to locate the business center of a
city at precisely such a square or corner. Things aggregate, and the point
to which they tend is their center; they make it, it does not make them.
The leader on a hill is a leader because he has followers; without them he
would be but a lone warrior. The school or the library that says proudly
to itself, "Go to; I will be a social center," may find itself in the same
lonely position. It can offer an opportunity: that is all. It can offer
houseroom to clubs, organizations, and groups of all kinds, whether
permanent or temporary, large or small, but its usefulness as a social
center depends largely on the existence of these and on their desire for a
meeting place. We have in St. Louis six branch libraries with assembly
rooms and clubrooms--in all a dozen or so. I have before me the calendar
for a single week and I find 55 engagements, running from 24 at one branch
down thru 13, 8, 6, and 3 to one. If I had before me only the largest
number I should conclude that branch libraries as social centers were a
howling success; if only the smallest, I should say that they were dismal
failures. Why the difference? For the same reason that the leader who
displays his standard may or may not be surrounded with eager "flocking"
followers. There may be no one within earshot, or they may have no stomach
for the war, or they may not be interested in the cause that he
represents. Or again, he may not shout loud or persuasively enough, or his
standard may not be attractive enough in form or color, or mounted on a
sufficiently high staff.
I have said that all we can offer is opportunity; to change our figure, we
can furnish the drinking-fountain--thirst must bring the horse to it. But
we must not forget that we offer our opportunity in vain unless we are
sure that everyone who might grasp it realizes our offer and what it
means.
Here is the chance for personal endeavor. If the young people in a
neighborhood continue to hold their social meetings over a saloon when the
branch library or the school is perfectly willing to offer its assembly
room, it is pretty certain that they do not understand that offer, or that
they mistrust its sincerity, or that there is something wrong that might
be remedied by personal effort. In the one of our branches that is most
used by organizations there is this personal touch. But I should hesitate
to say that the others do not have it too. There are plenty of
organizations near this busiest library and there are no other good places
for them to meet. In the neighborhood of some other branches there are
other meeting-places, and elsewhere, perhaps, the social instinct is not
so strong, or at any rate the effort to organize is lacking. Should the
librarian step out and attempt to stimulate this social instinct and to
guide this organizing effort? There is room for difference of opinion
here.
Personally I think that he should not do it directly and officially as a
librarian. He may do it quietly and unobtrusively like any other private
citizen, but he needs all his efforts, all his influence, to bring the
book and the reader together in his community. Sometimes by doing this he
can be doing the other too, and he can always do it vicariously. He should
bear in mind that the successful man is not he who does everything
himself, but he who can induce others to do things--to do them in his way
and to direct them toward his ends. Even in the most sluggish, the most
indifferent community there are these potential workers with enthusiasms
that need only to be awakened to be let loose for good. The magic key is
often in the librarian's girdle, and his free offer of house room and
sympathy, with good literature thrown in, will always be of powerful
assistance in this kind of effort. He will seldom need to do more than to
make clear the existence and the nature of the opportunity that he offers.
I know that there are some librarians and many more teachers who hesitate
to open their doors in any such way as this; who are afraid that the
opportunities offered will be misused or that the activities so sheltered
will be misjudged by the public. It has shocked some persons that a young
people's dancing-class has been held, under irreproachable auspices, in
one of our branch libraries; others have been grieved to see that
political ward meetings have taken place in them, and that some rather
radical political theories have been debated there. These persons forget
that a library never takes sides. It places on its shelves books on the
Civil War from the standpoint of both North and South, histories of the
great religious controversies by both Catholics and Protestants, ideas and
theories in science and philosophy from all sides and at all angles. It
may give room at one time to a young people's dancing-class and at another
to a meeting of persons who condemn dancing. Its walls may echo one day to
the praises of our tariff system and on another to fierce denunciations of
it.
These things are all legitimate and it is better that they should take
place in a library or a school building than in a saloon or even in a
grocery store. The influence of environment is gently pervasive. I may be
wrong, but I cannot help thinking that it is easier to be a gentleman in a
library, whether in social meeting or in political debate, than it is in
some other places. In one of our branches there meets a club of men who
would be termed anarchists by some people. The branch librarian assures me
that the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder
since they have met in the library. It is getting to be literary,
academic, philosophic. Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudicious
repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs and dynamite.
In this catholicity I cannot help thinking that the library as an
educational institution is a step ahead of the school. Most teachers would
resent the imputation of partisanship on the part of the school, and yet
it is surely partisan--in some ways rightly and inevitably so. One cannot
well explain both sides of any question to a child of six and leave its
decision to his judgment. This is obvious; and yet I cannot help thinking
that there is one-sided teaching of children who are at least old enough
to know that there is another side, and that the one-sided teaching of
two-sided subjects might be postponed in some cases until two-sided
information would be possible and proper. Where a child is taught one side
and finds out later that there is another, his resentment is apt to be
bitter; it spoils the educational effect of much that he was taught and
injures the influence of the institution that taught him. My resentment is
still strong against the teaching that hid from me the southern viewpoint
concerning slavery and secession, the Catholic viewpoint of what we
Protestants call the Reformation--dozens of things omitted from textbooks
on dozens of subjects because they did not happen to meet the approval of
the textbook compiler. I am no less an opponent of slavery--I am no less a
Protestant--because I know the other side, but I think I am a better man
for knowing it, and I think it a thousand pities that there are thousands
of our fellow citizens, on all sides of all possible lines, from whom our
educative processes have hid even the fact that there is another side.
This question, as I have said, does not affect the library, and
fortunately need not affect it. And as we are necessarily two-sided in our
book material so we can open our doors to free social or neighborhood use
without bothering our heads about whether the users are Catholics,
Protestants, or Jews; Democrats, Republicans, or Socialists; Christian
Scientists or suffragists. The library hands our suffrage and
anti-suffrage literature to its users with the same smile, and if it hands
the anti-suffrage books to the suffragist, and vice versa, both sides are
certainly the better for it.
I have tried to make it clear in what I have said that in this matter of
social activity, public institutions should go as far as they can in
furnishing facilities without taking upon themselves the burden of
administration. I believe fully in municipal ownership of all kinds of
utilities, but rarely in municipal operation. Municipal ownership
safeguards the city, and private or corporate operation avoids the
numerous objections to close municipal control of detail. So the library
authorities may retain sufficient control of these social activities by
the power that they have of admitting them to the parts of the buildings
provided for them, or of excluding them at any time. These activities
themselves are better managed by voluntary bodies, and, as I have said,
there is no indication that the formation of such bodies is on the wane.
The establishment and operation of a musical or athletic club, a debating
society, or a Boy Scouts company, are surely quite as educational as the
activities themselves in which their members engage. Do not let us
arrogate to ourselves such opportunities as these. I should be inclined to
take this attitude also with regard to the public playgrounds, were they
not somewhat without the province of this paper; and I take it very
strongly with regard to the public school. Throw open the school buildings
as soon as you can, and as freely as you can to every legitimate form of
social activity, but let your relationship to this activity be like that
of the center to the circle--in it and of it, but embracing no part of its
areal content. So, I am convinced, will it be best for all of us--for
ourselves, the administrators of public property, and for the public, the
owning body which is now demanding that it should not be barred out by its
servants from that property's freest and fullest use.
THE SYSTEMATIZATION OF VIOLENCE
The peace propaganda has suffered much from the popular impression that
many of those engaged in it are impractical enthusiasts who are assuming
the possibility of doing away with passions and prejudices incident to our
very humanity, and of bringing about an ideal reign of love and good will.
Whether this impression is or is not justified we need not now inquire. It
is the impression itself that is injuring the cause of peace, and will
continue to injure it until it is removed.
It may at least be lessened by allowing the mind to dwell for a time on
another aspect of the subject in which the regime of peace that would
follow the discontinuance of all settlement of disputes by violence will
appear to consist not so much in the total disappearance of violence from
the earth as in the use of it for a different purpose, namely, the
preservation of the peaceful status quo, by a systematic and lawful use of
force, or at any rate, the readiness to employ it.
A state of peace, whether between individuals or nations, whether without
or within a regime of law, always partakes of the nature of an armed
truce: under one regime, however, the arms are borne by the possible
contestants themselves; under the other, by the community whose members
they are. If there is a resort to arms, violence ensues under both
regimes; in both cases it tends ultimately to restore peace, but the
action is more certain and more systematic when the violence is exerted by
the community.
These laws may apply indifferently to a community of individuals or to one
of nations. The most cogent and the most valid argument at the disposal of
the peace advocate is the fact that we no longer allow the individual to
take the law into his own hand, and that logically we should equally
prohibit the nation from doing so. This is unanswerable, but its force has
been greatly weakened by the assumption, which it requires no great
astuteness to find unwarranted, that the settlement of individual quarrels
by individual force has resulted from--or at least resulted in--the
discontinuance of violence altogether, or in the dawn of a general era of
good-will, man to man. On the contrary, it is very doubtful whether there
is less violence to-day than there would be if the operation of law were
suspended altogether; the difference, is that the violence has shifted its
incidence and altered its aim--it is civic and social and no longer
individual.
If we are to introduce the regime of law among nations as among
individuals, our first step must be similarly to shift the incidence of
violence. In so doing we may not decrease it, we may, indeed, increase
it--but we shall none the less be taking that step in the only possible
direction to achieve our purpose.
Among individuals, custom, crystallizing into law, generally precedes the
enforcement of that law by the community. Hence, a somewhat elaborate code
may exist side by side with the settlement of disputes, under that code,
by personal combat. We have among nations such a code, and we yet admit
the settlement of disputes by war, because the incidence of violence has
not yet completely shifted. We have established a tribunal to act, in
certain cases, on behalf of the community of nations, but we have not yet
given that tribunal complete jurisdiction and we have given it no power
whatever to enforce its decrees. It is on this latter point that I desire
to dwell. In a community of individuals, there are two ways of using
violence to enforce law--by the professional police force and by the posse
of citizens. The former is more effective, but the latter is often readier
and more certain in particular instances, especially in primitive
communities. To give it force we must have readiness on the part of every
citizen to respond to a call from the proper officer, and ability to do
effective service, especially by the possession of arms and skill in their
use. These requisites are not generally found in more advanced
communities.
In like manner, the decrees of an international tribunal might be enforced
either by the creation of an international army or by calling upon as many
of the nations as necessary to aid in coercing the non-law-abiding member
of the international community. Each nation is already armed and ready.
Whatever may be thought of the ultimate possibility of an international
army, it must be evident that the principle of the posse must serve us at
the outset. An international army would always consist in part of members
of the nation to be coerced, whereas, in selecting a posse those furthest
in race and in sympathy from the offender might always be chosen, just as
members of a hostile clan would make up the best posse to arrest a
Highlander for sheep-stealing.
Moreover, the posse has been used internationally more than once, as when
decrees have been pronounced by a general European Congress and some
particular nation or nations have been charged with their execution.
When a frontier community that has been a law unto itself gets its first
sheriff, the earliest visible result is not impossibly a sudden increase,
instead of a decrease, of violence. There is a war of the community,
represented by the sheriff and the good citizens, against all the bad
ones. Even so it may be expected that among the first results of an
effective agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal,
would be an exceptionally great and violent war. Sooner or later some
nation would be sure to take issue with an unpopular decree and refuse to
obey it. This would probably be one of the larger and more powerful
nations, for a weaker power would not proceed to such lengths in protest.
Not improbably other nations might join the protesting power. The result
would be a war; it might even be the world war that we have been fearing
for a generation. It might conceivably be the greatest and the bloodiest
war that the world has yet seen. Yet it would be far the most glorious war
of history, for it would be a struggle on behalf of law and order in the
community of nations--a fight to uphold that authority by whose exercise
alone may peace be assured to the world. The man who shudders at the
prospect of such a war, who wants peace, but is unwilling to fight for it,
should cease his efforts on behalf of a universal agreement among nations,
for there is no general agreement without power to quell dissension.
This is not the place to discuss the details of an international agreement
to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal. It may merely be said
that if the most powerful and intelligent communities of men that have
ever existed cannot devise machinery to do what puny individuals have long
been successfully accomplishing, they had better disband and coalesce in
universal anarchy.
My object here is neither to propose plans nor to discuss details, but
merely to point out that not the abandonment, but the systematization of
violence is the goal of a rational peace propaganda, and that when this is
once acknowledged and universally realized, an important step will have
been taken toward winning over a class of persons who now oppose a
world-peace as impractical and impossible.
These persons disapprove of disarmament: and from the point of view here
advocated, a general disarmament would be the last thing to be desired.
The possible member of a posse must bear arms to be effective. Armaments
may have to be limited and controlled by international decree, but to
disarm a nation would be as criminal and foolish as it would be to take
away all weapons from the law-abiding citizens of a mining town as a
preliminary to calling upon them to assist in the arrest of a notorious
band of outlaws.
Again: a common objection to the peace propaganda is that without war we
shall have none of the heroic virtues that war calls into being. This
objection fails utterly when we consider that what we shall get under a
proper international agreement is not the abolition of war, but simply an
assurance that when there is a war it will be one in which every good
citizen can take at once the part of international law and order--a
contest between the law and the law-breaker, and not one in which both
contestants are equally lawless. Thus the profession of arms will still be
an honorable one--it will, in fact, be much more honorable than it is
to-day, when it may at any moment be prostituted to the service of greed
or commercialism.
THE ART OF RE-READING
"I have nothing to read," said a man to me once. "But your house seems to
be filled with books." "O, yes; but I've read them already." What should
we think of a man who should complain that he had no friends, when his
house was thronged daily with guests, simply because he had seen and
talked with them all once before? Such a man has either chosen badly, or
he is himself at fault. "Hold fast that which is good" says the Scripture.
Do not taste it once and throw it away. To get at the root of this matter
we must go farther back than literature and inquire what it has in common
with all other forms of art to compel our love and admiration. Now, a work
of art differs from any other result of human endeavor in this--that its
effect depends chiefly on the way in which it is made and only secondarily
upon what it is or what it represents. Were this not true, all statues of
Apollo or Venus would have the same art-value; and you or I, if we could
find a tree and a hill that Corot had painted, would be able to produce a
picture as charming to the beholder as his.
The way in which a thing is done is, of course, always important, but its
importance outside of the sphere of art differs from that within. The way
in which a machine is constructed makes it good or bad, but the thing that
is aimed at here is the useful working of the machine, toward which all
the skill of the maker is directed. What the artist aims at is not so much
to produce a likeness of a god or a picture of a tree, as to produce
certain effects in the person who looks at his complete work; and this he
does by the way in which he performs it. The fact that a painting
represents certain trees and hills is here only secondary; the primary
fact is what the artist has succeeded in making the on-looker feel.
While Sorolla is painting a group of children on the beach, I may take a
kodak picture of the same group. My photograph may be a better likeness
than Sorolla's picture, but it has no art-value. Why? Because it was made
mechanically, whereas Sorolla put into his picture something of himself,
making it a unique thing, incapable of imitation or of reproduction.
The man who has a message, one of those pervasive, compelling messages
that are worth while, naturally turns to art. He chooses his subject not
as an end, but as a vehicle, and he makes it speak his message by his
method of treatment, conveying it to his public more or less successfully
in the measure of his skill.
We have been speaking of the representative arts of painting and
sculpture, but the same is true of art in any form. In music, not a
representative art, in spite of the somewhat grotesque claims of so-called
program music, the method of the composer is everything, or at least his
subject is so vague and immaterial that no one would think of exalting it
as an end in itself. There is, however, an art in which the subject stands
forth so prominently that even those who love the art itself are
continually in danger of forgetting the subject's secondary character. I
mean the art of literature. Among the works of written speech the
boundaries of art are much more ill-defined than they are elsewhere. There
is, to be sure, as much difference between Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"
and Todhunter's "Trigonometry" as there is between the Venus de Milo and a
battleship; and I conceive that the difference is also of precisely the
same kind, being that by which, as we have seen above, we may always
discriminate between a work of art and one of utility. But where art-value
and utility are closely combined, as they are most frequently in
literature, it is, I believe, more difficult to divide them mentally and
to dwell on their separate characteristics, than where the work is a
concrete object. This is why we hear so many disputes about whether a
given work does or does not belong to the realm of "pure literature," and
it is also the reason why, as I have said, some, even among those who love
literature, are not always ready to recognize its nature as an art, or
mistakenly believe that in so far as its art-value is concerned, the
subject portrayed is of primary importance--is an aim in itself instead of
being a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an impression.
Take, if you please, works which were intended by their authors as works
of utility, but have survived as works of art in spite of themselves, such
as Walton's "Compleat Angler" and White's "Natural History of Selborne."
Will anyone maintain that the subject-matter of those books has much to do
with their preservation, or with the estimation in which they are now
held? Nay; we may even be so bold as to enter the field of fiction and to
assert that those fictional works that have purely literary value are
loved not for the story they tell, but for the way in which the author
tells it and for the effect that he thereby produces on the reader.
I conceive that pure literature is an art, subject to the rules that
govern all art, and that its value depends primarily on the effect
produced on the reader--the message conveyed--by the way in which the
writer has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Where
a man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily,
he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, a
drama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it is
his message that matters.