BY GEORGE ILES, _New York City_.
Six months ago the curtain descended upon what is likely to be accounted
the most memorable century in the annals of mankind. So salient are
three of its characteristics that they challenge the eye of the most
casual retrospection. First of all, we see that knowledge was increased
at a pace beyond precedent, to be diffused throughout the world with a
new thoroughness and fidelity. Next we must observe how republican
government passed from the slender ties spun in the times of Washington,
Jefferson and Adams, to the intimate and pervasive cords of to-day,
when, as never before, the good of the bee is bound up with the welfare
of the hive. Parallel with this political union of each and all there
was a growth of free organization which, in every phase of life, has
secured uncounted benefits which only joined hands may receive. Fresh
torches of light fraternally borne from the centers of civilization to
its circumference have tended to bring the arts and ideals of life
everywhere to the level of the best. These distinctive features of the
nineteenth century were in little evidence at its dawn, but they became
more and more manifest with each succeeding decade. In American
librarianship, as in many another sphere of labor, more was accomplished
in the last quarter of the century than in the seventy-five preceding
years.
It is as recently as 1852 that Boston opened the doors of the first free
public library established in an American city. Its founders were
convinced that what was good for the students at Harvard, the
subscribers to the Athenæum, was good for everybody else. Literature,
they felt, was a trust to be administered not for a few, but for the
many, to be, indeed, hospitably proffered to all. To this hour, by a
wise and generous responsiveness to its ever-growing duties, the Boston
foundation remains a model of what a metropolitan library should be. As
with the capital, so with the state; to-day Massachusetts is better
provided with free public libraries than any other commonwealth on the
globe; only one in two hundred of her people are unserved by them, while
within her borders the civic piety of her sons and daughters has reared
more than six score library buildings. The library commission of the
state is another model in its kind; its powers are in the main advisory,
but when a struggling community desires to establish a library, and
contributes to that end, the commission tenders judicious aid. The
population of Massachusetts is chiefly urban, an exceptional case, for
taking the Union as a whole, notwithstanding the constant drift to the
cities, much more than half the people are still to be found in the
country. For their behoof village libraries have appeared in thousands.
Still more effective, because linked with one another, are the
travelling libraries, inaugurated by Mr. Melvil Dewey in New York in
1893, and since adopted in many other states of the Union, and several
provinces of Canada. All this registers how the democracy of letters has
come to its own. Schools public and free ensure to the American child
its birthright of instruction; libraries, also public and free, are
rising to supplement that instruction, to yield the light and lift, the
entertainment and stimulus that literature stands ready to bestow. The
old-time librarian, who was content to be a mere custodian of books, has
passed from the stage forever; in his stead we find an officer anxious
that his store shall do all the people the utmost possible good. To that
end he combines the zeal of the missionary with the address of a
consummate man of business. Little children are invited to cheery rooms
with kind and intelligent hospitality; teachers and pupils from the
public schools are welcomed to classrooms where everything is gathered
that the library can offer for their use; helpful bulletins and
consecutive reading lists are issued for the home circle; every book,
magazine and newspaper is bought, as far as feasible, with an eye to the
special wants and interests of the community; information desks are set
up; and partnerships are formed with expositors of acknowledged merit,
with museums of industry, of natural history, of the fine arts. Not the
borrowers only, but the buyers of books are remembered. The Standard
Library, brought together by Mr. W. E. Foster, in Providence, is a
shining example in this regard.
The sense of trusteeship thus variously displayed has had a good many
sources; let us confine our attention to one of them. During the past
hundred years the treasure committed to the keeping of librarians has
undergone enrichment without parallel in any preceding age. We have more
and better books than ever before; they mean more than in any former
time for right living and sound thinking. A rough and ready
classification of literature, true enough in substance, divides it into
books of power, of information, and of entertainment. Let us look at
these three departments a little in detail. Restricting our purview to
the English tongue, we find the honor roll of its literature lengthened
by the names of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, Carlyle and
Ruskin, Emerson and Lowell. And not only to authors such as these must
our debt be acknowledged. We owe scholarly editors nearly as much. In
Spedding's Bacon, the Shakesperean studies of Mr. Furniss, and the
Chaucer of Professor Skeat, we have typical examples of services not
enjoyed by any former age. To-day the supreme poets, seers and sages of
all time are set before us in the clearest sunshine; their gold, refined
from all admixture, is minted for a currency impossible before. In their
original, unedited forms, the masterpieces of our language are now cheap
enough to find their way to the lowliest cottage of the cross-roads.
It is not, however, in the field of literature pure and simple that the
manna fell most abundantly during the past hundred years. Mr. Alfred
Russel Wallace, the last of the great students who took all natural
history for their province, declares that the advances in discovery,
invention and generalization during the nineteenth century outweigh
those of all preceding time. Admit this judgment, and at once is
explained why the records and the spirit of science dominate the
literature of the last ten decades. And let us note that while books of
knowledge have increased beyond measure, they have appeared with a
helpfulness and with merits wholly new. For the first time in the
history of letters, men and women of successful experience, of practised
and skilful pens, write books which, placed in the hands of the people,
enlighten their toil, diminish their drudgery, and sweeten their lives.
Cross the threshold of the home and there is not a task, from choosing a
carpet to rearing a baby, that has not been illuminated by at least one
good woman of authority in her theme. On the heights of the literature
of science we have a quality and distinction unknown before these later
days. The modern war on evil and pain displays weapons of an edge and
force of which our forefathers never dared to dream; its armies march
forward not in ignorant hope, but with the assured expectation of
victory. All this inspires leaders like Huxley, Spencer and Fiske with
an eloquence, a power to convince and persuade, new in the annals of
human expression and as characteristic of the nineteenth century as the
English poetry of the sixteenth, in the glorious era of Elizabeth. The
literature of knowledge is not only fuller and better than of old, it is
more wisely employed. In the classroom, and when school days are done,
we now understand how the printed page may best direct and piece out the
work of the hand, the eye and the ear; not for a moment deluding
ourselves with the notion that we have grasped truth merely because we
can spell the word. To-day we first consider the lilies of the field,
not the lilies of the printer; that done it is time enough to take up a
formal treatise which will clarify and frame our knowledge. If a boy is
by nature a mechanic, a book of the right sort shows him how to
construct a simple steam engine or an electric motor. Is he an amateur
photographer, other books, excellently illustrated, give him capital
hints for work with his camera. It is in thus rounding out the circle
which springs from the school desk that the public library justifies its
equal claim to support from the public treasury.
In the third and last domain of letters, that of fiction, there is a
veritable embarrassment of riches. During the three generations past
the art of story-telling culminated in works of all but Shakesperean
depth and charm. We have only to recall Scott and Thackeray, Hawthorne,
George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to be reminded that an age of science may
justly boast of novelists and romancers such as the world never knew
before. No phase of life but has been limned with photographic fidelity,
no realm of imagination but has been bodied forth as if by experience on
fire, so that many a book which bears the name of fiction might well be
labelled as essential truth. Within the past decade, however, the old
veins have approached their bounds, while new lodes do not as yet
appear. Of this the tokens are the eager sifting of the rubbish heap,
the elaborate picturing of the abnormal and the gross. Pens unable to
afford either delight or cheer have abundant capacity, often with
evident malice, to strike the nerves of horror and of pain. If at the
present hour high achievement in fiction is rare, if we hear more echoes
than ever and fewer voices, quantity abounds to the point of surfeit.
With an output in America alone of 616 works for 1900, all fears of
famine may well be allayed.
The main fact of the situation then is that the librarian's trust has of
late years undergone stupendous increase; this at once broadens his
opportunities and adds to his burdens. Gold and silver, iron and lead,
together with much dross, are commingled in a heap which rises every
hour. Before a trust can be rightly and gainfully administered, its
trustees must know in detail what it is that they guard, what its
several items are worth, what they are good for. And let us remember
that literature consists in but small part of metals which declare
themselves to all men as gold or lead; much commoner are alloys of every
conceivable degree of worth or worthlessness. There is plainly nothing
for it but to have recourse to the crucibles of the professional
assayer, it becomes necessary to add to the titles of our catalogs some
responsible word as to what books are and what rank they occupy in an
order of just precedence.
This task of a competent and candid appraisal of literature, as a
necessity of its trusteeship, has been before the minds of this
Association for a good many years. A notable Step toward its
accomplishment was taken when Mr. Samuel S. Green, in 1879, allied
himself with the teachers of Worcester, Massachusetts, that they and he
together might select books for the public schools of that city. The
work began and has proceeded upon comprehensive lines. Such literature
has been chosen as may usefully and acceptably form part of the daily
instruction, there is a liberal choice of books of entertainment and
inspiration worthily to buttress and relieve the formal lessons. The
whole work goes forward with intent to cultivate the taste, to widen the
horizons, to elevate the impulses of the young reader. Mr. Green's
methods, with the modifications needful in transplanting, have been
adopted far and wide throughout the Union. Already they have borne fruit
in heightening the standards of free choice when readers have passed
from the school bench to the work-a-day world.
Thus thoughtfully to lay the foundation of the reading habit is a task
beyond praise; upon a basis so sound it falls to our lot to rear, if we
can, a worthy and durable superstructure. It is time that we passed from
books for boys and girls to books for the youth, the man and the woman.
And how amid the volume and variety of the accumulated literature of the
ages shall we proceed? For light and comfort let us go back a little in
the history of education, we shall there find a method substantially
that of our friend, Mr. Green. Long before there were any free libraries
at all, we had in America a small band of readers and learners who
enjoyed unfailing pilotage in the sea of literature. These readers and
learners were in the colleges, where the teachers from examination and
comparison in the study, the class-room and the laboratory were able to
say that such an author was the best in his field, that such another had
useful chapters, and that a third was unreliable or superseded. While
literature has been growing from much to more, this bench of judicature
has been so enlarged as to keep steadily abreast of it. At Harvard there
are twenty-six sub-libraries of astronomy, zoology, political economy,
and so on; at hand are the teachers who can tell how the books may be
used with most profit. Of the best critics of books in America the
larger part are to be found at Harvard, at its sister universities and
colleges, at the technological institutes and art schools of our great
cities. We see their signed reviews in such periodicals as the
_Political Science Quarterly_ and the _Physical Review_; or unsigned in
journals of the stamp of the _Nation_. Fortunately, we can call upon
reinforcements of this vanguard of criticism. It would be difficult to
name a branch of learning, an art, a science, an exploration, from
folk-lore to forestry, from psychical research to geological surveys,
whose votaries are not to-day banded to promote the cause they have at
heart. These organizations include not only the foremost teachers in the
Union, but also their peers, outside the teaching profession, of equal
authority in bringing literature to the balances. And the point for us
is that these societies, through their publications and discussions,
enable these laymen to be known for what they are. Because the American
Historical Association is thus comprehensive, its membership has opened
the door for an initial task of appraisal, important in itself and
significant for the future.
Drawing his two score contributors almost wholly from that Association,
Mr. J. N. Larned, of Buffalo, an honored leader of ours, has, without
fee or reward, acted as chief editor of an annotated Bibliography of
American History. The work is now passing through the composing room of
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston; its contributors include professors
of history at Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, Harvard, McGill, Toronto,
Tulane and Yale, as well as the Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin and
Chicago; our own Association is worthily represented by Messrs. James
Bain, Clarence S. Brigham, V. L. Collins, W. E. Foster, J. K. Hosmer, E.
C. Richardson and R. G. Thwaites. As a rule the notes are signed. Where
for any reason a book demanding notice could not be allotted to a
contributor, Mr. Larned has quoted the fairest review he could find in
print. He has included not only good books, but such other works as have
found an acceptance they do not deserve. All told his pages will offer
us about 3400 titles; a syllabus of the sources of American history is
prefixed by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford; as an appendix will appear a
feature also of great value. In their "Guide to American history,"
published in 1896, Professors Channing and Hart, of Harvard University,
recommended such collections of books as may be had for $5, $10, $20,
$50 or $100. Professor Channing is kind enough to say that he will
revise these lists and bring them down to date as a contribution to Mr.
Larned's work. Professor Channing may, we trust, name the books in each
collection in the order in which they may be most gainfully read.
In times past our bibliographies have begun to need enlargement the
moment they left the bindery; in the present case that need is for the
first time to be supplied. Mr. Larned's titles come to the close of
1899; beyond that period current literature is to be chosen from and
appraised with the editorship of Philip P. Wells, librarian of the Yale
Law Library, who will issue his series in card form. We hope that he may
be ready with his cards for 1900 at the time that Mr. Larned's book
appears. Thereafter Mr. Wells' series will probably be published quarter
by quarter. Beginning with 1897, Mr. W. Dawson Johnston, now of the
Library of Congress, has edited for us a series of annotated cards
dealing with the contemporary literature of English history. Both the
form and substance of his series are capital. In so far as his cards go
directly into catalog cases, where readers and students must of
necessity see them, they render the utmost possible aid. If subscribers
in sufficient array come forward, Mr. Larned's book may be remolded for
issue in similar card form, with a like opportunity for service in
catalog cases. In the Cleveland Public Library and its branches useful
notes are pasted within the lids of a good many volumes. It is well thus
to put immediately under the reader's eye the word which points him
directly to his goal, or prevents him wasting time in wanderings of
little value or no value at all.
With Mr. Larned's achievement a new chapter is opened in American
librarianship; he breaks a path which should be followed up with a
discernment and patience emulous of his example. If the whole working
round of our literature were sifted and labelled after his method, the
worth of that literature, because clearly brought into evidence, might
well be doubled at least. Every increase in the availability of our
books, every removal of fences, every setting-up of guide-posts, has had
a heartening public response. So it will be if we proceed with this
effort to bring together the seekers and the knowers, to obtain the best
available judgments for the behoof of readers and students everywhere.
Economics and politics, so closely interwoven with American history,
might well afford the second field for appraisal. A good many libraries
still find aid in the "Reader's guide" in this department, although it
appeared as long ago as 1891. Next might follow the literature of the
sciences pure and applied, together with the useful arts. Among useful
arts those of the household might well have the lead, for we must not be
academic, or ever lose sight of the duties nearest at hand to the great
body of the plain people. Mr. Sturgis and Mr. Krehbiel, in 1897, did an
excellent piece of work for us in their "Bibliography of the fine arts";
their guide might profitably be revised and enlarged in its several
divisions, not omitting the introductory paragraphs which make the book
unique in its class. These tasks well in hand, we might come to such
accessions of strength and insight as to nerve us for labors of wider
range and greater difficulty, where personal equations may baffle even
the highest court of appeal, where it is opinion rather than fact that
is brought to the scales. I refer to the debatable ground of ethics,
philosophy and theology; and, at the other pole of letters, to the vast
stretches of fiction and belles lettres in our own and foreign tongues.
With regard to fiction and belles lettres, one of Mr. Larned's methods
has a hint for us. In some cases he has found it best to quote Mr.
Francis Parkman, Mr. Justin Winsor, or the pages of the _Nation_, the
_Dial_, the _American Historical Review_, and similar trustworthy
sources. With respect to novels and romances, essays and literary
interpretation, it does not seem feasible to engage a special corps of
reviewers. It may be a good plan to appoint judicious editors to give us
composite photographs of what the critics best worth heeding have said
in the responsible press.
It is in the preponderant circulation of fiction, and fiction for the
most part of poor quality, that the critics of public libraries find
most warrant for attack. They point to the fact that many readers of
this fiction are comparatively well-to-do, and are exempted by public
taxation from supporting the subscription library and the bookseller.
The difficulty has been met chiefly in two ways; by curtailing the
supply of mediocre and trashy fiction; by exacting a small fee on
issuing the novels brought for a season to a huge demand by advertising
of a new address and prodigality. Appraisal, just and thorough, may be
expected to render aid more important because radical instead of
superficial. In the first place, the best books of recreation, now
overlaid by new and inferior writing, can be brought into prominence;
secondly, an emphasis, as persuasive as it can be made, ought to be
placed upon the more solid stores of our literature. "Business," said
Bagehot long ago, "is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests
the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously and
deeply, but it does not look as if it did." Let it be our purpose to
reveal what admirable substance underlies appearances not always
seductive to the casual glance. Lowell and Matthew Arnold, Huxley and
John Fiske, Lecky and Goldwin Smith are solid enough, yet with no lack
of wit or humor to relieve their argument and elucidation. A New York
publisher of wide experience estimates that the average American family,
apart from school purchases, buys less than two books a year. Newspapers
and magazines form the staple of the popular literary diet. What fills
the newspapers is mainly news; their other departments of information
are often extensive and admirable, but within the limits of the hastily
penned paragraph or column they cannot rise to the completeness and
quality of a book carefully written and faithfully revised. The plain
fact is, and it behooves us to reckon with it, the average man, to whom
we bear our credentials as missionaries, looks upon a book as having
something biblical about it. To sit down deliberately and surrender
himself to its chapters is a task he waves away with strangely mingled
awe and dislike. So he misses the consecutive instruction, as delightful
as profitable to an educated taste, which authors, publishers and
librarians are ready and even anxious to impart.
We hear a good deal in these days about the need of recreation, and not
a word more than is true, but let us remember that the best recreation
may consist in a simple change of work. Behold the arduous toil of the
city lawyer, or banker, as on a holiday tour he climbs a peak of the
Alps or the Adirondacks, or wades the chilly streams of Scotland or
Canada a salmon rod in his hands. Why does he undergo fatigues so
severe? Partly because they are freely chosen, partly because they are
fatigues of an unwonted and therefore refreshing kind. So in the field
before us to-day. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more
fascinating when once its charms are recognized and entertained. Our
public schools throughout the land prove that a true story of
exploration, of invention or discovery, of heroism or adventure, has
only to be well told to rivet a boy's attention as firmly as ever did
Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island. When readers take up from
instinctive appetite, or wise incitement, the best books about flowers
or birds, minerals or trees, an art, a science, a research, they come to
joys in new knowledge, in judgments informed and corrected, unknown to
the tipplers and topers whose staple is the novel, good, bad and
indifferent. And why, if we can help it, should public money ever be
spent for aught but the public good?
With a new sense of what is implied in the trusteeship of literature, if
we endeavor in the future to ally ourselves with the worthiest critics
of books, we must bid good-bye to the temporary expedients which have
cramped and burdened our initial labors. The work of the appraisal of
literature requires a home, a Central Bureau, with a permanent and
adequately paid staff of editors and assistants. The training of such a
staff has already begun; in addition to the experience acquired by those
enlisted in our present bibliographical tasks, instruction is now given
in advanced bibliography at the New York State Library School at Albany,
and doubtless also at other library schools. And at the Central Bureau,
which we are bold enough to figure to ourselves, much more should be
done than to bring books to the balances. At such a home, in New York,
Washington, or elsewhere, every other task should proceed which aims at
furthering the good that literature can do all the people. There might
be conducted the co-operative cataloging now fast taking form; there
should be extended the series of useful tracts begun by that of Dr. G.
E. Wire on "How to start a library," by Mr. F. A. Hutchins on
"Travelling libraries." At such a center should be exhibited everything
to inform the founder of a public library; everything to direct the
legislator who would create a library commission on the soundest lines
or recast library laws in the light of national experience; there,
moreover, should be gathered everything to arouse and instruct the
librarian who would bring his methods to the highest plane. Thence, too,
should go forth the speakers and organizers intent upon awakening torpid
communities to a sense of what they miss so long as they stand outside
our ranks, or lag at the rear of our movement. In the fulness of time
such a bureau might copy the Franklin Society, of Paris, and call into
existence a needed book, to find within this Association a sale which,
though small, would be adequate, because free from the advertising taxes
of ordinary publishing. To found and endow such a bureau would
undoubtedly cost a great deal, and where is the money to come from? We
may, I think, expect it from the sources which have given us thousands
of public libraries, great and small. Here is an opportunity for our
friends, whether their surpluses be large or little. When a gift can be
accompanied by personal aid and counsel, it comes enriched. It is much
when a goodly gift provides a city with a library, it would be yet more
if the donation were to establish and maintain an agency to lift
libraries everywhere to the highest efficiency possible, to give
literature for the first time its fullest acceptance, its utmost
fruitage.
In a retrospective glance at nineteenth century science, Professor
Haeckel has said that the hundred years before us are not likely to
witness such victories as those which have signalized the era just at an
end. Assume for a moment that his forecast is sound, and that it applies
beyond the immediate bounds of science, what does it mean for
librarianship? It simply reinforces what in any case is clear, namely,
that it is high time that the truth and beauty of literature known to
the few made its way to all the people, for their enlightenment,
consolation and delight. If the future battles of science are to be
waged less strenuously than of yore, if scholarship has measurably
exhausted its richest mines, let us give the broadest diffusion to the
fruits of their triumphs past. In thus diffusing the leaven of culture
the public library should take a leading, not a subordinate part. Its
treasure is vaster and more precious than ever before. The world's
literature grows much like the world's stock of gold, every year's
winning is added to the mass already heaped together at the year's first
day. In the instruction, entertainment and inspiration of every man and
woman there is a three-fold ministry, that of art, of science, and of
letters. Because letters bring to public appreciation, to popular
sympathy, both art and science, and this in addition to their own
priceless argosies, may we not say that of art, science and letters, the
greatest of these is letters?