Chapter 19

Almost while I have been writing this I have been visited by a delegate from the foundrymen's club--an organization that wants more books on foundry practice and wants them placed together in a convenient spot. Such a visit is of course a heaven-sent opportunity and I suppose I betrayed something of my pleasure in my manner. My visitor said, "I am so glad you feel this way about it; we have been meaning for some time to call on you, but we were in doubt about how we should be received." Such moments are humiliating to the librarian. Great heavens! Have we advertised, discussed, talked and plastered our towns with publicity, only to learn at last that the spokesman of a body of respectable men, asking legitimate service, rather expects to be kicked downstairs than otherwise when he approaches us? Is our publicity failing in quantity or in quality?

Whatever may be the matter, it is in response to demands like this that the library must play its part in community education. Here as elsewhere it is the foundrymen who are the important factors--their attitude, their desires, their capabilities. Our function is that of the organ pipe--to pick out the impulse, respond to it and give it volume and carrying power. The community will educate itself whether we help or not. It is permeated by lines of intelligence as the magnetic field is by lines of force. Thrust in a bit of soft iron and the force-lines will change their direction in order to pass through the iron. Thrust a book into the community field, and its lines of intelligence will change direction in order to take in the contents of the book. If we could map out the field we should see great masses of lines sweeping through our public libraries.

All about us we see men who tell us that they despair of democracy; that at any rate, whatever its advantages, democracy can never be "efficient." Efficient for what? Efficiency is a relative quality, not absolute. A big German howitzer would be about as inefficient a tool as could be imagined, for serving an apple-pie. Beside, democracy is a goal; we have not reached it yet; we shall never reach it if we decide that it is undesirable. The path toward it is the path of Nature, which leads through conflicts, survivals, and modifications. Part of it is the path of community education, which I believe to be efficient in that it is leading on toward a definite goal. Part of Nature is man, with his desires, hopes and abilities. Some men, and many women, are librarians, in whom these desires and hopes have definite aims and in whom the corresponding abilities are more or less developed. We are all thus cogs in Nature's great scheme for community education; let us be intelligent cogs, and help the movement on instead of hindering it.

CLUBWOMEN'S READING

I--_The Malady_

A well-dressed woman entered the Art Department of a large public library. "Have you any material on the Medici?" she asked the custodian. "Yes; just what kind of material do you want?" "Stop a minute," cried the woman, extending a detaining hand; "before you get me anything, just tell me what they are!" Librarians are trained not to laugh. No one could have detected the ghost of a smile on this one's face as she lifted the "M" volume of a cyclopedia from a shelf and placed it on the table before the seeker after knowledge. "There; that will tell you," she said, and returned to her work.

Not long afterward she was summoned by a beckoning finger. "I can't tell from this book," said the perplexed student, "whether the Medici were a family or a race of people." The Art Librarian tried to untie this knot, but it was not long before another presented itself. "This book doesn't explain," said the troubled investigator, "whether the Medici were Florentines or Italians." Still without a quiver, the art assistant emitted the required drop of information. "Shan't I get you something more now?" she asked. "Oh, no; this will be quite sufficient," and taking out pencil and paper the inquirer began to write rapidly with the cyclopedia propped before her. Presently, when the Art Librarian looked up, her guest had disappeared. But she was on hand the next morning. "May I see that book again?" she asked sweetly. "There are some words here in my copy that I can't quite make out."

On another occasion a reader, of the same sex, wandered into the reading-room and began to gaze about her with that peculiar sort of perplexed aimlessness that librarians have come to recognise instinctively as an index to the wearer's state of mind. "Have you anything on American travels?" she asked.

"Do you mean travels in America, or travels by Americans in foreign countries?"

"Well; I don't know--exactly."

"Do you want books like Dickens's _American Notes_, that give a foreigner's impression of this country?"

"Ye-es--possibly."

"Or books like Hawthorne's _Note Book_, telling how a foreign country appears to an American?"

"We-ell; perhaps."

"Are you following a programme of reading?"

"Yes."

"May I see it? That may give me a clue."

"I haven't a copy here."

"Can you give me the name of the person or committee who made it?"

"Oh, I _made_ it _myself_."

This was a "facer"; the librarian seemed to have brought up against a stone wall, but she waited, knowing that a situation, unlike a knot, will sometimes untie itself.

The seeker after knowledge also waited for a time. Then she broke out animatedly:

"Why, I just wanted American travels, don't you know? Funny little stories and things about the sort of Americans that go abroad with a bird-cage!"

Just what books were given to her I do not know; but in due time her interesting paper before the Olla Podrida Club was properly noticed in the local papers.

In another case a perplexed club-woman came to a library for aid in making a programme of reading. "Have you some ideas about the subject you want to take up?" asked the reference assistant.

"Well, we had thought of England, or perhaps Scotland; and some of us would like the Elizabethan Period."

The assistant, after some faithful work, produced a list of books and articles on each of these somewhat comprehensive subjects and sent them to the reader for selection. "Which did you finally take?" she asked when the inquirer next visited the library.

"Oh, they were so good, we decided to use all of them this year!"

The writer is no pessimist. These stories which are as true, word for word, as any tales not taken down by a stenographer (and far more so than some that are) seemed to throw the persons who told them into a sort of dumb despair, but I hastened to reassure them. I pointed out that the inquirers after knowledge had, beyond all doubt, obtained some modicum of what they wanted. If the lady in the first tale, for instance, had mistakenly supposed that the Medici were a new kind of dance or something to eat, she surely has been disabused. And her cyclopedia article was probably as well written as most of its kind, so that a literal transcript of it could have done no harm either to the copyist or to her clubmates. And the paper on "American Travels," and the combined lists on England, Scotland and the Elizabethan Period; did not those who laboured on them, or with them, acquire information in the process? Most assuredly!

Still, I must confess that, in advancing these arguments, I feel somewhat like an _advocatus diaboli_. It is all very well to treat the puzzled clubwoman as a joke. When a man slips on a banana-peel and goes down, we may laugh at his plight; but suppose the whole crowd of passers-by began to pitch and slide and tumble! Should we not think that some horrible epidemic had laid its hand on us? The ladies with their Medici and their Travels are not isolated instances. Ask the librarians; they know, but in countless instances they do not tell, for fear of casting ridicule upon the hundreds of intelligent clubwomen whom they are proud to help. In many libraries there is a standing rule against repeating or discussing the errors and slips of the public, especially to the ever hungry reporter. I break this rule here with equanimity, and even with a certain degree of hope, for my object is to awaken my readers to the knowledge that part of the reading public is suffering from a malady of some kind. Later I may try my hand at diagnosis and even at therapeutics. And I am taking as an illustration chiefly the reading done by women's clubs, not because men do not do reading of the same kind, or because it is not done by individuals as well as by groups; but because, just at the present time, women in general, and clubwomen in particular, seem especially likely to be attacked by the disease. It must be remembered also that I am writing from the standpoint of the public library, and I here make humble acknowledgement of the fact that many things in the educational field, both good and bad, go on quite outside of that institution and beyond its ken.

The intellectual bonds between the library and the woman's club have always been close. Many libraries are the children of such clubs; many clubs have been formed in and by libraries. If any mistakes are being made in the general policies and programmes of club reading, the librarian would naturally be the first to know it, and he ought to speak out. He does know it, and his knowledge should become public property at once. But, I repeat, although the trouble is conspicuous in connection with the reading of women's clubs, it is far more general and deeply rooted than this.

The malady's chief symptom, which is well known to all librarians, is a lack of correspondence between certain readers and the books that they choose. Reading, like conversation, is the meeting of two minds. If there is no contact, the process fails. If the cogs on the gearwheels do not interact, the machine can not work. If the reader of a book on algebra does not understand arithmetic; if he tackles a philosophical essay on the representative function without knowing what the phrase means; if he tries to read a French book without knowing the language, his mind is not fitted for contact with that of the writer, and the mental machinery will not move.

In the early days of the Open Shelf, before librarians had realised the necessity of copious assignments to "floor duty," and before there were children's librarians, I saw in a branch library a small child staggering under the weight of a volume of Schaff's _History of the Christian Church_, which he had taken from the shelves and was presenting at the desk to be charged. "You are not going to read that, are you?" said the desk assistant.

"It isn't for me; it's for me big brudder."

"What did your big brother ask you to get?"

"Oh, a Physiology!"

Nowadays, our well-organised children's rooms make such an occurrence doubtful with the little ones, but apparently there is much of it with adults.

Too much of our reading--I should rather say our attempts at reading--is of this character. Such attempts are the result of a tendency to regard the printed page as a fetich--to think that if one knows his alphabet and can call the printed words one after another as his eye runs along the line, some unexplained good will result, or at least that he has performed a praiseworthy act, has "accumulated merit" somehow or somewhere, like a Thibetan with his prayer-wheel.

It is probably a fact that if a man should meet you in the street and say, "In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility," you would stare at him and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereas if you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them to ascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your own meaning into them. The words I have strung together happen to have no meaning, but the result would be the same if they meant something that was hidden from the reader by his inability to understand them, no matter what the cause of that inability might be.

This malady is doubtless spontaneous in some degree, and dependent on failings of the human mind that we need not discuss here, but there are signs that it is being fostered, spread, and made more acute by special influences. Probably our educational methods are not altogether blameless. The boy who trustfully approached a Reference Librarian and said, "I have to write a composition on what I saw between home and school; have you got a book about that?" had doubtless been taught that he must look in a book for everything. The conscientious teacher who was now trying to separate him from his notion may have been the very one who, perhaps unconsciously, had instilled it; if so, her fault had thus returned to plague her.

The boy or girl who comes to attach a sacredness or a wizardry to the book in itself will naturally believe, after a little, that whether he understands what is in it matters little--and this is the malady of which we have been complaining.

A college teacher of the differential calculus, in a time now happily long past, when a pupil timidly inquired the reason for this or that, was wont to fix the interrogator with his eye and say, "Sir; it is so because the book says so!" Even in more recent days a well-known university teacher, accustomed to use his own text-book, used to say when a student had ventured to vary its classic phraseology, "It can not be expressed better than in the words of the book!?" These instances, of course, are taken from the dark ages of education, but even to-day I believe that a false idea of the value of a printed page merely as print--not as the record of a mind, ready to make contact with the mind of a reader--has impressed itself too deeply on the brains of many children at an age when such impressions are apt to be durable. Not that the schools are especially at fault; we have all played our part in this unfortunate business. It might all fade, at length; we all know that many good teachings of our childhood do vanish; why should not the bad ones occasionally follow suit?

But now come in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult--the Chautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, the correspondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists, the devisers of "courses." They deepen the fleeting impression and increase its capacity for harm, while varying slightly the mechanism that produced it. As the child grows into a man, his childish idea that a book will produce a certain effect independently of what it contains is apt to yield a little to reason. The new influences, some of which I have named above, do not attempt directly to combat this dawning intelligence; they utilise it to complete the mental discomfiture of their victims. They admit the necessity of comprehending the contents of the book, but they persuade the reader that such comprehension is easier than it really is. And they often administer specially concocted tabloids that convince one that he knows more than he really does. Thus the unsuspecting adult goes on reading what he does not understand, not now thinking that it does not matter, but falsely persuaded that he has become competent to understand.

Every one of the agencies that I have named aims to do good educational work; every one is competent to do such work; nearly every one does much of it. I am finding fault with them only so far as they succeed in persuading readers that they are better educated than they really are. In this respect such agencies are precisely on a par with the proprietary medicine that is an excellent laxative or sudorific, but is offered also as a cure for tuberculosis or cancer.

I once heard the honoured head of a famous body that does an enormous amount of work of this sort deliver an _apologia_, deserving of all attention, in which he complained that his institution had been falsely accused of superficiality. It was, he said, perfectly honest in what it taught. If its pupils thought that the elementary knowledge they were gaining was comprehensive and thorough, that was their fault--not his. And vet, at that moment, the institution was posing before its pupils as a "university" and using the forms and nomenclature of such a body to strengthen the idea in their minds. We cannot acquit it, or any of the agencies like it, of complicity in the causation of the malady whose symptoms we are discussing.

It is not the fault of the women's clubs that they have fallen into line in such an imposing procession as this. Their formation and work constitute one of the most interesting and important manifestations of the present feminist movement. Their rôle in it is partly social, partly educational; and as they consist of adults, elementary education is of course excluded from their programme. We therefore find them committed, perhaps unconsciously, to the plan of required or recommended reading, in a form that has long been the bane of our educational systems both in school and out.

One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisition of information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be the relationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may be made in the future. According to this idea, if a woman can once get into her head that the Medici were a family and not "a race of people," it matters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are worth reading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she has ever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future.

That the members of these clubs are willing to pursue knowledge under these hampering conditions is of course a point in their favour, so far as it goes. A desire for knowledge is never to be despised, even when it is not entertained for its own sake. And a secondary desire may often be changed into a primary one, if the task is approached in the right way. The possibility of such a transformation is a hopeful feature of the present situation.

The reading that is done by women in connection with club work is of several different types. In the simplest organisations, which are reading clubs pure and simple, a group of books, roughly equal in number to the membership, is taken and passed around until each person has read them all. There is no connection between them, and each volume is selected simply on some one's statement that it is a "good book." A step higher is the club where the books are on one general subject, selected by some one who has been asked to prescribe a "course of reading." By easy gradations we arrive at the final stage, where the reading is of the nature of investigation and its outcome is an essay. A subject is decided on at the beginning of the season. The programme committee selects several phases of it and assigns each to a member, who prepares her essay and reads it to the club at one of the stated meetings. In this case the reading to be done in preparation for writing the essay may or may not be guided by the committee. In many cases, where the local public library cooperates actively with the clubs, a list may be made out by the librarian and perhaps printed, with due acknowledgment, in the club's year book. No one can doubt, in looking over typical programmes and lists among the thousands that represent the annual reading of the women's clubs throughout the United States, that a serious and sustained effort is being made to introduce the intellect, as an active factor, into the lives of thousands of women--lives where hitherto it has played little part, whether they are millionaires or near paupers, workers or idlers. With this aim there must be frill measure of sympathy, but I fear we can commend it only in the back-handed fashion in which a great authority on sociology recently commended the Socialists. "If sympathy with what they are trying to do, as opposed to the way in which they are trying to do it, makes one a Socialist," said the Professor, "then I am a Socialist." Here also we may sympathise with the aim, but the results are largely dependent on the method; and that method is the offspring of ignorance and inefficiency. The results may be summed up in one word--superficiality. I have elsewhere warned readers not to think that this word means simply a slight knowledge of a subject. A slight knowledge is all that most of us possess, or need to possess, about most subjects. I know a little about Montenegro for instance--something of its origin and relationships, its topography, the names and characteristics of a city or two, the racial and other peculiarities of its inhabitants. Yet I should cut a poor figure indeed in an examination on Montenegrin history, geography or government. Is my knowledge "superficial"? It could not properly be so stigmatised unless I should pose as an authority on Montenegro, or unless my opportunities to know about the country had been so great that failure to take advantage of them should argue mental incapacity. The trouble with the reading-lists and programmes of our women's clubs, inherited in some degree from our general educational methods, is that they emphasise their own content and ignore what they do not contain, to such an extent that those who use them remain largely in ignorance of the fact that the former bears a very small proportion indeed to the latter.

It was once my duty to act as private tutor in algebra and geometry to a young man preparing for college. He was bright and industrious, but I found that he was under the impression that when he had gone to the end of his text-books in those two subjects he would have mastered, not only all the algebra and geometry, but all the mathematics, that the world held in store. And when this story has been told in despair to some very intelligent persons they have commented: "Well, there isn't much more, is there?"

The effort of the text-book writer, as well as that of the maker of programmes, lists, and courses, appears to have been to produce what he calls a "well-rounded" effect; in other words, to make the student think that the whole subject--in condensed form perhaps, but still the whole--lies within what he has turned out. Did you ever see a chemistry that gave, or tried to give, an idea of the world of chemical knowledge that environs its board cover? One has to become a Newton before he feels, with that sage, like a child, playing on the sands, with the great, unexplored ocean of knowledge stretching out before him. Most students are rather like ducks in a barn-yard puddle, quite sure that they are familiar with the whole world and serene in that knowledge.

Most writers of text-books would indignantly deny that this criticism implies a fault. It is none of their business, they would say, to call attention to what is beyond their scope. So be it. Unfortunately, every one feels in the same way and so the horizon of our women's clubs is that of the puddle instead of the ocean.

It is a most interesting fact in this connection that there exist certain organisations which make a business of furnishing clubwomen with information for their papers. I have heard this service described as a "godsend," to clubs in small places where there are no libraries, or where the libraries are poorly equipped with books and _personnel_. But, if I am correctly informed, the service does not stop with the supply of raw material; it goes on to the finished product, and the perplexed lady who is required to read a paper on "Melchisedek" or on "Popular Errors Regarding the Theory of Groups," may for an adequate fee, or possibly even for an inadequate one, obtain a neatly typewritten manuscript on the subject, ready to read.