Part 21

If we were allowed to charge for our privileges I believe we could turn ourselves into a money-making institution on this count of publicity alone. I believe that it would be profitable for publishers to pay us for putting their books on our shelves. If we charged for the space we are giving to trade catalogs, circulars and other publicity material the issuers, I am sure, would not wait for us to ask for what they print. We have been trying for several years to get framed pictures of St. Louis industries to hang in our Business and Industrial Room. If we had asked $50 per, for the privilege of using space on the walls of a public institution I am sure we could have had it. But since we offer that space absolutely free of charge--a sovereign for a shilling--we can’t get what we want.

This is special publicity too, not general. There are some other cases where something about a piece of special publicity makes it so valuable to us that we display it, letting the advertiser get his advantage as a side issue. Within the last few years we have put up boldly in our art room, big glaring poster ads of beer, cigars and breakfast foods. How much could one of you have extorted from an advertiser if you had made him believe that you had some kind of a pull that would enable you to placard his wares not on Smith’s fence or Jones’s barn, but actually on the inside of the St. Louis Public Library? Now these posters were displayed, of course, not as inducements to smoke Fatimas or to drink Satanet, but because they were good and interesting commercial art. We believe that more people see the art on the fences than that in the Art Museum, and we want to do our part toward making it good. It has made great strides of late, as I think you will acknowledge. But answer me this: was not that valuable publicity for these products? Will not the knowledge that similar publicity may await the manufacturer who gets out a good poster, work out to the advantage of all concerned?

You know those articles in _System_, of course, telling what the writer would do if he were an undertaker, or a druggist, or a farmer. Well, if I were an ad-man I would get up an exhibition of St. Louis-made commercial art, advertising St. Louis products, and offer it to the Public Library. We will display it, our only condition in each case being that it is artistically worth display. Your clients will have their products advertised gratis, in a place where space could not be bought for a million dollars a square foot. You will gain in reputation as a man who puts over big things: we shall get an interesting display of commercial art, and better than all else, an impulse will have been given toward improved quality in the poster art of St. Louis. This is only one instance of the fact, which I believe to be a fact, that there is almost no kind of advertising that cannot be done in a live, modern public library, if one only goes the right way about it. Many go about it quite the wrong way, and do not succeed.

We do not assist Mrs. Smith to get piano pupils by placing on our bulletin boards a scrawled announcement. We are not willing to distribute by the million, small dodgers announcing that Jones’s clothes-wringers are the best. We do not allow Robinson to lecture in one of our assembly rooms in order to form a class in divine healing from which he, and he alone, will profit.

Publicity furnished by us must be incidental, as I have said; or it must be general, but I believe it to be all the more effective for this, and I invite your attempts to make more frequent and better use of it in such ways as I have suggested. Study the business and industrial material in our Applied Science Room, or the commercial art material in our Art Room. Examine the collection of travel folders on display in our delivery hall. See our bulletin of daily attractions in St Louis, entered months ahead when we can get the information--and see whether you do not agree with me.

Now let me remind you that you are paying for all this service, whether you make use of it or not. You are members of the best club in St. Louis. I don’t mean the Advertising Men’s Club, good as that is; I mean the Library Club. The taxgatherer collects the dues: if you are not a taxpayer you pay just the same, the burden being passed along to you in some of the many ways familiar to economists. The dues amount to about three cents a month for each inhabitant of St. Louis--not excessive. The club has the finest club house in the city, the most comfortable reading and study rooms, the finest and most useful books, the most intelligent and helpful attendants. You may have to belong to other clubs that you do not use; this, at least it would be folly to neglect.

POETS, LIBRARIES AND REALITIES[17]

We are met to dedicate a temple of the Book on the birthday of a man who did more than any other American, perhaps, to bring the book to the hearts of the masses. All poetry, all song, begins with the people, in the mouths of humble singers. Elaboration, refinement, unintelligent imitation, carry them both away from popular appreciation, until finally someone like James Whitcomb Riley brings them back. Great poetry is always about familiar things. Homeric epics tell of the kind of fighting that every Greek knew at first hand. The shepherds and shepherdesses of the earliest pastorals were the everyday workers of the fields. It was only at a later day the epic and pastoral grew artificial because the poets did their best to keep them unchanged while the things of which they told had passed away. Only when the poets forget the stilted symbols which once were real and discover that they themselves are surrounded by realities worthy of verse does poetry again become popular. It is this phenomenon that we are witnessing today.

Everyone who has had occasion to keep in touch with popular taste will tell you that the increased love for poetry shown in the publication of verse, the purchase of it, the study of it, the demand for it at public libraries, is nothing less than astounding. That this represents any sudden change in the public, I cannot believe. The public has always loved verse. The child chants it in his games; he drinks it in greedily at his mother’s knee. He begs for it, even when he cannot understand it, just for the joy of its rhythm, its lilt. But when the great poets go to the abodes of the gods, or to regions as far away in esthetics or metaphysics, for their subjects, they carry their product beyond public appeal. When our great verse is all remote and the familiar things are left to folk-lore and rag-time, then folk-lore and rag-time will monopolize public attention and fill the heart of the people. It is this feeling, on the part of many poets, that the familiar things of life are beneath their notice, that has made poetry so long unpopular. The feeling is quite unjustified. All the great elemental things are also among the most familiar--birth, death, love, grief, joy, in human experience: in the outer world, day and night, winter and summer, storm, wind and flood. And affiliated with these are all the little everyday things of which Riley sings--the bathing urchins, the ragged farm hand, the old tramp, the little orphan girl with her tales of fright, the rabbit under the railroad ties. When the modern reader first read in verse about such things there was a rush of red blood to the heart, with a recognition of the fact that verse had come down from Olympus to earth, and that after all, earth is where we live and that life and its emotions and events are both important and poetical.

I am not denying the poetry of romance, but we should remember that this too, has its roots in reality. Even the most imaginative works must be based, in the last analysis, on the real. Take for instance such works as Poe’s. Poe despised realism. His best work is about half imagination and half form. Yet when he succeeds in rousing in us the mingled emotions of fear and horror on which so many of his effects depend he is using for his purposes what was once a defensive mechanism of the human organism, causing it to shrink from and avoid the real things--wild beasts, enemies, the forces of nature--that were striving continually to overwhelm and destroy it. Without the survival of this defensive mechanism of fear and horror, Poe’s tales would have no dominion over the human mind. In fact, the main difference between what we call realism and romanticism is that while both have their relations with the real facts of life, the facts on which romanticism depends are unfamiliar, distant and distorted, while realism deals with that which is near at hand and familiar. Knights in armor, distressed damsels, donjon keeps and forests of spears were once as everyday affairs as aeroplanes are now, or gas attacks, or the British tanks. These all have in them the elements of romance; and when they too have passed, as God grant they may, they will doubtless take their place in the equipment of the poetical romanticist. Not these realities that pass, but those that are with us always, are the ones that inspire verse like Riley’s.

Those who love to study group-psychology, and who realize that we have in the motion-picture audience one of the most wonderful places to observe it that ever has been vouchsafed to mortals, may see every night the hold that this kind of realism has over the popular mind. Armed hosts may surge across the screen, volcanoes may belch and catastrophe may be piled on catastrophe. The eyes of the spectators may bulge and their mouths may gape, but they remain untouched. But let a little dog appear with his tongue out and his tail awag; let a small babe lie in its cradle and double up its tiny fists and yell, and at once you have evidence that the picture has penetrated the skin of the house and got down to the quick. Homely realities make an appeal that neither the knights in armor of the fourteenth century nor the tanks in armor of the twentieth are able to exert. Gilbert, who wrote many a truth in the guise of jest, never said a truer thing than when he made Bunthorne proclaim that in all Nature’s works “something poetic lurks”--

Even in Colocynth and Calomel.

That is the poet’s mission--to show us the poetry in the things that we had never looked upon as within poetry’s sphere. They are all doing it now--Noyes, Masefield and all the rest, and the public has risen at them as one man.

If James Whitcomb Riley were here today I should take him by the hand and say, “Beloved poet, you have known how to touch the great heart of the people quickly and deeply. That is what we must all do, if we are to succeed. We librarians must do it if our libraries are to be more than paper and glue and leather. Teach us the way.”

Our libraries are closer, far closer, to the people today than they were fifty years ago. They can never get as close as an individual voice like Riley’s, for they are a combination, not even a harmonious chorus, but a jumble of sounds from all regions and all ages. Yet we must not forget that in every instrument of music there is a potential mass of discord. The skilled player selects his tones and produces them in proper sequence and rhythm; and lo! a sweet melody! So the librarian may play upon his mass of books, selecting and grouping and bringing into correspondence his own tones and the receptive minds of his community, until every man sees in the library not a jumble but a harmony, not a promoter of intellectual confusion but a clarifier of ideas. In some such fashion it is allowed him to get close to the minds and hearts of his community as Riley did to his readers.

We are realizing today, we of the library world, that it is a poor instrument that yields but one tune, and a poor player who is able to produce only one. The librarians of the early days were of this kind; so were their libraries. The time they played was the tune of scholarship--a grand old melody enough, and yet with the right keyboard one may play not only fugues and chorals but the waltz and even the one-step. The scholar will find his refuge in this great building, but here also will be a multitude of functions undreamt of in the early library day--the selection of literature for children and their supervision while they use it, co-operation with the schools, the training of library workers, the publication of lists and other library aids, helpful cataloging and indexing, the provision of books and assistance for special classes, such as engineers, business men or teachers, a staff and facilities for all kinds of extension work, filling the space around the library as a magnet’s field of force surrounds its material body. A modern library is a city’s headquarters in its strife against ignorance and inefficiency; its working force is a general staff--books, ammunition for the fighter and food for the worker.

Of the poet I have said that his ability to gain the public ear and to reach the public heart is closely bound up with the portrayal of realities. This is true also of the library. Every step of its progress from a merely scholarly institution to a widely popular one has been marked by the introduction of more red blood, more real life, into its organism. The frequenter of the older library went there to find books on the pure sciences, on philosophy, in the drama, in poetry. These we of today in no wise neglect, but we entertain also those who look for books on plumbing, on the manufacture of hats, shoes and clothing, on salesmanship and cost accounting, on camping and fishing, on first aid to the injured, on the products of Sonoma county, California. Our assistants take over the telephone requests to furnish the population of Bulgaria, the average temperature of Nebraska in the month of June, plans for bungalows not to cost more than $1750, pictures of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, sixty picture postals of Baltimore for a reflectoscope lecture, a copy of a poem beginning “O beauteous day!” the address of the speaker’s uncle who left Salem, Massachusetts, for the West twenty-six years ago. Everyone of these queries throbs with the red blood of reality. Few of them would have been considered within the library’s scope fifty years ago. Books are written nowadays about all such subjects, whereas in the earlier day the knowledge of these things and the ability to write of them did not reside in the same person. So the library’s progress toward the realities is but the expression of that same progress in literature, using the word in its widest sense to signify all that may lurk between the covers of a book. The contemptuous name of _biblia abiblia_--books that are no books--which the earlier writers bestowed upon dictionaries, directories, indexes, lists and the like, is disregarded by the modern librarian. He prizes a list of all the grocers in the United States; he points with pride to his collection of hundreds of telephone directories; he has names galore in alphabetical array--indexes to places, persons, pictures, events and books. All these things are as much a part of his library as the Iliad of Homer or the dramas of Calderon.

But the librarian does not stop here. He conceives that it is his duty to deal not only with books but with what we may call adjuncts to books--things which may lead to books those who do not read--things that may interpret books to those who read but do not read understandingly or appreciatively. Some of our brothers beyond the sea have criticized us American librarians for the freedom--nay, the abandon--with which we have thrown ourselves into the search for such adjuncts and the zeal with which we have striven to make use of them. It has been our aim of late years, for instance, to make of the library a community center--to do everything that will cause its neighbors to feel that it is a place where they will be welcome, for whatever cause and that they may look to it for aid, sympathy and appreciation in whatever emergency. If the life of the community thus centers in the library, we have felt that the community cannot fail ultimately to take an interest in the library’s contents and in its primary function. The branch libraries in many of our cities are such local centers. Here one may find the neighbors round about holding an exhibition of needlework, the children dancing, the young men debating questions of the day, the women’s clubs discussing their programs, the local musical society rehearsing a cantata, Sunday schools preparing for a festival, the ward meeting of a political party. In one of our own branch libraries, in a well-to-do neighborhood, the librarian said to one of the young men at a social meeting, “I am curious to know why you come here. You could all afford, I know, to rent a larger and better hall; or you could meet in your own homes.” The young man looked at her with surprise, “Why,” he said, “we like this place. We all grew up in this library.” I confess that this anecdote sends a little thrill of satisfaction thru me every time I tell it. What could a librarian desire more than to have his neighborhood “grow up” in his library--to have the books as their roommates--to feel that they would rather be in that one spot than any other? On what a point of vantage does this place him! How much more readily will his neighbors listen to the good genius of a much-loved spot than to the keeper of a jail! Just here, of course, is the strong point of the so-called Gary system, which has so much in common with our modern library ideas. Whatever may be its faults, it at least makes of the school what we librarians have long sought to make of the library--a place that will be loved by its inmates instead of loathed. This once gained there is hardly any result that we may not bring about.

And now let us consider at least one thing more that we may gain from this intimate contact with the life of the community around us.

Formalism has been the death of art, of literature, of science, in many an age. It has atrophied an entire civilization, as it did in China. It paralyzed Egyptian art; it would have paralyzed Greek art, if the Greeks had not had the vitality to throw it off. Art, literature and science are never sufficient unto themselves. They must all drink continually at the fresh springs of reality. To move up to date with our metaphor, they must all get fresh current from the feeders of nature if the trolley wire is to be kept “live” and the motor running. Those perennial currents that Ampere conceived of as chasing themselves round and round the molecules of matter could keep going only in the absence of resistance, and that is something that we may imagine or talk about, but that does not really exist. Every electric current will stop unless a continuous electro-motive force is behind it; every river will dry up unless fed by living springs. All art, all literature, all science, will shrivel out of existence, or at any rate out of usefulness, if those who practice it think that all they have to do is to copy some trick, some method, some symptom perhaps of real genius, of their predecessors. Aristotle was a real scientist, tho his outlook was not ours. But those who kept on copying Aristotle for centuries and would not believe what they saw with their own eyes unless they could confirm it with a passage from his writings--they were no scientists at all. We have recovered from their formalism as Greek art recovered from the formalism of the lions of Mycenae.

Who shall say that James Whitcomb Riley did not do just this when he chose to abandon the stock in trade of the standard poets and put into verse what he saw about him here in Indiana? It is not beyond the possibilities, of course, that his own fresh point of view may one day succumb to formalism--that his little Orphant Annies and his raggedy men may become familiar to posterity through the work of a school of copyists who prefer to write about an Indiana that they never saw in a period when they never lived, instead of going themselves to the fresh inspiration of the realities about them. Now, of course, the current or the river of art or poetry must run a little while by itself; it cannot be all spring. Only, the fresh inspiration must not be delayed too long, lest the current or the river be dried.

In a recent article on current British novelists, one of our own most gifted writers, Mrs. Gerould, says with some truth that the stories of the younger realists in England--Compton Mackenzie, Oliver Onions, Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and their kin--are so similar in subject, treatment and style, that they might almost be interchangeable. She wittily develops the idea of a syndicate--the British Novelists, Limited--in which one writer is told to do the descriptions, another the character-drawing and a third the thrills. Mrs. Gerould is hardly fair here. These young men are almost the first writers in the English language to do just what they are accomplishing. They are by turns engrossing and boresome, but they are like the boy who has, all by himself, picked out a succession of chords on the piano. The harmony thrills him, but he is in danger of keeping it up so long that he will drive his hearers daft. When our British realists have over-worked their new vein, their sales will fall off and their publishers will see that fresh ore is brought to light ere more of their work reaches the public. How shall we ensure that this new ore shall be at hand--the jungle cleared so that there may be a fresh vista?

I may be taking too much upon my chosen profession; but I cannot help thinking that this is one of the tasks with which we librarians shall have to grapple. We have ourselves, as we have seen, come lately into more intimate touch with the realities about us. Can we not put into literature what we are taking from life and so act as the feeders that shall keep civilization from drying up or turning to stone? This is perhaps a startling idea. A book is a record. In the nature of things there is no progress in a record. And we are the keepers of the records of civilization; how then shall we be also founts of inspiration?