Part 25

There were doubtless poets before the invention of alphabets, and one may appreciate a symphony concert without knowing his musical alphabet or being able to use it; but we are accustomed now to considering thorough ability to read as a prerequisite to the requirement of a general education; and I do not see why as complete an ability to read music should not be a prerequisite for such a musical education as all persons ought to possess.

The analogy between the reading of music and that of language is very close, as we have seen, and we may be guided by it largely; but there is one respect in which it fails. Music and poetry may both be bad in the sense that they are ugly, of faulty construction, or trivial. But poetry may also be bad because it conveys a bad moral lesson or causes one to accept what is false. I can not see that it is possible for music to do this, except by association. A tune that has always been associated with improper words may in time come to be considered as itself improper, but there can be nothing objectionable about the music in itself. Again, music may be improperly used. Anyone would say that a largo in a minor key was out of place at a wedding, or a jig at a funeral. Association may have, but does not necessarily have anything to do with this; but here again the music in itself is not objectionable. This simplifies the selection of music for a library; for it excludes at the outset almost all the problems of censorship. Music is rejected usually for negative reasons--because it is not worth buying; not for any active evil influence that it is likely to exert.

This question comes up especially in connection with certain adjuncts to a music collection--pianola rolls and phonograph records. These are both of great aid in assisting the public to understand the language of music, which they must do before they learn to read it. They may be profitably used, of course in connection with reading, and yet the pleasure of following a piano player or a phonograph with the printed score seems to be known to few. Every library must judge for itself whether it can afford to put money into these adjuncts but in most cases it is unnecessary to do so, it being easy to get the rolls and records by donation. In doing this at my own library I have been struck with the trivial or so-called “popular” character of most of the rolls received. I am told, also that those who borrow them (and they have gone out “like hot cakes”) are largely persons who have not visited the library before. I believe that this sort of music is popular not because it is trivial or “trashy”, but because it is easy to understand. There is some music that is both good and easy--easy to understand and easy to read. Schumann’s Album for the young will occur to anyone. The compositions of Ludwig Schytte are modern examples. But the general impression that good music is difficult both to read and appreciate--is “high-brow”, in fact; and that easy music is always trivial and poor, is a deduction, I am afraid from experience. It is certainly not in the nature of things. However, so long as we want easy music, both to hear and to read, and a good deal of it is trashy, I can see nothing to do but to use the trashy music. With the music rolls triviality is all we have to object to--the ceaseless repetition of the same phrases and harmonies. We must remember, however, that these are not boresome to the beginner. It takes a good deal of repetition to make one tired of a musical phrase. And there is absolutely no question of active badness here--only of worthlessness.

When we come to phonograph records, however, we encounter something different. So far as these are purely musical, what has been said of the music rolls applies to them also, but many of them are vocal, and the words are often far below library standard. When a record is rejected for its words, the music, of course, must go with it, although as music it may be quite unexceptionable.

The location of the music collection is affected by the purpose for which it is maintained. A collection for scholars alone should certainly be in a separate room, with an expert custodian. But when we regard the collection as a means of popularizing music and of improving popular musical taste, the matter takes on another aspect. A person who comes to the library for the purpose of visiting the music room will find it, no matter where it may be, but the reader who needs to have his attention called to it or in whose case it must compete for use with other books, will never do so. Going back to our analogy with general literature we may note that when a librarian wishes to promote the circulation of some special class of literature or call attention to some particular book or books, the last thing he would think of doing would be to set them apart in a special room. What he does do is to place them conspicuously in the most frequented spot in his library.

This is, of course, only one side of the question. No one can browse in a collection of books unless he knows how to read; and so long as music readers can not read “to themselves”, the reading of instrumental pieces can not be done without the aid of the actual instrument. Even when one can read music to himself well enough to pick out what he wants it may aid him to be able to perform the piece on the instrument for which it was written. Now the most frequented spot in the library, where I recommend that the music collection shall be displayed, is not the place for a piano or for its use. This must necessarily be in a separate room.

These are not, however, absolutely irreconcilable requirements. It is not necessary that the music and the instrument should be in the same room. A sound-proof or a distantly-located room, for the instruments, may be used by those who wish to perform pieces before selecting them, even if no music at all is shelved in the room. This room should preferably be as near as possible to the music shelves, and if it is it must of course be sound proof.

Going back again for a moment to our analogy, the provision of a sound proof music room corresponds to the creation of a similar room for the ordinary reader, where he may take his books and read them aloud to see how they sound. The mere statement shows us how far behind our ability to read language is our ability to read music.

When I first began to present these ideas, which seemed to me to be absurdly self-evident, it was gradually borne in upon me that most people considered them new and strange, both those who agreed with me and those who disagreed. But without going into the question of what music can and can not convey to the human mind, it seems clear to me that both music and language succeed in conveying _something_ to the human organism, and do it principally by sound-waves. In the case of both, there is a way of writing down what is to be conveyed, so that the record may be used by another person who wishes to convey it by sound, or so that a person, sufficiently skilled, may convey it to himself, without making an audible sound. These facts seem to me to establish so complete an analogy that we may treat music in a library precisely as we treat ordinary books, both in selection, distribution and use. If to complete the analogy we must insist on certain changes in the attitude toward music of both educators and readers, this kind of missionary work is after all no more and no other than that which the modern librarian, especially in America, is often called upon to do.

I am a believer in the mission of music. The public library can do no more helpful thing to our modern life than to assist the public to understand and love it. The fact that it is not a representative art makes it all the more valuable as a means of detaching the mind from the things of this earth and transporting it to a separate world. A beautiful picture or statue or poem is anchored to the ground by the necessary associations of its subject matter. Music has no such anchor. It is free to soar, and soar it does, bearing with it the listening soul into regions that have no relations with the things of every day life. It may rest or it may stimulate; it may gladden or depress; but it does so by means of its own, not by reminding us of the stimulating or depressing things of our own past experience.

In the multifarious mission of the Public Library, as we Americans see it, surely the popularization of good music is to assume no unimportant place.

TWO CARDINAL SINS

The sins of which I purpose to speak are Duplication and Omission. They are peculiar to no one class of persons, to no one business, profession or institution. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Those who use the Book of Common Prayer acknowledge them when they confess that they have done those things that they ought not to have done and have left undone those things that they ought to have done. This statement covers other sins, both of commission and omission, than those that I have specified above, but it includes both of them. The peculiarity of Duplication and Omission is that they are complementary so far as the labor and expense involved in them is concerned. Their existence is like that of a surplus and a debt in the same purse. To bewail them is like complaining because you have a thousand dollars that you know not how to invest and at the same time because you owe a thousand that you can not pay. The whole world is out of joint because it is doing twice things that need to be done only once, and at the same time is not doing at all things that ought to be done. The man with the thousand-dollar surplus and the debt of the same amount may obtain quick relief by paying his indebtedness with his balance. The world will be relieved when it takes the energy and the money now expended in wasteful duplication and puts it into the doing of those things that are now left undone because the energy and money necessary to do them are expended wastefully. It is very easy, is it not? As easy as adding plus 10 to minus 10 and getting zero. The surplus and the debt, the duplications and the omissions, extinguish each other and neither of them bothers us any more. Unfortunately there are practical obstacles that do not present themselves in the case of the algebraic sum. These difficulties might occur in the case of the man with the surplus who owed money, if he could be supposed ignorant both of his balance and of his debt, while suffering the inconveniences due to both. This ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception, in the case of ordinary duplications and omissions. Either the duplication is not noticed, because at first sight it does not appear to be a duplication, or when recognized as such, its existence does not seem to be of any consequence. Besides this, both duplications and omissions seem to some to be part of the natural order of things ordained for us and not to be disturbed by the hand of impiety.

One hardly knows when to begin with illustrations where there is such a wealth of material, whether we seek it in civics, or history, or science, or business or in domestic economy. As you have doubtless surmised I intend to take the Public Library as my chief field of research, but I must maintain or at least justify my thesis of universality by a preliminary trip through a much broader field.

First let us take the age-old universal grievance, the unequal distribution of wealth, which from our present standpoint we may simplify by saying that one man has two dollars where he needs only one and another has no dollars at all--omission in his case where there is duplication in the other. I know there are some people who fail to see two sins in these simple and well-known facts, but most of us nowadays are recognizing that it is at least an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Where we disagree is that some feel that however unsatisfactory it may be there is nothing to be done about it; that others who agree that it is unsatisfactory are unable to agree on what they would consider satisfactory; and that even those who think they know this are unable to get together on a method of attaining what they desire. These various kinds and degrees of disagreement constitute the reason why these two particular sins of duplication and omission continue to be committed.

Now let us take a very big jump, from the general theory of socialism down to the golf-clubs of Middlefield, Mass.--a real place, though I have taken the liberty to change its name. With a population of about a thousand, this model village supported until recently two of these institutions for no other reason than the general tendency to wasteful duplication, already noted. The links on the West Side and those on the East Side had both their ardent partisans. Each club considered the existence of the other a shame and an outrage and each was only too willing to abolish duplication by consolidation, always provided its own particular links should be the ones to survive.

For years this small place supported these two clubs, each with its club-house, grounds, dues and assessments. Those who were not partisans had to belong to both, to keep the peace. Meanwhile, the town greatly needed a small social club where the retired city merchants, professional men and artists who largely made up its population could assemble occasionally, have a game of pool or bridge and drink a cup of tea. But their incomes were not large and they had to keep up those two golf clubs. The situation is so typical that I am enlarging on it a little. I wish that the outcome were typical too. That outcome was that after years of discussion the clubs were merged, one of the links was discontinued, and the village now enjoys the little social club that it needed. An omission has been filled by doing away with a duplication.

The church history of many a small place is very much to the point. We see three or four denominational bodies struggling with small congregations, inadequate buildings and general poverty when by uniting they might fill all these lacks simply by saving what they are now spending on duplication. Doctrinal differences are said to keep them apart; but to the non-theological mind these differences are not greater than these that must always exist between thoughtful men in the same religious body. It is pleasant to see an occasional lapse into sanity, shown by the union of such churches and the consequent strengthening and growth of a town’s religious life. Probably it is not too much to say that the whole problem of Christian Unity is but a phase of this general question of duplication and omission.

In the business world our two sins flourish like green bay trees. Small villages have two groceries and no hardware store; large cities may be overrun with one trade while there is lack of another. These things ought to adjust themselves, but they do not. One can pick out duplication and omission in the stock of a single institution. On asking for something at a department store recently I was met with the remark, “Isn’t that funny? You are the fifteenth person who has asked for that in the last three days!” The fact was noted as merely curious and interesting and there was apparently no intention of remedying the omission, even by cutting out some of the superfluous styles of neckties.

The most flagrant example I know of duplication in the business and industrial world is the duplicate telephone company. A telephone company is a good example of a mutual enterprise; its value to any subscriber depends on the existence of all the other subscribers. If a man could afford to buy up the company and discontinue all the telephones but his own, the value would disappear. Two companies are simply a nuisance, involving duplication of plant with no resulting convenience. The same is not true of gas or water companies, because here one user does not depend on the others. You would get just as good service if the electric company concluded to serve you, and you alone. There is, to be sure, wasteful duplication in these cases also, but in the instance of the telephone it is accompanied with necessary deterioration of service.

I suppose I need say little about the existence of our two sins in the household. We are honeycombed with them from the rural dinner table where there are no soup and three kinds of pie, to the housewife who yields to the temptation to buy another evening dress and “can not afford” an outing costume. What we need everywhere is some kind of a Board of Equalization, with autocratic powers, that will rigourously suppress all our duplication and with the money saved supply our omissions for us.

We may learn something from the efforts that have recently been made to minimize these two sins in charitable work and social service. Every city contains numerous charitable bodies, all trying to relieve want and alleviate suffering. They are frequently the prey of unscrupulous persons who manage to get their wants alleviated by three or four societies at once--by each, of course, without the knowledge of the others. The result is that there are no funds to relieve many worthy persons who accordingly suffer. The two sins in this case are being avoided by the simple establishment of a card-index at a central point. When an application is made for relief the index-office is informed by telephone, the index is consulted, and if it is found that the applicant is already receiving aid from some other source his request is politely but firmly refused.

The present production of books gives us an instructive example of the existence of duplications and omissions on a large scale; and the elucidation of these will bring us a little nearer to the application of our principles to the library, toward which we are tending. I know not which is the more striking fact in connection with the publishing business--the continual issue of useless books--fiction and non-fiction, or the non-existence of works on vital subjects regarding which we need information. Of course this is due partly to the fact that the men who know things are also the men who do things. They are too busy to write them down. It is also due to the abnormal appetites of the semi-educated, which create a demand for the trivial and fatuous. The semi-educated person is intellectually young; he has the peculiarities of the child. Foremost among these is the love of repetition. The little one would rather hear his favorite fairy tale for the hundredth time than risk an adventure into stranger fields of narrative. There is something admirable about this when it leads to the adult’s love of re-reading great literature. But in the semi-educated it appears as an unlimited capacity for assimilating unreal fiction with the same plots, the same characters, the same adventures and the same emotions, depicted time after time with slight changes in names and attendant circumstances.

An African explorer told me recently that the events attending the southward progress of the French through the Sahara and down into Central Africa were the most thrilling and the most important, from the standpoint of world history, among those of recent times. The story of them remains unwritten, except for a few episodes in French that have not been thought worthy of translation into other tongues. Yet in this period how much trivial incident, how much banal reminiscence, has been thought worthy of enshrinement in bulky octavos, selling at four dollars each! The money spent in putting forth the same idle stuff that has oppressed the world for centuries would have supplied great gaps in our catalogues of history, travel and science and have given us vital literature that we may now have lost forever.

In fiction, the sin of repetition is largely due to the substitution of imagination for observation. No two actual things are alike and no two events happen in the same way. Observation and accurate description will never result in duplication. But the semi-educated imagination sees always the same things and sees them in the same way; and its use in the writing of fiction results as we have seen.

Would that we had, to-day and here, realism like that of Turgenief in his “Memoirs of a Sportsman”--the detailed account of every-day happenings; the hardest thing in the world to write interestingly. When we try it, which we seldom do, we seem to revert at once to the dreary side of life, which doubtless exists but surely not to the exclusion of other things. Turgenief’s book helped toward the emancipation of the serfs. I will not dwell on that, for Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin--a very different sort of book, performed a like office for us. I will rather insist that Turgenief wrote simple, vital descriptive literature; something that you will look far to find in our modern fiction.

Our books of reference are full of duplications and omissions. Search the commoner dictionaries and cyclopedias on the library shelves and you will find countless instances of items of information given twice or thrice and others left out altogether--of words entered under more than one form and completely defined under each, while cross-references lead the seeker to nothing at all. After working a good many years on books of this kind I am convinced that the art of making a perfect dictionary or cyclopedia is the art of avoiding duplication and omission. This can not be done until publishers are willing to allow sufficient time to elaborate a plan before beginning work on one of these books. This, so far, has never been done, and the two sins continue to be committed, here as elsewhere.

It is doubtless time for our application of these principles to the library. We have not to look far to begin.

Take any city of average size and inquire how many libraries it supports. Is there any necessity in a town for more than one library? I am open to conviction, but I doubt. There are excellent reasons for the duplication in each case, I know, just as there were for the two golf clubs in our little town. The duplication in buildings, staff and books is very costly, and the service, no matter how good it may be, is not bettered by this duplication. The trouble may be minimized by co-operation, but it still exists. Take, if you please, the one item of book-purchase. I shall not speak here of private owners, though they must bear their share of blame and of punishment for our two sins; but add together the book funds of the two or three large libraries--public or subscription--and of the dozen small ones--special, denominational, associational--in a community, and see to what a considerable sum it amounts. If it could be administered and expended as a unit, is there any one who will maintain that the precise books would be bought that actually are bought? We find all these libraries buying copies of the same book when one copy is all that the community needs, each ignoring the others and each lamenting the insufficiency of its funds. I have not forgotten such conspicuous instances of co-operation in book-purchase as that of the three large libraries in Chicago, but I also do not forget that it is rare, and that even in Chicago it has been found difficult to carry it out in the perfection in which it is to be found on paper. If we add private purchasers to the libraries I have little hesitation in saying that the money spent on books in any community is quite enough to buy all that the community needs. The lacks are due to the fact that the sum needed to supply them is spent on useless duplicates.