Part 9

Books, or no books, his educational development goes on, at home, among his playmates, in his chosen work in shop, farm or office, but the use of books gives it a wider relationship--a broader outlook. This relation of our formal intellectual records to education which is emphasized especially during the period of attendance at school or college, makes a storehouse of books of peculiar value and importance to a community. Especially should the existence of such a collection direct the attention of every person in the community to the fact that the use of books to develop the mind and broaden the possibilities does not properly end with the close of the school life. It is the misfortune of the school, in too many instances, that its work engenders a hatred of books instead of a love for them. Play, we are told, is “work that you don’t have to do.” It is the merit of the library that there is no compulsion about its use. We dislike what is forced upon us, but the study which is the hardest of work in a school may become recreation when one is free to follow the line of inclination among the books of a well-made collection. In this way the post-scholastic education, if we may call it so, which lasts as long as the life, is kept in touch with the written records, instead of casting those records aside and proceeding haphazard wholly on so-called “practical” lines. The teachers express this, when they admit the public library at all into the educational pantheon, by saying that it may “continue the work of the school.” This is a one-sided way of looking at the matter--as one-sided as it would be to say that the function of the school is to prepare people for the use of the public library--a statement no less and no more true than the other. The proper way to put it is that the school and the library have closely related educational functions, both employing largely the written records of previous attainment, but the school concentrating its influence on a short period of peculiar susceptibility, with the aid of enforced personal discipline and exposition, while the library works without such opportunities, but also freed from these limitations. Thus the library uses books as a means of development, not with the aid of personal influence, but without taskmasters; not without discipline, but without compulsion. During the years of school attendance, it works with the school, and it recognizes the fact that its use is a habit best acquired early. This is the reason for our separate rooms for children, with their special collections and trained assistants, and also for our efforts to co-ordinate the child’s reading with his school work. We are not trying to set up a rival educational system, which by its superior attractiveness may divert the attention of the child from school; we are merely seeing that our young people may become accustomed to use books properly, to love them dearly and to look upon the place where they are housed as in some sense an intellectual refuge through life.

This closeness of contact with a public collection of books is largely a modern idea. In ancient times the safeguarding and preservation of the individual book was far more important than it is today. Greater public security, and especially the improvement in methods of duplication, have now made such care unnecessary, except in the case of volumes kept as curiosities, or for occasional use. The book that does the most for popular education is not kept behind bars, but sent out broadcast for free use, shortly perishing in the flesh to be reincarnated in fresh paper, type and binding. Sending out books for home use has added enormously to the educational value of the library and to the good done by books--to the number of points of contact of mind with mind. Along the same line has been the development of subsidiary centers of distribution--branch libraries, traveling libraries, delivery stations. All these have added to the tendency to look upon the public library as a center of municipal education. In many communities it is being looked to now as such a center in matters having no direct connection with books. It is a museum on a small scale; a lecture bureau; the maker, sometimes the publisher, of lists and bibliographies. In old times the local collector of minerals or of prints turned over his crystals or his pictures to the school; now, as likely as not, he gives them to the library. It is better that he should; for in the educational life of the individual, the school comes and goes, but the library goes on forever.

It is this capacity of the modern library to reach out beyond its own walls in many different directions that makes it proper for us to speak of it as a center. In a similar way the physicist speaks of centers of force. And as a body exerting attraction or repulsion--a magnetic pole, an electrified sphere, a gravitating particle--is surrounded by a field of force which is very real, though invisible, so there are invisible lines that connect such an intellectual center as the library with every interest in the community. We recognize this in our colloquial speech. Did you never hear of a network of branch libraries? Yet on a map they show merely a system of dots. The network is formed of the commingling fields of force, which together enmesh the community in a web of intellectual influences. And as an ordinary force has two aspects, so the influences radiating from our library centers are directed both from and toward them. The up-to-date library strikes out toward every member of the community and it strives to draw each one to itself. It sends its books into every home, its helpful aids to reading and to study, its library news and gossip in the local paper: but on the other hand, its cozy rooms, its well-stocked reference shelves, its willing and pleasant attendants exert on every man, woman and child in the community an intellectual attraction, and having let them taste of the delights it has to offer sends him out again as a willing missionary to lure in others. By such methods should the library strive to be a center of mental development in a community; by such methods is it succeeding, for no other center can vie with it in the universality of its appeal, whether we follow the individual from birth to death, or regard the various members of a community as they exist at one specified time.

But there is another sense in which the library should be and is able to serve as the intellectual center of a community. A community’s moral and intellectual status is not simply the sum of that of its component members. This is true of all aggregates where the components are interrelated in any way. In all such cases the properties of the whole depend, it is true, on the properties of the components, but not by simple addition. The taste of common salt is not the taste of sodium added to that of chlorine; the feelings, thoughts and acts of any aggregate of men may be quite different from those of the men taken individually. This is true whether the aggregate be simply a body of spectators in a theater, mutually related only by the fact of their common presence in the place, or an association, or the members of a municipal community. The human aggregate is in all cases less advanced than the individual; it is more primitive in its emotions, its morals, its acts. This might be expected, since the formal group, of whatever kind, began its evolution later than the individual. A community’s moral sense is thus less advanced than that of its members; it will lie, swindle and steal, when they would hesitate to do so; it will resort to violence sooner than they. Its intellectual ability is also less; its business transactions are looser; its appreciation of artistic values is inferior.

The education of a group of men, as a group, is thus something different from the education of its individual members. In the case of a loose group, such as an audience, it could not be attempted; with a group dwelling together and bound by ties of blood and common interest it is not only possible but quite worth while.

Of course it must be understood that whatever educates the individual also helps to educate the community; but when, as is almost always the case, the community lags behind, something may be done to bring its ideals, feelings and acts nearer to the individual standard, even without altering the latter.

Now we have already been reminded by Prof. Vincent of Chicago university that the library may act as the social memory; the town library should therefore be emphatically the municipal memory. And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. As the individual looks back with interest on his own personal history and refreshes his recollection by means of family portraits, old letters, diaries, scrapbooks and material of all kinds, so the community should retain consciousness of the continuity of its own history by keeping in the public library full records of similar import--files of all local publications, printed memorabilia of all kinds, material for local history, even to the point of imagined triviality; even private letters, when these bear in any way on the community life. The legal and political history, or, at last, its dry bones, is locked up in the official archives or the town or city; we need, in addition, an intellectual and social hall of records out of which the delver in local history may clothe this skeleton with flesh and blood.

A man with a memory has the basis for a mind and a conscience; so a community with this kind of a collective memory is much more ’apt than another to develop collective intelligence and collective morality. It may be asserted, not as a figure of speech, but as a cold fact, that a community whose citizens look back upon an honorable history with records preserved in an accessible place, ought to be much less likely to sanction a trolley steal or to wink-at official graft.

In a recent striking address, Prof. William James has called attention to the importance of the things that may serve to unlock stores of reserve energy. When the runner’s fatigue has increased up to a certain point he all at once gets, as we say, his “second wind”--something to enable him to draw on a reserve energy. These reserves, Prof. James tells us, we all possess, especially in matters of the intellect and morals; they may be unlocked by ideas, sentiments or objects. The ideas represented by such phrases--catchwords, if you choose to call them so--as love, mother, home, liberty, church, the old flag; righteousness, civic duty--have had a power in setting energy free and accomplishing results, that is beyond estimation. In regarding the library as a center of municipal education we make it a storehouse of objects and records, with their associated ideas and sentiments, that are competent to act in just this way. A man who feels that he is a “citizen of no mean city,” who has been made to realize it from earliest childhood, whose mind turns habitually to the storehouse that has done most to make him realize it, is a nobler man, and the community of which he is a part is a nobler community, than if such a place were non-existent, or if its records and associations were scattered and unheeded. This is a most cogent reason for making the library the intellectual center of the town, as the town hall is the political and the church the religious center; for seeing in it not alone a collection of books, however good, that are given out to those who ask for them but a means for guiding and leading the town’s intellectual progress, for turning it from trivialities to what is worth while, caring for the children’s reading, stimulating public thought by lectures, endeavoring by every legitimate means to attract toward it the public eye in regard to all things that contribute to individual and civic development.

The most important part of our education, says Emil Reich, we gain after we are twenty-five years old. We cannot prevent the acquisition of such a post-graduate education by every young man and young woman in the town. The question is not: Shall the mind be trained? Shall character be developed? It is rather, How and by what means shall the development go on? Under what auspices shall it take place and toward what end shall it point? Shall it deal in trivialities and end in vacuity? Shall it impart insincerity, dishonesty, uncleanliness? Shall its product be a useless citizen, an indifferent one, a positively harmful one?

The answers to these questions depend on the home, the church, the school--a score, perhaps, of minor civic societies. Let us at the very center of the town’s mental and moral life erect an institution, which, having as its basal object the collection, preservation and popularization of the records of what has been worth while in the past, may serve also as a support to what is good in the present, and a ladder on which the community may mount to still better things in the future. Is this too large, too serious a view to take of the importance of the public library? That will depend on what we choose to make of it--a mere pile of books to be turned over by the passerby, or a true center of municipal education.

THE LIBRARIAN AS A CENSOR[8]

“Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is in this last way that the librarian has become a censor of literature. Originally the custodian of volumes placed in his care by others, he has ended by becoming in these latter days much else, including a selector and a distributor, his duties in the former capacity being greatly influenced and modified by the expansion of his field in the latter. As the library’s audience becomes larger, as its educational functions spread and are brought to bear on more of the young and immature, the duty of sifting its material becomes more imperative. I am not referring now to the necessity of selection imposed upon us by lack of funds. A man with five dollars to spend can buy only five dollars’ worth from a stock worth a hundred, and it is unfair to say that he has “rejected” the unbought ninety-five dollars’ worth. Such a selection scarcely involves censorship, and we may cheerfully agree with those who say that from this point of view the librarian is not called upon to be a censor at all. But there is another point of view. A man, we will say, is black-balled at a club because of some unsavory incident in his life. Is it fair to class him simply with the fifty million people who still remain outside of the club? He would, we will say, have been elected but for the incident that was the definite cause of his rejection. So there are books that would have been welcome on our library shelves but for some one objectionable feature, whose appearance on examination ensures their exclusion--some glaring misstatement, some immoral tendency, some offensive matter or manner. These are distinctly rejected candidates. And when the library authority, whether librarian, book committee, or paid expert, points out the objectionable feature that bars out an otherwise acceptable book the function exercised is surely censorship.

May any general laws be laid down on this subject?

Let us admit at the outset that there is absolutely no book that may not find its place on the shelves of some library and perform there its appointed function. From this point of view every printed page is a _document_, a record of something, material, as the French say, _pour servir_; from a mass of such material neither falsity, immorality nor indecency can exclude it. I do not speak at this time, therefore, of the library as a storehouse of data for the scholar and the investigator, but rather of the collection for the free use of the general public and especially of collections intended for circulation. It is to these that the censorship to which I have alluded may properly apply and upon these it is generally exercised. I know of no more desirable classification of books for our present purpose than the old three categories--the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Those books that we desire, we want because they fall under one or more of these three heads--they must be morally beneficial, contain accurate information or satisfy the esthetic sense in its broadest meaning. Conversely we may exclude a book because it lacks goodness, truth or beauty. We may thus reject it on one or more of the three following grounds; badness--that is undesirable moral teaching or effect; falsity--that is, mistakes, errors or misstatements of fact; and ugliness--matter or manner offensive to our sense of beauty, fitness or decency. The first and third qualities, badness and ugliness, are often wrongly confounded, and as I desire therefore to speak of them together, we will now take up the second, namely, falsity or lack of truth. Strangely enough, among all reasons for excluding books this is perhaps least often heard. Possibly this is because it applies only to non-fiction, and apparently in the minds of many non-fiction is desirable simply because it is what it is. Again, the application of this test to any particular book can generally be made only by an expert. The librarian needs no adviser to tell him whether or not a book is immoral or indecent, but he cannot so easily ascertain whether the statements in a work on history, science or travel are accurate. This lack of expert knowledge is bad enough when inaccuracy or falsity of statement is involuntary on the author’s part. But of late we have in increasing numbers a class of books whose authors desire to deceive the public--to make the reader take for authentic history, biography or description what is at best historical fiction. Again, the increasing desire to provide information for children and to interest the large class of adults who are intellectually young but who still prefer truth to fictitious narrative, has produced countless books in which the writer has attempted to state facts, historical, scientific or otherwise, in as simple, and at the same time as striking, language as possible. Unfortunately, with some noteworthy exceptions, persons with comprehensive knowledge of a subject are generally not able to present it in the desired way. Co-operation is therefore necessary, and it is not always properly or thoroughly carried out, even where the necessity for it is realized. Proper co-operation between the expert and the popularizer involves (1) the selection and statement of the facts by the former; (2) their restatement and arrangement of the latter; and (3) the revision of this arrangement by the former. It is this third process that is often omitted even in serious cyclopedic work, and the result is inaccuracy. Often, however, there is no cooperation at all; the writer picks up his facts from what he considers reliable sources, puts them into eminently readable shape, dwelling on what seem to him striking features, heightening contrasts here and slurring over distinctions or transitions there. This process produces what scientific men call contemptuously “newspaper science,” and we have as well newspaper history, newspaper sociology and so on. They fill the pages not only of our daily press, but of our monthly magazines and of too many of the books that stand on our library shelves. It is unfair to blame the newspapers alone for their existence; in fact, some of the best simple presentations of valuable information that we have appear in the daily press. Then there are the text books. Any librarian who has ever tried to select a few of the best of one kind--say elementary arithmetics--to place on his shelves, knows that their name is legion and that differences between them are largely confined to compilers’ names and publishers’ imprints. In part they are subject to the same sources of error as the popularized works and in addition to the temptation to hasty, scamped or stolen work due to some publisher’s or teacher’s cupidity. This catalog might be extended indefinitely, but even now we begin to see the possibilities of rejection on the ground of falsity and inaccuracy. I believe that the chief menace to the usefulness of the public libraries lies, not as some believe in the reading of frankly fictitious narrative, but in the use of false or misleading history, biography, science and art. Not the crude or inartistic printing of toy money, but the counterfeiting of real money, is a menace to the circulating medium.

Against such debasement of the sterling coin of literature it is the duty of the librarian to fight; and he cannot do it single-handed. Some things he should and does know; he is able to tell whether the subject matter is presented in such a way as to be of value to his readers; he can tell whether the simple and better known facts of history and science are correctly stated; he is often an authority in one or more subjects in which he is competent to advise as an expert; but only the ideal paragon, sometimes described but never yet incarnated, can qualify simultaneously as an expert in all branches of science, philosophy, art and literature. The librarian must have expert advisers.

Nor are these so difficult to obtain. The men who know are the very ones that are interested in the library’s welfare and are likely to help it without compensation. And in the smaller places where the variety and extent of special knowledge is less comprehensive the ground covered by the library’s collection is also less, and the advice that it needs is simpler. The advice should if possible be personal and definite. No amount of lists, I care not who prepares or annotates them, can take the place of the friend at one’s elbow who is able and willing to give aid just when and exactly where it is needed. As well might the world’s rulers dismiss all their cabinet ministers and govern from textbooks on law and ethics. The formula, the treatise, the bibliography--we must still have all these, but they must be supplemented by personal advice. And competent advisers exist, as I have said, in almost every place. The local clergy on questions of religion, and often on others, too; the school principal on history and economics, the organist on music, the village doctor on science--some such men will always be found able and glad to give advice on these subjects or some others; and the place is small indeed that does not include one or two enthusiasts, collectors of insects or minerals or antiquities, who have made themselves little authorities on their pet hobbies and may possibly be the greatest or the only living authorities on those local phases that particularly interest the local librarian. It will do the librarian no harm to hunt these men out and ask their aid; possibly his own horizon will broaden a little with the task and his respect for the community in which he works will grow as he performs it.