But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit that the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least in so far as he deals with the adult reader. We furnish parks and playgrounds for our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful, but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess—that a man may not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent in supporting his family. So in the library we may and do see that harmful literature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books which are not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess.
I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude about the large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises from our misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon the attention in a state of society where public education and public taste are on the increase. In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven in different departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities; so that discrepancies frequently present themselves. We may observe, for instance, a quietly and tastefully dressed woman reading, we will say, Laura Jean Libbey. We are disconcerted, and the effect is depressing. But the discrepancy may arise in either of two ways. If we have here a person formerly possessing good taste both in dress and reading, whose taste in the latter regard has deteriorated, we certainly have cause for sadness; but if, as is much more likely, we have one who had formerly bad taste of both kinds and whose taste in dress has improved, we should rather rejoice. The argument is the same whether the change has taken place in the same generation or in more than one. Our masses are moving upward and the progress along the more material lines is often more rapid than in matters of the intellect. Or, on the contrary, intellectual progress may be in advance of manners. Such discrepancies are frequently commented upon by foreign travelers in the United States, who almost invariably misinterpret them in the same way. Can we blame them, when we make the same mistake ourselves? M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book “En Amerique,” notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educated persons among us. He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of a certain clergyman. His thought is evidently, “How shocking that a clergyman should act in this way!” But we might also put it: “How admirable that professional education in this country is so easily obtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it! How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed in doing so!” These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorse neither of them. But when I find that on the upper west side of New York, where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives and daughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale of living is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I do not say, as I am tempted to do “How surprising and how discouraging that persons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, and that not of the highest grade!” I say rather: “What an evidence it is of our great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mental development, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature, are living in such comfort or even luxury!”
Is not this the right way to look at it? I confess that I can see no reason for despairing of the American people because it reads more fiction than it used to read, so long as this is for the same reason that a ten year old boy reads more stories than a baby. Intellectual youth is at least an advance over mental infancy so long as it is first childhood—not second. It is undoubtedly our duty, as it is our pleasure, to help these people to grow, but we cannot force them, and should not try. Complete growth may take several generations. And even when full stature has been obtained, literature in its narrative modes, though not so exclusively as now, will still be loved and read. Romance will always serve as the dessert in the feast of reason—and we should recollect that sugar is now highly regarded as a food. It is a producer of energy in easily available form, and, thinking on some such novels as “Uncle Tom,” “Die Waffen nieder” and shall we say “The jungle”? we realize that this thing is a parable, which the despiser of fiction may well read as he runs.
[The Value Of Association][ 3]
Man is a gregarious animal; he cannot think, act, or even exist except in certain relations to others of his kind. For a complete description of those relations we must go to a treatise on sociology; our present subject is a very brief consideration of certain groups of individuals, natural or voluntary, and the application of the laws that govern such groups to the voluntary associations with which we are all familiar in library work. Men have joined together to effect certain things that they could not accomplish singly, ever since two savages found that they could lift a heavy log or stone together, when neither one could manage it alone. Until recently the psychology of human groups has received little study. Le Bon, in his book on “The Crowd,” gives the modern treatment of it. A group of persons does not think and act precisely as each of its component individuals would think or act. The very act of association, loose as it may be, introduces a new factor. Even the two savages lifting the log do not work together precisely as either would have worked singly. Their co-operation affects their activity; and both thought and action may likewise be affected in larger groupings even by the mere proximity of the individuals of the group, where there is no stronger bond.
But although the spirit that collectively animates a group of men cannot be calculated by taking an arithmetical sum, it does depend on that possessed by each individual in the group, and more particularly on what is common to them all and on the nature of the bonds that connect them. Even a chance group of persons previously unconnected and unrelated is bound together by feelings common to all humanity and may be appealed to collectively on such grounds. The haphazard street crowd thrills with horror at the sight of a baby toddling in front of a trolley-car and shouts with joy when the motorman stops just in time. But the same crowd, if composed of newly-arrived Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, would fail utterly to respond to some patriotic appeal that might move an American crowd profoundly. You may sway a Methodist congregation with a tale of John Wesley that would leave Presbyterians or Episcopalians cold. Try a Yale mob with “Boola” and then play the same tune at Princeton, and watch the effect.
Thus, the more carefully our group is selected the more particular and definite are the motives that we can bring to bear in it, and the more powerful will its activities be along its own special lines. The mob in the street may be roused by working on elemental passions—so roused it will kill or burn, but you cannot excite in it enthusiasm for Dante’s Inferno, or induce it to contribute money or labor toward the preparation of a new annotated edition. To get such enthusiasm and stimulate such action you must work upon a body of men selected and brought together for this very purpose.
Besides this, we must draw a distinction between natural and artificial groups. The group brought together by natural causes and not by man’s contriving is generally lower in the scale of civilization when it acts collectively than any one of its components. This is the case with a mob, a tribe, even a municipal group. But an artificial or selected group, where the grouping is for a purpose and has been specially effected with that end in view may act more intelligently, and be, so far as its special activities are concerned, more advanced in the scale of progress than its components as individuals. There is the same difference as between a man’s hand and a delicate tool. The former is the result of physical evolution only; the latter of evolution into which the brain of man has entered as a factor. The tool is not as good for “all round” use as the hand; but to accomplish its particular object it is immeasurably superior.