A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects

by Arthur E. Bostwick

Whatever we do in school, our subsequent education, which goes on at least as long as we inhabit this world, must be in and through social contact, men and women together. But if each sex is not true to itself and does not live its own life, the results cannot be satisfactory. Reactions that are sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as they would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is to let the woman’s mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as the man’s always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released from the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down and will bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition.

We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members of women’s clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is often trivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment. Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a total lack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligent programme-making. The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acute programitis and the physician is in a position to consider what therapeutic measures may be indicated. We shall endeavor to prescribe some simple remedies.

III—The Remedy

When we have once discovered the cause of a malady, we may proceed in two ways to combat it; either we may destroy the cause or we may render the possible victims immune. To put it a little differently, we may eliminate either of the two elements whose conjunction causes the disease. To grow weeds, there must co-exist their seeds and a favourable soil. They may be exterminated either by killing the seeds or sterilising the soil. Either of these methods may be used in dealing with the disease that prevails among readers, or, if you prefer the other metaphor, with the rank vegetation that has choked the fertile soil of their minds, making any legitimate mental crop impossible. We have seen that the conditions favorable to the disease are a lack of interest and a fallacious idea that there is something inherent in the printed page per se that makes its perusal valuable whether the reader is interested or not—somewhat as a charm is supposed to work even when it is in a language that the user does not understand.

We are considering only the form of the disease that affects clubwomen, and this we have diagnosed as programitis—the imposition of a set programme of work—which, as an exciting cause, operates on the mental soil prepared by indifference and fetichism to produce the malady from which so many are now suffering.

I think physicians will generally agree that where the exciting cause can be totally removed that method of dealing with the disease is far more effective than any attempt to secure immunity. I believe that in most cases it is so in the present instance.

In other words, my prescription is the abandonment, in nine cases out of ten, of the set programme, and the substitution of something that is interesting primarily to each individual concerned. This is no new doctrine. Listen to William James:

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.... If we could recall for a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our thinking--they hang to each other by associated links, but the original source of interest in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed.

If we are to exorcise this spirit of indifference that has settled down like a miasma upon clubdom we must find James’s original germ of interest—the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang. Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested in something; few are supremely interested in the same thing. I shall not attempt to prove these, and what I shall have to say will be addressed only to those who can accept them without proof. But I am convinced that illustrations will occur at once to everyone. Who has not seen the man or woman, the boy or girl who, apparently stupid, indifferent and able to talk only in monosyllables, is suddenly shocked into interest and volubility by the mere chance mention of some subject of conversation—birds, or religion, or Egyptian antiquities, or dolls, or skating, or Henry the Eighth? There are millions of these electric buttons for galvanising dumb clay into mental and spiritual life, and no one of them is likely to act upon more than a very few in a given company—the theory of chances is against it. That is why no possible programme could be made that would fit more than a very small portion of a given club. We have seen that many club-programmes are made with an irreducible minimum of intelligence; but even a programme committee with superhuman intellect and angelic goodwill could never compass the solution of such a problem as this. Nor will it suffice to abandon the general programme and endeavour to select for each speaker the subject that he would like best to study and expound. No one knows what these subjects are but the owners of the hearts that love them.

We have seen how the scientific and technical societies manage the matter and how well they succeed. They appoint a committee whose duty it is to receive contributions and to select the worthiest among those presented. The matter then takes care of itself. These people are all interested in something. They are finding out things by experimentation or thought; by induction or deduction. It is the duty and the high pleasure of each to tell his fellows of his discoveries. It is in this way that the individual gives of his best to the race—the triumph of the social instinct over selfishness. As this sort of intellectual profit-sharing becomes more and more common, the reign of the social instinct will extend and strengthen. To do one’s part toward such an end ought to be a pleasure, and this is one reason why this course is commended here to the women’s clubs.