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.