If James Whitcomb Riley were here today I should take him by the hand and say, “Beloved poet, you have known how to touch the great heart of the people quickly and deeply. That is what we must all do, if we are to succeed. We librarians must do it if our libraries are to be more than paper and glue and leather. Teach us the way.”
Our libraries are closer, far closer, to the people today than they were fifty years ago. They can never get as close as an individual voice like Riley’s, for they are a combination, not even a harmonious chorus, but a jumble of sounds from all regions and all ages. Yet we must not forget that in every instrument of music there is a potential mass of discord. The skilled player selects his tones and produces them in proper sequence and rhythm; and lo! a sweet melody! So the librarian may play upon his mass of books, selecting and grouping and bringing into correspondence his own tones and the receptive minds of his community, until every man sees in the library not a jumble but a harmony, not a promoter of intellectual confusion but a clarifier of ideas. In some such fashion it is allowed him to get close to the minds and hearts of his community as Riley did to his readers.
We are realizing today, we of the library world, that it is a poor instrument that yields but one tune, and a poor player who is able to produce only one. The librarians of the early days were of this kind; so were their libraries. The time they played was the tune of scholarship—a grand old melody enough, and yet with the right keyboard one may play not only fugues and chorals but the waltz and even the one-step. The scholar will find his refuge in this great building, but here also will be a multitude of functions undreamt of in the early library day—the selection of literature for children and their supervision while they use it, co-operation with the schools, the training of library workers, the publication of lists and other library aids, helpful cataloging and indexing, the provision of books and assistance for special classes, such as engineers, business men or teachers, a staff and facilities for all kinds of extension work, filling the space around the library as a magnet’s field of force surrounds its material body. A modern library is a city’s headquarters in its strife against ignorance and inefficiency; its working force is a general staff—books, ammunition for the fighter and food for the worker.
Of the poet I have said that his ability to gain the public ear and to reach the public heart is closely bound up with the portrayal of realities. This is true also of the library. Every step of its progress from a merely scholarly institution to a widely popular one has been marked by the introduction of more red blood, more real life, into its organism. The frequenter of the older library went there to find books on the pure sciences, on philosophy, in the drama, in poetry. These we of today in no wise neglect, but we entertain also those who look for books on plumbing, on the manufacture of hats, shoes and clothing, on salesmanship and cost accounting, on camping and fishing, on first aid to the injured, on the products of Sonoma county, California. Our assistants take over the telephone requests to furnish the population of Bulgaria, the average temperature of Nebraska in the month of June, plans for bungalows not to cost more than $1750, pictures of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, sixty picture postals of Baltimore for a reflectoscope lecture, a copy of a poem beginning “O beauteous day!” the address of the speaker’s uncle who left Salem, Massachusetts, for the West twenty-six years ago. Everyone of these queries throbs with the red blood of reality. Few of them would have been considered within the library’s scope fifty years ago. Books are written nowadays about all such subjects, whereas in the earlier day the knowledge of these things and the ability to write of them did not reside in the same person. So the library’s progress toward the realities is but the expression of that same progress in literature, using the word in its widest sense to signify all that may lurk between the covers of a book. The contemptuous name of biblia abiblia—books that are no books—which the earlier writers bestowed upon dictionaries, directories, indexes, lists and the like, is disregarded by the modern librarian. He prizes a list of all the grocers in the United States; he points with pride to his collection of hundreds of telephone directories; he has names galore in alphabetical array—indexes to places, persons, pictures, events and books. All these things are as much a part of his library as the Iliad of Homer or the dramas of Calderon.
But the librarian does not stop here. He conceives that it is his duty to deal not only with books but with what we may call adjuncts to books—things which may lead to books those who do not read—things that may interpret books to those who read but do not read understandingly or appreciatively. Some of our brothers beyond the sea have criticized us American librarians for the freedom—nay, the abandon—with which we have thrown ourselves into the search for such adjuncts and the zeal with which we have striven to make use of them. It has been our aim of late years, for instance, to make of the library a community center—to do everything that will cause its neighbors to feel that it is a place where they will be welcome, for whatever cause and that they may look to it for aid, sympathy and appreciation in whatever emergency. If the life of the community thus centers in the library, we have felt that the community cannot fail ultimately to take an interest in the library’s contents and in its primary function. The branch libraries in many of our cities are such local centers. Here one may find the neighbors round about holding an exhibition of needlework, the children dancing, the young men debating questions of the day, the women’s clubs discussing their programs, the local musical society rehearsing a cantata, Sunday schools preparing for a festival, the ward meeting of a political party. In one of our own branch libraries, in a well-to-do neighborhood, the librarian said to one of the young men at a social meeting, “I am curious to know why you come here. You could all afford, I know, to rent a larger and better hall; or you could meet in your own homes.” The young man looked at her with surprise, “Why,” he said, “we like this place. We all grew up in this library.” I confess that this anecdote sends a little thrill of satisfaction thru me every time I tell it. What could a librarian desire more than to have his neighborhood “grow up” in his library—to have the books as their roommates—to feel that they would rather be in that one spot than any other? On what a point of vantage does this place him! How much more readily will his neighbors listen to the good genius of a much-loved spot than to the keeper of a jail! Just here, of course, is the strong point of the so-called Gary system, which has so much in common with our modern library ideas. Whatever may be its faults, it at least makes of the school what we librarians have long sought to make of the library—a place that will be loved by its inmates instead of loathed. This once gained there is hardly any result that we may not bring about.
And now let us consider at least one thing more that we may gain from this intimate contact with the life of the community around us.
Formalism has been the death of art, of literature, of science, in many an age. It has atrophied an entire civilization, as it did in China. It paralyzed Egyptian art; it would have paralyzed Greek art, if the Greeks had not had the vitality to throw it off. Art, literature and science are never sufficient unto themselves. They must all drink continually at the fresh springs of reality. To move up to date with our metaphor, they must all get fresh current from the feeders of nature if the trolley wire is to be kept “live” and the motor running. Those perennial currents that Ampere conceived of as chasing themselves round and round the molecules of matter could keep going only in the absence of resistance, and that is something that we may imagine or talk about, but that does not really exist. Every electric current will stop unless a continuous electro-motive force is behind it; every river will dry up unless fed by living springs. All art, all literature, all science, will shrivel out of existence, or at any rate out of usefulness, if those who practice it think that all they have to do is to copy some trick, some method, some symptom perhaps of real genius, of their predecessors. Aristotle was a real scientist, tho his outlook was not ours. But those who kept on copying Aristotle for centuries and would not believe what they saw with their own eyes unless they could confirm it with a passage from his writings—they were no scientists at all. We have recovered from their formalism as Greek art recovered from the formalism of the lions of Mycenae.
Who shall say that James Whitcomb Riley did not do just this when he chose to abandon the stock in trade of the standard poets and put into verse what he saw about him here in Indiana? It is not beyond the possibilities, of course, that his own fresh point of view may one day succumb to formalism—that his little Orphant Annies and his raggedy men may become familiar to posterity through the work of a school of copyists who prefer to write about an Indiana that they never saw in a period when they never lived, instead of going themselves to the fresh inspiration of the realities about them. Now, of course, the current or the river of art or poetry must run a little while by itself; it cannot be all spring. Only, the fresh inspiration must not be delayed too long, lest the current or the river be dried.
In a recent article on current British novelists, one of our own most gifted writers, Mrs. Gerould, says with some truth that the stories of the younger realists in England—Compton Mackenzie, Oliver Onions, Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan and their kin—are so similar in subject, treatment and style, that they might almost be interchangeable. She wittily develops the idea of a syndicate—the British Novelists, Limited—in which one writer is told to do the descriptions, another the character-drawing and a third the thrills. Mrs. Gerould is hardly fair here. These young men are almost the first writers in the English language to do just what they are accomplishing. They are by turns engrossing and boresome, but they are like the boy who has, all by himself, picked out a succession of chords on the piano. The harmony thrills him, but he is in danger of keeping it up so long that he will drive his hearers daft. When our British realists have over-worked their new vein, their sales will fall off and their publishers will see that fresh ore is brought to light ere more of their work reaches the public. How shall we ensure that this new ore shall be at hand—the jungle cleared so that there may be a fresh vista?
I may be taking too much upon my chosen profession; but I cannot help thinking that this is one of the tasks with which we librarians shall have to grapple. We have ourselves, as we have seen, come lately into more intimate touch with the realities about us. Can we not put into literature what we are taking from life and so act as the feeders that shall keep civilization from drying up or turning to stone? This is perhaps a startling idea. A book is a record. In the nature of things there is no progress in a record. And we are the keepers of the records of civilization; how then shall we be also founts of inspiration?