These are not, however, absolutely irreconcilable requirements. It is not necessary that the music and the instrument should be in the same room. A sound-proof or a distantly-located room, for the instruments, may be used by those who wish to perform pieces before selecting them, even if no music at all is shelved in the room. This room should preferably be as near as possible to the music shelves, and if it is it must of course be sound proof.
Going back again for a moment to our analogy, the provision of a sound proof music room corresponds to the creation of a similar room for the ordinary reader, where he may take his books and read them aloud to see how they sound. The mere statement shows us how far behind our ability to read language is our ability to read music.
When I first began to present these ideas, which seemed to me to be absurdly self-evident, it was gradually borne in upon me that most people considered them new and strange, both those who agreed with me and those who disagreed. But without going into the question of what music can and can not convey to the human mind, it seems clear to me that both music and language succeed in conveying something to the human organism, and do it principally by sound-waves. In the case of both, there is a way of writing down what is to be conveyed, so that the record may be used by another person who wishes to convey it by sound, or so that a person, sufficiently skilled, may convey it to himself, without making an audible sound. These facts seem to me to establish so complete an analogy that we may treat music in a library precisely as we treat ordinary books, both in selection, distribution and use. If to complete the analogy we must insist on certain changes in the attitude toward music of both educators and readers, this kind of missionary work is after all no more and no other than that which the modern librarian, especially in America, is often called upon to do.
I am a believer in the mission of music. The public library can do no more helpful thing to our modern life than to assist the public to understand and love it. The fact that it is not a representative art makes it all the more valuable as a means of detaching the mind from the things of this earth and transporting it to a separate world. A beautiful picture or statue or poem is anchored to the ground by the necessary associations of its subject matter. Music has no such anchor. It is free to soar, and soar it does, bearing with it the listening soul into regions that have no relations with the things of every day life. It may rest or it may stimulate; it may gladden or depress; but it does so by means of its own, not by reminding us of the stimulating or depressing things of our own past experience.
In the multifarious mission of the Public Library, as we Americans see it, surely the popularization of good music is to assume no unimportant place.
TWO CARDINAL SINS
The sins of which I purpose to speak are Duplication and Omission. They are peculiar to no one class of persons, to no one business, profession or institution. They are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Those who use the Book of Common Prayer acknowledge them when they confess that they have done those things that they ought not to have done and have left undone those things that they ought to have done. This statement covers other sins, both of commission and omission, than those that I have specified above, but it includes both of them. The peculiarity of Duplication and Omission is that they are complementary so far as the labor and expense involved in them is concerned. Their existence is like that of a surplus and a debt in the same purse. To bewail them is like complaining because you have a thousand dollars that you know not how to invest and at the same time because you owe a thousand that you can not pay. The whole world is out of joint because it is doing twice things that need to be done only once, and at the same time is not doing at all things that ought to be done. The man with the thousand-dollar surplus and the debt of the same amount may obtain quick relief by paying his indebtedness with his balance. The world will be relieved when it takes the energy and the money now expended in wasteful duplication and puts it into the doing of those things that are now left undone because the energy and money necessary to do them are expended wastefully. It is very easy, is it not? As easy as adding plus 10 to minus 10 and getting zero. The surplus and the debt, the duplications and the omissions, extinguish each other and neither of them bothers us any more. Unfortunately there are practical obstacles that do not present themselves in the case of the algebraic sum. These difficulties might occur in the case of the man with the surplus who owed money, if he could be supposed ignorant both of his balance and of his debt, while suffering the inconveniences due to both. This ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception, in the case of ordinary duplications and omissions. Either the duplication is not noticed, because at first sight it does not appear to be a duplication, or when recognized as such, its existence does not seem to be of any consequence. Besides this, both duplications and omissions seem to some to be part of the natural order of things ordained for us and not to be disturbed by the hand of impiety.
One hardly knows when to begin with illustrations where there is such a wealth of material, whether we seek it in civics, or history, or science, or business or in domestic economy. As you have doubtless surmised I intend to take the Public Library as my chief field of research, but I must maintain or at least justify my thesis of universality by a preliminary trip through a much broader field.
First let us take the age-old universal grievance, the unequal distribution of wealth, which from our present standpoint we may simplify by saying that one man has two dollars where he needs only one and another has no dollars at all—omission in his case where there is duplication in the other. I know there are some people who fail to see two sins in these simple and well-known facts, but most of us nowadays are recognizing that it is at least an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Where we disagree is that some feel that however unsatisfactory it may be there is nothing to be done about it; that others who agree that it is unsatisfactory are unable to agree on what they would consider satisfactory; and that even those who think they know this are unable to get together on a method of attaining what they desire. These various kinds and degrees of disagreement constitute the reason why these two particular sins of duplication and omission continue to be committed.
Now let us take a very big jump, from the general theory of socialism down to the golf-clubs of Middlefield, Mass.—a real place, though I have taken the liberty to change its name. With a population of about a thousand, this model village supported until recently two of these institutions for no other reason than the general tendency to wasteful duplication, already noted. The links on the West Side and those on the East Side had both their ardent partisans. Each club considered the existence of the other a shame and an outrage and each was only too willing to abolish duplication by consolidation, always provided its own particular links should be the ones to survive.