Let me remind you that this has all been illustrative of my principle that library service, like every other kind of mundane activity, is a phase of the eternal struggle between keeping still and getting somewhere else. At the close of a recent novel one of the most thoughtful of current English writers, Mr. J.D. Beresford, states the issue thus (I quote from memory): “Virtue is only continued effort; a boast of success is really a confession of failure”. Of course, continuance of effort, virtuous though it may be, will be of little avail without ability, intelligence, common-sense—at least a modicum of those qualities whose complete combination makes up that wholly impossible creature, the Perfect Librarian. Training will not give you these—the Almighty bestows them at our birth—but it will develop such as you have already—and none of us lacks all of them.
Keep on moving, then, and when you score a point, rejoice only because it proves that scoring is one of your possibilities, and that you are likely to score many others before your race is run.
LUCK IN THE LIBRARY
“It is better to be born lucky than rich”, says the old proverb. “Is he lucky?” Napoleon used to ask when anyone was recommended to him. Literature is full of allusions to luck; history is full of the belief in it and of the influence of that belief on the course of events. Do I believe in luck? Most assuredly, if you will allow me to frame my own definition. One of the most important and fascinating branches of modern mathematics—the theory of chances or probabilities, deals with what may be called luck, and with its laws. Chance, we are told, is “the totality of unconsidered causes”. When an event is conditioned entirely by chance we say that it came about by “luck”, though the unconsidered causes are there just the same. A tyrant, we will say, stakes his victim’s life on the cast of a die. Whether he perishes or not is solely a matter of good or bad “luck”. When a basket contains ten marbles, of which five are black and five are white we know that in the long run the number of black and white marbles drawn at random tends toward equality, and we express this by saying that the chance of drawing either black or white is one in two, or ½. Whether black or white appears at any single drawing is purely a matter of luck. In this sense, luck confronts us at every turn, and no one can deny its existence. Now let us go a little further. May chance happenings be affected by circumstances that have no apparent connection with them? Doubtless; but so far as they are they are no longer subject to the laws of chance. It is because we know this that we are able to study nature by experiment. If in a long series of drawings, from a basket containing an equal number of black and white marbles, we draw chiefly black, we recognize at once the fact that some cause, distinct from the mass of slight and unconsidered causes whose combined action we know as “chance”, is acting. We try at once to get at that cause by varying the conditions. If we find, for instance, that by plunging the hand deeper into the basket we get white balls as well as black, we conclude that the white balls were heavier and so settled to the bottom when the mass was shaken. So it may be that a particular series of happenings may be affected by locality, by personality or by season. So far as this is true, chance or “luck” has ceased to act and we must look for the cause. These, however, are precisely the circumstances in which many persons are accustomed to invoke a luck of higher grade and more potent qualities, a luck that clings to person, place, or time. If in a series of happenings more turn out to the advantage of a particular person than pure chance would warrant, he is said to be “lucky”. In other words, the necessity of assigning a cause is recognized, and it is easier to call this cause “luck” than to search for it and to identify it. I am not sure that we are right in objecting to this procedure. We do not object to lumping together the totality of unconsidered causes and calling them “chance”. It is legitimate to do so when it is impossible to discover and treat them separately. In like manner it may be considered proper to call a man “lucky” when the causes of his success evade detection, though we may be sure that they exist. It is in this sense that it is better to be born lucky than rich. This was what Napoleon meant, I have no doubt, by his question, “Is he lucky?” He might have said, “Is he uniformly successful, for reasons that do not lie on the surface? If so, we must assume the existence of causes, though we cannot detect them. Doubtless he will continue to succeed, even if we can not always tell why. That is the kind of man that I prefer.”
Just a little philology here may throw additional light on our subject. I have said that Napoleon’s question was, “Is he lucky?” Now of course Napoleon did not use these words, because they are English words, and he spoke in French. What he said, doubtless, was “Est-il heureux?” We translate heureux in two ways, “happy” and “fortunate”, but they are really the same, for happy means “of good hap”, or good fortune. When we say “by a happy chance”, we go back to this primitive meaning. The word heureux is derived by the French lexicographers from the Latin augurium, so that its basic meaning is “of good augury.” I think you will agree with me that there is something more here than mere chance. The augur’s business was to ascertain the will of the gods, and all through we have the idea of some impelling force that makes things turn out as they do. If this force, whatever it was, was on the side of the candidate, Napoleon wanted him.
As for our word “luck” itself, it is purely Teutonic and our lexicographers do not trace it beyond its earlier forms. It should be noted, however, that in many of these, as in the modern German glück, it means happiness as well as chance. This wide association of ideas may be taken to mean that happiness was regarded by our forefathers as always the sport of chance; but I prefer to regard it as an evidence that a life in which everything is for the best—where no mistakes are made and where all is fair sailing and successful outcome, is dependent on some fundamental cause.
These “lucky devils”, that we see all about us—the ones who “always fall right-side-up”—the men whose touch turns everything into gold—the college students who pass examinations because the questions happened to be the very ones they knew—all these are people whose “luck” can usually be depended on to last. It is all right to explain their success by calling them “lucky”, so long as we do not forget that this is merely a word to cloak our ignorance of the real causes.
The trouble is that this is what we do often forget. We have been forgetting it since the dawn of civilization, and we inherit our forgetfulness from the twilight of ignorance that preceded it. If the cause of a man’s success was not immediately apparent, he must, it was concluded, have effected it by magic or sorcery, or he was in league with the Devil, or Fortuna or some other goddess guided his hand. If he was a consistent failure, someone had hoodooed him, or blasted him with the evil eye, or worked upon him some magical charm, or the fickle goddess had turned her back on him. Nowadays we simply say “lucky dog!” or “unlucky dog!” and let it go at that; but the words carry with them the meaning that something occult is at work—a meaning quite as unreasonable as the specific supernatural causes assigned in earlier days, and possibly still more objectionable.
I am quite willing to recognize that Jones is “lucky”. His success is due to something that I can not detect; in fact, he seems to me rather an ordinary young man. He may possibly not understand, himself, why he gets ahead so fast. He may believe that there is something occult about it. Plenty of successful men have believed in their “stars” and trusted them, and this worked well until it encouraged them to be reckless. Luck and stars are all very well as symbols, but they will not perform impossibilities.
So far I have not openly mentioned the public library, but I have been thinking of it a good deal, and I hope that you have also. It is one of the beauties of public library work that the points at which it touches life in general are many. He who is given the honor of addressing librarians, as I am doing at present, may talk about pretty much what he pleases, when he begins, serene in the confidence that its application to library work will not only be reached in good time, but will even obtrude itself prematurely on his hearers.