Postscript. I do hope that no one will suppose from this chapter that I am finding fault or think I am finding fault with our assistant librarians. I am merely finding fault with them (may Heaven forgive them!) because I cannot. It doesn’t seem to make very much difference—their doing certain things or not doing them. They either do them or they don’t do them—whichever it is—with the same spirit. They are not really down in their hearts true to the books. One can hardly help feeling vaguely, persistently resentful over having them about presiding over the past. One never catches them—at least I never do—forgetting themselves. One never comes on one loving a book. They seem to be servants,—most of them,—book chambermaids. They do not care anything about a library as a library. They just seem to be going around remembering rules in it.
IV
etc.
The P. G. S. of M. as good as said the other day, when I had been trying as well as I could to express something of this kind, that the real trouble with the modern library was not with the modern library, but with me. He thought I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes around with me, that I was too sensitive. He seemed to think that I should learn to be callous in places of public resort.
I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal with. The only thing I could think of that was the matter with me in a library was that I had a passion for books. I didn’t like climbing over a barricade of catalogues to get to books. I hated to feel partitioned off from them, to stand and watch rows of people marking things between me and books. I thought that things had come to a pretty pass, if a man could not so much as touch elbows with a poet nowadays—with Plato, for instance—without carrying a redoubt of terrible beautiful young ladies. I said I thought a great many other people felt the way I did. I admitted there were other sides to it, but there were times, I said, when it almost seemed to me that this spontaneous uprising in our country—this movement of the Book Lovers, for instance—was simply a struggle on the part of the people to get away from Mr. Carnegie’s libraries. They are hemming literature and human nature in, on every side, or they are going to unless Mr. Carnegie can buy up occasional old-fashioned librarians—some other kind than are turned out in steel works—to put into them. Libraries are getting to be huge Separators. Books that have been put through libraries are separated from themselves. They are depersonalised—the human nature all taken off. And yet when one thinks of it, with nine people out of ten—the best people and the worst both—the sense of having a personal relation to a book, the sense of snuggling up with one’s own little life to a book, is what books are for.
“To a man,” I said, “to whom books are people, and the livest kind of people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his relations with the great, meddled with by strangers—pleasant enough strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He goes down town to a great unhomelike-looking building, and slides in at the door. He steps up to a wall, and asks permission to see John Milton. He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that machinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews where a large audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels the great, heartless building gathering itself together, going after John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other he hears human beings’ names being called out in space, and one by one poor scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their names—most of them—step up before the audience. He sees a book being swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his own name echoing about among the Immortals, startles its way down to him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on some huge transcendental derrick belonging to the city of ——, is swung into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly—takes it home. If he can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes with him. In two weeks he takes him back. Then the derrick again.”
The only kind of book that I ever feel close to, in the average library, is a book on war. Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded, or that would go off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found a book I could do it with yet. However I struggle to follow the train of thought in it, it ‘s a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books. “A library,” I say to myself, “is a huge barbaric, mediæval institution, where behind stone and glass a man’s dearest friends in the world, the familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends and relatives are allowed to come, but it only—” At this point a gong sounds and tells me to go home. “Are not books bone of a man’s bone, and flesh of his flesh? Oughtn’t they to be? Shall a man ask permission to see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want to be in Greece with Homer, or go to hell with Dante? Why should I write on a piece of paper, ‘I promise to return—infinity—by six o’clock’? A library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books and violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery worse—if they are a part of it. They make one expect something better.”
The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand at this point that I was not made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural, or country relation to books.
“It doesn’t follow,” he said, “because you are bashful in a library, cannot get your mind to work there, with other people around, that the other people oughtn’t to be around. There are a great many ways of using a library, and the more people there are crowded in with the books there, other things being equal, the better. It’s what a library is for,” he said, and a great deal more to the same effect.
I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I did think there ought to be places in libraries—all libraries—where wild ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in every library some uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibrarianed tract where a man with a skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be alone with books—with books just as books—will be permitted to browze, unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk with his mind and roll himself, without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian’s assistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of his soul.