I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,—that is, might be well enough,—but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit—those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one’s mood, when one gets hold of one’s divining-rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new, unconscious, subterranean self there.
The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and said this was all subjective folderol on my part—that I had better drop it—a kind of habit I had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of my emotions—or something to that effect. He went on at some length and took the general ground before he was through, that absolutely everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. Librarians—I should judge—in a modern library were what books were for. He said that the more intelligent people were nowadays the more they enjoyed librarians—knew how to use them—doted on them, etc., ad infinitum.
“The kind of people one sees at operas,” I interrupted, “listening with librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields, nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people who have to have charts to enjoy stars with—these are the people who want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece the more they feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogues, gazetteers, dictionaries, derricks, and other machinery they can have pulling and hauling above their heads in a library the more literary they feel in it. They feel culture—somehow—stirring around them. They are not exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of it—whatever it is—is being poured over into them.”
But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close. It can do no harm to remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining—do not wish to maintain (I could not if I dared) that the modern librarian with all his faults is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola or æolian attachment for a library, as a mechanical contrivance for making a comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it (which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps. All that I am maintaining is, that I am not this comparatively ignorant man. I am another one. I am merely saying that the pianola way of dealing with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not grow on me.
V
O
I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say—if it said anything—that I had a mere Old Athenæum kind of a mind. I am obliged to confess that I dote on the Old Athenæum. It protects one’s optimism. One is made to feel there—let right down in the midst of civilisation, within a stone’s throw of the State House—that it is barely possible to keep civilisation off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself up out on Tremont Street and the Common (the very trees cannot live in it), but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilisation, as most of us do, nearly all of one’s time every day in the week, it means a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me, in the daily struggle with it, to be able to dodge behind the Athenæum, to be able to go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind glass, as it were, to hear great, hungry Tremont Street chewing men up, hundreds of trainloads at a time, into wood-pulp, smoothing them out into nobody or everybody; it makes one feel, while it is not as it ought to be, as if, after all, there might be some way out, as if some provision had been made in this world, or might be made, for letting human beings live on it.
The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street feeling one has—all these things are very grave and important obstacles which our great librarians, with their great systems—most of them—have yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence, slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness (and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one’s knowledge, to make modest discoveries all by one’s self. It is no small thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel one’s self sitting down with a book—one’s own private Providence—turning the pages of events.
One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent carnegieing nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a great many people to pile up order among a great many books, could be spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries, or small places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe to creep in sometimes and open their souls—nobody looking—it would be no more than fair.
Postscript. One has to be so much of one’s time helpless before a librarian in this world, one has to put him on his honour as a gentleman so much, to expose such vast, incredible tracts of ignorance to him, that I know only too well that I, of all men, cannot afford, in these pages or anywhere else, to say anything that will permanently offend librarians. I do hope I have not. It is only through knowing so many good ones that I know enough to criticise the rest. If I am right, it is because I am their spokesman. If I am wrong, I am not a well-informed person, and I do not count anywhere in particular on anything. The best way, I suspect, for a librarian to deal with me is not to try to classify me. I ought to be put out of the way on this subject, tucked back into any general pigeon-hole of odds and ends of temperament. If I had not felt that I could be cheerfully sorted out at the end of this page, filed away by everybody,—almost anybody,—as not making very much difference, I would not have spoken so freely. There is not a librarian who has read as far as this, in this book, who, though he may have had moments of being troubled in it, will not be able to dispose of me with a kind of grateful, relieved certainty. However that may be, I can only beg you, Oh, librarians, and all ye kindly learned ones, to be generous with me, wherever you put me. I leave my poor, naked, shivering, miscellaneous soul in your hands.