From a desert of dust-covered magazines, this comes to us like a hidden spring bubbling with energy which no outer crust of years can quell.[51] Then as now, they had the pernicious school-book—instance Peter Parley;[52] then as now, they had the flippant tale. Our unknown author recommended “Puss in Boots,” with designs by Otto Specker, as the beau ideal of nursery books, and the Grimm Tales with Cruikshank’s illustrations; he recognised the admirable qualities in the verses by the Taylor sisters. Miss Edgeworth, Miss Tytler, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Hofland, Mary Howitt (although some of her books are questioned), Catherine Sinclair, Mrs. Marcet, and a host of others, now dead to the circulating shelves, received their quota of commendation. The list is a curious example of existing circumstances; it illustrates the futility of crystallising the library system; it demonstrates that the library, as an institution, must reflect the aspirations of its age, not overreaching its full capacity of usefulness and of average excellence.
II. The Library, The School, The Home: A Plea for Culture.
“Criticism,” says Matthew Arnold, “must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting.” Still, not for a moment are we able to lose sight of the active working conditions of the library. Speculation as to the functions of such an institution in a community may lead to the formulation of certain ideals which are to guide the practical machinery in the future. But, on the instant, there is the urgent necessity of supply and demand; the theorist must cope with the actual reader calling for a book.
It is, however, only proper to expect that human activity be directed, not along the lines of least resistance, but along the lines of best results. This infers that the library, as an institution, fully recognises that it has a function to perform in society, and that it will strive, in its several capacities, so to unify its activities that it will become a force as well as a convenience.
Through pleasure, we would train the child to future usefulness; physically we would let him find expression for all his surplus energy; but as a reader, we would so far guide him that none of his mental energy will go to waste. Intellectually, a boy or a girl should not be given what one library called “leisure hour reading”; a book should not mean, for either, a vehicle for frittering the time away, but their training should lead to the finding of “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
An essential purpose is a most important element in the future history of children’s rooms, and at the present initial stage it were unwise to criticise the methods by which the library is trying to state this purpose in definite terms. But whether we regard its activity in the direction of the home, the school, the settlement, or the city at large, we may safely claim that its main duty in all directions is to supply the best books to be had on any stated line. And herein we discover the connection that ought to exist between our schools as educational, and our libraries as cultural centres. In Buffalo, Mr. Melvil Dewey, during an address given to teachers, said:
“By law, the children are put under your influence in their earlier years, when, if ever, they can be taught to love good books so well that in all their lives thereafter they will seize on every opportunity to read them. If the librarians, with their wing of the educational army, can select and catalogue and provide free of cost the best on every subject, the schoolmen, with their wing and with their immensely larger resources both of money and men—and still better, of devoted women—must send out from the schools, year by year, boys and girls who will be lifelong patrons of the public library, and will, in due time, help to send their own children along the paths which have proved for them so profitable and pleasant; ... but its great work should be the partial recognition that education is no longer for youth and for a limited course, in a school to which they give most of their time, but that it is really a matter for adults as well as youth, for life and not for the course, to be carried on at home as well as in the schools, and to be taken up in the hours or minutes of leisure, as the proper accompaniment of their regular business or labour. This means that education must be carried on by means of reading, and that, if the librarians are to furnish the books and give all necessary help in their proper field, the schools must furnish the readers.”
It is, therefore, the supreme function of a supervisor of school libraries to reconcile culture with knowledge-getting—taste and desire with mental training—quite as much as it is his official duty to furnish supplementary books for the class-rooms. In fact, the former should become his chief business, for in the other capacity he slightly encroaches upon, rather than aids—duplicates in expense, rather than enforces by supplying a need—the work being done by the neighbourhood library.
Between the school and the library there should thus be a reciprocal interchange of courtesies, the sum total of which tends toward culture.[53] For the child is the potential man, and in our reading, despite the opportunities for education, we are not made to understand, at the early age when habits are most readily formed, the real import of the sustaining power of art.
The reading of novels is a delightful recreation; it is not the reading which should be questioned; it is the power to stop. Periods of rest are a psychological necessity, but it is the power of returning from the side issue to the life issue, which, in so many cases, is the missing element. The literature that does nothing more than amuse is not the literature which, in future days, one is to fall back on as a maintaining force. Browning cries out: