And since it is asserted that many persons will read nothing but fiction, and that such reading is especially adapted to put new life into the tired shop-girl, to illuminate the social gloom that shrouds the proletariat, by taking him into worlds as unlike his real world as it is possible to make them, and to put a little more vitality into the merchant overwrought by too strenuous pursuit of the elusive dollar, why question its importance as at once a tonic and a sedative, a general promoter of bright days and peaceful dreams?
Of course, though many think otherwise, it is not undeniably the business of a public library to act as a pharmaceutical dispensatory and to make persons read who might much better get a required physical stimulus in some other way. Mr. Dana some months ago put the reading of the classics into the limbo of out-worn tradition—put them perpetually "on the blink," if I may use language similar to that employed in fiction by Sewall Ford's popular hero—and Miss Corinne Bacon, in a brilliant paper which, if you have not read it, I commend to your attention, keenly reminds Mr. Dana that it is not really necessary for any of us to read at all.
If, however, we dispute the unqualified benefits of fiction reading, it is the works of the masters which are used to overwhelm us—the recognized standard novels, quite modern some of them, for the production of good fiction did not stop with the death of Scott or Thackeray or Dickens—as if anybody questioned their influence or their power!
If I wished, on the other hand, to assume the rôle of Mrs. Partington, and seek to beat back the on-rushing tide of printed matter, all of which claims to be imaginative and romantic, I should need no better broom with which to attempt that forlorn and hopeless task than one made from the strands which Mr. Booth Tarkington, and others actively engaged in the production of fiction, supplied in the letters read from this platform Monday evening.
There is a trinity of things, frequently asserted, which I do not believe, that is, I do not believe them in my present state of mental development, though I trust I am still open to conviction.
First, I do not believe that everybody is entitled to receive at our hands the books they want, when they want them! I hear it put this way: The State or the municipality ought to provide any citizen who wants a book with the book he wants when he wants it.—A moment's candid examination will, I think, show that this is impossible, and it being impossible, we need not spend time in disputing the theory.
Second, I do not believe that we should buy the book of the day, and all the books of the day, irrespective of merit; or, as a critical journal once put it, "Buy the books the world is talking about—merit or demerit cast entirely aside."
The talk of the people, about the books of the day is, 99 per cent of it, if we may apply a quantitive measure to that which is immeasurable, pure gossip, fostered by more or less interested, or paid notices in the newspapers, and the reading of books which for the moment are made the subjects of such gossip is of about as much real value to the average man or woman as was Mrs. A's inquiry after the health of Mrs. B's old man. Not that she cared anything about his health but the inquiry helped conversation. And when the book of the day rises above the plane of mere gossip its interest or value is frequently momentary. Two years ago, the cheerful idlers on summer hotel verandas were lightening the burden of persistent application to what, for want of a better term, is called "fancy work" by reading "The rosary." Last year, their affections were centered on "The harvester." This year—well, I refrain from advertising what is likely to be found there.
But surely most public libraries in these days of expanding opportunity, find it difficult enough to supply things which have higher civic promise in them, even in fiction, without stocking up extensively with that which is as evanescent as the foam on the wave.
Third, I do not believe—as some do—that the indiscriminate reading of fiction, even poor fiction, leads finally to the selection of better books. Once I thought so, and I know that my distinguished predecessor, Dr. Winsor, held that opinion. But, after some thirty years' intimate knowledge of a library (outside of Boston), not too large to permit the study of the peculiarities of individual readers, this seems to me delusive. If I wanted to promote good reading, I would not treat it as a pill to be sugar-coated. Good wine needs no bush.