JENNETTE LEE.
New York, N. Y.,
April 3rd, 1913.
I'd like to do as you request—but I have no facts to contribute. I feel sure that the public library is doing much to improve dramatic taste—but I can't adduce any evidence.
Yours truly,
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
Philadelphia, Pa.
The librarian's constant difficulty is now, what shall a library try to collect, what shall it keep? This has become a grave question. Being myself book greedy, a gourmand of print, I am a poor judge of what to reject.
Soon or late the average man, who is presumed to represent common sense, will ask, "What is the use of these accumulations of books?" This average man can never consider a library with comment of imagination. A book is for him a book, whereas for you or me a book is a saint, a hero, a martyr, a fool, a seraph of light bearing science. Let us drop him with a word of scorn. We shall not ever understand one another. Nor would he have the faith in books of that Samonicus who, for the cure of a tertian fever in the Emperor Gordian, ordered the fourth book of the Iliad to be applied to the head of the patient. That has long puzzled me—why the fourth? But Mr. Average awaits a quotation. A voice out of the splendid day of Elizabeth shall say it: "Sir, he hath not fed of the dainties that are bred of a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink."