Pardon a digression which enforces the point that in these days everything has to be pictorial. You see, when I am addressing a group of librarians in a jaded condition, I have to use pictorial illustrations. It is true, I should like to be didactic and pedagogic on an occasion like this, but you are in a psychological condition which makes it absolutely impossible. Even the thought of listening to these songs that are coming afterward, would not keep you if I were not constantly pictorial and keeping your minds filled with this beguiling imagery.
Imagery, then, is absolutely essential; self-control and social control are dependent upon the distribution of appropriate mental slides. The very life of the nation depends upon this. Here we are, nearly a hundred million people—we always include children—whose slides must be supplied and in some fashion unified. The imagination breaks down at the thought of this vast task. This national like-mindedness is a glorious achievement. It has never been equaled anywhere on the face of the earth. To keep these millions of people, who are scattered over three million square miles, with the same fundamental pictures in their heads is a marvelous triumph.
That we are the most progressive, the most mighty, the most highly civilized country on the face of the world—that is a gorgeous colored slide, which we keep on hand all the time. There are a lot of slides like that, that are common to everybody. True, we have slides specialized for the use of various social groups, but the fundamental slides that preserve our nationality, are common to millions.
We have to have institutions that keep these slides vivid in the minds of our people. It is the greatest attempt at social control that has ever been conceived.
But the national slide industry is by no means perfected. On the whole, there is an appalling number of these pictures that are vulgar slides, cheap slides, commonplace slides, uninteresting slides. It is your business—for now I come to my analogy—it is your business, as the people who are running the moving-picture concerns of the United States, to see to it that better pictures are put into the minds of your fellow citizens. You have the responsibility of superseding in the mental collections of millions of our citizens slides that are cheap and unworthy and inaccurate and misleading, with mental pictures that are clean-cut, trustworthy, informing and inspiring. That is your business. You are in competition with the moving-picture houses. There are nine thousand of these moving-picture concerns working night and day in the United States, filling the minds of people with mental imagery. But every library is full of potential mental pictures which can be made interesting, ennobling and uplifting to millions of people. It is your privilege to get these slides out into circulation, a mighty appealing thing to do, a splendidly stirring thing to do. I hope you are thoroughly alert as members of this mental picture syndicate. You know what you have to do. You must advertise and you must capture the public in every possible way; you must not be ashamed to put out posters describing the wonderful pictures.
And what rare pictures you have! What is a novel? It is a film of moving pictures. What is a great novel? It is a series of great pictures—and what lovely pictures they may be; what interesting, what inspiring pictures they may be! What a great collection of such mental pictures you have in your libraries! And when people read George Barr McCutcheon, try to get that film away from them and give them George Meredith. You laugh at that, but how about "Harry Richmond?" Isn't it as good a story as ever Anthony Hope or as ever George Barr McCutcheon wrote? It is a good slide, a good film. When people come and want to read Laura Jean Libbey—of course you wouldn't have her on the premises—but if that is their standard try to work off Robert Louis on them. You know, there are some of Robert Louis' that are fairly sensational. You can get people started on the right road with Robert Louis if you go about it in a clever way to pull the cheap slides out of people's minds.
But, you say, there are a lot of people whose mental apparatus, if I may modify the figure a little bit,—no, it is not a modification, it is an amplification, it is a perfectly logical development of the figure,—you say that for a good many people you want a magic lantern in their mind that will focus properly. That is the business of education. That is what Dr. Robertson and I are trying to do, to make the minds of the young focus properly, on the right sort of things. You must get a great deal of inaccurate information made accurate and definite. You know, one of the great troubles with our educational system is that our ideas are so haphazard, so untrustworthy.
The scientific slides need looking after carefully. They are changed every few minutes, but we have to do the best we can to run the latest and most trustworthy slides into the minds of the people. Then think of the literary slides. I was very much interested in the discussion this morning. I fear it will go on indefinitely as long as the gentlemen do not define their terms. But I think if they were to do this they would discover that they both believe about the same thing.
But here at hand is the real application of this figure. What is it that makes life interesting? It is to be able to associate with the ordinary, commonplace experiences of life an illuminating, inspiring, fascinating imagery. Do you realize that the books in your library give no pleasure whatever except as they interpret life to people who bring the experience of life to the books? A book is a mere dead symbol until it becomes vital in the life of a living man or woman. You have books in your library in foreign languages. These books are sealed to people who do not know those foreign languages. You would not think of offering a French or German book, say, to an average college graduate. You must have people who understand the language in which books are written. So when you give a book of history or a book of science or a book of poetry to a man or woman, that man or woman must bring a little bit of life, a little gleam of life experience, in order to get into any kind of relationship with that book. Then the book reacts and becomes a guide for the further investigation and interpretation of life. And so the book and life together go on enriching human experience.
I wish we had more accurate slides about history, especially about the French Revolution. We mostly get our slides on the French Revolution from the Sunday evening sermons of eminent divines who are proving that the French Revolution was completely parallel with our times, and that France went to the bad largely because the Church was temporarily disestablished. Now, if we get our slides of the French Revolution from popular pulpits and from stump speakers we shall get some curious pictures. We want to put into the minds of the people the slides from men like Morse Stephens and von Holst before we introduce those lurid and beautifully colored slides from Carlyle and those rather melodramatic slides from "A tale of two cities." Then there is the fall of Rome, for example. Anybody can explain the fall of Rome, and we are always upon the brink of a French revolution. What we need is an accurate picture of what caused Rome to fall. Then as for Greece—Greece, that magic word! We need a lot of pictures about Greece. I have a good deal of interest in classic culture if it can be, for a large number of people, divorced from the classic languages. To suppose that there is an identity between Greek grammar and Greek life, its social institutions and its aspirations and their lessons for us, is to make a very serious blunder. You have noticed that an eminent Greek scholar from England has been lecturing at Amherst. Did he talk about grammar? No. He talked about the philosophy of Greece, the politics of Greece, the social history of Greece. These are things we need; for, my friends, you know, and you need to preach this doctrine, that modernity defeats itself. To suppose that reading the daily newspaper and having the mind filled with contemporary events gives any one a right to judge of those events, is absurdity itself. We can understand the present only as we can connect that present with the past. Therefore, if we are to have an intelligent population many men must have a vivid and accurate panorama of human history; they must be able to see the present in the light of the past, and then to predict with some little degree of certainty what we are to have in the future. Look, for example, at our present crisis. I am not going to interpret it, I do not understand it; but we cannot possibly see beneath the surface of it unless we try to interpret it in the light of the experience of other nations. What have all the great nations of Western Europe done? When we ask that question, and when we see how parties are aligned in this Dominion where we meet to-night, we cannot fail to get a little light upon what is going on at home. There the same social forces are at work, under different conditions, to be sure, but working themselves out inevitably.