Dr. Talcott Williams, the orator of this occasion, Feb. 7, 1891, was at that time a journalist in Philadelphia. He has always been a welcome writer and speaker on literary themes.
Talcott Williams was born in Abeih, Turkey, July 20, 1849, the son of an American missionary. He graduated at Amherst in 1873 and in that year entered journalism, becoming later an editorial writer on several large dailies until 1912 when he was made director of the School of Journalism of Columbia University, New York City.
For the first and for the last time, the voices of men are heard in this place, dedicated to the more eloquent silence of books. Nowhere is man more and men less than in the library. In the presence of books individual learning pales. The scholar dies; the library lives. Yet only in part. In this bookish age, we fondly impute immortality to books. Nothing could be more false. Few books have the power of an endless life. Against these books of power stand a great multitude of books of use, which perish with the using. The vast mass of books, like the thoughts in our daily lives, sink into the background of the recollection of the race and furnish the soil from which fresh growths spring. Few there are who have written books of power. Not a score in all. Poets for the most part. High priests forever after the order of humanity, whose flaming message burns from age to age in the great tree of human existence, consuming and unconsumed. These books of power which live that humanity may not die, and books of use that die that others may live, divide literature between them. They constitute the warp and woof out of which the university weaves the higher education. In its last analysis a liberal training is the mastery of books of use and a glad yielding to the mastery of books of power.
Controversy over the classics, wrangling over Greek, vain jangling over required and elective courses—these are details. Direct contact between the growing minds of each generation and the great minds of the race—this is essential. We smile at the space given Confucius in Chinese education; the Koran in Mohammedan schools; but this is only a perversion of the sound instinct which everywhere puts the young to school to the teachers of the race. Unless your education does this, it stands where the electric telegraph did before its wires were grounded—its batteries and instruments, its poles and wires useless until they were in direct contact with the elemental source of electric energy in the earth itself. So-called and mis-called practical systems of education, realschulen, which omit these eternal realities of the race, find when they have stuffed their pupils with the facts of the day that they are still insulated from the thinkers of all time. Fortunately for us and for our education, these books of power exist in more than one language and are accessible through more than one channel of learning. Thanks to the matchless translation of the Bible, one incomparable group of books of power is taught in every Sunday-school, though I doubt if this will be held sufficient reason for neglecting their study in every university. Greek holds another group. But it is the pitiful pedant's plea to urge their study because Greek is difficult. It is not because Greek is Greek, but because Homer is Homer that Chapman “spake out loud and bold” of the solitary text-book which has held its own for 2500 years, and links, as may it forever link, this university with the school of Athens.
“Yet still your Homer, living, lasting, reigning,
And proves how truth builds in poets feigning.”
It is because these books of power hold the truth that makes men free, working thoughts that perish never, that they live when the tongues in which they speak are dead. Books of power which transmit the spiritual life of the race keep the self-same spirit through all the transmigrations of speech. The scriptures of the race, no less than the scriptures of religion, enjoy a pentecostal gift of tongues, and are heard by every man in his own language. Where such books are few in number, which a shelf or two will hold, there is a liberal education, and no elective course which permits their exclusion offers intellectual salvation. Some such books every race has found in its own literature as it reached the full stature of universal humanity, as our own English-speaking race, well-nigh within this generation, has discovered in adding Shakespeare to our general schooling. By the production of such books of power nations are justly measured. This is the wisdom which keepeth a city from destruction. The ship of state, however weighted with worldly wealth, moves a trackless keel through the waters of history unless some poet wings its course with “the proud, full sail of his great verse.” We have all heard to-day from one whose lifelong devotion has raised him to the foremost rank of scholarship.
“Weave a circle around him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
The study of such books is possible without any aid or apparatus whatever; so near is the diviner of letters to every one of us. But the first office which the library discharges in a university is in providing the limitless and manifold interpretation which the ages have builded about these great books of power. Better than all other books as are the books of power when read without study, they are infinitely bettered by all study. The literature of interpretation is only second in value to the literature of inspiration. The study even of books of power tends to become scholastic, narrow, provincial, letterwise, and spiritually dead, unless it is quickened and corrected by the fruits of the entire field of critical science. For lack of this more than one sacred book has met a fate which makes one feel, as well kill a book as give it a good name. Even in the teaching of books of power—which of all teaching needs but a soul and the book to awake eternity—the scholar is saved from himself by the library. He learns that with all the inspired prophets of the race no scripture is of private interpretation, that only time unlocks the weaving of these deeper oracles of humanity, because they spake not of themselves, but for the spirit of man. Nor need we fear that they will be smothered by their interpretation. The mountains bear easily the weight of forests they uprear, and at the last and highest, no tree ascends above the snow-line of eternal thought.
But such ascents are as little the normal work of the university as of the road-builder. Its course lies chiefly along the broad highways of learning. Not books of power, but books of use, which sum first general, and then special and professional knowledge, occupy the greater portion of its time, just as the most saintly of mortals devotes more of his days to earning his living than to saving his soul. If the study of books of power is rendered more valuable by a library, the adequate teaching of books of use without one is impossible. Every text-book is a compromise between what is known and what can be taught. Two classes, I know, the publishers and the public, cherish the belief that there are text-books which sum current knowledge on this subject and that; but there are none. Every text-book is out of date the day after it goes to the printer, and the day before it gave out, not what is known, but the view of what is known then in vogue. It measures the advancing tides of learning by a gauge itself incessantly changing. We love to speak of authorities and standards. We delude ourselves. The whole field of letters and of learning is in a perpetual flux, whose only complete record is the library. We know that in science discovery succeeds discovery. There is nothing certain about a scientific book except that it will be wrong in five or ten years. Only now and then does some law-giver in science, some Newton or Darwin, descend the mount of discovery, bearing eternal and lasting laws of nature, writ by Nature's God. But in literature we dream of permanent reputation. Here, too, “Every century gives the last the lie.” All the lesser priests of letters stand at shrines like that of Nemi and the Golden Bough,
“Beneath Aricia's trees,
Where the ghastly priest doeth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain,”