The center of a geometrical figure is important, not for its size and content, but for its position—not for what it is in itself, but for its relations to the other elements of the figure. And words used with derived meanings are used best when their original significations are kept in mind. The business center of a city does not contain all of that city’s commercial activity; when we speak of the church as a religious center, we do not mean that there is to be no religious activity in the home or in other walks of life; as for the center of population of a large and populous country, it may be out in the prairie where neither man nor his dwellings are to be seen. All these centers are what they are because of certain relationships. It is so with a social center. But social relationships cover a wide field. The relationships of business, of religion, even of mere co-existence, are all social. May we have a center for so wide a range of activities? Even the narrower relations of business or of religion tend to form subsidiary groups and to multiply subsidiary centers. In a large city we may have not only a general business center but centers of the real estate business, of the hardware or textile trades, and so on. Our religious affiliations condense into denominational centers.
In the district of a large city where newly arrived foreign immigrants gather, you will be shown the group of blocks where the Poles or the Hungarians have segregated themselves from the rest, and even within these, the houses where dwell families from a particular province or even from one definite city or village. Man is social but he is socially clannish, and the broadest is not so much he who refuses to recognize these clan or caste relationships as he who enters into the largest number of them—he who keeps in touch with his childhood home, has a wide acquaintance among those of his own religious faith and of his chosen business or profession, keeps up his old college friendships, is interested in collecting coins or paintings and knows all the other collectors, is active in civic and charitable societies, takes an interest in education and educators, and so on. The social democracy that should succeed in abolishing all these groups or leveling them—that should recognize no relationships but the broader ones that underly all human effort and feeling—the touches of nature that make the whole world kin—would be barren indeed.
We cannot spare these fundamentals; we could not get rid of them if we would; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do away with these additions would be like destroying a city to get at its foundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result in economics or aesthetics. Occupying a foremost place among these groupings is the large division embracing our educational activities. And these are social not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower. The intercourse of student with student in the school and even of reader with reader in the library, especially in such departments as the children’s room, is so obviously that of society that we need dwell on it no further.
This intercourse, while a necessary incident of education in the mass, is only an incident. It is sufficiently obtrusive, however, to make it evident that any use of school or library building for social purposes is fit and proper. There is absolutely nothing new nor strange about such use. In places that cannot afford separate buildings for these purposes, the same edifice has often served for church, schoolhouse, public library, and as assembly room for political meetings, amateur theatricals, and juvenile debating societies. The propriety of all this has never been questioned and it is difficult to see why it should not be as proper in a town of 500,000 inhabitants as in one of 500. The incidence of the cost is a matter of detail. Why should such purely social use of these educational buildings—always common in small towns—have been allowed to fall into abeyance in the larger ones? It is hard to say; but with the recent great improvements in construction, the building of schools and libraries that are models of beauty, comfort, and convenience, there has arisen a not unnatural feeling in the public that all this public property should be put to fuller use. Why should children be forced to dance on the street or in some place of sordid association when comfortable and convenient halls in library or school are closed and unoccupied? Why should the local debating club, the mothers’ meeting—nay, why should the political ward meeting be barred out? Side by side with this trend of public opinion there has been an awakening realization on the part of many connected with these institutions that they themselves might benefit by such extended use.
Probably this realization has come earlier and more fully to the library, because its educational function is directed so much more upon adults. The library is coming to be our great continuation school—an institution of learning with an infinity of purely optional courses. It may open its doors to any form of adult social activity.
There are forms of activity proper to a social center that require special apparatus or equipment. These may be furnished in a building erected for the purpose, as are the Chicago fieldhouses. Here we have swimming-pools, gymnasiums for men and for women, and all the rest of it. A branch library is included and some would house the school also under the same roof. We may have to wait long for the general adoption of such a composite social center. Our immediate problem is to supply an immediate need by using means directly at our disposal. And it is remarkable how many kinds of neighborhood activity may take place in a room unprovided with any special equipment. A brief glance over our own records for only a few months past enables me to classify them roughly as athletic or outdoor, purely social, educational, debating, political, labor, musical, religious, charitable or civic, and expository, besides many that defy or elude classification.
The athletic or outdoor organizations include the various turning or gymnastic clubs and the Boy and Girl Scouts; the social organizations embrace dancing-classes, “welfare” associations, alumni and graduate clubs of schools and colleges, and dramatic clubs; the educational, which are very numerous, reading circles, literary clubs galore, free classes in chemistry, French, psychology, philosophy, etc., and all such organizations as the Jewish Culture Club, the Young People’s Ethical Society, the Longan Parliamentary Class, and the Industrial and Business Women’s Educational leagues. Religious bodies are parish meetings, committees of mission boards, and such organizations as the Theosophical Society; charitable or civic activities include the National Conference of Day Nurseries, the Central Council of Civic Agencies, the W.C.T.U., playground rehearsals for the Child Welfare Exhibit, and the Business Men’s Association; and the Advertising Men’s League; musical organizations embrace St. Paul’s Musical Assembly, the Tuesday Choral Club, etc. Among exhibitions are local affairs such as wild flower shows, an exhibit of bird-houses, collections from the Educational Museum, the Civil League’s Municipal Exhibit, selected screens from the Child Welfare Exhibit, and the prize-winners from the St. Louis Art Exhibit held in the art room of our central library. Then we have the Queen Hedwig Branch, the Clay School Picnic Association, the Aero Club, the Lithuanian Club, the Philotechne Club, the Fathers’ Club, and the United Spanish War Veterans.
I trust you will not call upon me to explain the objects of some of these, as such a demand might cause me embarrassment—not because their aims are unworthy, but because these are skilfully obscured by their names. If anyone believes that there is a limit to the capacity of the human race for forming groups and subgroups on a moment’s notice, for any reason or for no reason at all, I would refer him to our assembly room and clubroom records; and he would find, I think, that these are typical of every large library offering the use of such rooms somewhat freely.
It will be noted that the library takes no part in organizing or operating any of these activities; it does not have to do so.
The successful leader is he who repairs to a hill and raises his standard, knowing that at sight of it followers will flock around him. When you drop a tiny crystal into a solution, the atoms all rush to it naturally: there is no effort or compulsion except that of the aptitudes that their Creator has implanted in them. So it is with all centers, business or religious or social. No one instituted a campaign to locate the business center of a city at precisely such a square or corner. Things aggregate, and the point to which they tend is their center; they make it, it does not make them. The leader on a hill is a leader because he has followers; without them he would be but a lone warrior. The school or the library that says proudly to itself, “Go to; I will be a social center,” may find itself in the same lonely position. It can offer an opportunity: that is all. It can offer houseroom to clubs, organizations, and groups of all kinds, whether permanent or temporary, large or small, but its usefulness as a social center depends largely on the existence of these and on their desire for a meeting place. We have in St. Louis six branch libraries with assembly rooms and clubrooms—in all a dozen or so. I have before me the calendar for a single week and I find 55 engagements, running from 24 at one branch down thru 13, 8, 6, and 3 to one. If I had before me only the largest number I should conclude that branch libraries as social centers were a howling success; if only the smallest, I should say that they were dismal failures. Why the difference? For the same reason that the leader who displays his standard may or may not be surrounded with eager “flocking” followers. There may be no one within earshot, or they may have no stomach for the war, or they may not be interested in the cause that he represents. Or again, he may not shout loud or persuasively enough, or his standard may not be attractive enough in form or color, or mounted on a sufficiently high staff.
I have said that all we can offer is opportunity; to change our figure, we can furnish the drinking-fountain—thirst must bring the horse to it. But we must not forget that we offer our opportunity in vain unless we are sure that everyone who might grasp it realizes our offer and what it means.
Here is the chance for personal endeavor. If the young people in a neighborhood continue to hold their social meetings over a saloon when the branch library or the school is perfectly willing to offer its assembly room, it is pretty certain that they do not understand that offer, or that they mistrust its sincerity, or that there is something wrong that might be remedied by personal effort. In the one of our branches that is most used by organizations there is this personal touch. But I should hesitate to say that the others do not have it too. There are plenty of organizations near this busiest library and there are no other good places for them to meet. In the neighborhood of some other branches there are other meeting-places, and elsewhere, perhaps, the social instinct is not so strong, or at any rate the effort to organize is lacking. Should the librarian step out and attempt to stimulate this social instinct and to guide this organizing effort? There is room for difference of opinion here.
Personally I think that he should not do it directly and officially as a librarian. He may do it quietly and unobtrusively like any other private citizen, but he needs all his efforts, all his influence, to bring the book and the reader together in his community. Sometimes by doing this he can be doing the other too, and he can always do it vicariously. He should bear in mind that the successful man is not he who does everything himself, but he who can induce others to do things—to do them in his way and to direct them toward his ends. Even in the most sluggish, the most indifferent community there are these potential workers with enthusiasms that need only to be awakened to be let loose for good. The magic key is often in the librarian’s girdle, and his free offer of house room and sympathy, with good literature thrown in, will always be of powerful assistance in this kind of effort. He will seldom need to do more than to make clear the existence and the nature of the opportunity that he offers. I know that there are some librarians and many more teachers who hesitate to open their doors in any such way as this; who are afraid that the opportunities offered will be misused or that the activities so sheltered will be misjudged by the public. It has shocked some persons that a young people’s dancing-class has been held, under irreproachable auspices, in one of our branch libraries; others have been grieved to see that political ward meetings have taken place in them, and that some rather radical political theories have been debated there. These persons forget that a library never takes sides. It places on its shelves books on the Civil War from the standpoint of both North and South, histories of the great religious controversies by both Catholics and Protestants, ideas and theories in science and philosophy from all sides and at all angles. It may give room at one time to a young people’s dancing-class and at another to a meeting of persons who condemn dancing. Its walls may echo one day to the praises of our tariff system and on another to fierce denunciations of it.
These things are all legitimate and it is better that they should take place in a library or a school building than in a saloon or even in a grocery store. The influence of environment is gently pervasive. I may be wrong, but I cannot help thinking that it is easier to be a gentleman in a library, whether in social meeting or in political debate, than it is in some other places. In one of our branches there meets a club of men who would be termed anarchists by some people. The branch librarian assures me that the brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder since they have met in the library. It is getting to be literary, academic, philosophic. Nourished in a saloon, with a little injudicious repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs and dynamite.
In this catholicity I cannot help thinking that the library as an educational institution is a step ahead of the school. Most teachers would resent the imputation of partisanship on the part of the school, and yet it is surely partisan—in some ways rightly and inevitably so. One cannot well explain both sides of any question to a child of six and leave its decision to his judgment. This is obvious; and yet I cannot help thinking that there is one-sided teaching of children who are at least old enough to know that there is another side, and that the one-sided teaching of two-sided subjects might be postponed in some cases until two-sided information would be possible and proper. Where a child is taught one side and finds out later that there is another, his resentment is apt to be bitter; it spoils the educational effect of much that he was taught and injures the influence of the institution that taught him. My resentment is still strong against the teaching that hid from me the southern viewpoint concerning slavery and secession, the Catholic viewpoint of what we Protestants call the Reformation—dozens of things omitted from textbooks on dozens of subjects because they did not happen to meet the approval of the textbook compiler. I am no less an opponent of slavery—I am no less a Protestant—because I know the other side, but I think I am a better man for knowing it, and I think it a thousand pities that there are thousands of our fellow citizens, on all sides of all possible lines, from whom our educative processes have hid even the fact that there is another side. This question, as I have said, does not affect the library, and fortunately need not affect it. And as we are necessarily two-sided in our book material so we can open our doors to free social or neighborhood use without bothering our heads about whether the users are Catholics, Protestants, or Jews; Democrats, Republicans, or Socialists; Christian Scientists or suffragists. The library hands our suffrage and anti-suffrage literature to its users with the same smile, and if it hands the anti-suffrage books to the suffragist, and vice versa, both sides are certainly the better for it.
I have tried to make it clear in what I have said that in this matter of social activity, public institutions should go as far as they can in furnishing facilities without taking upon themselves the burden of administration. I believe fully in municipal ownership of all kinds of utilities, but rarely in municipal operation. Municipal ownership safeguards the city, and private or corporate operation avoids the numerous objections to close municipal control of detail. So the library authorities may retain sufficient control of these social activities by the power that they have of admitting them to the parts of the buildings provided for them, or of excluding them at any time. These activities themselves are better managed by voluntary bodies, and, as I have said, there is no indication that the formation of such bodies is on the wane. The establishment and operation of a musical or athletic club, a debating society, or a Boy Scouts company, are surely quite as educational as the activities themselves in which their members engage. Do not let us arrogate to ourselves such opportunities as these. I should be inclined to take this attitude also with regard to the public playgrounds, were they not somewhat without the province of this paper; and I take it very strongly with regard to the public school. Throw open the school buildings as soon as you can, and as freely as you can to every legitimate form of social activity, but let your relationship to this activity be like that of the center to the circle—in it and of it, but embracing no part of its areal content. So, I am convinced, will it be best for all of us—for ourselves, the administrators of public property, and for the public, the owning body which is now demanding that it should not be barred out by its servants from that property’s freest and fullest use.
The peace propaganda has suffered much from the popular impression that many of those engaged in it are impractical enthusiasts who are assuming the possibility of doing away with passions and prejudices incident to our very humanity, and of bringing about an ideal reign of love and good will. Whether this impression is or is not justified we need not now inquire. It is the impression itself that is injuring the cause of peace, and will continue to injure it until it is removed.
It may at least be lessened by allowing the mind to dwell for a time on another aspect of the subject in which the regime of peace that would follow the discontinuance of all settlement of disputes by violence will appear to consist not so much in the total disappearance of violence from the earth as in the use of it for a different purpose, namely, the preservation of the peaceful status quo, by a systematic and lawful use of force, or at any rate, the readiness to employ it.
A state of peace, whether between individuals or nations, whether without or within a regime of law, always partakes of the nature of an armed truce: under one regime, however, the arms are borne by the possible contestants themselves; under the other, by the community whose members they are. If there is a resort to arms, violence ensues under both regimes; in both cases it tends ultimately to restore peace, but the action is more certain and more systematic when the violence is exerted by the community.
These laws may apply indifferently to a community of individuals or to one of nations. The most cogent and the most valid argument at the disposal of the peace advocate is the fact that we no longer allow the individual to take the law into his own hand, and that logically we should equally prohibit the nation from doing so. This is unanswerable, but its force has been greatly weakened by the assumption, which it requires no great astuteness to find unwarranted, that the settlement of individual quarrels by individual force has resulted from—or at least resulted in—the discontinuance of violence altogether, or in the dawn of a general era of good-will, man to man. On the contrary, it is very doubtful whether there is less violence to-day than there would be if the operation of law were suspended altogether; the difference, is that the violence has shifted its incidence and altered its aim—it is civic and social and no longer individual.
If we are to introduce the regime of law among nations as among individuals, our first step must be similarly to shift the incidence of violence. In so doing we may not decrease it, we may, indeed, increase it—but we shall none the less be taking that step in the only possible direction to achieve our purpose.
Among individuals, custom, crystallizing into law, generally precedes the enforcement of that law by the community. Hence, a somewhat elaborate code may exist side by side with the settlement of disputes, under that code, by personal combat. We have among nations such a code, and we yet admit the settlement of disputes by war, because the incidence of violence has not yet completely shifted. We have established a tribunal to act, in certain cases, on behalf of the community of nations, but we have not yet given that tribunal complete jurisdiction and we have given it no power whatever to enforce its decrees. It is on this latter point that I desire to dwell. In a community of individuals, there are two ways of using violence to enforce law—by the professional police force and by the posse of citizens. The former is more effective, but the latter is often readier and more certain in particular instances, especially in primitive communities. To give it force we must have readiness on the part of every citizen to respond to a call from the proper officer, and ability to do effective service, especially by the possession of arms and skill in their use. These requisites are not generally found in more advanced communities.
In like manner, the decrees of an international tribunal might be enforced either by the creation of an international army or by calling upon as many of the nations as necessary to aid in coercing the non-law-abiding member of the international community. Each nation is already armed and ready.
Whatever may be thought of the ultimate possibility of an international army, it must be evident that the principle of the posse must serve us at the outset. An international army would always consist in part of members of the nation to be coerced, whereas, in selecting a posse those furthest in race and in sympathy from the offender might always be chosen, just as members of a hostile clan would make up the best posse to arrest a Highlander for sheep-stealing.
Moreover, the posse has been used internationally more than once, as when decrees have been pronounced by a general European Congress and some particular nation or nations have been charged with their execution.
When a frontier community that has been a law unto itself gets its first sheriff, the earliest visible result is not impossibly a sudden increase, instead of a decrease, of violence. There is a war of the community, represented by the sheriff and the good citizens, against all the bad ones. Even so it may be expected that among the first results of an effective agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal, would be an exceptionally great and violent war. Sooner or later some nation would be sure to take issue with an unpopular decree and refuse to obey it. This would probably be one of the larger and more powerful nations, for a weaker power would not proceed to such lengths in protest.
Not improbably other nations might join the protesting power. The result would be a war; it might even be the world war that we have been fearing for a generation. It might conceivably be the greatest and the bloodiest war that the world has yet seen. Yet it would be far the most glorious war of history, for it would be a struggle on behalf of law and order in the community of nations—a fight to uphold that authority by whose exercise alone may peace be assured to the world. The man who shudders at the prospect of such a war, who wants peace, but is unwilling to fight for it, should cease his efforts on behalf of a universal agreement among nations, for there is no general agreement without power to quell dissension.
This is not the place to discuss the details of an international agreement to enforce the decrees of an international tribunal. It may merely be said that if the most powerful and intelligent communities of men that have ever existed cannot devise machinery to do what puny individuals have long been successfully accomplishing, they had better disband and coalesce in universal anarchy.
My object here is neither to propose plans nor to discuss details, but merely to point out that not the abandonment, but the systematization of violence is the goal of a rational peace propaganda, and that when this is once acknowledged and universally realized, an important step will have been taken toward winning over a class of persons who now oppose a world-peace as impractical and impossible.
These persons disapprove of disarmament: and from the point of view here advocated, a general disarmament would be the last thing to be desired. The possible member of a posse must bear arms to be effective. Armaments may have to be limited and controlled by international decree, but to disarm a nation would be as criminal and foolish as it would be to take away all weapons from the law-abiding citizens of a mining town as a preliminary to calling upon them to assist in the arrest of a notorious band of outlaws.
Again: a common objection to the peace propaganda is that without war we shall have none of the heroic virtues that war calls into being. This objection fails utterly when we consider that what we shall get under a proper international agreement is not the abolition of war, but simply an assurance that when there is a war it will be one in which every good citizen can take at once the part of international law and order—a contest between the law and the law-breaker, and not one in which both contestants are equally lawless. Thus the profession of arms will still be an honorable one—it will, in fact, be much more honorable than it is to-day, when it may at any moment be prostituted to the service of greed or commercialism.
“I have nothing to read,” said a man to me once. “But your house seems to be filled with books.” “O, yes; but I’ve read them already.” What should we think of a man who should complain that he had no friends, when his house was thronged daily with guests, simply because he had seen and talked with them all once before? Such a man has either chosen badly, or he is himself at fault. “Hold fast that which is good” says the Scripture. Do not taste it once and throw it away. To get at the root of this matter we must go farther back than literature and inquire what it has in common with all other forms of art to compel our love and admiration. Now, a work of art differs from any other result of human endeavor in this—that its effect depends chiefly on the way in which it is made and only secondarily upon what it is or what it represents. Were this not true, all statues of Apollo or Venus would have the same art-value; and you or I, if we could find a tree and a hill that Corot had painted, would be able to produce a picture as charming to the beholder as his.
The way in which a thing is done is, of course, always important, but its importance outside of the sphere of art differs from that within. The way in which a machine is constructed makes it good or bad, but the thing that is aimed at here is the useful working of the machine, toward which all the skill of the maker is directed. What the artist aims at is not so much to produce a likeness of a god or a picture of a tree, as to produce certain effects in the person who looks at his complete work; and this he does by the way in which he performs it. The fact that a painting represents certain trees and hills is here only secondary; the primary fact is what the artist has succeeded in making the on-looker feel.
While Sorolla is painting a group of children on the beach, I may take a kodak picture of the same group. My photograph may be a better likeness than Sorolla’s picture, but it has no art-value. Why? Because it was made mechanically, whereas Sorolla put into his picture something of himself, making it a unique thing, incapable of imitation or of reproduction.
The man who has a message, one of those pervasive, compelling messages that are worth while, naturally turns to art. He chooses his subject not as an end, but as a vehicle, and he makes it speak his message by his method of treatment, conveying it to his public more or less successfully in the measure of his skill.
We have been speaking of the representative arts of painting and sculpture, but the same is true of art in any form. In music, not a representative art, in spite of the somewhat grotesque claims of so-called program music, the method of the composer is everything, or at least his subject is so vague and immaterial that no one would think of exalting it as an end in itself. There is, however, an art in which the subject stands forth so prominently that even those who love the art itself are continually in danger of forgetting the subject’s secondary character. I mean the art of literature. Among the works of written speech the boundaries of art are much more ill-defined than they are elsewhere. There is, to be sure, as much difference between Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” and Todhunter’s “Trigonometry” as there is between the Venus de Milo and a battleship; and I conceive that the difference is also of precisely the same kind, being that by which, as we have seen above, we may always discriminate between a work of art and one of utility. But where art-value and utility are closely combined, as they are most frequently in literature, it is, I believe, more difficult to divide them mentally and to dwell on their separate characteristics, than where the work is a concrete object. This is why we hear so many disputes about whether a given work does or does not belong to the realm of “pure literature,” and it is also the reason why, as I have said, some, even among those who love literature, are not always ready to recognize its nature as an art, or mistakenly believe that in so far as its art-value is concerned, the subject portrayed is of primary importance—is an aim in itself instead of being a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an impression.
Take, if you please, works which were intended by their authors as works of utility, but have survived as works of art in spite of themselves, such as Walton’s “Compleat Angler” and White’s “Natural History of Selborne.” Will anyone maintain that the subject-matter of those books has much to do with their preservation, or with the estimation in which they are now held? Nay; we may even be so bold as to enter the field of fiction and to assert that those fictional works that have purely literary value are loved not for the story they tell, but for the way in which the author tells it and for the effect that he thereby produces on the reader.
I conceive that pure literature is an art, subject to the rules that govern all art, and that its value depends primarily on the effect produced on the reader—the message conveyed—by the way in which the writer has done his work, the subject chosen being only his vehicle. Where a man who has something to say looks about for means to say it worthily, he may select a tale, a philosophical disquisition, a familiar essay, a drama or a lyric poem. He may choose badly or well, but in any case it is his message that matters.
My excuse for dwelling on this matter must be that unless I have carried you with me thus far what I am about to say will have no meaning, and I had best fold my papers, make my bow, and conclude an unprofitable business. For my subject is re-reading, the repetition of a message; and the message that we would willingly hear repeated is not that of utility but of emotion. It is the word that thrills the heart, nerves the arm, and puts new life into the veins, not that which simply conveys information. The former will produce its effect again and again, custom can not stale it. The latter, once delivered, has done its work. I see two messengers approaching; one, whom I have sent to a library to ascertain the birth-date of Oliver Cromwell, tells me what it is and receives my thanks. The other tells me that one dear to my heart, long lying at death’s door, is recovering. My blood courses through my veins; my nerves tingle; joy suffuses me where gloom reigned before. I cry out; I beg the bearer of good tidings to tell them again and again; I keep him by me, so that I may ask him a thousand questions, bringing out his message in a thousand variant forms. But do I turn to the other and say, “O, that blessed date! was Cromwell truly born thereon? Let me, I pray, hear you recite it again and again!” I trow, not.
The message that we desire to hear again is the one that produces its effect again and again; and that is the message of feeling, the message of art—not that of mere utility. This is so true that I conceive we may use it as a test of art-value. The great works of literature do not lose their effect on a single reading. One makes response to them the hundredth time as he did the first. Their appeal is so compelling that there is no denying it—no resisting it. There are snatches of poetry—and of prose, too—that we have by heart; that we murmur to ourselves again and again, sure that the response which never failed will come again, thrilling the whole organism with its pathos, uplifting us with the nobility of its appeal, warming us with its humor. There is a little sequence of homely verse that never fails to bring the tears to my eyes. I have tested myself with it under the most unfavorable circumstances. In the midst of business, amid social jollity, in the mental dullness of fatigue, I have stopped and repeated to myself those three verses. So quickly acts the magic of the author’s skill that the earlier verses grip the fibers of my mind and twist them in such fashion that I feel the pathos of the last lines just as I felt them for the first time, years ago. You might all tell similar stories. I believe that this is a characteristic of good literature, and that all of it will bear reading, and re-reading, and reading again.
But I hear someone say, “Do you mean to tell me that those three little verses that bring the tears to your eyes, will bring them also to mine and my neighbor’s? I might listen to them appreciatively but dry-eyed; my neighbor might not care for them enough to re-read them once. All about us we see this personal equation in the appreciation of literature. Unless you are prepared, then, to maintain that literature may be good for one and bad for another, your contention will scarcely hold water.”
Even so, brother. The messenger who told me of the safety of my dear one did not thrill your heart as he did mine. She was dear to me, not to you, and the infinitely delicate yet powerful chain of conditions and relations that operated between the messenger’s voice and my emotional nature did not connect him with yours. Assuredly, the message that reaches one man may not reach another. It may even reach a man in his youth and fall short in manhood, or vice versa. It may be good for him and inoperative on all the rest of the world. We estimate literature, it is true, by the universality of its appeal or by the character of the persons whom alone that appeal reaches. The message of literature as art may thus be to the crowd or to a select few. I could even imagine intellect and feeling of such exquisite fineness, such acknowledged superiority, that appeal to it alone might be enough to fix the status of a work of art, though it might leave all others cold. Still, in general I believe, that the greatest literature appeals to the greatest number and to the largest number of types. I believe that there are very few persons to whom Shakespeare, properly presented, will not appeal. In him, nevertheless, the learned and those of taste also delight. There are authors like Walter Pater who are a joy to the few but do not please the many. There are others galore, whom perhaps it would be invidious to name, who inspire joy in the multitude but only distaste in the more discriminating. We place Pater above these, just as we should always put quality above quantity; but I place Shakespeare vastly higher, because his appeal is to the few and the many at once.
But we must, I think, acknowledge that an author whose value may not appeal to others may be great to one reader; that his influence on that reader may be as strong for good as if it were universal instead of unique. We may not place such a writer in the Walhalla, but I beseech you, do not let us tear him rudely from the one or two to whom he is good and great. Do not lop off the clinging arms at the elbow, but rather skilfully present some other object of adoration to the intent that they may voluntarily untwine and enfold this new object more worthily.
The man who desires to own books but who can afford only a small and select library can not do better than to make his selection on this basis—to get together a collection of well-loved books any one of which would give him pleasure in re-reading. Why should a man harbor in his house a book that he has read once and never cares to read again? Why should he own one that he will never care to read at all? We are not considering the books of the great collectors, coveted for their rarity or their early dates, for their previous ownership or the beauty of their binding—for any reason except the one that makes them books rather than curiosities. These collections are not libraries in the intellectual or the literary sense. Three well thumbed volumes in the attic of one who loves them are a better library for him than those on which Pierpont Morgan spent his millions.
This advice, it will be noted, implies that the man has an opportunity to read the book before he decides whether to buy it or not. Here is where the Public Library comes in. Some regard the Public Library as an institution to obviate all necessity of owning books. It should rather be regarded from our present standpoint as an institution to enable readers to own the books that they need—to survey the field and make therefrom a proper and well-considered selection. That it has acted so in the past, none may doubt; it is the business of librarians to see that this function is emphasized in the future. The bookseller and the librarian are not rivals, but co-workers. Librarians complain of the point of view of those publishers and dealers who regard every library user as a lost customer. He is rather, they say, in many cases a customer won—a non-reader added to the reading class—a possible purchaser of books. But have not librarians shared somewhat this mistaken and intolerant attitude? How often do we urge our readers to become book-owners? How often do we give them information and aid directed toward this end? The success of the Christmas book exhibitions held in many libraries should be a lesson to us. The lists issued in connection with these almost always include prices, publishers’ names, and other information intended especially for the would-be purchaser. But why should we limit our efforts to the holiday season? True, every librarian does occasionally respond to requests for advice in book-selection and book-purchase, but the library is not yet recognized as the great testing field of the would-be book owner; the librarian is not yet hailed as the community’s expert adviser in the selection and purchase of books, as well as its book guardian and book distributor. That this may be and should be, I believe. It will be if the librarian wills it.
Are we straying from our subject? No; for from our present standpoint a book bought is a book reread. My ideal private library is a room, be it large or small, lined with books, every one of which is the owner’s familiar friend, some almost known by heart, others re-read many times, others still waiting to be re-read.
But how about the man whose first selection for this intimate personal group would be a complete set of the works of George Ade? Well, if that is his taste, let his library reflect it. Let a man be himself. That there is virtue in merely surrounding oneself with the great masters of literature all unread and unloved, I can not see. Better acknowledge your poor taste than be a hypocrite.
The librarian can not force the classics down the unwilling throats of those who do not care for them and are perhaps unfitted to appreciate them. There has been entirely too much of this already and it has resulted disastrously. Surely, a sane via media is possible, and we may agree that a man will never like Eschylus, without assuring him that Eschylus is an out-of-date old fogy, while on the other hand we may acknowledge the greatness of Homer and Milton without trying to force them upon unwilling and incompetent readers. After all it is not so much a question of Milton versus George Ade, as it is of sanity and wholesomeness against vulgarity and morbidity. And if I were to walk through one city and behold collections of this latter sort predominating and then through another, where my eyes were gladdened with evidences of good taste, of love for humor that is wholesome, sentiment that is sane, verse that is tuneful and noble, I should at once call on the public librarian and I should say to him, “Thou art the man!” The literary taste of your community is a reflection of your own as shown forth in your own institution—its collection of books, the assistants with which you have surrounded yourself, your attitude and theirs through you toward literature and toward the public.
But, someone asks, suppose that I am so fortunate and so happy as to sit in the midst of such a group of friendly authors; how and how often shall I re-read? Shall I traverse the group every year? He who speaks thus is playing a part; he is not the real thing. Does the young lover ask how and how often he shall go to see his sweetheart? Try to see whether you can keep him away! The book-lover reopens his favorite volume whenever he feels like it. Among the works on his shelves are books for every mood, every shade of varying temper and humor. He chooses for the moment the friend that best corresponds to it, or it may be, the one that may best woo him away from it. It may be that he will select none of them, but occupy himself with a pile of newcomers, some of whom may be candidates for admission to the inner group. The whole thing—the composition of his library, his attitude toward it, the books that he re-reads oftenest, the favorite passages that he loves, that he scans fondly with his eye while yet he can repeat them by heart, his standards of admission to his inner circle—all is peculiarly and personally his own. There is no other precisely like it, just as there is no other human being precisely like its owner. There is as much difference between this kind of a library and some that we have seen as there is between a live, breathing creature with a mind and emotions and aspirations, and a wax figure in the Eden Musee.
Thus every book lover re-reads his favorites in a way of his own, just as every individual human being loves or hates or mourns or rejoices in a way of his own.
One can no more describe these idiosyncrasies than he can write a history of all the individuals in the world, but perhaps, in the manner of the ethnological or zoological classifier, it may interest us to glance at the types of a few genera or species.
And first, please note that re-reading is the exact repetition of a dual mental experience, so far at least as one of the minds is concerned. It is a replica of mind-contact, under conditions obtainable nowhere else in this world and of such nature that some of them seem almost to partake of other-worldliness. My yesterday’s interview with Smith or Jones, trivial as it is, I can not repeat. Smith can not remember what he said, and even if he could, he could not say it to me in the same way and to the same purpose. But my interview with Plato—with Shakespeare, with Emerson; my talk with Julius Caesar, with Goethe, with Lincoln! I can duplicate it once, twice, a hundred times. My own mind—one party to the contact—may change, but Plato’s or Lincoln’s is ever the same; they speak no “various language” like Byrant’s nature, but are like that great Author of Nature who has taken them to Himself, in that in them “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” To realize that these men may speak to me today, across the abyss of time, and that I can count on the same message tomorrow, next year and on my death bed, in the same authentic words, producing the same effect, assures me that somewhere, somehow, a miracle has been wrought.
I have said that one of the minds that come thus into contact changes not, while the other, the reader’s, is alterable. This gives him a sort of standard by which he can measure or at least estimate, the changes that go on within him, the temporary ones due to fluctuations in health, strength or temper, the progressive ones due to natural growth or to outside influences.
In his “Introduction to Don Quixote,” Heine tells us how that book, the first that he ever read, was his mental companion through life. In that first perusal knowing not “how much irony God had interwoven into the world,” he looked upon the luckless knight as a real hero of romance and wept bitterly when his chivalry and generosity met with ingratitude and violence. A little later, when the satire dawned upon his comprehension, he could not bear the book. Still later he read it with contemptuous laughter at the poor knight. But when in later life, he lay racked on a bed of pain his attitude of sympathy returned. “Dulcinea del Toboso,” he says “is still the most beautiful woman in the world; although I lie stretched upon the earth, helpless and miserable, I will never take back that assertion. I can not do otherwise. On with your lances, ye Knights of the Silver Moon; ye disguised barbers!”
So every reader’s viewpoint shifts with the years.
Our friend who welcomes George Ade to his inner sanctuary may find as the years go on that his reaction to that contact has altered. I should not recommend that the author be then be cast into outer darkness. Once a favorite, always a favorite, for old sake’s sake even if not for present power and influence. Our private libraries will hold shelf after shelf of these old-time favorites—milestones on the intellectual track over which we have wearily or joyously traveled.
There will always be a warm spot in my heart and a nook on my private shelf for Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger. Though I bar them from my library (I mean my Library with a big L) I have no right to exclude them from my private collection of favorites, for once I loved them. I scarcely know why or how. If there had been in those far-off days of my boyhood, children’s libraries and children’s librarians, I might not have known them; as it is, they are incidents in my literary past that can not be blinked, shameful though they may be. The re-reading of such books as these is interesting because it shows us how far we have traveled since we counted them among our favorites.
Then there is the book that, despite its acknowledged excellence, the reader would not perhaps admit to his inner circle if he read it now for the first time. It holds its place largely on account of the glamour with which his youth invested it. It thrills him now as it thrilled him then, but he half suspects that the thrill is largely reminiscent. I sometimes fancy that as I re-read Ivanhoe and my heart leaps to my mouth when the knights clash at Ashby, the propulsive power of that leap had its origin in the emotions of 1870 rather than those of 1914. And when some of Dickens’ pathos—that death-bed of Paul Dombey for instance—brings the tears again unbidden to my eyes, I suspect, though I scarcely dare to put my suspicion into words, that the salt in those tears is of the vintage of 1875. I am reading Arnold Bennett now and loving him very dearly when he is at his best; but how I shall feel about him in 1930 or how I might feel if I could live until 2014, is another question.
Then there is the book that, scarce comprehended or appreciated when it was first read, but loved for some magic of expression or turn of thought, shows new beauties at each re-reading, unfolding like an opening rose and bringing to view petals of beauty, wit, wisdom and power that were before unsuspected. This is the kind of book that one loves most to re-read, for the growth that one sees in it is after all in oneself—not in the book. The gems that you did not see when you read it first were there then as they are now. You saw them not then and you see them now, for your mental sight is stronger—you are more of a man now than you were then.
Not that all the changes of the years are necessarily for the better. They may be neither for better nor for worse. As the moving train hurries us onward we may enjoy successively the beauties of canyon, prairie and lake, admiring each as we come to it without prejudice to what has gone before. In youth we love only bright colors and their contrasts—brilliant sunsets and autumn foliage; in later life we come to appreciate also the more delicate tints and their gradations—a prospect of swamp-land and distant lake or sea on a gray day; a smoky town in the fog; the tender dove colors of early dawns. So in youth we eagerly read of blood and glory and wild adventure; Trollope is insufferably dull. Jane Austen is for old maids; even such a gem as Cranford we do not rate at its true value. But in after life how their quiet shades and tints come out! There is no glory in them, no carnage, no combat; but there is charm and fascination in the very slowness of their movement, the shortness of their range, their lack of intensity, the absence of the shrill, high notes and the tremendous bases.
Then there is the re-reading that accuses the reader of another kind of change—a twist to the right or the left, a cast in the mental eye, or perhaps the correction of such a cast. The doctrines in some book seemed strange to you once—almost abhorrent; you are ready to accept them now. Is it because you then saw through a glass darkly and now more clearly? Or is your vision darker now than it was? Your rereading apprizes you that there has been a change of some sort. Perhaps you must await corroborative testimony before you decide what its nature has been. Possibly you read today without a blush what your mind of twenty years ago would have been shocked to meet. Are you broader-minded or just hardened? These questions are disquieting, but the disturbance that they cause is wholesome, and I know of no way in which they can be raised in more uncompromising form than by re-reading an old favorite, by bringing the alterable fabric of your living, growing and changing mind into contact with the stiff, unyielding yardstick of an unchangeable mental record—the cast of one phase of a master mind that once was but has passed on.
Here I can not help saying a word of a kind of re-reading that is not the perusal of literature at all with most of us—the re-reading of our own words, written down in previous years—old letters, old lectures, articles—books, perhaps, if we chance to be authors. Of little value, perhaps, to others, these are of the greatest interest to ourselves because instead of measuring our minds by an outside standard they enable us to set side by side two phases of our own life—the ego of 1892, perhaps, and that of 1914. How boyish that other ego was; how it jumped to conclusions; how ignorant it was and how self-confident! And yet, how fresh it was; how quickly responsive to new impressions; how unspoiled; how aspiring! If you want to know the changes that have transformed the mind that was into the very different one that now is, read your own old letters.
I have tried to show you that pure literature is an art and like other arts depends primarily upon manner and only secondarily upon matter. That the artist, who in this case is the author, uses his power to influence the reader usually through his emotions or feelings and that its effects to a notable extent, are not marred by repetition. That on this account all good literature may be re-read over and over, and that the pleasure derived from such re-reading is a sign that a book is peculiarly adapted in some way to the reader. Finally, that one’s private library, especially if its size be limited, may well consist of personal favorites, often re-read.
When the astronomer Kepler had reduced to simple laws the complicated motions of the planets he cried out in ecstacy: “O God! now think I Thy thoughts after Thee!” Thus when a great writer of old time has been vouchsafed a spark of the divine fire we may think his divine thoughts after him by re-reading. And Shakespeare tells us in that deathless speech of Portia’s, that since mercy is God’s attribute we may by exercising it become like God. Thus, by the mere act of tuning our brains to think the thoughts that the Almighty has put into the minds of the good and the great, may it not be that our own thoughts may at the last come to be shaped in the same mould?
“Old wine, old friends, old books,” says the old adage; and of the three the last are surely the most satisfying. The old wine may turn to vinegar; old friends may forget or forsake us; but the old book is ever the same. What would the old man do without it? And to you who are young I would say—you may re-read, you first must read. Choose worthy books to love. As for those who know no book long enough either to love or despise it—who skim through good and bad alike and forget page ninety-nine while reading page 100, we may simply say to them, in the words of the witty Frenchman, “What a sad old age you are preparing for yourself!”