The Library and Society Part 10

All truths being inter-dependent, every road will lead to the end of the world, and so while studying one subject a man becomes interested in others, and his range of inquiry expands. When he kindles one dry stick, many green ones will catch, and his brightest blazes are lit up by unexpected sparks. One quickly learns to love hunting, and before working up many topics, he forms an investigating habit which will perpetuate itself. Thus while seeking an oyster, he finds a pearl, like SAUL who sought a.s.ses and found a kingdom. Henceforth he reads more by subjects, each a cord to string pearls on, than by volumes, for he feels that,

"Unless to some particular end designed, Reading is but a specious trifling of the mind, And then, like ill-digested food, To humors turns and not to blood."

But less and less of that sort is his reading, though it range through all time, and tax all the world. Such an inquirer will live longer than METHUSELAH, for he will have more thoughts, yet he will wish each of his minutes was a millenary. He will read with an appet.i.te growing as long as he lives; indeed reading will help him to live longer. A thousand such readers feel what one has spoken out, saying:

"In a library I was thrown, instead of worse society, into the company of poets, philosophers and sages--to me good angels and ministers of grace. From these silent instructors who often do more than fathers for our interests, from these delightful a.s.sociates I learned something of the divine and more of the human religion. They were my interpreters in the House Beautiful of G.o.d, and my guides among the Delectable Mountains of Nature,

Blessing be with them and eternal praise, Who gave me n.o.bler loves and n.o.bler cares."

Pre-eminently to the _young_ will the myriad-minded library be an oracle in perplexities. They have been better trained in public schools than we of the last generation were. They have broken ground in more various studies, and their curiosity has been stimulated concerning more questions. Each question, each study puts in their hand a new _key_ to the locks which shut up libraries. Singers love to sing, and it is joy for the just to do justice, so will our youth rejoice to use in the library the skill they have acquired in school as naturally as when they get jack knives they take to whittling. The public schools then find in free libraries their fitting supplement, and complement. Schools without libraries feed a prisoner with salted viands and then tantalize his thirst with pitchers and bottles, all empty. The free school and the free library will join hands like husband and wife in a well-matched marriage.

"He is the half-part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fulness of perfection lies in him; But two such silver currents when they join, Do glorify the banks that bind them in.

Each befits the other, as ALEXANDER said concerning the finest poem and the most costly casket in the world when he enshrined the Iliad in the Persian box of gold and gems. Both are lotteries where tickets cost nothing and everybody may draw all the prizes.

In addition to this, the free library will be to some nothing less than an _inspiration_. _To some_--I wish I could say _to all_, but alas, it is only an "elect few" whom the library can inspire. Spectacles are invaluable,--but only to those who have eyes. One Sultan never wore a s.h.i.+rt that had not every word of the Koran written on it yet absorbed little piety. AARON'S excuse for making only a golden calf was, that the Jews did not bring him gold enough to make an ox. The cherubim who know most can never equal the seraphim who love most. An ugly and stupid man, walking with a lady on each arm, boasts that he is between wit and beauty, but may not imbibe one particle of either.

To some, however, a free library will make up for the lack of a liberal education. More than that. It will furnish such an education every jot and t.i.ttle of it, and that, in some sense, better than was ever bestowed in a college, because acquired in the face of greater difficulties.

Libraries have often vouchsafed this priceless boon. That in Salem did to BOWDITCH, the mathematician, in the last century, and to WHIPPLE, the essayist, in this. The Edinburgh library made HUME an historian. Another was inspiration to COBBETT. So was that of the Erfurt convent to LUTHER.

"It had purchased," says his biographer, "at heavy cost, several Latin Bibles just printed for the first time in the neighboring city of Mainz.

When he first opened one of these tomes his eyes fell on the story of HANNAH and SAMUEL. "O, G.o.d," he murmured, "could I have one of these books I would seek no other worldly treasure." A great revolution then took place in his soul. His happiest hours were in the library.

Concerning such a scholar--

"We cannot say: ''Tis pity He lacks instructions,' for he seems a master To most that teach."

The influence of ancient Libraries on cla.s.sical writers is manifest from their quotations. PLUTARCH'S have been traced to 250 authors. PLINY'S to 2,000 works. Cla.s.sical Libraries preserved in Constantinople, so long as studied, made there a Goshen of light in the Dark Ages, and when carried to Italy proved a Promethean spark to kindle occidental culture anew. It is well known that inventions are oftenest struck out in the Patent Office, the grand store-house of inventions. In the world of mind, as well as of matter, new ideas are suggested where old ideas most congregate, or are most communed with. According to CHAUCER,

"Out of old fields, as man saith, Cometh all the new corn from year to year, And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all the new science that men lear."

The idea of writing the "Life of COLUMBUS" first darted into the mind of IRVING, when, in Madrid, he found himself surrounded by an unrivaled magazine of materials made ready to his hand, and for which the world had been ransacked. Thus the sight of means to make good books makes good books made.

Not only those volumes which compose the body of literature, but those finer essences which form its soul,--the literature of power,--stamped in Nature's mint of ecstasy--are marked all over with proofs of familiarity with the best that had been achieved,--each in its own department. n.o.body has hesitated thus to affirm concerning VIRGIL, DANTE, Ta.s.sO, MILTON. But it is commonly said that SHAKESPEARE was _ignorant_. The truth is that no ignorant man, no ordinary, scholar can understand his allusions, historical, romantic, cla.s.sical, or those to art, science, nationalities, customs--or even his words. He could get more from a Library in a day than most men in a life-time, but he needed it still.

In speaking of SHAKESPEARE, I mean the man who wrote the Plays reputed his, no matter whether that author was BACON, or JOHN SMITH, or even our townsman GEORGE B.

We ought to say that SHAKESPEARE was a universal man,--because he was heir of all ages,--and his was universal knowledge, a knowledge which neither can we fathom nor could he find without a library.

His peculiarity was ability to discern the immortal part of books, or to stamp what were otherwise perishable with his own immortality. Whoever can do much without tools, can do more with them. Accordingly men do their broken weapons rather use than their bare hands. Whoever can do much without a library, can do more with a library. DAVID did much with a sling, but more with better arms, and builded an armory on which there hung a thousand bucklers, all s.h.i.+elds of mighty men.

If then there be among us any one person endued with any spark of Shakespearian or other genius he will find it kindling to a flame through contact in this library with similar celestial fires. To such a "meeting soul!" as MILTON calls it,--the library will prove a better bonanza than has been prospected in our States of silver and gold.

Though having nothing he shall possess all things,--infinite riches in a little room.

Thus our Free Library will amuse, and instruct, and inspire. Over its entrance I seem to read as on the front of the oldest in the world, the inscription, "The healing of the soul," or the words of FRANKLIN to his namesake town, "I give you books instead of a bell, sense rather than sound." Let it have free course for a generation, calling to culture as ceaselessly as a standing army calls to war, and this community will say with SENECA, "Leisure without books and letters is mental death and burial."

The first public library in Ohio--just two years younger than the State--was founded in Ames. It was bought by hunters who threw together a lot of racc.o.o.n skins, sent them in a sleigh by one of their number to Boston and there bartered them for books. They soon hunted Greek as zealously as game, and while Ames remained a hamlet ten of them, or their children, were among the early graduates of the State University.

The influences of a library are _c.u.mulative_, and sometimes become manifest only after a long lapse of ages. The cuniform library of a.s.syrian bricks, dating from pre-historic periods, burned up, buried and forgotten just now emerges from its grave speaking in a voice heard round the world, and no less authoritative than a second book of Genesis. From its shelves more centuries look down upon us than upon NAPOLEON at the Pyramids.

Libraries are hemmed in by no lines of State, nation, race, language, religion or century. Their field is the world. But ours is the cosmopolitan age, and we are pre-eminently the cosmopolitan people. More than any other people, then must we feel the need of libraries, which are, of all inst.i.tutions, the most cosmopolitan. Hence they will benefit us most.

Considerations like these demonstrate that free libraries tend to _equality_ and _fraternity_. They are free lunches, crying to all: "Cut, and come again!" As we all have equal rights at the polls and in court, so have we in the free library. In church we each secure a blessing in proportion to our capacity; so can we in the library. In both blessed are they who hunger and thirst, for they shall be filled. In public schools all can enjoy the best of teaching without money and without price; so can they in the free library. Free libraries will create an aristocracy--one open to talent and toil, but to nothing else; the aristocracy of knowledge. Where street cars have been introduced, half the private carriages are soon given up, so the establishment of free libraries will lead many to refrain from large domestic collections as superfluous, and to the transfer of many a private library to the public shelves, where they will not only do more good, but will be better cared for, better arranged, and more accessible than they now are even to their owners. One millionaire as we walked into his library, said with a sigh: "See how many gaps there are in my shelves! Five hundred of my books are missing, lent and lost." "Lost!" cried I, half in joke, "say rather found! lost to you, but found each by some one who will make the most of them. Would to heaven these 5,000 were lost in the same way, lost by you who have no time nor care for them, found by those who have both. n.o.body could steal them from you, but at most only from moths and worms, dust and mould." Rich men who have bought libraries as luxuries will learn that the way to save them is to lose them, and that their books serve them best when deposited in free libraries.

Many varieties of _sham_ equality result from outside pressure. In Venetian gondolas all awnings are required to be black that no one may outs.h.i.+ne his neighbor. Under the first republic the French proscribed all t.i.tles but citizen, and citizeness, which they gave to everybody.

Communists would make all men's shares in property equal. Endeavors of this sort not only fail, but prove suicidal like the impetuous Irishman, insisting that one man is as good as another, and _a great dey better too_. The influence of Free Libraries, however is toward genuine and not merely visible equality. Thanks to them the most expensive luxury of the rich becomes the daily food of the poor, and the tree of knowledge no more bears forbidden fruit. A volume which I can draw out of a library at will is worth as much to me as if I owned it. In fact, though my private library is not small, the books I read are more often borrowed than my own.

If I take out books from a library, I am doubly spurred to to make their contents my own, because those books must be returned more promptly than to the friend who neither exacts fines nor yet even notes in a book what book we borrow.

FRANKLIN tells us that "he often sat up reading, the greater part of the night, when a book borrowed (he means _stolen_) from booksellers in the evening, was to be returned in the morning lest it should be found missing." In proportion as men make full proof of books, they become alike _inside_, in real communion with great authors, in information, taste, mental capacity, mastery of speech,--accomplishments which cannot be lost, and which render each one more equal and congenial with his fellows. Men will still differ by G.o.d, not by man. What then is the Free Library less than the key stone in our Republican arch?

When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing.

But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and say; "These are our jewels." Not tombs, but living shrines that on the living still work miracles,--the shrines where all the relics of the saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the dumb speak--the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is

"Made porous to receive And drink the liquid light, firm to retain Its gathered beams, great palace now of light, Hither as to a fountain countless stars Repairing in their golden urns draw light."

Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and University parks are without.

A library,--the a.s.sembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;--reminds me of that fres...o...b.. RAPHAEL, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces, popularly styled "The School of Athens," and which I hope to see hung up as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical man, like FRANKLIN'S Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. SOCRATES, with sly humor, is humbling the self-sufficient ALCIBIADES that he may rouse him to loftier aspirations. PYTHAGORAS is writing among disciples, one of whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the temple, appear ARISTOTLE, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to the earth, and PLATO, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for G.o.d. The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as RAPHAEL painted--and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,--which is well said to unite cl.u.s.tered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars.

"Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime."

THE FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY

This section, devoted to the general relations of the library and society, which opened with a historical account by Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, may appropriately close with another of similar tenor, contributed eleven years later to _The American Magazine of Civics_ (New York, May, 1895) by Prof. Henry H. Barber. It covers some of the same ground but gives results to a later date, while it is still only introductory to the social development of more recent years.

Henry Hervey Barber was born in Warwick, Ma.s.s., Dec. 30, 1835, graduated at Meadville Theological Seminary in 1861 and after holding several Unitarian pastorates was professor of philosophy and theology there from 1884 to 1904. He was also editor of the Unitarian Review from 1875 to 1884. He died about 1915.

No public inst.i.tution has made greater progress during the last few years or grown more rapidly in public interest and favor than the free public library. The building of a magnificent structure in Chicago, together with the excellent Newberry free reference library, and in cooperation with the fast growing library of the Chicago University, will make perhaps the most superb public provision for free literary culture ever furnished by any munic.i.p.ality. Boston has lately transferred its more than half a million volumes to the new and n.o.ble public library building on the Back Bay. The newspapers of this last week tell us that in New York Mr. Tilden is after all not to be finally counted out; but that the two millions rescued from his estate by the high sense of honor of one of his heirs is to be joined with the invaluable Astor Library, and the choice Lennox Reference Library, and all made free and available to the public--a property valued in the aggregate at eight million dollars. These events, together with the recent founding of the Carnegie free libraries in Pittsburg and Allegheny, the not very remote establishment of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and the addition by Mr. Henry C. Lea to the splendid Ridgway foundation in Philadelphia, const.i.tute a series of brilliant triumphs for the free public library, unparalleled in the history of educational inst.i.tutions, and seldom equalled, I must think, in the intellectual progress of civilization.

Nor do these metropolitan successes indicate, after all, the most essential advance. The frequency with which private beneficence is coming to the aid of public enterprise in smaller cities and country towns, for the establishment and increase of these libraries; the recent notable instances of stimulative auxiliary legislation; and the growth of intelligent interest in new and widely scattered sections of the civilized world, are equally significant, and perhaps even more widely beneficent. It is the era of the free public library; and it is of special interest to us to see that our community and our commonwealth are moving in accord with this tide of new feeling and enterprise concerning it.

Of special interest, I say, to us as Pennsylvanians; for we are glad to remember that it is here that the first impulse was given to the foundation of the system of circulating libraries, the development of which is the free public library in England and America. Benjamin Franklin, after considerable effort, founded in 1732 the Philadelphia Library Company, the "mother," as he himself calls it, "of all the subscription libraries in North America."

This library which Franklin started for the advantage of himself and his fifty young business a.s.sociates, in the early time, when, as he says, "there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston," and when most of the books had to be imported from England, was followed soon by the establishment of more ambitious similar libraries in Newport (1747) and Hartford (1774); and later in many other places in England and this country. These were called public libraries, though books could only be taken out by subscribers.

Probably, however, as in Philadelphia, the librarian could "permit any civil gentlemen to peruse the books of the library in the library room."

But it was in the formation of many so-called "Social Libraries" in the smaller cities and country towns of New England and the Middle States, early in the present century, that the foundations of the free munic.i.p.al library were laid. These subscription libraries, in their growth and in their decay, no less than in the appet.i.te for books they developed, created a demand and at length a necessity for public provision for what had come to be one of the prime intellectual needs of many communities.

Meantime in Scotland, in 1816, Samuel Brown of Haddington, following in part the methods of London booksellers, established a system of free itinerating libraries, loaning without cost selections of fifty books in each package to villages and neighborhoods that would engage to circulate and take proper care of them. At the end of two years each loan was called in, and another of different works sent in its place.

This scheme was for many years highly successful, and doubtless highly useful; but seems to have failed soon after the death of its projector and inspirer in 1839. The system had the earnest sanction of Lord Brougham, and about 1825 was taken up in some parts of England; and, in a modified form, has had a great success in Melbourne and its neighborhood, in Australia. Stanley Jevons, whose article on the rationale of free public libraries in his "Methods of Social Reform" is one of the most interesting and valuable contributions to the literature of this subject, commends it as the best form of extending free public libraries in the rural portions of Great Britain, and he estimates that there ought to be three thousand such literary itinerants in England and Wales.

This system was copied in this country in the School District Libraries which were started in the state of New York in 1835, and a few years afterward were in successful operation in Ma.s.sachusetts and other New England states, and in Michigan and Ohio at least, among states further west. At first every school district raising thirty dollars the first year and ten dollars thereafter, by tax or subscription, was a.s.sisted by the state--I cite the Ma.s.sachusetts statute--to a like sum; and a small but choice selection of books sent to it for free circulation within the district. A little later Ma.s.sachusetts, at least, removed this condition; and supplied every school district with such a library. These libraries after remaining in use for a while, and generally being thoroughly read, were exchanged among the districts. New books were thus continually coming to new readers. This movement was earnestly forwarded by that pioneer among American educators, Horace Mann, and during the period of my boyhood was a G.o.dsend to the young people of New England. I want to bless the memory of Samuel Brown, Father Page (a pioneer of the system in New York), and Horace Mann for the gleams of literary light thus cast across the bookless darkness of New England rural homes forty to fifty years ago. This highly economical missionary agency of general intelligence pa.s.sed away in New England with the incoming of the more satisfactory town system of free libraries. The cause of its decadence elsewhere is not clear, but it has lately had a remarkable resurrection in New York, as we soon shall see.

The first free town library in America, or the world, supported by munic.i.p.al taxation, was established by the efforts of Abiel Abbot, D.D., in Peterboro, New Hamps.h.i.+re, in 1833. A decayed social library and an operatives' library, and perhaps some other small collections, were thus gathered under the shelter of the town; and took on new life from its fostering care, and the small annual appropriation for new books which is the breath of life to all libraries. Here, as always, it was _a man_ that inspired the advance movement and carried it on to successful fulfilment.

In 1849, New Hamps.h.i.+re pa.s.sed a general law enabling towns and cities to maintain free libraries by taxation; and in 1851 Ma.s.sachusetts, which had granted Boston in 1847 the right to establish such a library, pa.s.sed a similar general enabling act. Several other states followed almost immediately, and nearly every northern and northwestern state, except Pennsylvania, has since adopted the measure. In 1893, twenty states had enacted similar statutes; and, in all, more than seven hundred free libraries have been established under them. They have increased--as might naturally have been expected--most rapidly in the portions of the country where other library agencies, and where an efficient public school system, have been longest and most efficiently at work. Thus, of the seven hundred libraries, more than three hundred are in Ma.s.sachusetts (according to the returns of the Public Library Commission for 1894), or 1,233 volumes for every thousand of population; in New Hamps.h.i.+re something over one hundred (in 1894), or 464 volumes per thousand of inhabitants.