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judgment and bias. Probably no two persons would divide the list in just
the same way, but it is my belief that the general result in each case
would be much the same. To me the possessive in every one of the
above-quoted titles would have been more idiomatic, thus:
"Hilton Fernbrook's Shadow,"
"Stella Maberly's Statement,"
"John Wallace's Shadow,"
"Morrice Buckler's Courtship,"
"A Stoic's Daughter,"
"Henry Vane's Crime," etc., etc.
In one case, at least, this fact has been recognized by a publisher, for
"The Vengeance of James Vansittart," whose title is included in the list
given above, has appeared in a later edition as "James Vansittart's
Vengeance"--a palpable improvement.
I shall not discuss the cause of this change in the use of the possessive,
though it seems to me an evident Gallicism, nor shall I open the question
of whether it is a mere passing fad or the beginning of an actual
alteration in the language. However this may be, it seems undeniable that
there is an actual and considerable difference in the use of the
possessive to-day and its use ten years ago, at least in formal titles and
headings. I have confined myself to book-titles, because that is the
department where the tendency presents itself to me most clearly; but it
may be seen on street signs, in advertisements, and in newspaper headings.
It is not to be found yet in the spoken language, at least it is not
noticeable there, but it would be decidedly unsafe to prophesy that it
will never appear there. Ten years from now we may hear about "the
breaking of the arm of John Smith" and "the hat of Tom," without a thought
that these phrases have not been part of our idiomatic speech since
Shakespeare's time.
SELECTIVE EDUCATION[1]
[1] Read before the Schoolmen of New York.
Since Darwin called attention to the role of what he named "natural
selection" in the genesis and preservation of species, and since his
successors, both followers and opponents, have added to this many other
kinds of selection that are continually operative, it has become
increasingly evident that from one standpoint we may look on the sum of
natural processes, organic and inorganic, as a vast selective system, as
the result of which things are as they are, whether the results are the
positions of celestial bodies or the relative places of human beings in
the intellectual or social scale. The exact constitution of the present
population of New York is the result of a great number of selective acts,
some regular, others more or less haphazard. Selection is no less
selection because it occurs by what we call chance--for chance is only our
name for the totality of trivial and unconsidered causes. When, however,
we count man and man's efforts in the sum of natural objects and forces,
we have to reckon with his intelligence in these selective processes. I
desire to call attention to the place that they play in educative systems
and in particular to the way in which they may be furthered or made more
effective by books, especially by public collections of books.
When we think of any kind of training as it affects the individual, we
most naturally regard it as changing that individual, as making him more
fit, either for life in general or for some special form of life's
activities. But when we think of it as affecting a whole community or a
whole nation, we may regard it as essentially a selective process. In a
given community it is not only desirable that a certain number of men
should be trained to do a specified kind of work, but it is even more
desirable that these should be the men that are best fitted to do this
work. When Mr. Luther Burbank brings into play the selection by means of
which he achieves his remarkable results in plant breeding he gets rid of
the unfit by destruction, and as all are unfit for the moment that do not
advance the special end that he has in view, he burns up plants--new and
interesting varieties perhaps--by the hundred thousand. We cannot destroy
the unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the educational point of
view unfitness is merely bad adjustment. There is a place for every man in
the world and it is the educators business to see that he reaches it, if
not by formative, then by selective processes. This selection is badly
made in our present state of civilization. It depends to a large extent
upon circumstances remote from the training itself--upon caprice, either
that of the person to be trained or of his parents, upon accidents of
birth or situation, upon a thousand irrelevant things; but in every case
there are elements present in the training itself that aid in determining
it. A young man begins to study medicine, and he finds that his physical
repulsion for work in the dissecting-room can not be overcome. He abandons
the study and by doing so eliminates an unfit person. A boy who has no
head for figures enters a business college. He can not get his diploma,
and the community is spared one bad bookkeeper. Certainly in some
instances, possibly in all, technical and professional schools that are
noted for the excellence of their product are superior not so much because
they have better methods of training, but because their material is of
better quality, owing to selection exercised either purposely, or
automatically, or perhaps by some chance. The same is true of colleges. Of
two institutions with the same curriculum and equally able instructors,
the one with the widest reputation will turn out the best graduates
because it attracts abler men from a wider field. This is true even in
such a department as athletics. To him that hath shall be given. This is
purely an automatic selective effect.
It would appear desirable to dwell more upon selective features in
educational training, to ascertain what they are in each case and how they
work, and to control and dispose them with more systematic care. Different
minds will always attach different degrees of importance to natural and
acquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training bestowed upon
the absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there are persons
whose natural aptitudes are so great that upon them a minimum of training
will produce a maximum effect. Such selective features as our present
educational processes possess, the examination, for instance, are mostly
exclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather than to attract the fit.
Here is a feature on which some attention may well be fixt.
How do these considerations affect the subject of general education? Are
we to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and Latin
for the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be? Not so;
for here we are training not experts but citizens. Discrimination here
must be not in the quality but in the quantity of training. We may divide
the members of any community into classes according as their formal
education--their school and college training--has lasted one, two, three,
four, or more years. There has been a selection here, but it has operated,
in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special training.
Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling to the end
of a college course, and who by so doing would become more useful members
of the community, are obliged to be content with two or three years in the
lower grades, while others, who are unfitted for the university, are kept
at it until they take, or fail to take, the bachelor's degree. An ideal
state of things, of course, would be to give each person the amount of
general education for which he is fitted and then stop. This would be
difficult of realization even if financial considerations did not so often
interfere. But at least we may keep in view the desirability of preventing
too many misfits and of insisting, so far as possible, on any selective
features that we may discover in present systems.
For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of a
given course of study to those who are desired to pursue it. If we can
find a way, for example, to make our high school courses attractive to
those who are qualified to take them, while at the same time rendering
them very distasteful to those who are not so qualified, we shall
evidently have taken a step in the right direction. It is clear that both
parts of this prescription must be taken together or there is no true
selection. Much has been done of late years toward making educational
courses of all kinds interesting and attractive, but it is to be feared
that their attractiveness has been such as to appeal to the unfit as well
as to the fit. If we sugar-coat our pills indiscriminately and mix them
with candy, many will partake who need another kind of medicine
altogether. We must so arrange things that the fit will like while the
unfit dislike, and for this purpose the less sugar-coating the better.
This is no easy problem and it is intended merely to indicate it here, not
to propose a general solution.
The one thing to which attention should be directed is the role that may
be and is played by the printed book in selective education. There is more
or less effort to discredit books as educative tools and to lay emphasis
on oral instruction and manual training. We need not decry these, but, it
must be remembered that after all the book contains the record of man's
progress; we may tell how to do a thing, and show how to do it, but we
shall never do it in a better way or explain the why and wherefore, and
surely transmit that ability and that explanation to posterity, without
the aid of a stable record of some kind. If we are sure that our students
could and would pick out only what they needed, as a wild animal picks his
food in the woods, we might go far toward solving our problem, by simply
turning them loose in a collection of books. Some people have minds that
qualify them to profit by such "browsing," and some of these have
practically educated themselves in a library. Even in the more common
cases where formal training is absolutely necessary, access to other books
than text-books is an aid to selection both qualitative and quantitative.
Books may serve as samples. To take an extreme case, a boy who had no
knowledge whatever of the nature of law or medicine would certainly not be
competent to choose between them in selecting a profession, and a month
spent in a library where there were books on both subjects would certainly
operate to lessen his incompetence. Probably it would not be rash to
assert that with free access to books, under proper guidance, both before
and during a course of training, the persons who begin that course will
include more of the fit and those who finish it will include less of the
unfit, than without such access.
Let us consider one or two concrete examples. A college boy has the choice
of several different courses. He knows little of them, but thinks that one
will meet his needs. He elects it and finds too late that he is wasting
his time. Another boy, whose general reading has been sufficient to give
him some superficial knowledge of the subject-matter in all the courses,
sees clearly which will benefit him, and profits by that knowledge.
Again, a boy, full of the possibilities that would lead him to appreciate
the best in literature, has gained his knowledge of it from a teacher who
looks upon a literary masterpiece only as something to be dissected. The
student has been disgusted instead of inspired, and his whole life has
been deprived of one of the purest and most uplifting of all influences.
Had he been brought up in a library where he could make literary friends
and develop literary enthusiasms, his course with the dry as dust teacher
would have been only an unpleasant incident, instead of the wrecking of a
part of his intellectual life.
Still again, a boy on a farm has vague aspirations. He knows that he wants
a broader horizon, to get away from his cramped environment--that is about
all. How many boys, impelled by such feelings, have gone out into the
world with no clear idea of what they are fitted to do, or even what they
really desire! To how many others has the companionship of a few books
meant the opening of a peep-hole, thru which, dimly perhaps, but none the
less really, have been descried definite possibilities, needs, and
opportunities!
To all of these youths books have been selective aids merely--they have
added little or nothing to the actual training whose extent and character
they have served to point out. Such cases, which it would be easy to
multiply, illustrate the value of books in the selective functions of
training. To assert that they exercise such a function is only another way
of saying that a mind orients itself by the widest contact with other
minds. There are other ways of assuring this contact, and these should not
be neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both in
space and in time. How else could we know exactly what Homer and St.
Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin and
William James, we will say, are even now thinking?
It has scarcely been necessary to say all this to convince you of the
value of books as aids to education; but it is certainly interesting to
find that in an examination of the selective processes in education, we
meet with our old friends in such an important role.
A general collection of books, then, constitutes an important factor in
the selective part of an education. Where shall we place this collection?
I venture to say that altho every school must have a library to aid in the
formative part of its training, the library as a selective aid should be
large and central and should preferably be at the disposal of the student
not only during the period of his formal training, but before and after
it. This points to the public library, and to close cooperation between it
and the school, rather than to the expansion of the classroom library.
This is, perhaps, not the place to dispute the wisdom of our Board of
Education in developing classroom libraries, but it may be proper to put
in a plea for confining them to books that bear more particularly on the
subjects of instruction. The general collection of books should be outside
of the school, because the boy is destined to spend most of his life
outside of the school. His education by no means ends with his graduation.
The agents that operate to develop and change him will be at work so long
as he lives, and it is desirable that the book should be one of these. If
he says good-by to the book when he leaves school, that part of his
training is likely to be at an end. If he uses, in connection with, and
parallel to, his formal education a general collection of books outside of
the school, he will continue to use it after he leaves school. And even so
far as the special classroom library is concerned, it must be evident that
a large general collection of books that may be drawn upon freely is a
useful supplement. For the teacher's professional use, the larger the
collection at his disposal the better. A sum of money spent by the city in
improving and making adequate the pedagogical section of its public
library, particularly in the department of circulation, will be expended
to greater advantage than many times the amount devoted to a large number
of small collections on the same subjects in schools.
These are the considerations that have governed the New York Public
Library in its effort to be of assistance to the teachers and pupils in
the public schools of the city. Stated formally, these efforts manifest
themselves in the following directions:
(1) The making of library use continuous from the earliest possible age,
thru school life and afterwards;
(2) Cooperation with the teacher in guiding and limiting the child's
reading during the school period;
(3) Aid within the library in the preparation of school work;
(4) The supplementing of classroom libraries by the loan of books in
quantity;
(5) The cultivation of personal relations between library assistants and
teachers in their immediate neighborhood;
(6) The furnishing of accurate and up-to-date information to schools
regarding the library's resources and its willingness to place them at the
school's disposal;
(7) The increase of the library's circulation collection along lines
suggested and desired by teachers;
(8) The granting of special privileges to teachers and special students
who use the library for purposes of study.
Toward the realization of these aims three departments are now
cooperating, each of them in charge of an expert in his or her special
line of work.
(1) The children's rooms in the various libraries, now under the direction
of an expert supervisor.
(2) The traveling library office.
(3) The division of school work, with an assistant in each branch, under
skilled headquarters superintendence.
When our plans, which are already in good working order, are completely
carried out, we shall be able to guarantee to every child guidance in his
reading up to and thru his school course, with direction in a line of
influence that will make him a user of books thruout his life and create
in him a feeling of attachment to the public library as the home and
dispenser of books and as a permanent intellectual refuge from care,
trouble, and material things in general, as well as a mine of information
on all subjects that may benefit or interest him.
Some of the obstacles to the immediate realization of our plans in full
may be briefly stated as follows:
(1) Lack of sufficient funds. With more money we could buy more books, pay
higher salaries, and employ more persons. The assistants in charge of
children's rooms should be women of the highest culture and ability, and
it is difficult to secure proper persons at our present salaries.
Assistants in charge of school work must be persons of tact and quickness
of perception, and they should have no other work to do; whereas at
present we are obliged to give this work to library assistants in addition
to their ordinary routine duties, to avoid increasing our staff by about
forty assistants, which our appropriation does not permit.
(2) Misunderstanding on the part of the public, and also to some extent on
the part of teachers, of our aims, ability, and attitude. This I am glad
to say is continually lessening. We can scarcely expect that each of our
five hundred assistants should be thoroly imbued with the spirit of
helpfulness toward the schools or even that they should perfectly
understand what we desire and aim to do. Nor can we expect that our wish
to aid should be appreciated by every one of fifty thousand teachers or a
million parents. This will come in time.
(3) A low standard of honesty on the part of certain users of the library.
It is somewhat disheartening to those who are laboring to do a public
service to find that some of those whom they are striving to benefit, look
upon them merely as easy game. To prevent this and at the same time to
withstand those who urge that such misuse of the library should be met by
the withdrawal of present privileges and facilities uses up energy that
might otherwise be directed toward the improvement of our service. Now,
like the intoxicated man, we sometimes refuse invitations to advance
because it is "all we can do to stay where we are." Here is an opportunity
for all the selective influences that we may bring to bear, and
unfortunately the library can have but little part in these.
Have I wandered too far from my theme? The good that a public library may
do, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may assume
in a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which it
is administered and the resources at its disposal. Its public services may
be various, but probably there is no place in which it may be of more
value than side by side with the public school; and I venture to think
that this is the case largely because education to be complete must select
as well as train, must compel the fit to step forward and the unfit to
retire, and must do this, not only at the outset of a course of training
but continuously thruout its duration. We speak of a student being "put
thru the mill," and we must not forget that a mill not only grinds and
stamps into shape but also sifts and selects. A finished product of a
given grade is always such not only by virtue of formation and adaptation
but also by virtue of selection. In human training one of the most potent
of these selective agencies is the individual will, and to train that will
and make it effective in the right direction there is nothing better than
constant association with the records of past aims and past achievements.
This must be my excuse for saying so much of libraries in general, and of
one library in particular, in an address on what I have ventured to give
the name of Selective Education.
THE USES OF FICTION[2]
[2] Read before the American Library Association, Asheville
Conference, May 28, 1907.
Literature is becoming daily more of a dynamic and less of a static
phenomenon. In other days the great body of written records remained more
or less stable and with its attendant body of tradition did its work by a
sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneath
it--on a special class peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we have
added to this effect that of a moving multitude of more or less ephemeral
books, which appear, do their work, and pass on out of sight. They are
light, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and ease
with which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less and
less limited to a class, and more and more familiar to the masses. The
book nowadays is in motion. Even the classics, the favorites of other
days, have left their musty shelves and are moving out among the people.
Where one man knew and loved Shakespeare a century ago, a thousand know
and love him to-day. The literary blood is circulating and in so doing is
giving life to the body politic. In thus wearing itself out the book is
creating a public appreciation that makes itself felt in a demand for
reprinting, hence worthy books are surer of perpetuation in this swirling
current than they were in the old time reservoir. But besides these books
whose literary life is continuous, though their paper and binding may wear
out, there are other books that vanish utterly. By the time that the
material part of them needs renewing, the book itself has done its work.
Its value at that moment is not enough, or is not sufficiently
appreciated, to warrant reprinting. It drops out of sight and its place is
taken by another, fresh from the press. This part of our moving literature
is what is called ephemeral, and properly so; but no stigma necessarily
attaches to the name. In the first place, it is impossible to draw a line
between the ephemeral and the durable. "One storm in the world's history
has never cleared off," said the wit--"the one we are having now." Yet the
conditions of to-day, literary as well as meteorological, are not
necessarily lasting.
We are accustomed to regard what we call standard literature as
necessarily the standard of innumerable centuries to come, forgetful of
the fact that other so-called standards have "had their day and ceased to
be." Some literature lasts a century, some a year, some a week; where
shall we draw the line below which all must be condemned as ephemeral? Is
it not possible that all literary work that quickly achieves a useful
purpose and having achieved it passes at once out of sight, may really
count for as much as one that takes the course of years to produce its
slow results? The most ephemeral of all our literary productions--the
daily paper--is incalculably the most influential, and its influence
largely depends on this dynamic quality that has been noted--the
penetrative power of a thing of light weight moving at a high speed. And
this penetrative power effective literature must have to-day on account of
the vastly increased mass of modern readers.
Reading is no longer confined to a class, it is well-nigh universal, in
our own country, at least. And the habit of mind of the thoughtful and
intent reader is not an affair of one generation but of many. New readers
are young readers, and they have the characteristics of intellectual
youth.
Narrative--the recapitulation of one's own or someone else's experience,
the telling of a story--is the earliest form in which artistic effort of
any kind is appreciated. The pictorial art that appeals to the young or
the ignorant is the kind that tells a story--perhaps historical painting
on enormous canvasses, perhaps the small genre picture, possibly something
symbolic or mythological; but at any rate it must embody a narrative,
whether it is that of the signing of a treaty, a charge of dragoons, a
declaration of love or the feeding of chickens. The same is true of music.
The popular song tells something, almost without exception. Even in
instrumental music, outside of dance rhythms, whose suggestion of the
delights of bodily motion is a reason of their popularity, the beginner
likes program music of some kind, or at least its suggestion. So it is in
literature. With those who are intellectually young, whether young in
years or not, the narrative form of expression is all in all. It is, of
course, in all the arts, a most important mode, even in advanced stages of
development. We shall never be able to do without narrative in painting,
sculpture, music and poetry; but wherever, in a given community, the
preference for this form of expression in any art is excessive, we may be
sure that appreciation of that form of art is newly aroused. This is an
interesting symptom and a good sign. To be sure, apparent intellectual
youth may be the result of intellectual decadence; there is a second as
well as a first childhood, but it is not difficult to distinguish between
them. In general, if a large proportion of those in a community who like
to look at pictures, prefer such as "tell a story," this fact, if the
number of the appreciative is at the same time increasing, means a newly
stimulated interest in art. And similarly, if a large proportion of those
persons who enjoy reading prefer the narrative forms of literature, while
at the same time their total numbers are on the increase, this surely
indicates a newly aroused interest in books. And this is precisely the
situation in which we find ourselves to-day. A very large proportion of
the literature that we circulate is in narrative form--how large a
proportion I daresay few of us realize. Not only all the fiction, adult
and juvenile, but all the history, biography and travel, a large
proportion of literature and periodicals, some of the sciences, including
all reports of original research, and a lesser proportion of the arts,
philosophy and religion, are in this form. It may be interesting to
estimate the percentage of narrative circulated by a large public library,
and I have attempted this in the case of the New York public library for
the year ending July 1, 1906.
Class Per cent. Estimated per
Fiction cent. of narrative
Juvenile 26
Adult 32 ........... 58 58
History ................. 6 6
Biography ............... 3 3
Travel .................. 3 3
Literature .............. 7 3
Periodicals ............. 4 2
Sciences ................ 9 3
Arts .................... 3 1
Philos. & Relig. ........ 2 1
Foreign ................. 5 4
--- --
100 84
In other words, if my estimates are not too much out of the way--and I
have tried to be conservative--only 16 per cent. of our whole circulation,
and 38 per cent. of our non-fiction, is non-narrative, despite the fact
that our total fiction percentage is low.
I attach little importance in this regard to any distinction between true
and fictitious narrative, people who read novels do not enjoy them simply
because the subject matter is untrue. They enjoy the books because they
are interesting. In fact, in most good fiction, little beside the actual
sequence of the events in the plot and the names of the characters is
untrue. The delineation of character, the descriptions of places and
events and the statements of fact are intended to be true, and the further
they depart from truth the less enjoyable they are. Indeed, when one looks
closely into the matter, the dividing line between what we call truth and
fiction in narrative grows more and more hazy.
In pictorial art we do not attempt to make it at all. Our museums do not
classify their pictures into true and imaginary. Our novels contain so
much truth and our other narrative works so much fiction, that it is
almost as difficult to draw the line in the literary as it is in the
pictorial arts. And in any case objections to a work of fiction, as well
as commendations, must be based on considerations apart from this
classification.
To represent a fictitious story as real or an imaginary portrait as a true
one is, of course, a fault, but the story and the portrait may both be of
the highest excellence when the subjects are wholly imaginary. It should
be noted that the crime of false representation, when committed with
success, removes a work from library classification as fiction and places
it in one of the other classes. Indeed, it is probable that much more
lasting harm is done by false non-fiction than by fiction. The reader,
provided he uses literature temperately, has much less need to beware of
the novel, which he reads frankly for entertainment, than of the history
full of "things that are not so," of the biased biography, of science
"popularized" out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories in
sociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading as
philosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers and
pseudo-naturalists.
In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate.
One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result is
the same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction. One may
thus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics--the
mathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he does
exist--and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is
that fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have to warn
the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any more
than we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears,
or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fiction
has the fatal gift of being too entertaining. The novel-writer must be
interesting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not often
regard it as necessary--unless he happens to be a Frenchman.
But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit
that the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his sphere, at least in
so far as he deals with the adult reader. We furnish parks and playgrounds
for our people; we police them and see that they contain nothing harmful,
but we cannot guarantee that they will not be used to excess--that a man
may not, for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels
that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be spent in
supporting his family. So in the library we may and do see that harmful
literature is excluded, but we cannot be expected to see that books which
are not in themselves injurious are not sometimes used to excess.
I venture to suggest that very much of our feeling of disquietude about
the large use of fiction in the public library and elsewhere arises from
our misapprehension of something that must always force itself upon the
attention in a state of society where public education and public taste
are on the increase. In this case the growth will necessarily be uneven in
different departments of knowledge and taste, and in different localities;
so that discrepancies frequently present themselves. We may observe, for
instance, a quietly and tastefully dressed woman reading, we will say,
Laura Jean Libbey. We are disconcerted, and the effect is depressing. But
the discrepancy may arise in either of two ways. If we have here a person
formerly possessing good taste both in dress and reading, whose taste in
the latter regard has deteriorated, we certainly have cause for sadness;
but if, as is much more likely, we have one who had formerly bad taste of
both kinds and whose taste in dress has improved, we should rather
rejoice. The argument is the same whether the change has taken place in
the same generation or in more than one. Our masses are moving upward and
the progress along the more material lines is often more rapid than in
matters of the intellect. Or, on the contrary, intellectual progress may
be in advance of manners. Such discrepancies are frequently commented upon
by foreign travelers in the United States, who almost invariably
misinterpret them in the same way. Can we blame them, when we make the
same mistake ourselves? M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book "En
Amerique," notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educated
persons among us. He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of a
certain clergyman. His thought is evidently, "How shocking that a
clergyman should act in this way!" But we might also put it: "How
admirable that professional education in this country is so easily
obtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it!
How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed in
doing so!" These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorse
neither of them. But when I find that on the upper west side of New York,
where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives and
daughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale of
living is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I do
not say, as I am tempted to do "How surprising and how discouraging that
persons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, and
that not of the highest grade!" I say rather: "What an evidence it is of
our great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mental
development, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature,
are living in such comfort or even luxury!"
Is not this the right way to look at it? I confess that I can see no
reason for despairing of the American people because it reads more fiction
than it used to read, so long as this is for the same reason that a ten
year old boy reads more stories than a baby. Intellectual youth is at
least an advance over mental infancy so long as it is first childhood--not
second. It is undoubtedly our duty, as it is our pleasure, to help these
people to grow, but we cannot force them, and should not try. Complete
growth may take several generations. And even when full stature has been
obtained, literature in its narrative modes, though not so exclusively as
now, will still be loved and read. Romance will always serve as the
dessert in the feast of reason--and we should recollect that sugar is now
highly regarded as a food. It is a producer of energy in easily available
form, and, thinking on some such novels as "Uncle Tom," "Die Waffen
nieder" and shall we say "The jungle"? we realize that this thing is a
parable, which the despiser of fiction may well read as he runs.
THE VALUE OF ASSOCIATION[3]
[3] An address delivered before the Library Associations of Iowa,
Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio, October 9-18, 1907.
Man is a gregarious animal; he cannot think, act, or even exist except in
certain relations to others of his kind. For a complete description of
those relations we must go to a treatise on sociology; our present subject
is a very brief consideration of certain groups of individuals, natural or
voluntary, and the application of the laws that govern such groups to the
voluntary associations with which we are all familiar in library work. Men
have joined together to effect certain things that they could not
accomplish singly, ever since two savages found that they could lift a
heavy log or stone together, when neither one could manage it alone. Until
recently the psychology of human groups has received little study. Le Bon,
in his book on "The Crowd," gives the modern treatment of it. A group of
persons does not think and act precisely as each of its component
individuals would think or act. The very act of association, loose as it
may be, introduces a new factor. Even the two savages lifting the log do
not work together precisely as either would have worked singly. Their
co-operation affects their activity; and both thought and action may
likewise be affected in larger groupings even by the mere proximity of the
individuals of the group, where there is no stronger bond.
But although the spirit that collectively animates a group of men cannot
be calculated by taking an arithmetical sum, it does depend on that
possessed by each individual in the group, and more particularly on what
is common to them all and on the nature of the bonds that connect them.
Even a chance group of persons previously unconnected and unrelated is
bound together by feelings common to all humanity and may be appealed to
collectively on such grounds. The haphazard street crowd thrills with
horror at the sight of a baby toddling in front of a trolley-car and
shouts with joy when the motorman stops just in time. But the same crowd,
if composed of newly-arrived Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, would fail
utterly to respond to some patriotic appeal that might move an American
crowd profoundly. You may sway a Methodist congregation with a tale of
John Wesley that would leave Presbyterians or Episcopalians cold. Try a
Yale mob with "Boola" and then play the same tune at Princeton, and watch
the effect.
Thus, the more carefully our group is selected the more particular and
definite are the motives that we can bring to bear in it, and the more
powerful will its activities be along its own special lines. The mob in
the street may be roused by working on elemental passions--so roused it
will kill or burn, but you cannot excite in it enthusiasm for Dante's
Inferno, or induce it to contribute money or labor toward the preparation
of a new annotated edition. To get such enthusiasm and stimulate such
action you must work upon a body of men selected and brought together for
this very purpose.
Besides this, we must draw a distinction between natural and artificial
groups. The group brought together by natural causes and not by man's
contriving is generally lower in the scale of civilization when it acts
collectively than any one of its components. This is the case with a mob,
a tribe, even a municipal group. But an artificial or selected group,
where the grouping is for a purpose and has been specially effected with
that end in view may act more intelligently, and be, so far as its special
activities are concerned, more advanced in the scale of progress than its
components as individuals. There is the same difference as between a man's
hand and a delicate tool. The former is the result of physical evolution
only; the latter of evolution into which the brain of man has entered as a
factor. The tool is not as good for "all round" use as the hand; but to
accomplish its particular object it is immeasurably superior.
If, then, we are to accomplish anything by taking advantage of the very
peculiar crowd or group psychology--owing to which a collected body of men
may feel as a group and act as a group, differently from the way in which
any one of its components would feel or act--we must see that our group is
properly selected and constituted. This does not mean that we are to go
about and choose individuals, one by one, by the exercise of personal
judgment. Such a method is generally inferior and unnecessary. If we
desire to separate the fine from the coarse grains in a sand-pile we do
not set to work with a microscope to measure them, grain by grain; we use
a sieve. The sieve will not do to separate iron filings from copper
filings of exactly the same size, but here a magnet will do the business.
And so separation or selection can almost always be accomplished by
choosing an agency adapted to the conditions; and such agencies often act
automatically without the intervention of the human will. In a voluntary
association formed to accomplish a definite purpose we have a
self-selected group. Such a body may be freely open to the public, as all
our library clubs and associations practically are; yet it is still
selective, for no one would care to join it who is not in some way
interested in its objects. On the other hand, the qualifications for
membership may be numerous and rigid, in which case the selection is more
limited. The ideal of efficiency in an association is probably reached
when the body is formed for a single definite purpose and the terms of
admission are so arranged that each of its members is eager above all
things to achieve its end and is specially competent to work for it, the
purpose of the grouping being merely to attain the object more surely,
thoroughly and rapidly. A good example is a thoroughly trained military
organization, all of whose members are enthusiastic in the cause for which
the body is fighting--a band of patriots, we will say--or perhaps a band
of brigands, for what we have been saying applies to evil as well as to
good associations. The most efficient of such bodies may be very
temporary, as when three persons, meeting by chance, unite to help each
other over a wall that none of them could scale by himself, and, having
reached the other side, separate again. The more clearly cut and definite
the purpose the less the necessity of retaining the association after its
accomplishment. The more efficient the association the sooner its aims are
accomplished and the sooner it is disbanded. Such groups or bodies, by
their very nature are affairs of small detail and not of large and
comprehensive purpose. As they broaden out into catholicity they
necessarily lose in efficiency. And even when they are accomplishing their
aims satisfactorily the very largeness of those aims, the absence of sharp
outline and clear definition, frequently gives rise to complaint. I know
of clubs and associations that are doing an immense amount of good, in
some cases altering for the better the whole intellectual or moral tone of
a community, but that are the objects of criticism because they do not act
in matters of detail.
"Why don't they do something?" is the constant cry. And "doing something,"
as you may presently discover, is carrying on some small definite,
relatively unimportant activity that is capable of clear description and
easily fixes the attention, while the greater services, to the public and
to the individual, of the association's quiet influences pass unnoticed.
The church that has driven out of business one corner-saloon gets more
praise than the one that has made better men and women of a whole
generation in one neighborhood; the police force that catches one
sensational murderer is more applauded than the one that has made life and
property safe for years in its community by quiet, firm pressure.
There is no reason of course, why the broader and the more definite
activities may not be united, to some degree, in one organization. Either
smaller groups with related aims may federate for the larger purpose, or
the larger may itself be the primary group, and may subdivide into
sections each with its specified object. Both these plans or a combination
of the two may be seen in many of our large organizations, and it is this
combination that seems finally to have been selected as the proper form of
union for the libraries and the librarians of the United States. We have a
large organization which, as it has grown more and more unwieldy, has been
subdivided into smaller specialized sections without losing its continuity
for its broader and perhaps vaguer work. At the same time, specialized
bodies with related aims have been partially or wholly absorbed, until, by
processes partly of subdivision and partly of accretion, we have a body
capable of dealing alike with the general and the special problems of
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