Arthur E. Bostwick

“ You are changing every instant and the reality about you is the change, not what you see with the eye or photograph with the camera—that is merely a stage through which you pass and in which you do not stay—not for the thousand millionth part of the smallest recognizable instant. So our current American life and thought is not something that stands still long enough for us to describe it. ”

“ He lives because he took his wares to his audience. And without its public, as we have already said, the public library, too, would soon pass into oblivion. It must look to the public for the breath of life, for the very blood in its veins, for its bone and sinew. What, then, is the part that the community may play in increasing the efficiency of a public institution like the public library? Such an institution is, first of all, a medium through which the community does something for itself. The community employs and supports it, and at the same time is served by it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we are ever to govern our cities properly, hold the balance evenly betwixt capital and labor, develop our great natural resources without undue generosity on the one hand or parsimony on the other—solve the thousand and one problems that rise to confront us on every hand—we shall never accomplish these things by struggling singly—one man at a time or even one State at a time, but by concerted, united effort, the perfect union of which our flag is a symbol, and which we need to-day even more than we did in 1776 or 1861. ”

“ Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that the hope for the future efficiency of all our public institutions, including the library, lies in the success of democracy, and that depends on the existence and improvement of the conditions in whose absence democracy necessarily fails. Foremost among these is the homogeneity of the population. The people among whom democracy succeeds must have similar standards, ideas, aims and abilities. Democracy may exist in a pack of wolves, but not in a group that is half wolves and half men. Either the wolves will kill the men or the men the wolves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Should we not be proud that we are of the blood of men who withstood the self-styled rulers of the world and won their freedom and their right to shape their own personal and civic development?
I should like to see a book tracing the history and development of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon American line of ancestry, taking it from the forests of Northern Germany across to Britain, through the Norman conquest and down the stream of subsequent English history across seas to America—through savage wars and Revolution, perhaps across the Alleghenies, to settle finally in the great West. ”

“ If we do not love the Grand Canyon and the Northern Rockies, the wild Sierras and the more peaceful beauties of the Alleghenies or the Adirondacks, simply because leaving these all unseen we prefer the lakes and mountains of foreign lands, we are like a man who should desert his own children, whom he had never seen, to pass his time at a moving-picture show, because he believed that he saw there faces and forms more fair than those of his own little ones. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Did you ever see a chemistry that gave, or tried to give, an idea of the world of chemical knowledge that environs its board cover? One has to become a Newton before he feels, with that sage, like a child, playing on the sands, with the great, unexplored ocean of knowledge stretching out before him. Most students are rather like ducks in a barn-yard puddle, quite sure that they are familiar with the whole world and serene in that knowledge. ”

“ Here, of course, is where we make connection with the moving picture, whose fascinating realism and freedom from the taint of the footlights have perhaps been sufficiently insisted upon in what has been already said. In the moving picture, with the possibility of realistic backgrounds such as no skill, no money, no opportunity could build up on the ordinary stage—distant prospects, marvels of architecture, waving trees and moving animals—comes the ability of passing from one environment to another, on the other side of the globe perhaps, in the twinkling of an eye. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is pleasant, perhaps, to have plenty of servants to wait upon one, but surely health, physical, mental and moral, waits on him who does most things for himself. I once heard Lincoln Steffens say: “What we want is not ‘Good Government’; it is Self-Government.” But is it not possible to get the advantage of government by a few, with its possibilities of continuous policy and its freedom from “crowd-psychology,” with its skillful utilization of expert knowledge, while admitting the public to full knowledge of what is going on, and full ultimate control of it? ”

“ 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! ”

“ More of this unfortunate and heart-breaking, interest-killing work than I like to think of goes on in school. Not necessarily; for the name of those is legion who have had their eyes opened to the beauties of literature by good teachers. This makes it all the more maddening when we think how many poor teachers, or good teachers with mistaken methods, or indifferent teachers, have succeeded in associating with books in the minds of their pupils simply burdensome tasks—the gloom and heaviness of life rather than its joy and lightness. ”

“ If one loves coffee or alcohol, or even candy, so dearly that one can not give it up, it is time to stop using it altogether. If a reader is so fond of an exciting story that he can not lay it aside, so that he sits up late at night reading it, or if he can not drop it from his mind when he does lay it aside, but goes on thinking about the deadly combat between the hero and Lord William Fitz Grouchy when he ought to be studying his lessons or attending to his business, it is time to cut out fiction altogether. ”

“ And yet we have done so radical a thing as to change absolutely the method of electing senators of the United States; and we did it as easily and quietly as buying a hat—vastly more easily than changing a cook. The only obstacle to changing our Constitution, no matter how radically and fundamentally, is the opposition of the people themselves. As soon as they want the change, it comes quickly and simply. Changes like these are not un-American if the American people like them well enough to make them. ”

“ To go back to our old illustration and consider for a moment not the book but the mind, the personality whose ideas it records, such association with books represents association with one’s fellowmen in society—at a reception, in school or college, at a club. Some we pass by with a nod, with some we exchange a word; sometimes there is a warm handgrasp; sometimes a long conversation. No matter what the mental contact may be, it has its effects—we are continually gaining knowledge, making new friends, receiving fresh inspiration. ”

“ And it is later that the public library does its best work. Supported by the public it has no impulse and no desire to please anyone else. No suspicion of outside control hangs over it. It receives gifts; but they are gifts to the public, held by the public, not by outsiders. It is tax-supported, and the public pays cost price for what it gets—no more and no less. The community has the power of abolishing the whole system in the twinkling of an eye. The library’s power in an American municipality lies in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its position by love. ”

“ But if we can make it an unusual thing for a librarian not to be a member of the American Library Association; if wherever one goes he meets our members and recognizes what they stand for, then, it seems to me, public opinion of librarians and librarianship is sure to rise. Our two savages, who band together for a few moments to lift a log, become by that act of association marked men among their fellows; the mere fact that they have intelligence enough to work together for any purpose raises them above the general level. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But in an American city, especially where we have enough money to let our architects do their utmost, we find streets where France, England, Italy, Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to his nerve-specialist. It seems all right to us, and it is all right from the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism. And our other art—painting, sculpture, music—it is all similarly mixed. ”

“ We are almost forced to conclude that they do not care whether their volumes are read or not. In only one class of books, as a rule, do the writers endeavor to interest the reader first and foremost; you all know that I refer to fiction. What is the result? The writers of fiction are the ones read by the public. More fiction is read, as you very well know, than all the other classes of literature put together. The library that is able to show a fiction percentage of 60, points to it with pride, while there are plenty with percentages between 70 and 80. ”

“ And anything that tends to lift our interest from the individual to the historical plane—to make us cease from congratulating ourselves personally on some connection with the good and great and substitute a feeling of group pride shared in common by some body to which we all belong, is acting toward this desirable end. The body may be a family; it may be the community or the state; it may be as broad as humanity itself, for we may all be proud of the world’s greatest. ”

“ One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisition of information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be the relationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may be made in the future. According to this idea, if a woman can once get into her head that the Medici were a family and not “a race of people,” it matters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are worth reading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she has ever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But to say that the movies allow no scope for the imagination is absurd. As I said at the outset, the movie play is just a play seen through the medium of a moving picture. It is like seeing a drama near enough to note the slightest play of feature and at the same time so far away that the actors can not be heard—somewhat like seeing a distant play through a fine telescope. ”

“ The public library in America has blossomed out into a different thing, a wider thing, a combination of more different kinds of things, than in any other part of the world. Foreign librarians and foreign library users look at us askance. They wonder at the things we are trying to combine under the activities of one public institution; they shudder at our extravagance. They wonder that our tax-payers do not rebel when they are compelled to foot the bills for what we do. ”