Part 8 (2/2)
The demonstration is at hand. Let it be pressed upon our fellow citizens, and let them be shown the practical operation of the project you have in hand and the good it has accomplished, and the further good of which it is capable through their increased liberality, and it will be strange if they fail to respond generously to your appeal to put the city of New York in the front rank of the cities which have recognized the usefulness of the free circulating libraries.
THE WADSWORTH ATHENAEUM
ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF ITS LIBRARY IN HARTFORD, CONN., JAN. 2, 1893.
These addresses, by Charles Dudley Warner and Charles H.
Clark, are reprinted from brief abstracts given in _The Library Journal_ of January, 1893.
Charles Dudley Warner was born in Plainfield, Ma.s.s., Sept.
12, 1829 and graduated at Hamilton College in 1851. He practised law in Chicago in 1856-60 and in 1861 became managing editor of the Hartford, Conn., _Press_. In 1867 on its consolidation with the _Courant_, he became co-editor.
He was made a.s.sociate editor of _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884, and died at Hartford, Oct. 20, 1900. He was widely popular as an essayist, first gaining favorable notice by his ”My Summer in a Garden.”
This building and its contents are contributory to the excellence and enjoyment of life exactly as Bushnall Park is--not merely that it is a place of rest and recreation, but it is a training in beauty, in the appreciation of n.o.bleness, and in the public and private refinement.
Culture is a plant of rather slow growth. I suppose there never was such a change wrought, almost instantaneously, in a people as was wrought in the American people by the opening and exhibition of the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876. Its effect was at once apparent everywhere. But knowledge precedes culture, culture being, after all, but another name for educational taste.
Now this inst.i.tution is simply a means for the culture of the city of Hartford, in all ways, because literature and art--not taken externally, but absorbed as a part of our lives, not only of knowledge, but of experience--are the things that make life worth living.
No one can speak too highly of the offices of a great library. It was one of our great essayists, you remember, who said that the monastery--speaking of it with reference to its books--was the ark that floated down over the tempest and darkness of the middle ages, in order to carry cla.s.sic learning to the fifteenth century. They were repositories of learning. That is the old idea. And for a long time--almost to our day--that was the notion of the library. It was a place to put something away. It was not even like a market for the sale of provisions or eggs; indeed, if they were eggs the librarians thought it their duty to sit on them, with the idea that they might hatch out other books. That was a n.o.ble thing to do. But much better than that is to scatter these books abroad among the people, so that we shall not have reproduction--an egg for an egg--but that these books will so revivify the life that we shall have books new, that express the actual conditions and that appeal to the human life as it is. This is the modern idea of the library. This great collection, which is not to be secluded, is to be carried and even forced upon the people, so that it shall enter into and become a part of their daily lives.
You remember, perhaps, what Milton says about the books, in that n.o.blest of n.o.ble defences of unlicensed printing, that ”they are not dead things. As good almost,” he says, ”kill a man as you kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable being, made in G.o.d's image.
Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of G.o.d as it were, in the eye. Many a man,” he goes on to say, ”lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so that if we slay a good book we would slay immortality rather than a life.”
Charles Hopkins Clark, who immediately followed Mr. Warner, was at this time editor in chief of _The Hartford Courant_, of which Mr. Warner was co-editor. Mr. Clark was born in Hartford April 1, 1848, graduated at Yale, and joined the _Courant_ staff in 1871, becoming editor in 1890.
One of the earliest sins of my youth, or rather one of the earliest that is burnt into my memory, was committed in the library of what was then the Young Men's Inst.i.tute. I spoke out loud! The rebuke that I received sent me down the stairs overwhelmed with a sense of the enormity of my crime, yet more than sustained by joy to think that I had escaped the utter annihilation with which my reprimand was freighted. And I can say that the awe with which I used to enter that chamber of silence, and the fear with which I regarded the librarian were the common property of all the young people of that somewhat remote period. But long since we found out that the old librarian was one of the gentlest and most inoffensive men, and that we had misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood us.
But I have no such gloomy recollection, nor to be honest, have I any recollection at all of the Wadsworth Athenaeum gallery, because, like everybody else who then lived in Hartford, I never went in there. The door was often open and the only sentinel on guard had no more formidable weapon than a pair of knitting-needles. But no one ever crossed that threshold. The simple legend, traced on a placard at the door, ”Admission Ten Cents,” did the business, or rather, to be more elegant as well as accurate, prevented any business being done. The people who came up the stone steps read the notice and turned off to the left to the library or to the right to the Historical Society, where entrance was free. I say free, but freedom must have its limits if we are to have safety, so the tin sign on the outside of the door gave notice to the always unwelcome boy that he could not go in until he reached the mature age of twelve years. That was one of the things that I wanted to grow to full manhood for.
And I well remember my first visit there. As I walked slowly up the stairs I wondered what venerable monument of patriotic achievement, what new inspiration to love for our n.o.ble State whose history is such a priceless treasure, what vision of heroic self-sacrifice in her behalf would first burst upon my eager eyes when I should look around the hall.
I looked and lo! there in a gla.s.s jar stood the chaste but familiar figure of Charles Hosmer's night-blooming cereus--the modest pioneer of the canned-fruit industry in this community.
I have made this brief review in order to suggest to you the state of innocuous desuetude in which for more or less time the various miscalled interests in this building had been lying for lack of any interest at all. The library had a limited and dwindling clientage. The Athenaeum was deserted. The Historical Society, with no funds and few friends, was exhibiting a collection of animal, vegetable, and mineral curiosities, while its real treasures of history and truth were by lock and key shut off from the very public for whom they were collected and preserved.
Look at that picture, then look at this which greets us here to day.
In these elegant and s.p.a.cious buildings the whole public of Hartford is welcome, without money and without price. The circulating library will furnish every home with books, and Miss Hewins, who has devoted her life to this town, is always ready to help the younger readers. The Library of Reference, monument alike to Mr. Watkinson's liberality and Dr.
Trumbull's rare judgment and life-long devoted service as a librarian, offers free to all students the authorities on every branch of knowledge. The Historical Society, with improved facilities, has been able to adopt a more liberal policy, and is widening its claim upon public interest, and so increasing its usefulness, and, thanks largely to the women of Hartford, the Art Gallery and Art School are ready to spread their refining and wholesome influence all through this community.
LIBRARIES AS LEAVEN
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