Part 9 (1/2)
This address was delivered at the inauguration of the Free Public Library, Madison, Wis., by Prof. James D. Butler.
James Davie Butler was born in Rutland, Vt., March 15, 1815, and was graduated at Middlebury College, Vt., in 1836. He entered the Congregational ministry, and held the chairs of ancient languages in Wabash College, 1854-58 and the University of Wisconsin, 1858-67, after which he devoted himself to lecturing and writing until his death in Madison in 1905.
My subject is ”Libraries as Leaven,” or the relation of libraries to the increased diffusion of knowledge.
What is a Library? It is the knowledge of all brought within the reach of each one. It is an expanded encyclopaedia, or the books which are, or ought to be, consulted in compiling a perfect encyclopaedia.
Human knowledge--and hence the books in which it is treasured up--is divided by some authors into forty departments. I have their names here all written down--but I dare not read them. You would give no more quarter to such a catalogue than the lover gave to the mercantile inventory of his sweetheart's charms, when itemized as ”two lips indifferent red,” ”two gray eyes with lids to them,” and so on.
But all these forty cla.s.ses of knowledge ought to be represented in a library, and the more largely the better. They should also mingle there in due proportion, ”parts into parts reciprocally shot, and all so forming a harmonious whole.” ”If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing?”
I once lived in a town of a thousand families, where, through a legacy, one copy of some single author was annually presented to each family.
But, with the same money, a thousand different works might have been every year purchased, and all kept accessible by all the families. The result would have been a feast as appetizing to all palates as the miraculous manna which the rabbins tell us tasted to each Jew like that particular dainty which he loved best.
It is no objection to a library that no man will ever read it through.
No man will read through his dictionary, and time is not long enough for a man to read all the words in the daily _Tribune_. Nor will any customer exhaust a store. Yet he demands an a.s.sortment from which to select the little that he needs. In every library most authors, bound up in congenial calf, sleep soundly in their own sheets. Yet the dust of dead men's bones, at the touch of genius, comes forth in a new life. How much that is best in Macaulay and in Buckle is extracted from bibliothecal rubbish--or reading which had never been read. Hence even Samson could not say to the jaw-bone of an a.s.s: ”I have no need of you.”
The wise thank G.o.d for fools. They get their living out of them, and mostly out of the greatest fools. In truth, no library is large enough.
Guizot and Michelet complain of inability to consult certain books, even in that Parisian library, where books are as plenty as water in the deluge, and the shelves would reach from here to Milwaukee.
A library should be a cosmos; but it is a chaos till arrangement, catalogues and librarians bring us at once the volume we desire, and which, without them, would be as hard to fish up as the Atlantic cable lost in mid-ocean.
”Thus warlike arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order and disposed with grace: Not thus alone the curious eye to please, But to be _found_, when need requires, with ease.”
In some libraries, however, books are arranged on a system which seems borrowed from Spanish hospitals, where patients are arranged according to religious creeds, rather than bodily complaints. Every library has more volumes than I can master; but no library though it be the conflux of all civilizations, has so many volumes as I may need to consult.
Chief Justice Story used to a.s.sert that no American could test the accuracy of Gibbon without crossing the Atlantic. Such an a.s.sertion would now, perhaps, be extravagant, yet many of Gibbon's references are still hard to trace in America. One instance may be worth notice. Our approaching national centenary leads us to curiosity in reference to the secular feasts of the Romans. In Gibbon's account of the most famous among them, a thousand years from the founding of Rome, the main authority quoted is Zosimus. But the history of Zosimus you will seek in vain throughout Madison libraries. You will not find his name in the public collections of Chicago, or Cincinnati, or St. Louis, or San Francisco. It is unlikely that any single copy of Zosimus has yet penetrated west of our Atlantic slope.
But how dare I thus speak about Zosimus? How is it possible for me to know whether his history can, or cannot, be discovered, either on the Pacific sh.o.r.e, or in the Mississippi valley? I know it, thanks to the Library of Our Historical Society, and specifically to its goodly array of bibliothecal catalogues.
Why will not our Centenary Women's Club buy our Free Library a Zosimus?
Free libraries, especially those maintained by public taxation, were scarcely known before the last half of the nineteenth century. If in an antiquarian mood, I could indeed bring forth curious details concerning half a hundred in continental Europe, some of them running back several centuries, but I forbear. The earliest British library law, similar to ours in Wisconsin, dates from 1850. The earliest in Ma.s.sachusetts--and I suppose in America--was approved May 24, 1851. The first library opened in consequence of this law was in New Bedford, March 3, 1853. The grandest triumph under the Ma.s.sachusetts law is in Boston. The free library there stands to-day surpa.s.sed in volumes by only three or four American libraries--say the Astor, Congress, and Harvard--while in arrangement, architecture, and equipment it is p.r.o.nounced by the most enlightened foreigners unsurpa.s.sed by any library in the world.
Our legislature in 1872 empowered the mayors and councils in towns and cities to lay an annual tax of one mill on a dollar of the a.s.sessed valuation, for establis.h.i.+ng and maintaining free libraries. This law will bear good fruit. Yet it is a step backward from the act of 1859.
That act created a library fund by setting apart for that purpose one-tenth of the school-fund income, and imposing a tax of one-tenth of a mill on all property. The sum of $88,784.78 had been thus acc.u.mulated when the war of 1861 broke out,--and the money was used for military purposes. It ought to be refunded by the State, or United States, and expended for its original object. The great superiority of the law of 1859 lies in its extending to rural districts,--and so leaving no hamlet unvisited--while the maxim of the present law is, ”Coals to Newcastle, owls to Athens, apples to Alcinous. He that hath--to him shall be given.” It gives a library to Madison, where 40,000 volumes were already within reach, but nothing at all to five and twenty other places in Dane County, whose need of books is ten times greater. But libraries bring forth after their kind, and free libraries, we may hope, will become co-extensive with free schools.
Madison, to-day, in opening to all her sons and daughters a Free Library, has outstripped every other munic.i.p.ality in the State. It is a n.o.ble preeminence, and will do her honor to the end of the world.
The Madison Free Library, it may be reasonably hoped, will approximate to the bibliothecal ideal. It starts with an inheritance of 3,308 volumes, acc.u.mulated during a score of years by the Madison Inst.i.tute.
Its revenue is considerable, and it will grow in even pace with the growth of the city. Nothing but Adam and Minerva was ever born of full stature. The tax now a.s.sessed for it would impoverish no man till after the lapse of thrice three thousand years. It was limited to less than a third of what the law allows because we make the entering edge of a wedge thin, and would learn wisdom from Satan who never makes his temptations so bad at the beginning as at the end. Is is only the first step that costs. The Free Library will be ready for windfalls, and so surely as history repeats itself, they will pour cornucopias into its lap. Of the million volumes in the British Museum, two out of every five were gifts. No wonder. Book-gatherers abhor the breaking up of their collections as we do the dissolution of the Union, or as abolitionists did the snapping of family ties by slave-traders. Lest what they have joined together shall be put asunder, they rejoice to lay up their treasures in an inst.i.tution which shall never die. Accordingly, in tracing the origin of one hundred and eighty libraries in continental Europe, it has been discovered that all of them, except sixteen, were presented to the munic.i.p.alities by book-lovers.
Experience this side the Atlantic is thus far equally encouraging. I will notice a single specimen. The Boston Free Library is mainly contributed by individuals. One thousand volumes were given by Everett; 2,300 by Bowditch; 11,360 by Theodore Parker; 26,000 by Joshua Bates; 11,899 by the Old South Church, and those of greater rarity than any other equal number of volumes. Then Ticknor and Prescott bestowed the best Spanish library ever gathered by private men, and Wheelwright one scarcely inferior, relating to South America. Of pecuniary benefactions, I will only mention $10,000 from Lawrence, $30,000 from Phillips, and $50,000 from Bates. But legacies to the Free Library have become so common that we may confidently expect that, if any Bostonian shall die and bequeath it nothing, the courts will decide the neglect of the Library to be conclusive proof of insanity, and so will nullify his will! On the whole, we cannot be too sanguine concerning the prospective progress of our book-feast for the million.
But a library, however perfect, and though freely open to all the world, may be a light s.h.i.+ning in a darkness which comprehendeth it not. Many years ago, I was a student in such a library at Rome. It was larger than any one in America at that time, and offered the best of all its stores daily to everybody, and that without charge. Yet it was well-nigh a solitude. The reason was obvious. My walk thither was through a gauntlet of beggar-boys, and I once took with me an Italian primer, and cried out that I would give something to any boy who could read. I held it up before nineteen in succession, but no one could spell out a line. They had eschewed not only writing as tempting to forgery, but reading also as a black art. Had they been giants they could,--like the barbarians who sacked Rome,--ruin, but not relish, the nectared sweets of books. To them the collective wisdom of the world was as suns.h.i.+ne to the blind, or as smoke in the nursery riddle,--”roomful, houseful, can't catch a handful!”
”Or like gospel pearls which pigs neglect When pigs have that opportunity.”
But in regard to _our_ Free Library, I have better hopes, and beg your leave to show _what use_, in my judgment, will be made of it. It will be resorted to for _amus.e.m.e.nt_. Some will flit through it in the spirit of the Viennese, who turn their central cathedral into a thoroughfare on promenades and business walks. But such visitors will learn something in glancing at the backs of books. Books, as well as men, have a physiognomy. Here, as elsewhere, the admirers of Shakespeare will take out his plays, return them with the leaves uncut, and then insist that booksellers be instructed if Mr. Shakespeare writes any new book, to forward it without further orders. Many will have no eyes except for the volumes of _fiction_, and sometimes will rather run through these than read them. Novels are a sort of cake, which, if eaten alone, is p.r.o.ne to make mental dyspeptics. Yet most novel-readers will gain some profit from our library. Some of them will here acquire a facility in reading which for lack of practice has. .h.i.therto been unknown to them. No one has really learned to read, until he has read to learn. Their interest in stories will beguile the toil of becoming _ready_ readers, and their range of reading will naturally widen. But if it does not, they may learn much. Every good fiction is _true_, if not to particular fact yet to general principles, to natural scenery, to human nature, to the ways of human life, manners, customs, the very age and body of the time. Even Tom Moore declares that ”his chief work of fiction is founded on a long and labourious collection of facts.” Again, when worn out by work, when care-crazed, and nerves are unstrung, who has not found in fiction--the balm of hurt minds--a recreation, a city of refuge, a restorative.