Part 3 (1/2)
THE LIBRARY--PLEASURE AND PROFIT
We cannot remind ourselves too frequently that a fundamental purpose of good books, and so of the library which possesses them, is to give pleasure, and that the library ought to be more closely and peculiarly a.s.sociated with pleasure than any other inst.i.tution supported by the public.
Life for most of us is sufficiently dull and colorless. The workday aspect of the world is always with us and oppresses us. For the average man and woman, whose education has been limited, whose imagination has lacked all wider opportunity for cultivation, the easiest escape from the cares of daily life, from the depressing monotony of daily routine, will be through the avenue opened by the story, the people's road out of a care-filled life, ever since the days of ”Arabian Nights.” Such readers as these desire fiction and ought to have it. If their imagination can be cultivated to the point of reaching similar freedom from care through poetry, through the drama, or through any of the higher forms of literature, so much the better. The library's message is to men and women cramped by toil and narrowed by routine, ever seeking some way out of this troublesome world into that larger realm which is more truly ours because it is our creation and that of our fellows. This wider world, in its friendliness and homelikeness, the library must represent.
The library is where the readers are introduced to the friends.h.i.+p of authors and their books. There they are at home and there we too may be at home. Old and young, rich and poor, wise and simple, men and women and children, there we may meet new friends on kindly and familiar terms and widen our thoughts as we learn of their wisdom and their wit. Still better, there we may renew our acquaintance with old friends and feel the contracted horizon of our lives again enlarge as we meet them once more. New friends and old, they all greet us with an a.s.sured welcome and yield to us the best which they can give, or we receive. We come to them not to learn lessons but to be with them for a little while and to live with them that larger and truer life which their presence creates for us.
Thus the library performs its high and n.o.ble duty of helping men to live, ”not by bread alone, but by every word of G.o.d,” who, through good books, has been speaking to the generations of men not only for their instruction but even more for their delight.
E. A. BIRGE.
VALUE OF FREE LIBRARIES
The best proof of the value of public libraries lies in the cordial support given them by all the people, when they are managed on broad, sensible lines. Such inst.i.tutions contribute to the fund of wholesome recreation that sweetens life and to the wider knowledge that broadens it. They give ambition, knowledge and inspiration to boys and girls from sordid homes, and win them from various forms of dissipation. They form a central home where citizens of all creeds and conditions find a common ground of useful endeavor.
Libraries are needed to furnish the pupils of our schools the incentive and the opportunity for wider study; to teach them ”the art and science of reading for a purpose,” to give to boys and girls with a hidden talent the chance to discover and develop it; to give to mechanics and artisans a chance to know what their ambitious fellows are doing; to give men and women, weary and worn from treading a narrow round, excursions in fresh and delightful fields; to give to clubs for study and recreation, material for better work, and, last but not least, to give wholesome employment to all cla.s.ses for those idle hours that wreck more lives than any other cause.
F. A. HUTCHINS.
”Even now many wise men are agreed that the love of books, as mere things of sentiment, and the reading of good books, as mere habit, are incomparably better results of schooling than any of the definite knowledge which the best of teachers can store into pupils' minds.
Teaching how to read is of less importance in the intelligence of a generation than the teaching what to read.”
THE BOOKLESS MAN
The bookless man does not understand his own loss. He does not know the leanness in which his mind is kept by want of the food which he rejects.
He does not know what starving of imagination and of thought he has inflicted upon himself. He has suffered his interest in the things which make up G.o.d's knowable universe to shrink until it reaches no farther than his eyes can see and his ears can hear. The books which he scorns are the telescopes and reflectors and reverberators of our intellectual life, holding in themselves a hundred magical powers for the overcoming of s.p.a.ce and time, and for giving the range of knowledge which belongs to a really cultivated mind. There is no equal subst.i.tute for them.
There is nothing else which will so break for us the poor hobble of everyday sights and sounds and habits and tasks, by which our thinking and feeling are naturally tethered to a little worn round.
J. N. LARNED.
THE LIBRARY'S EDUCATIONAL MISSION
To the great ma.s.s of boys and girls the school can barely give the tools with which to get an education before they are forced to begin their life work as breadwinners. Few are optimistic enough to hope that we can change this condition very rapidly. The great problem of the day is, therefore, to carry on the education after the elementary steps have been taken in the free public schools. There are numerous agencies at work in this direction--reading rooms, reference and lending libraries, museums, summer, vacation and night schools, correspondence and other forms of extension teaching; but by far the greatest agent is good reading. An educational system which contents itself with teaching to read and then fails to see that the best reading is provided, when undesirable reading is so cheap and plentiful as to be a constant menace to the public good, is as inconsistent and absurd as to teach our children the expert use of the knife, fork and spoon, and then provide them with no food. The most important movement before the professional educators to-day, is the broadening going on so rapidly in their duties to their profession and to the public. Too many have thought of their work as limited to schools for the young during a short period of tuition. The true conception is that we should be responsible for higher as well as elementary education, for adults as well as for children, for educational work in the homes as well as in the schoolhouses, and during life as well as for a limited course. In a nutsh.e.l.l, the motto of the extended work should be ”higher education for adults, at home, during life.”
MELVIL DEWEY.
THE FREEDOM OF BOOKS
The free town library is wholly a product of the last half century. It is the crowning creature of democracy for its own higher culture. There is nothing conceivable to surpa.s.s it as an agency in popular education.
Schools, colleges, lectures, cla.s.ses, clubs and societies, scientific and literary, are tributaries to it--primaries, feeders. It takes up the work of all of them to utilize it, to carry it on, and make more of it.
Future time will perfect it, and will perfect the inst.i.tutions out of which and over which it has grown; but it is not possible for the future to bring any new gift of enlightenment to men that will be greater, in kind, than the free diffusion of thought and knowledge as stored in the better literature of the world.
The true literature that we garner in our libraries is the deathless thought, the immortal truth, the imperishable quickenings and revelations which genius--the rare gift to now and then one of the human race--has been frugally, steadily planting in the fertile soil of written speech, from the generations of the hymn writers of the Euphrates and the Indus to the generations now alive. There is nothing save the air we breathe that we have common rights in so sacred and so clear, and there is no other public treasure which so reasonably demands to be kept and cared for and distributed for common enjoyment at common cost.