The Library and Society Part 9

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 establishing 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 shining 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 sunshine 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.

"Cups that cheer but not inebriate?"

In this way our free library will be a new pleasure, and the founder of it deserves the reward offered by the Sicilian tyrant, for such an invention. Work was never so monotonous as now; accordingly, play ought to be more than ever amusing. The Kilkenny cats, who devoured each other all but the tails, left one orphan kitten which began to eat up itself, but catching sight of a mouse was diverted from suicide. There is among us more than one disconsolate kitten now destroying himself, who will in our free feast of fiction espy a mouse which will reconcile him to life, and save him from himself. The rationale of this solace is indicated after a forcible, though rather a homely fashion, in the Chinese saying: "A dog chasing game does not mind the fleas which he _barks_ at while he lies in his kennel." "The labour we delight in physics pain."

Again, in all great works of fiction the purpose is, while not o'erstepping the modesty of nature, to show virtue her own feature, and scorn her own image. Who can count the admirers of Scott and d.i.c.kens that have learned from their portraitures moral lessons so well as never to forget them;--to loathe the mean and aspire to the n.o.ble;--to shun evil and cleave to good--in spite of temptations to one and from the other?

But, after all, our book-treasury will only now and then bestow its best gifts on those who resort to it merely for pleasure. To most visitors of this cla.s.s it must remain no more than a telescope to a child, something to play with rather than to look through. Accordingly, they no more exhaust the capacities of books than the Irish made full proof of potatoes while they cooked only the b.a.l.l.s and left the tubers to rot in the ground.

But the Free Library will be resorted to for _instruction_. Few will always hold the amusing b.u.t.ton so close to their eyes that it will hide the instructive sun. From the start it will be superior to every private collection in the city, and its superiority will increase. Accordingly, professional men will come thither to inform themselves either each in his own specialty, or sallying on excursions from their home fields.

Besides the time-honoured and traditional three professions, editors and teachers will be there, learning how to answer the hard questions of pupils and subscribers. Each of these professionals will more or less make known what he learns. The bibliothecal odor will be as plain upon them as a certain other odor is upon those who emerge from the smoking-car or saloon. "Dispensing native perfumes they whisper whence they stole those balmy spoils." But the bibliothecal leaven will leaven the community more _directly_.

G.o.d has set geniuses as great lights in the firmament to give light and delight as well on the earth. The circuit of such suns is unto the ends of the heaven, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. More and more pervasive is their influence, like the spring-time, which leaves no corner of the land untouched. In a library every man will recognize some supreme author transfiguring whatever he touches,--crystallizing into diamonds by wit, turning to gold with poetry, and glorifying as with tongues of angels by eloquence, and whom he hence worships as Scotchmen do Burns and as all the world does Shakespeare. Less and less do men entertain angels unawares, more and more are they ashamed to know the world's books only by name. n.o.body now asks concerning Paradise Lost, "What does it prove?"

Moreover, the Free Library will be patronized by the people in quest of answers to mult.i.tudinous questions. Newspapers, whether in its reading-room or out of it, will rouse in many directions a curiosity they cannot satisfy, and so will urge to the library. There is a story that an Englishman in a London library, after looking through an atlas, said to a friend, "Help me find _Umbrage_ on the map! I read in my gazette that the French have taken _Umbrage_. What a good-for-nothing minister is ours--to leave _Umbrage_ so poorly defended that the French could take it." That John Bull discovered in the library either _umbrage_, or what was better for him--his own ignorance and the way to remove it, "taking umbrage" against himself. His gazette probably brought the same earnest inquirer to the library for _history_ as well as for geography. A daily paper, which is the history of the world for one day, leads backward, as a stream carries our thoughts to its fountain. Whoever repairs to a library with one historical query will be likely to repeat his visit, since newspapers, in the light of history, will become more significant as the last chapter in a novel is more interesting to those who have read the previous chapters, and so often leads one back to them. Again, discussions are always arising, not merely in formal debates, but as we sit in the house and walk by the way. Some carry them on by a.s.sertions and counter-a.s.sertions--a strong will and a strong won't--equally positive and ignorant, discussing and sometimes leaving off the _dis_, till like Milton's devils they find no end, in wandering mazes lost. Too often "It comes to pa.s.s that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent tw.a.n.ged off, gives an opinion more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned it." Others back up their opinions by _wagers_, in spite of a lurking feeling that

"Bets are the blockhead's argument,-- The only logic he can vent, His minor and his major.--

'Tis to confess your head a worse Investigator than your purse, To reason with a wager."

But where standard books are at hand, investigation will often either take the place of disputation, or bring strife to a speedy end.

Let us hope those here seeking props for their arguments will never be those jealous lovers of books who cannot use them without using them up, or who spirit them away for themselves alone. Such abductors have sometimes infested the libraries in the Capitol. Their thefts can be justified only by that casuistry which holds stealing the relics of saints for a pious fraud. But in truth the more holy the saint, the more heinous the sacrilege of what Hood calls _Book_-aneering.

Moreover, every _lecture_ delivered in the city will send some investigators to the library, that they may confute, or confirm, or amplify its teachings. A lecture that pops will not be as surely _popular_ as formerly, if the library shall evince that what is true in it is not new, and that what is new is not true, or that the speaker draws on imaginations for facts and on facts for imaginations.

Every meeting of our Women's Centennial Club will start inquiries which cannot be answered without recourse to the library.

It is certain that books of _travel_ will here be largely consulted.

Some of us purpose to go abroad. Such will read beforehand in order to add a precious seeing to their eyes. They would dislike to have their experiences those of a lady who when asked what she saw in Rome answered "dirt," or of the London barber who at the coronation of Napoleon remembered nothing except that the Emperor was well shaved, or of the Bostonian fresh from the West who, when called on for his opinion of Madison, said it would be a pretty fair Ma.s.sachusetts village if it were not spoiled by so many fresh water ponds around it. Others among us have travelled already, and we shall be studious in the library that we may ascertain what we ought to have seen--but did not, or the meaning of what we did see, but which was Greek to us. The Shah of Persia noted in his journal that of all the fine things in Europe the finest to his mind was a show of wax work. His library would teach him better, and would not laugh at him, as we do. A Vermont friend of mine, after his trip to London, when asked whether he saw Westminster Abbey, confessed that he did not, but added that Westminster Abbey was out of town at the time of his visit. If he had free course in our library he would hardly excuse himself in that way again. Soon after crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, I heard a New York merchant, bound for California, remarking: "How much geography one learns in travelling. Here is Burlington. I always thought it in Illinois, but now I find it is in Missouri." Library-reading may by this time have added insight to his sight, and convicted him of the blunder which I suffered to pa.s.s uncorrected, though we chatted 100 miles together. There are others of us who, on hearing a traveller's tales, are curious to examine how far we, like the old prophet, should count the way-faring man a fool, and how far he uses his license to lie. Hence they will read that they may make up their minds whether all MARK TWAIN'S caricatures have the ring of truth.

A German table d'hote of twenty courses will surfeit a careless diner before it is half over, and yet fail to afford him either what he likes best or what he should like best. Hence it compels guests to a careful choice what they will partake of and what refuse of the blessing there is no room to receive in its fulness. A similar influence will be exerted by the free library where we fall into the embara.s.sment of riches. We shall be driven to select from its bill of fare, that is the catalogue, that fraction which we can enjoy most and which will profit us most.

"Taste after taste upheld by kindliest change."

Some persons, when they survey a library and perceive that they can never read the hundredth part of its volumes, will be attracted to those works which teach "what to read," or open a panoramic outlook on the diversified regions of the bookish world.

"Of all the best of man's best knowledges, The contents, indexes and t.i.tle-pages, Through all past, present, and succeeding ages."

Unless we thus liberalize our views we are likely to vegetate, like the rhubarb pie plant, under a barrel, and see the world only through its bunghole. Ignorant of bibliographical guides and hence at a loss how to estimate books, the steward of a British n.o.bleman sold as rubbish all volumes in the library which lacked _covers_. One of those thus disposed of, and bought by a pedlar for nine pence, proved to be the very earliest issue of the British press, snapped up by the British museum for 80, and could not now be bought for ten times that sum. In regard to the _intrinsic_ value of books blunders more egregious are daily made. Libraries were never so needful as now, for libraries and life never lay so close to one another as now. Our familiar sights lead to interest in recondite knowledge. Photography, gas, the locomotive, kerosene, yes, every match that lights it, provokes questions in chemistry, or philosophy, which not every library can answer. No one can gaze at the dome of our Capitol without naturally falling into architectural inquiries which draw him through a world of books that expose the nakedness of his ignorance, yet never put him to open shame.

But the truth is too palpable to dwell on that in our day life touches libraries at every point.

In all libraries there are readers whose emblem is dead fish who follow the stream, but thanks to various accidents, some of this cla.s.s, ceasing to be pa.s.sive recipients, begin to investigate as active seekers. They at once rise to a higher mental plane. The contrast between active seekers and pa.s.sive recipients is a.n.a.logous to that between the mountaineers and the maritime aborigines of California. The mountaineers lived on grizzly bears--food which it was impossible to seize without tasking their energies to the utmost. But tasking trains. The maritimes lived on salmon, which were so abundant and so tame that they could be caught by fishers who lay basking in the sun. But basking enervates.

Naturally enough no Indians are superior to the mountaineers who are active seekers, nor yet inferior to the maritimes, who are pa.s.sive recipients. What investigators seek they will not find at once; they may never find it. But they are sure to discover something better, so that they will say with LESSING, in the library at Wolfenb.u.t.tel, "Were G.o.d to hold truth in one hand and search in the other, and give me my choice, I would say: Give me seeking without finding, rather than finding without seeking!"

"All things that are, Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed."

Courtship once over, the novel ends.

In the library where LESSING was made librarian--not that he might serve the library, but that the library might serve him--I took in my hand with reverence the inkstand out of which he distilled the essence of a thousand books, and reformed German literature as radically as LUTHER had reformed German religion.