The Lost Art of Reading Part 12

The Seventh Interference: Libraries. Wanted: An Old-Fashioned Librarian

I

viz.

I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our town that old Mr. M----, our librarian--a gentle, furtive, silent man--a man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books--had been caught dancing one day with his wife.

"Which only goes to show," broke in The M. P., "what a man of fixed literary habits--mere book-habits--if he keeps on, is reduced to."

But as I was about to remark, for a good many weeks afterward--after the rumour was started--one kept seeing people (I was one of them) as they came into the library, looking shyly at Mr. M----, as if they were looking at him all over again. They looked at him as if they had really never quite noticed him before. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and bent over, with his fine-pointed pen and his labels, as usual, and his big leather-bound catalogue of the universe.

A few of us had had reason to suspect--at least we had had hopes--that the pedantry in Mr. M---- was somewhat superimposed, that he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the very thought of it, a sense of having acquired a secret possession in a librarian. The community at large, however, as it walked into its library, looked at its Acre of Books, and then looked at its librarian; felt cheated. It was shocked. The community had always been proud of its books, proud of its Book Worm. It had always paid a big salary to it.

And the Worm had turned.

I have only been back to the old town twice since the day I left it, as a boy--about this time. The first time I went he was there. I came across him in his big, splendid new library, his face like some live, but wrinkled old parchment, twinkling and human though--looking out from its Dust Heap. "It seems to me," I thought, as I stood in the doorway,--saw him edging around an alcove in The Syriac Department,--"that if one must have a great dreary heaped-up pile of books in a town--anyway--the spectacle of a man like this, flitting around in it, doting on them, is what one ought to have to go with it."

He always seemed to me a kind of responsive every-way-at-once little man, book-alive all through. One never missed it with him. He had the literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling in him.

The next time I was in town they said he had resigned. They said he lived in the little grey house around the corner from the great new glaring stone library. No one ever saw him except in one of his long, hesitating walks, or sometimes, perhaps, by the little study window, pouring himself over into a book there. It was there that I saw him myself that last morning--older and closer to the light turning leaves--the same still, swift eagerness about him.

I stepped into the library next door and saw the new librarian--an efficient person. He seemed to know what time it was while we stood and chatted together. That is the main impression one had of him--that he would always know what time it was. Put him anywhere. One felt it.

II

cf.

Our new librarian troubles me a good deal. I have not quite made out why. Perhaps it is because he has a kind of chipper air with the books.

I am always coming across him in the shelves, but I do not seem to get used to him. Of course I pull myself together, bow and say things, make it a point to a.s.sume he is literary, go through the form of not letting him know what I think as well as may be, but we do not get on.

And yet all the time down underneath I know perfectly well that there is no real reason why I should find fault with him. The only thing that seems to be the matter with him is that he keeps right on, every time I see him, making me try to.

I have had occasion to notice that, as a general rule, when I find myself finding fault with a man in this fashion--this vague, eager fashion--the gist of it is that I merely want him to be some one else.

But in this case--well, he is some one else. He is almost anybody else.

He might be a head salesman in a department store, or a hotel clerk, or a train dispatcher, or a broker, or a treasurer of something. There are thousands of things he might be--ought to be--except our librarian. He has an odd, displaced look behind the great desk. He looks as if he had gotten in by mistake and was trying to make the most of it. He has a business-like, worldly-minded, foreign air about him--a kind of off-hand, pert, familiar way with books. He does not know how to bend over--like a librarian--and when one comes on him in an alcove, the way one ought to come on a librarian, with a great folio on his knees, he is--well, there are those who think, that have seen it, that he is positively comic. I followed him around only the other day for fifteen or twenty minutes, from one alcove to another, and watched him taking down books. He does not even know how to take down a book. He takes all the books down alike--the same pleasant, dapper, capable manner, the same peek and clap for all of them. He always seems to have the same indefatigable unconsciousness about him, going up and down his long aisles, no more idea of what he is about or of what the books are about; everything about him seems disconnected with a library. I find I cannot get myself to notice him as a librarian or comrade, or book-mind. He does not seem to have noticed himself in this capacity--exactly. So far as I can get at his mind at all, he seems to have decided that his mind (any librarian's mind) is a kind of pneumatic-tube, or carrier system--apparently--for shoving immortals at people. Any higher or more thorough use for a mind, such as being a kind of spirit of the books for people, making a kind of spiritual connection with them down underneath, does not seem to have occurred to him.

Time was when librarians really had something to do with books. They looked it. One could almost tell a librarian on the street--tell him at sight, if he had been one long enough. One could feel a library in a man somehow. It struck in. Librarians were allowed to be persons. It was expected of them. They have not always been what so many of them are now--mere couplings, conveniences, connecting-rods, literary-beltings.

They were identified--wrought in with books. They could not be unmixed.

They ate books; and, like the little green caterpillars that eat green gra.s.s, the colour showed through. A sort of general brown, faded colour, a little undusted around the edges, was the proper colour for librarians.

It is true that people did not expect librarians to look quite human--at least on the outside, sometimes, and doubtless the whole matter was carried too far. But it does seem to me it is some comfort (if one has to have a librarian in a library) to have one that goes with the books--same colour, tone, feeling, spirit, and everything--the kind of librarian that slips in and out among books without being noticed there, one way or the other, like the overtone in a symphony.

III

et al.

But the trouble with our library is not merely the new librarian, who permeates, penetrates, and ramifies the whole library within and without, percolating efficiency into its farthest and loneliest alcoves.

Our new librarian has a corps of a.s.sistants. And even if you manage, by slipping around a little, to get over to where a book is, alone, and get settled down with it, there is always some one who is, has been, or will be looking over your shoulder.

I dare say it's a defect of temperament--this having one's shoulder looked over in libraries. Other people do not seem to be troubled much, and I suppose I ought to admit, while I am about it, that having one's shoulder looked over in a library does not in the least depend upon any one's actually looking over it. That is merely a matter of form. It is a little hard to express it. What one feels--at least in our library--is that one is in a kind of side-looking place. One feels a kind of literary detective system going silently on in and out all around one, a polite, absent-minded-looking watchfulness.

Now I am not for one moment flattering myself that I can make my fault-finding with our librarian's a.s.sistants amount to much--fill out a blank with it.

No one can feel more strongly than I do my failure to put my finger on the letter of our librarian's faults. I cannot even tell the difference between the faults and the virtues of our librarian's a.s.sistants. Either by doing the right thing with the wrong spirit, or the wrong thing with the right spirit they do their faults and virtues all up together. Their indefatigable un.o.btrusiveness, their kindly, faithful service I both dread and appreciate. I have tried my utmost to notice and emphasise every day the pleasant things about them, but I always get tangled up. I have started out to think with approval, for instance, of the hush,--the hush that clothes them as a garment,--but it has all ended in my merely wondering where they got it and what they thought they were doing with it. One would think that a hush--a hush of almost any kind--could hardly help--but I have said enough. I do not want to seem censorious, but if ever there was a visible, unctuous, tangible, actual thick silence, a silence that can be proved, if ever there was a silence that stood up and flourished and swung its hat, that silence is in our library. The way our librarian's a.s.sistants go tiptoeing and reverberating around the room--well--it's one of those things that follow a man always, follow his inmost being all his life. It gets in with the books--after a few years or so. One can feel the tiptoeing going on in a book--one of our library books--when one gets home with it. It is the spirit of the place. Everything that comes out of it is followed and tiptoed around by our librarian's a.s.sistants' silence. They are followed about by it themselves. The thick little blonde one, with the high yellow hair, lives in our ward. One feels a kind of hush r.i.m.m.i.n.g her around, when one meets her on the street.

Now I do not wish to claim that librarians' a.s.sistants can possibly be blamed, in so many words, either for this, or for any of the other things that seem to make them (in our library, at least) more prominent than the books. Everything in a library seems to depend upon something in it that cannot be put into words. It seems to be a kind of spirit. If the spirit is the wrong spirit, not all the librarians in the world, not even the books themselves can do anything about it.

Postscript. I do hope that no one will suppose from this chapter that I am finding fault or think I am finding fault with our a.s.sistant librarians. I am merely finding fault with them (may Heaven forgive them!) because I cannot. It doesn't seem to make very much difference--their doing certain things or not doing them. They either do them or they don't do them--whichever it is--with the same spirit. They are not really down in their hearts true to the books. One can hardly help feeling vaguely, persistently resentful over having them about presiding over the past. One never catches them--at least I never do--forgetting themselves. One never comes on one loving a book. They seem to be servants,--most of them,--book chambermaids. They do not care anything about a library as a library. They just seem to be going around remembering rules in it.

IV

etc.

The P. G. S. of M. as good as said the other day, when I had been trying as well as I could to express something of this kind, that the real trouble with the modern library was not with the modern library, but with me. He thought I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes around with me, that I was too sensitive. He seemed to think that I should learn to be callous in places of public resort.

I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal with. The only thing I could think of that was the matter with me in a library was that I had a pa.s.sion for books. I didn't like climbing over a barricade of catalogues to get to books. I hated to feel part.i.tioned off from them, to stand and watch rows of people marking things between me and books. I thought that things had come to a pretty pa.s.s, if a man could not so much as touch elbows with a poet nowadays--with Plato, for instance--without carrying a redoubt of terrible beautiful young ladies. I said I thought a great many other people felt the way I did. I admitted there were other sides to it, but there were times, I said, when it almost seemed to me that this spontaneous uprising in our country--this movement of the Book Lovers, for instance--was simply a struggle on the part of the people to get away from Mr. Carnegie's libraries. They are hemming literature and human nature in, on every side, or they are going to unless Mr. Carnegie can buy up occasional old-fashioned librarians--some other kind than are turned out in steel works--to put into them. Libraries are getting to be huge Separators. Books that have been put through libraries are separated from themselves. They are depersonalised--the human nature all taken off. And yet when one thinks of it, with nine people out of ten--the best people and the worst both--the sense of having a personal relation to a book, the sense of snuggling up with one's own little life to a book, is what books are for.

"To a man," I said, "to whom books are people, and the livest kind of people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his relations with the great, meddled with by strangers--pleasant enough strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He goes down town to a great unhomelike-looking building, and slides in at the door. He steps up to a wall, and asks permission to see John Milton.

He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that machinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews where a large audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels the great, heartless building gathering itself together, going after John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other he hears human beings' names being called out in s.p.a.ce, and one by one poor scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their names--most of them--step up before the audience. He sees a book being swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his own name echoing about among the Immortals, startles its way down to him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on some huge transcendental derrick belonging to the city of ----, is swung into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly--takes it home. If he can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes with him. In two weeks he takes him back. Then the derrick again."

The only kind of book that I ever feel close to, in the average library, is a book on war. Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded, or that would go off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found a book I could do it with yet. However I struggle to follow the train of thought in it, it's a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books.

"A library," I say to myself, "is a huge barbaric, mediaeval inst.i.tution, where behind stone and gla.s.s a man's dearest friends in the world, the familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends and relatives are allowed to come, but it only--" At this point a gong sounds and tells me to go home. "Are not books bone of a man's bone, and flesh of his flesh? Oughtn't they to be? Shall a man ask permission to see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want to be in Greece with Homer, or go to h.e.l.l with Dante? Why should I write on a piece of paper, 'I promise to return--infinity--by six o'clock'? A library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books and violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery worse--if they are a part of it. They make one expect something better."

The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand at this point that I was not made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural, or country relation to books.

"It doesn't follow," he said, "because you are bashful in a library, cannot get your mind to work there, with other people around, that the other people oughtn't to be around. There are a great many ways of using a library, and the more people there are crowded in with the books there, other things being equal, the better. It's what a library is for," he said, and a great deal more to the same effect.

I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I did think there ought to be places in libraries--all libraries--where wild ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in every library some uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibrarianed tract where a man with a skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be alone with books--with books just as books--will be permitted to browze, unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk with his mind and roll himself, without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's a.s.sistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of his soul.

I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,--that is, might be well enough,--but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit--those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new, unconscious, subterranean self there.

The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and said this was all subjective folderol on my part--that I had better drop it--a kind of habit I had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of my emotions--or something to that effect. He went on at some length and took the general ground before he was through, that absolutely everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. Librarians--I should judge--in a modern library were what books were for. He said that the more intelligent people were nowadays the more they enjoyed librarians--knew how to use them--doted on them, etc., _ad infinitum_.

"The kind of people one sees at operas," I interrupted, "listening with librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields, nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people who have to have charts to enjoy stars with--these are the people who want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece the more they feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogues, gazetteers, dictionaries, derricks, and other machinery they can have pulling and hauling above their heads in a library the more literary they feel in it. They feel culture--somehow--stirring around them. They are not exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of it--whatever it is--is being poured over into them."

But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close.

It can do no harm to remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining--do not wish to maintain (I could not if I dared) that the modern librarian with all his faults is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola or aeolian attachment for a library, as a mechanical contrivance for making a comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it (which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps. All that I am maintaining is, that I am not this comparatively ignorant man.

I am another one. I am merely saying that the pianola way of dealing with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not grow on me.

V

O