Vol. 16

Should Librarians Read?*

F. G. Kenyon, M. A., D. Litt., Ph. D., principal librarian of British Museum

It has been said, as you are no doubt aware, that "The librarian who reads is lost;" and I can well believe that for a librarian with literary tastes it must be difficult to catalog the titles of attractive books without spending much time in dipping into their contents. But the proposition which I wish to lay down is the opposite of this. It is that the librarian who does not read is lost.

Broadly speaking, I suppose the librarian engaged in supplying books to the public has to deal with three great classes of books-works of fiction, works of information, and works of pure literature; or, the literature of pastime, the literature of knowledge, and the literature of imagination. The classification is only a rough one, since works of fiction or of information may also be works of pure literature; but it will serve. Now, if a reader asks a librarian for advice with regard to the first of these classes his task is fairly obvious. He will try to steer the reader clear of trashy and ephemeral novels; indeed, we will hope that his library does not contain such books; and within the wide range of healthy fiction which, I am thankful to say, the English language possesses, he will adapt his prescription to the age and probable tastes of his patient.

All this is obvious enough, and the only requisite is that the librarian should himself have a large and catholic. taste for the best fiction of all kinds.

*Address before the Library assistants' association at the sixteenth session, held at Cutlers' Hall, Oct. 12, 1910. Printed first in The Library Assistant in November. Given by kind permission from The Library Assistant and Dr. Kenyon.

No. 2

With regard to works of information, the task of the librarian is still simpler. If a reader comes to you in search of information on a particular subject, presumably he wants information on that subject and not on another, and your duty is limited to furnishing him with the best book in your library which deals with that subject. If he wants information on aeroplanes, let us say, it is no good offering him a treatise on submarines; and if he is in search of a guide to emigration to Canada, it is useless to tell him that you have an excellent line in travels in Timbuctoo. You have just, with the assistance of bibliographies and subject indexes, to put him in the way of finding the facts he wants; and that is all.

But sometimes you may get a reader here and there-probably a young one

who wants neither fiction nor solid facts, but literature; and if you believe that the cultivation of the imagination is the leaven which leavens the whole lump of human progress, you will be anxious to do your best for those readers who show signs of possessing some sparks of this divine fire, and to steer them clear of the dangers which beset them. Dangers there are, unquestionably. A taste for literature may lead, only too easily, to a washy and ineffective sentimentalism. Many a man arrives at a truer intellectual culture by the simple study and accumulation of facts scientific or historical, than is ever attained by some of those who pride themselves on their culture and refinement. The ideal is an amalgam in proper proportions of the two elements, of information and imagination, of facts and dreams, if you like to put it in that way; but whereas compara

tively little guidance is necessary to enable the student to arrive at his facts, advice may be of very considerable value in guiding the beginner's footsteps in the gardens of pure literature, whether prose

or verse.

It is of this, therefore, that I wish mainly to speak, yet without pretending to lay down the law, as from a position of superior knowledge. I merely wish to bring into the general stock some personal opinions, some personal experiences, which may or may not be of use to others. If we wish to know how to interest those who come to us for advice. in certain classes of literature, it is helpful to know what books have been found most stimulating by others in the history of their own mental development. Let those who have learnt to love literature and who have found it a valuable element in their own lives say how they came to appreciate it, and by what steps they entered into their kingdom. Different minds respond to different stimuli, and the more unusual and abnormal a man's intellectual equipment is, the less valuable will his experience be to the average mortal. It is because I believe myself to be on the whole a very average mortal that, on being invited to address you, I decided to devote most of my time to speaking about a few books which I found of the greatest value in the formative period of my own boyhood.

The book which, from my own experience, I believe to be the very best as an introduction both to English literature and to English history is Macaulay's Essays. To them I owe the beginnings of my love of literature as distinct from a mere reading of story books. Perhaps I should go a step further back and say that I owe my introduction to the Essays to Trevelyan's Life of Lord Macaulay. This, which I believe to be one of the three or four best biographies in the English language, interested me in Macaulay as a man and sent me on to the Essays; and the Essays opened to me the gates of classical English literature. Macaulay is not altogether in fashion now among literary critics. He is charged

with being too rhetorical and metallic in style and as lacking the finer shades of critical appreciation. He has not the manner of Matthew Arnold, of Pater, of Austin Dobson, or Andrew Lang, or of half a score of the literary critics of today; nor does he worship at the same literary shrines. He did not, to all appearance, greatly care for Wordsworth or Coleridge, though he speaks in complimentary terms of both; Shelley and Keats did not appeal to him, if indeed he had read the latter at all; and I do not know that there is any evidence that he had, beyond the fact that there were few things between two covers which Macaulay had not read. He lived too near to these great luminaries of the Georgian age to appreciate them at their true value; and his own tastes had been formed on the literature of earlier generations. But of that literature, from Chaucer to Cowper, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there was nothing he had not read, nothing that he did not remember, and (what is more) no author who was not a living person to him. He was as much at home with Addison and Steele, with Swift and Defoe, with Johnson and Goldsmith, as he was with his most intimate contemporaries. Historian as he was— and of that I shall have something to say presently his life was steeped in literature. He read and reread the great authors of classical antiquity year after year; and the comments with which his copies of them are besprinkled show with what gusto he read them, how he entered into their surroundings, how alive and real they were to him. His greatest ambition was to be reckoned hereafter as one of this great fellowship of the masters of literature. After a brilliant entry into politics, after becoming a member of the cabinet, and with a reputation for eloquence unrivaled in the House of Commons, he turned his back upon a political career in order to devote himself to literature. "Courage," he says in one of the entries in his journal after dilating on the unapproachable excellence of Thucydides, "courage, and think of A. D.

2000." And I for one believe that he will have his reward.

That, however, is not exactly the point which I wish to make now. It is not Macaulay's literary merits, nor his ultimate place in literary history, that I want to dwell on; it is his excellence as a guide to those who may be called beginners in literature. And the root of this excellence I believe to be his own wholehearted faith in the value of literature and its vital share in human life. You may get finer insight into the shades of thought or expression, a more delicate appreciation of a writer's essential nature, from other critics; but nowhere will you get an equal recognition of the great writers of the past as living men. It is a principle as old as Horace, that if you wish to convey a certain feeling to your readers, you must first feel it yourself. To Macaulay the great men of letters of the past were living persons, and so he makes them seem so to us. To those who have read the Essays, the members of the literary society which gathered round Dryden in the coffee houses of the Restoration, round Addison in the time of Queen Anne, or round Johnson in the club of which he was the founder, are men with whose merits and failings we are intimately and familiarly acquainted.

It is the same with history. To Macaulay the politics of the Revolution were as real and as exciting as the politics of the first reform bill, in which he had taken an active and distinguished part; and the Whitehall of Charles II was as familiar as the Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square of his own day. To persons of dull imaginations the present is as dead as the past; to Macaulay the past was as living as the present. Consequently he is able to make it alive to those who read him. To anyone who is brought up on the Essays, Macaulay supplies the indelible groundwork of all his future conceptions of the great struggle between king and parliament, the policy of Walpole, the career of Chatham, the government of George III and Lord North, the characters of Fox and Burke, the achieve

ments of Clive and Warren Hastings; in short, the whole political drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is immaterial to say that in some respects his judgments need revision. His views were very clear-cut and definite and were colored by his own political prepossessions, so that he was not always fair to those of whom he disapproved. from the point of view from which we are now regarding him the important fact is that it is impossible to read him without being interested in the persons of whom he writes; that is, without becoming interested in the history of our own country.

But

And to this may be added as yet another of Macaulay's merits as a guide to the young, the masterly clearness of his style. His style may be antithetical to excess, metallic, rhetorical, a dangerous. style to imitate; but at least he never leaves you in doubt as to his meaning. Not even the best French prose is more perspicuously clear than Macaulay. His writings are a standing antidote to all sloppy, obscure, involved, meretricious. composition. It is a merit which, I think, will go far toward securing him that immortality toward which his ambitions were directed. Style is the great antiseptic of literature, and Macaulay's worst enemy cannot deny him an effective style. Whatever merits he may lack, he will at least teach his readers that literature does not consist of a mere succession of formless and incoherent sentences; that a sentence, a paragraph, should have a definite beginning, middle and end; that you should know what you mean to say and say it clearly. In these respects Macaulay is one of the great fellowship of English prose writers; not the resonant, mouth-filling, ponderous prose of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, of Johnson and Gibbon, nor the highly colored, poetical prose of Ruskin and Pater; but the clear, unambiguous prose of Addison and Swift, and (in a later day) of Newman. Its merits appear, too, to be capable of hereditary transmission; for they reappear in his nephew and biographer Sir George Trevelyan, and yet