College and Research Libraries B y D A V I D C . M E A R N S "In the Presence of the Schollars" * Mr. Mearns is assistant librarian for American Collections, Library of Congress. IT is GOOD to be in N o r t h Carolina. It is thrice good to be in N o r t h Carolina be- cause this State, a region of the muses, pro- vides a convenient mailing address for that itinerant, our foremost poet; because this state, with its genius f o r incitement to derring-do, compels the discovery of the South by that itinerant, our foremost edito- rial-explorer ; and finally, because this State, possessed of rich reserves of the ingredients of a compost-heap, offers asylum to, and is the retreat of, that itinerant, our foremost librarian. T o shelter, however precariously and momentarily, but simultaneously, a Sandburg, a Daniels, and a Lydenberg is to exalt a portion of the earth. B u t this experience is the more memo- rable f o r me because in my remote and dis- solute youth, I was ghost for a candidate f o r your highest office. T h e themes, as I re- member them, were exclusively patriotic, which explains w h y , when he had misplaced the address f o r L a b o r D a y , my patron fished out and repeated, without the audience being conscious of his duplicity, the stirring lines he had already intoned on the Fourth of J u l y . H i s formula was commendably simple, for, whatever the subject, his single injunction would be: "include a paragraph on the wonders of Southern W o m a n h o o d . " Looking back, it is strange that those juve- nile effusions were not enough to prevent his election. I could write with more convic- tion now. * A n address before the North Carolina L i b r a r y Association, October 22, 1 9 5 3 , A s h e v i l l e , North Caro- lina. W h e n selfishly, unfeelingly, gloatingly, I first accepted your now-repentant president's invitation to invade this austere and innocent front parlor, I was inclined to concoct a dis- course along historical lines. If only the sources are obscure enough and the sentences sufficiently sententious, history provides an excellent mask f o r ignorance, and the op- portunities f o r elaborate foot-notes are admirable and endless. W i t h this laudable purpose in view, I spent several afternoons idly turning over manuscripts in great port- folios, lettered " T h e N o r t h Carolina M i s c e l l a n y . " I n the main, this quest w a s vain, but in the course of futility I came upon a document which arrested my atten- tion. I am still in custody, f o r that foxed and yellowed leaf is dated November 6th, 1 8 4 8 , and relates how learning lighted on a school at Pisgah, situated in your Gaston County. T h i s is the text of that terrifying document: Articles of agreement in 22 Sde School destrict Between Charles L . Thomison as teacher & Enoch M c N a i r Francis Battie & Alexander Weer Committee in Said Schooll Destrict A r 1 T h e Said Charles L . Thomison doath bind Himself to teach by the month at thirteen dollars Per month the afore Said Thomison doath Bind Him Self to teach all the Branches Required By the Schooll acts to be taught in Common Schools A r 2 T h e Said Enoch M c N a i r Francis Battie & Alexander Weer doath bind them Selves to pay to The Said Charles L . Thomison the Sum of thirteen Dollars per month by giving him an Order on the Cheareman of Common Schools A r 3 The teacher has the privelege of cloasing the School At the end of any one month or the Committee M a y Cloase at the end of any month the See proper Ar 4 School to commence in the morning at the Sun one hour & a half high one hour at intermision and Cloase one hour by Sun Set Ar 5 All Schollars coming to this School over fifteen Years oald who transgress the rules of Said School Shall Be Expeled by Teacher & Committee Ar 6 None of the large Schollars Shall Exclude the Smaller Schollars from the benefit of the lire Righting Benches or any other privlege belonging to them in Said School Ar 7 Thair Shall be no Swareing rastling nor Tale bareing Dureing Said School Ar 8 Thair is to be no immorall conduct neither By Teacher Nor committee in the presence of The Schollars dureing the above mentioned School Now, for all I know, committeemen and teachers may be permitted their peccadilloes so long as they are conducted in shuttered privacy, off-duty, and out of hours. But not librarians—we belong to the Glass-House G a n g ! W e are forever "in the presence of the schollars." W e must be circumspect— or else. T h e inexhaustible Blades told a legend which illustrates our quandary in reverse: In the year 1439 [wrote William] two Minorite friars, who had all their lives collected books, died. In accordance with popular belief, they were at once conducted before the heavenly tribunal to hear their doom, taking with them two asses laden with books. At Heaven's gate the porter demanded, 'Whence came ye?' The Mi- norites replied, 'From a monastery of St. Francis.' 'Oh!' said the porter, 'then St. Francis shall be your judge.' So that saint was summoned, and at sight of the friars and their burden demanded who they were, and why they had brought so many books with them. 'We are Minorites,' they humbly replied, 'and we have brought these few books with us as a solatium in the new Jerusalem.' 'And you, when on earth, practiced the good they teach?' sternly demanded the saint, who read their char- acters at a glance. Their faltering reply was sufficient, and the blessed saint at once passed judgment as follows: 'Insomuch as, seduced by foolish vanity, and against your vows of poverty, you have amassed this multitude of books, and thereby and there- for have neglected the duties and broken the rules of your Order, you are now sen- tenced to read your books for ever and ever in the fires of Hell.' Immediately, a roaring noise filled the air, and a flaming chasm opened, in which friars and asses and books were suddenly engulphed. For having been diverted from their spir- itual exertions, it was no doubt proper that the monks were condemned for all eternity to the Great Books program. But books, ladies and gentlemen, are, temporally at least, a librarian's business. He should re- spect, honor, revere them. He should know something about them. With some temerity I venture to suggest that he should occasion- ally even have patience enough to look at them. And if he would serve an earthly penance and thereby assure himself a para- dise where there is neither print, nor readers, the librarian should piously bring himself, from time to time, to read a book. For the librarian is "in the presence of the schollars," and the "schollars" are uneasy. Their suspicions were aroused when first the librarian decided that he had a profes- sion ; those suspicions continue to mount; there are moments nowadays when the librarian, oilcan and wrench in hand, inter- rupts his tinkering and wonders forlornly what has happened to him. Warnings of popular disfavor came early. In the Eighteen-Eighties, Victoria's subject, Frederick Harrison, expressed a general misgiving in an essay, in which he wrote: Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged simply by multiply- ing our materials of knowledge and our facilities for communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam-presses, and ubiquity engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, no bigger and no stronger than the brains of 136 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES the men who heard Moses speak, and saw Aristotle and Archimides pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript. Until some new Gutenberg or W a t t can invent a machine for magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiplying its work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to rule. B u t ah! the apparatus was l o v e l y ; it was an end in itself; the caution went unheeded. T h e n , half a century ago, a N e w England divine, G e r a l d Stanley Lee, with his genius f o r opprobrium, put the so-called " m o d e r n " librarian squirmingly on the spot. W r o t e D r . L e e : They [the modern librarians] 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—forget- ting 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. • A n d D r . L e e made other unkind accusa- tions, declaring that 'So f a r 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 . . . f o r shoving immortals at people.' D r . L e e went on to say that ' A n y higher or more thorough use f o r 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 oc- curred to him.' B u t D r . Lee conceded that ' A s a sort of pianola or aeolian attachment f o r a library, as a mechanical contrivance f o r making a comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it (which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps.' T h a t was in 1 9 0 2 . In the same year, a youth in the Academic Department of Brooklyn's Polytechnic Institute (his name was W i l l i a m W a r n e r Bishop) indirectly protested so harsh a judgment, w r i t i n g that ' A librarian who is not a lover of books is indeed a sorry specimen of his kind,' and in- sisting that 'librarianship does not consist in standard sizes and pneumatic tubes.' A n d the youngster, with that unerring instinct that has made him always an elder states- man, posed a rhetorical question: ' M a y w e not find in the spirit of the bibliophile one of the bonds which shall hold firmly together the members of our calling now rapidly dif- ferentiating to such a degree that we are obliged to flock by ourselves in a yearly in- creasing number of sections?' I t is interesting but futile to speculate on what might have happened had anyone read D r . Bishop's essay and had had the hardi- hood to act upon an excellent suggestion. B u t , so f a r as my findings go, it received no attention whatever. Instead . . . W e find in the T w e n t i e s a distinguished colleague, overwhelmed with the number of books which came under his care, averring 'the librarian who reads is lost.' H i s lis- tener, my lamented friend, Francis Hud- dleston, did not agree. M r . Huddleston thought it would have been more true had he said, ' T h e librarian who does not read w i l l be found out.' A c t u a l l y , of course, he was found out long a g o ; but by some miracle of self-delu- sion he is either unaware of his exposure or completely immune to its implications. W h e n , in the pages of The Library Quarterly, Randolph Adams, the irreplace- able, added librarians to fire, water, vermin, dust, housemaids, collectors, children and other enemies of books, he credited an east- ern member of the guild, with having made, , n : 9 3 5 > the bland pronouncement: 'Book- loving is no doubt a noble passion, praise- worthy in business men and other amateurs, but out of place in the temperament of the librarian.' APRIL, 1954 137 Even so decorous and decorative a spirit as L a r r y Powell was recently obliged rue- fully to admit: 'It has been my experience that many of the present generation of library administrators are hardly more than literate.' And Manchester's Louis Stanley Jast, put the finishing touches on the indictment when he told an audience at Birmingham: ' W e speak of a man of the world, meaning a man who is easily at home in any society in which he finds himself. T h e librarian must be equally at home in the world of ideas.' But, continued D r . J a s t : ' T h e things that so many of them don't know, don't want to know, maybe aren't capable of knowing, are staggering.' D r . J a s t sup- posed 'that modern mechanized and unduly stressed vocational education is responsible, together with the revolt against the old- fashioned discipline.' There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Is the charge well-founded? Have we, thoughtlessly but deliberately, changed a rather lovely, personal art, compounded of imagination, pertinacity, initiative, and the exhilarating joy of the search into a grim and selfless technology? Have we forfeited the fertile fields of bibliography to the bar- barians who call themselves documentalists? Have those heathens, Mini and Magni, pros- elyted us to their strange cult where per- versely invisibility is held benign and every- thing must be reduced before it can regain wholesome dimensions? Have we replaced memory and ingenuity with electric scanners and magic eyes? Are our libraries become no more than intellectual garages? Must we practice our craft only in accordance with strict, inflexible and anointed pro- cedures? Have centralized cataloging and automatic accession processes removed us to an unlettered world? Have we surren- dered our prerogatives to the drugstore clerk behind the counter of paperbacks? If we have, ours is a wretched plight indeed. I do not disregard the plethora of print. I have grown old in acres of arrearage. I am not insensible to the problem of dealing daily with accretions of hundreds and thou- sands of books. But there is a maxim to the effect that 'if you can't lick 'em, jine 'em.' This I would paraphrase: if you can't list 'em, read 'em! Leigh Hunt described our quandary when he wrote: ' T h e idea of an ancient library perplexes our sympathy by its map-like volumes, rolled upon cylinders. Our imag- ination cannot take kindly to a yard of wit, or to thirty inches of moral observation, rolled up like linen in a draper's shop.' He was right. Unless we are resolved to resist the tendency, books in quantity lose their in- dividual identities and become mere com- modities, comparable to so many cans of soup on a market counter. T h i s Hunt was a man who hated 'to read in public, and in strange company.' Carlyle suffered acutely from what he called 'Museum headache.' Perhaps our environ- ment discourages us from obedience to our precepts. But there- have been those whom books did not appall. M y Lord Bishop of that other Durham, Richard De Bury, old philobiblon himself, exclaimed, 'Oblivions would overcome us had not God provided for mortals the remedies of books.' Another man of passion, Casanova, when wearied of more muscular exercise, graciously became librarian at D u x . It was Charles Lamb, you remember, who enquired why have we not 'a grace be- fore Milton—a grace before Shakespeare—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?' And Thack- eray, in one of the charming Roundabout Papers followed suit when he wrote: Many Londoners—not all—have seen the British Museum Library. . . . What peace, 138 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES what love, what truth, what beauty, what happiness for all, what generous kindness for you and me, are here spread out! It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place without a heart full of grateful rev- erence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked heaven for this my English birthright, freely to partake of these bountiful books, and to speak the truth I find there. Perhaps, a f t e r all, there is something to be said f o r the institutions to which we belong. B u t how, ladies and gentlemen, how are we to defend, as w e are called upon to defend, the freedom of enquiry, the freedom of in- formation, so long as we ourselves do not enquire and are uninformed? T h e r e is nothing f o r i t ; we must re- capture childhood's habit. W e must begin to read again. Reading is very splendid, but when w e librarians take it up again, let us be more moderate. T h e "schollars" are looking and vicariously insist on temperance in all things. A n d there was M a c a u l a y , of whom the Reverend Sydney Smith remarked : ' T h e r e are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as g r e a t ; he is like a book in breeches.' I t seems to me that M a c a u l a y also went too f a r . I t is fine to be crammed with learning and to talk like a page f r o m the World Almanac, but among librarians there are f a r too many women for the w o r l d ever to tolerate their being books in breeches. Despite her prevalent disbelief, it is con- trary to a l a w of nature f o r M a d a m e be- comingly to be contained within a pair of pants. N o , if I have persuaded you, if you are determined to recover an ancient, quite for- gotten taste, please, I beg you, take it easy. A n d if you would f o l l o w sound counsel, listen to a rising member of Parliament, A r t h u r J a m e s B a l f o u r , delivering the rec- torial address at St. A n d r e w s sixty-six years a g o : T h e best method of guarding against the danger of reading what is useless is to read only what is interesting. . . . He has only half learnt the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accom- plishment of skipping and skimming; and the first step has hardly been taken in the direction of making literature a pleasure until interest in the subject, and not a de- sire to spare (so to speak) the author's feel- ings, or to accomplish an appointed task, is the prevailing motive of the reader. . . . There are times, I confess, when I feel tempted somewhat to vary the prayer of the poet, and to ask whether Heaven has not reserved in pity to this much educating generation some peaceful desert of litera- ture as yet unclaimed . . . where it might be possible for the student to wander, even perhaps to stray, at his own pleasure: without finding every beauty labelled, every difficulty engineered, every nook surveyed, and a professional cicerone standing at every corner to guide each succeeding traveller along the same well-worn round. . . . This world may be kind or unkind, it may seem to us to be hastening on the wings of enlightenment and progress to an imminent millennium, or it may weigh us down with a sense of insoluble difficulty and irremediable wrong; but whatever else it be, so long as we have good health and a good library, it can hardly be dull. If this be so, how long shall w e be dullards? F o r us, salvation is at hand. W e can reach it on our shelves. W e can find fellowship with the "schollars" and become again part of a sometimes entrancing com- pany: the noble company of the lettered. A n d in the words of a manuscript come straight from the M i d d l e A g e s : O Lord, send the virtue of thy Holy Spirit upon these our books; that cleansing them from all earthly things, by thy holy blessing, they may mercifully enlighten our hearts and give us true understanding; and grant that by thy teaching, they may brightly preserve and make full an abun- dance of good works according to thy will. Surely we are standing in the need of prayer. A P R I L , 1954 139