Part 8

Mention of these two plays brings to mind several incidents when this rudimentary kind of acting brought out as fine and penetrating an interpretation of the dramatist as any performance by professional actors, with the usual lavish apparatus, that I have ever witnessed in a West End theatre. Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria and the Clown, were people I knew very well, attired in their ordinary dress. The stage was a bare platform, and there was nothing on it but a table and a few chairs. The performers had the book in their hands; but, evidently, they were word-perfect in their parts. The scene went with a verve and a naturalness that could hardly be bettered; and--best of all--it was Shakespeare, interpreted by intelligent and well-educated persons, who were the last people in the world to cut or rewrite or recreate a part as they thought Shakespeare ought to have written it. Another Sir Andrew Aguecheek is still more memorable. This gentleman would probably have been a failure or a very indifferent success in any other character: he was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the flesh--the wonder was how we had never noticed it all the years we had known him. A still more delightful proof of the latent genius that may be revealed by such modest performances was a certain Lady Teazle. She was a plain and not a very youthful person; the stage was as unfurnished and void of decoration as her get-up was plain and ordinary. Yet, by dint of dramatic instinct that any much-beparagraphed actress might envy, she easily conveyed the sense of youth and charm and beauty--she was the finest Lady Teazle I have seen, on or off the regular stage.

The London County Council and other educational bodies have thoroughly recognized the untold possibilities of the dramatic study of drama. It is undoubtedly the right method. Charles Lamb, in a famous essay, propounded the doctrine that in the theatre we see the actors but we may entirely fail to see the play. The plays of Shakespeare, he paradoxically argued, “are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever.” The actor gets between us and the dramatist; and if that was so in the days of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, how much more is it so in these days of sophisticated stage-display and mannered acting. But put the student of Shakespeare on the stage, however rudimentary the stage may be, and let him find his way into the mind of the great playwright by himself, so far as he may: that is how to study Shakespeare, and that is the mode of approach sought in such dramatic readings or more elaborate interpretations as are recommended here. Even the modest group of readers will probably go on from strength to strength. One group which I first set on this track were content at first with a series of readings, which were given in public, after many rehearsals, at the various district libraries of a London borough. Then they embarked on the complete presentation of _The Merchant of Venice_, _As You Like It_, and _Twelfth Night_, with scenery and costumes; and even ventured on a tragedy, all without discredit. Ultimately, a troupe of experienced players, they gave a series of Shakespearian plays at the Town Hall and other places, not only clearing all expenses, but realizing a handsome sum for an important charity. One of their number later on wrote a comedy, which they produced with some success. Here, surely, is a piece of library extension work having high cultural value; it is indicative of what may easily be done by apt suggestion and cultivation of the group spirit; and there are innumerable directions in which similar results may be achieved.

RELATIONS WITH WORK OUTSIDE.

The principle to be kept in view is that the civic library is a most natural home for all the intellectual activities of a social kind going on in each community. Even if it is not convenient for all such bodies to have their headquarters there, the library should entertain the most friendly and active relations with every one. In the United States, the public library in most cities performs a large part of its most remunerative work through the medium of public and private organizations outside. It may be likened to a nerve-centre, with a network of efferent and afferent fibres and a series of ganglia throughout the social organism. Thus the New York Public Library has a long and miscellaneous list of clubs, leagues, musical societies, classes of all sorts, business and other associations that hold their meetings in its various branches. Many American libraries are ready to plant a delivery station, dispatch a travelling library, or a collection of special works, anywhere that it is asked for, or even to provide an industrial firm with books, so long as accommodation and an acting librarian are supplied. They will prepare select lists of books on any given subject, get up an exhibition to celebrate any event or help on any deserving movement: there is no end to the ways in which they are prepared to put their services at the disposal of the common weal. British libraries have laboured too much in isolation. The future depends upon, more than anything else, its coming into the closest touch with every intellectual and social agency in the body politic. It should be a matter of course for the local scientific and literary societies, the field club, the local branch of the Workers’ Educational Association and the National Home-Reading Union--to name only two out of many--to make their home in the library building. The antiquarian society should deposit its collections and books and maps here, the natural history society its specimens and apparatus, thus laying the foundations of a local museum to be housed in the situation most favourable for study, both by themselves and by other inhabitants. Local historical and regional surveys are rapidly developing, whether as pieces of research aiming at the extension of knowledge or as a practical form of education: the library, with its local records, maps, and other historical material, should always be the base.

The Croydon Public Library is the centre from which the Photographic Survey and Record of Surrey operates. Surrey took the lead in this important branch of topographical history, and the photographic records of buildings, scenery, and miscellaneous objects of interest now collected in the library comprise some 8,000 prints and lantern-slides, all elaborately classified and indexed for instant reference. Housed along with these is the Regional Survey of Croydon, consisting of maps prepared from actual surveys of the district within fifteen miles’ radius, showing the geology, vegetation, surface utilization, industries, etc. This also is accompanied by photographs. Further, an artist has been commissioned to paint faithful records of architectural or natural features that are likely to perish or be disfigured by modern changes--a thing that will be of priceless value to future generations. This logical extension of the work of preserving local records, minute-books, newspapers, and various fugitive material is being carried on elsewhere, notably at Coventry, Brighton, Northampton, and Nottingham. It deserves the attention of the many local societies that have not yet thrown in their lot with the local library.

LIBRARY EXHIBITIONS.

Libraries may themselves get up exhibitions or grant hospitality to those organized by kindred bodies. The more the library takes a hand in the preparation, the more can the series of exhibits be related to the appropriate books, and the more effective will such efforts be as aids to popular enlightenment. There is a wide choice of suitable subjects--book-production and its various branches, engraving and other arts, local history and geography, the sciences. The library will be able to supply many of the exhibits from its own stores; usually it is not difficult to borrow useful material from commercial or private sources; and loan exhibits from the State museums are available as nucleus, supplement, or even as forming the whole display. Such exhibitions are placed under the care of keen and intelligent members of the staff, and lectures or demonstrations are given illustrated by the actual objects; the results are enormously ahead of those achieved by the ordinary static exhibition. Lines of reading are pointed out, and books brought into juxtaposition with their subject realities, in a way that even the trained conductor in a museum or picture gallery can hardly compass. Actual experience in organizing and running a number of such exhibitions has left me with no doubt of their popularity or their educational value. When an exhibition illustrating such a subject as the production of a book goes on for three months in the libraries of a London borough, and the average attendance during that period exceeds a thousand a day, we may feel that we are beyond the experimental stage.

Even our rural libraries, when they are located in the village hall or have a suitable building of their own, need not hesitate to attempt an exhibition. In many ways, they have exceptional opportunities. To begin with, there is nothing to compete with them; the novelty would be absolute. And then there is suitable material of some sort or other in abundance, botanical, geological, horticultural or agricultural, or such as illustrates local history, local industries, or any subject having strong associational interest. Differences of scope being allowed for, the rural librarian would probably find he had much less to do with his own hands than if he were getting up a show in the town. Such places as rejoice in the possession of museums and art galleries as well as libraries are specially favoured; but it does not inevitably follow that these departments of public culture do combine forces so effectually as do the places where the work is on a more frugal scale but comes at any rate from one and the same fount of activity.

RELATIONS WITH THE SCHOOLS.

The chapter before this concluded with some account of library work with children. The correlative of the children’s library and reading room is the school library or the periodical loan of books to the schools--sometimes it is the alternative. Under the Act of 1919 the library authority in places newly adopting the Acts will be the local education committee, and elsewhere the control of existing libraries may be handed over voluntarily to that body. Long before this Act, certain education committees had acted jointly with library committees in establishing school libraries and other modes of bringing school children into contact with good books. The aims and interests of library and school in large measure coincide. Recent legislation virtually admits this sound principle. Into the question whether it is wise to vest the control of libraries in the education authority, a question canvassed both for and against in the United States as well as in this country, there is no need to enter at the moment. Everybody agrees that children must be taught, or at least encouraged, at a fairly early age, to read books for themselves and to have some idea of the uses of a library. Most teachers and librarians would also agree that every school should have a library of its own, and that at some stage or other each child should be introduced to the public library. Perhaps this is as far as we need go in the direction of agreement: uniformity is surely not advisable, and local circumstances, relative situation in particular, may have to determine the nature of the interaction of library and school, and the more important point, how soon should the school child shift the centre of his reading interests from the school library to the public one, the one that is there to be his intellectual mainstay throughout life? From the point of view of a public librarian, it might be undesirable that a school library should be so efficient and amply sufficing that elder children were deterred from finding their way into the wider realm of the public library. The school library should be but a tributary flowing into that main stream.

There are three modes of dealing with the problem of books for the school child, and these may be variously combined. (1) There may be a permanent collection, stationed in the school, consisting of graded sets of reference works required to illustrate any of the subjects taught or studied in the school; and further, a collection, large or small, of such books, mainly of a recreational kind, as it may be thought fit to provide for home reading. Such a collection may be built up by the school itself or by the staff of the public library, who would act, as a rule, in close consultation with the teachers. One great advantage of having all the books permanently located at the school is that the children look upon it then as really the school library, and the teachers are able to familiarize themselves with the contents, and thus can influence the children’s reading to the maximum. If there are funds enough, a fairly large and representative collection can be provided--one that the most voracious boy or girl is not likely to exhaust till he or she is old enough to join the public library. The best books become household possessions; children talk about them to their chums, and not to have read them is a lapse that must be wiped out. If, on the other hand _Westward Ho!_ or _Little Women_ is merely a loan and has gone back to the central library, how can the young reader get even with the luckier ones?

(2) To save the expense of a number of permanent school libraries, an education authority may arrange with the public library to organize a series of travelling collections or merely boxes of books to circulate among the schools. This system may be combined with the other, the reference collection being regarded, most reasonably, as always indispensable and therefore permanent, and loans of books for recreation supplied at fixed intervals. There is one unquestionable boon attaching to this arrangement--the children enjoy the stimulus, as the date comes round, of choosing and rejoicing among a fresh lot of books. Many teachers too, no doubt, are not averse from a change.

(3) The third method implies suppression of the school library, at any rate so far as it is anything beyond the indispensable collection of volumes required for use in the school; it is to send the young reader to the public library. If this is not far away, and especially if it has a first-class junior department, where suitable reference books can be used as well as books for entertainment borrowed for reading at home, there is nothing to deplore; but to children in distant schools the loss will be serious. The value of this third solution of the problem, when it is a real solution and not an evasion, is that the child is introduced early to a large collection of books, and also comes into a different atmosphere from that of school. Its danger is that the child may come unchaperoned to a library where there is but a perfunctory service for the juniors, and will be turned adrift in a pathless wilderness.

This third method may be seen at work in the schools of Poplar. One of the poorest among the metropolitan boroughs, Poplar has been a leader in many library movements, such as the scheme of interchange between adjoining boroughs whereby all the books in a large group of libraries are made available for borrowing by dwellers in any part of the area. The libraries have long co-operated with the schools as actively as the teachers would permit. Nothing is more essential to the mental life and the economic efficiency of the future citizen than that the gap between schooling and maturity should be bridged over. Poplar has realized the fatal nature of that gap, and has long been doing its utmost to fill up the chasm. School children come to the public library to do their preparation and spend their leisure in the enjoyment of books. Classes are brought by teachers during quiet hours, and sit in the public rooms doing “silent reading.” For a long while measures have been taken so that no single boy or girl in the schools shall go out into the world without being introduced to the public library, and made acquainted with all that books and libraries can do to help them in life and the pleasures of life. Twice a week, the upper classes from schools in the borough, coming in regular rotation, attend at the nearest library to hear an address by the borough librarian, Mr. H. Rowlatt, or one of his chief assistants, on the libraries of their own borough and libraries in general, what they are and what they contain, and how freedom and ability to utilize the manifold services they afford is an invaluable part of the individual’s equipment for life.[17] The librarian and his coadjutors have always thrown themselves heart and soul into the work of co-operation with the schools; the children listen eagerly, and the results are seen in the statistics of reading.

The vital importance of this work has now been recognized by the London Education Committee. Similar schemes are being introduced in the boroughs of Islington, Greenwich, and Hackney, and it may be hoped that they will become general. This is by no means all that the Poplar libraries are doing for the school children. Attempts are made to help the older children in making up their minds on the occupation they would choose. Sets of books illustrating various trades are put before such children, from which they can gather an intelligent idea of what is the real nature and interest of some craft or trade which was previously a mere name. This has proved a real help in the critical moment of many a child’s life. All formalities, such as monetary guarantees against loss or damage, have been reduced to a minimum or abolished for the benefit of school children, who are admitted to full privileges on the bare recommendation of the teachers. Thousands avail themselves of the opportunity thus held out, and many thousands of books have been borrowed as a result without the loss of five shillings’ worth of books per annum. The help given to the children in general has likewise proved to be indirectly of inestimable value to the teachers. They admit that the introduction of the library habit among their young pupils has opened their own eyes to points they had never realized. One head master volunteered the statement that it had done away entirely with surreptitious reading of trash among the girls. Poplar cannot afford a regular system of school libraries; yet, in spite of poverty, it is signally doing yeoman’s service in moulding the minds of our future citizens: it is a shining example to boroughs of far superior resources.

On the whole, my own preference is for the stationary library, when the school can afford a good one; but one’s preferences may be modified, or even reversed, in altered circumstances. Whichever plan be adopted, supervision, or rather sympathetic guidance, is essential. Such guidance will, of course, be entirely of a positive, not a negative kind, and will consist of tactful suggestion, suggestion as unobtrusive as possible, by means of story-telling, illustrated talks, and personal help. There is not the slightest need for attempting to fit the book to the child. Let children read books for grown-ups if they have a mind to, let boys read girls’ books; the girls will read the boys’ books whether you want them or no. It is taken for granted that the whole library will be well-chosen, and everything in it worth reading. Alarmist nonsense, emanating from English justices or militant New England moralists, about boys led into crime by stories of brigands and pirates, are not likely to upset parents or librarians with all their faculties about them, including a normal sense of humour. If you listened to these people, Stevenson and Dumas would have to be put into a strait jacket, and Michael Scott, Aimard, and Mayne Reid burned by the hangman. It is the last expiring gasp of the prudery and lust for chastening the young which made the old-fashioned library for children a byword. Far more important than any anxiety about moral or immoral influence is an anxiety about good literature. Edification is thrown away if the well-meaning author is unpossessed of charm. The first requisite of a spell is that it shall work. Happily, the charm of fine literature can hardly be attained but by the fine personality. Good literature is healthy literature. Among the books a child will read with delight, it is doubtful indeed whether a single example can be found of a work of true literary worth that could lead a child astray. Harrison Ainsworth’s _Jack Sheppard_ and Lytton’s _Paul Clifford_ perished from the catalogues of junior libraries, not because they were wicked books, but because they were bad literature.

The best books should be duplicated over and over again, especially in libraries that let their young readers roam along the book-shelves and choose what they like--as all libraries should; and duplicated as far as possible in various editions, especially illustrated editions. This is a far wiser policy than aiming at a very comprehensive selection, which means that quantities of second and third-rate stuff will be introduced. After all, if life is short childhood is much shorter, and if every child had the opportunity of reading all the books that are fit, there would not be much time left before the date arrived for migrating to wider spheres.

A bibliography of ideal works for children would not, however, be a voluminous affair. The children’s librarian should form something of the sort for use, and the books starred in its pages as superlative should never be out--there should always be copies enough to ensure this. The young reader will find it hard to resist the appeal, if he sees one attractive copy and next week another staring him in the face: it will assuage disappointment for the absence of something else, or charming pictures may tempt to a second reading of a classic already familiar. By such careful management the taste of a healthy child will remain unspoiled, and in later life sound judgment and appreciation of the best will show the results of this novitiate.