LIBRARIES.
A library may be considered from two very different points of view: as a
workshop, or as a Museum.
FEELINGS ABOUT
The former commends itself to the practical turn of mind characteristic of
the present day; common sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has
done so much in other directions, should be employed in making the
acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous and less tedious; that as we travel
by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be helped in our studies by
the varied resources of modern invention. There lies on my table at this
present moment a Handbook of Library Appliances, in which[Pg 6] fifty-three
closely printed pages are devoted to this interesting subject, with
illustrations of various contrivances by which the working of a large
library is to be facilitated and brought up to date. In fact, from this
point of view a library may be described as a gigantic mincing-machine,
into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a
slightly altered form as the literature of the present.
LIBRARIES.
If, on the other hand, a library be regarded as a Museum—and I use the
word in its original sense as a temple or haunt of the Muses—very
different ideas are evoked. Such a place is as useful as the other—every
facility for study is given—but what I may call the personal element as
affecting the treasures there assembled is brought prominently forward.
The development of printing, as the result of individual effort; the art
of bookbinding, as practised by different persons in different countries;
the history of the books themselves, the libraries in which they have
found a home, the hands[Pg 7] that have turned their pages, are there taken
note of. Modern literature is fully represented, but the men of past days
are not thrust out of sight; their footsteps seem to linger in the rooms
where once they walked—their shades seem to protect the books they once
handled. What Browning felt about frescoes may be applied—mutatis
mutandis—to books in such an asylum as I am trying to portray:
Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains:
One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick,
Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,
A lion who dies of an ass's kick,
The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.
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