THE LIBRARY AND THE COSMOS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 3, Issue 2, 1 August 1970, Page 65

THE LIBRARY AND THE COSMOS

J. C. Beaglehole

Address delivered at the Alexander Turnbull Library on Tuesday, 30 June 1970, by Professor J. C. Beaglehole

I never wanted to be an engine-driver. I liked travelling by train when I was a boy, with my brother, out to the Lower Hutt in the holidays, when the Hutt was still country, with paddocks as far as you could see, and horses, and once out of the train you got into the buggy behind a horse; and when you got into the train you each had a penny cake of chocolate, to be consumed on the journey in case of extreme hunger; but I never wanted actually to drive the train. My idea of romance was libraries. I don't know why this was so, unless it was because I was one of those fortunate boys - and there could not have been very many, really, in New Zealand in those days - who were brought up in the midst of books, to whom books, of all sorts, were as much part of the intimate family environment as my mother's brown scones or the round piano stool that went up and down, so that when you got tired of practising you could twirl round and round on it. That familiarity did not lessen the romance for me, though it may have done so for another of my brothers, whose idea of romance was to clean our doctor's motor-car on Saturday mornings. There were not so many cars in Wellington, it was still possible to walk across Willis Street on the spur of the moment without being killed; and they were still called motor-cars, not cars. I am not simply indulging in the idle chatter of a born free-associationist, as I know I am: I am trying, if only for myself, to picture a period. The period was that of the early years of Alexander Turnbull's Library.

I may have been an extreme case of my particular sort of romance. I just don't know. And I don't mean that I had no other interest at all. I was not interested in football, but I was interested in food, and marbles, and making toy theatres. It just happened that I had a natural affinity with the printed page. As for the Cosmos, there it was, but it never struck me that it might be wondered about. I was never quite certain about the meaning of the word - I am almost, as a matter of fact, impelled to look it up again now, to give my ideas exactitude - but I knew it had something to do with the universe, and the universe was the stars, and I admired the stars; but how much more interesting the spangled firmament on high would have been if it had been books. It was not; and there was nothing to do but accept it unquestioningly. Perhaps that was why, when I first came across Margaret Fuller, I was a bit puzzled. You will remember that remarkable blue-stocking

Transcendentalist American lady, one of the ornaments of New England, and the age of Emerson, when our own colony was struggling into existence; and how she declared, with the true fervour of that remarkable age and that remarkable country, 'I accept the Universe'; and how Carlyle rather sourly commented, 'By God, she'd better!' Well, I thought, what else do you do with it? So I ignored it, except I suppose now and again as a visual display. I took it - the Universe, the Cosmos - for granted, the eternal silence of the immense spaces did not at all frighten me, I stuck my head in a book.

And of course they were books; or at least they looked like books. I don't know how you would define a book in our day. An instrument by which you hold high converse with the mighty dead? The precious life-blood of a master spirit? Or a small rectangular block of newsprint with a shiny cover bearing the picture of an undressed young lady? Not with such insubstantial sawdust were the great libraries of the past built. Who now will reissue, even with an undressed young lady outside it, Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature"? It was entrancing. There you could learn of the great library of Alexandria, beloved of the Ptolemies, the accumulation of all classical learning, wisdom, poetry, given to the flames by uningratiating Christians. I wept for Alexandria. I steeped myself in Andrew Lang, The Library. I remember its size, a small octavo; the texture of its cover, a rough light-brown linen; the panelling on its spine, the feel of its paper, the disposal of its print. I believe that Andrew Lang was somewhat the dilettante, but how delightful he was on Elzevirs and Aldines, and incunabula; what fascination when he discussed the sort of wood the true devotee would make his bookshelves of! Elzevirs and Aldines, indeed. They seemed the pinnacle of felicity to me. Abstractions - but romance, romance. I had to admit that though my father's shelves were not of well-seasoned English oak they held the books well enough. I suppose that only Turnbull, in Wellington, could afford to worry about that sort of thing, and he worried to some purpose, with the aid of Mr Kupli, cabinet-maker, of Upper Willis Street. It used to be said, of course, by strict moralists, that you should not read books about books, that was the way to perdition; you should read books and cultivate depth of character and moral fibre, and all those things the late Victorians valued. Idiots! Slayers of delight and innocent dissipations! They would frown on walks in flowery meads, insist that one should be forever climbing mountains. Were books about books not the most agreeable way of being led on to the strict rigours of bibliographical study? And is there anything more gratifying to the mind, in the end, than the triumphant pedantry of distinguishing between the first impression of the first edition and the second impression of the first edition? I do not say that there is a virtue in this superior to the virtue of the really esoteric mathematician, or of the youth who

delves in the bowels of the internal combustion engine or makes a television set work; I am not talking of virtue in the conventional sense at all, but simply of the working of the human mind, for its own sake, the area where the pedant meets the artist. In the old days the great librarian, I fancy, my figure of romance, was this sort of pedant. Nowadays, I gather, implicit or explicit in the words of emissaries from America, the great librarian is a high-powered public relations man. Well, I suppose there is a sort of romance in that. The romantic view changes from generation to generation. Perhaps librarians have their own forms of romance. Some of them dream about books; some of them dream about computers.

Librarians: one could meditate a good deal about them, their types or individual characteristics: the scholar-librarian, the technician librarian, the public relations librarian, the education of librarians, the history of librarianship, the influence of the librarian on history, the comparative study of the contribution of the sexes to the art, science, and practice of librarianship, the charismatic (one must keep up with the language) librarian, the librarian as cosmic figure. I have studied the peculiarities of a number of librarians, and on the whole they seem to be an estimable race. I once had ambitions that way myself- romance again, you see; and one of my schoolmasters, a man of harsh voice and kindly soul, whom I admired greatly, whose name I still revere, must have thought I showed some promise. He asked me, 'What are you going to do with your life, Beaglehole?' I said modestly I didn't know. 'Well', he said, you know a little about a lot of things and nothing much about anything; you might do quite well as a librarian.' I thought he did a little injustice to the depth of my learning, but I was struck with his perception otherwise. I think my father had already explored the possibilities, however; he had consulted Mr Charles Wilson, the Parliamentary Librarian, a man of weight, and Mr Wilson had been discouraging. There was nothing in it at all, he said; and anyhow there were no jobs going. I have been puzzled by this since; because how many of my juniors managed to get jobs in libraries, and became eminent in the profession - parliamentary librarians and city librarians and national librarians and Turnbull librarians! Their fathers could not have consulted Mr Wilson. So my father got me a job in Whitcombe and Tombs instead, which was also romantic; and I must certainly have shown some promise as a bookseller, because at the end of a year my stipend was raised from 25 shillings, or $2.50, a week, to 275 6d, or $2.75, and I was overcome with gratification. It was while I was in the shop that I encountered, rather remotely, Mr Wilson - rather remotely, for his conversation was reserved mainly for another exalted personage, Mr Cameron, the manager. Ah! if I could only give you an adequate picture of that 1918 Whitcombe's, or of the bookshop further down

the Quay, S. and W. Mackay's, whose great period had been earlier, who did not run a warehouse and supply the trade, or sell sporting goods - to say nothing of Ferguson and Osborn, and of Smith's - you would understand better how the literary pulse beat in Wellington in those days.

I think Wilson was an interesting piece of our literary, and library, history: in the literary history, minor; in the library history, quite largely illustrative. I suppose there was a sort of tough, local, middlegrade Bohemianism about him. He was a middle-sized man, much tobacco-stained, with a rather gruff voice, and the boys in the shop were convinced that he absorbed vast quantities of whiskey. If untrue, it was still delightful scandal. As a very young man he had been in the Bradford woollen trade, and then in some sort of business in Paris - he was said actually to be able to speak French; and still as a quite young man he came to New Zealand and took up teaching and then journalism, working his way down from the East Coast to an editor's chair in Wellington. At the end of the nineties he was briefly a member of parliament, and in 1901 began his quarter-century as parliamentary librarian. You see that he had had quite a varied experience, none of which, before he thus assumed the senior professional position in the country, had had any connection with libraries whatever. It was a colonial experience, and a very colonial sort of appointment. It seemed to work out all right, according to the lights of the time. Anyhow, there the distinctive figure was. I don't know what proportion of the library's books came directly from England - the war years may have had some effect - but Charlie Wilson used to come into the shop quite regularly and pick out a staggering number (as it seemed to me) from our new ones, that I had just unpacked and marked with the price, and carried downstairs; and Mr Cameron would then put them in piles, with a slip of paper inserted, marked in his very neat hand, 'G.A.L.'. I don't know who carried them up again to the packing department; my colleague Archie, I suppose, whose private love was astronomy. Archie confided this in me, with some shyness: it was the first inkling I had that anyone could have a disinterested passion for anything other than books, and I regarded Archie thereafter with a mixture of astonishment and a sort of amused awe.

Now, Charlie Wilson did something else besides smoke and assuage the legislative intellectual hunger and pick the eyes out of the stock. He kept a hand in journalism, and every Saturday morning he wrote about books in the Dominion newspaper. He was our Sainte-Beuve or Edmund Gosse: I must not compare him to anyone in our later reaches of criticism, he carried none of the Landfall and precious little of the Listener atmosphere with him. He wrote under the name 'Liber', and he used as epigraph lines famous in their day:

Give a man a pipe he can smoke, Give a man a book he can read And his home is bright with a calm delight, Though the room be poor indeed.

Very true. ‘Sunday up the River’ by James Thomson, 1869. Not The Seasons man. So you see there was an author coming into the shop, not only a librarian; and there was an added thrill. It was not quite Dr Johnson, but one makes do with what one has. It was at least Literary Authority. He republished a number of these articles a few years later, with the collected title - I am sorry if I give you a minor shock - Rambles in Bookland; and the volume being successful, followed it with New Rambles. Here I begin to suspect rather clayey feet: my father acquired neither of these volumes. Nor did I. Perhaps, as the century advanced, we were turning into intellectual snobs. Anyhow, I was a university student by then, deep in the Athenaeum and the Times Literary Supplement, and I had a different librarian before my eyes, the asthma-ridden, skull-capped, disciplinary, Greek-Testament-reading Horace Ward, the Reverend B. H. Ward, ba (london) - whom the junior janitor, with mildly humorous hostility, would refer to as ‘the reverend gentleman’. And a different library: minute, I suppose one would call it, but it had books, some of them out of the common run, it had the Athenaeum, it was a Cave of Enchantment. Horace Ward was not a great scholar; but sitting in the centre of it at his raised desk, he looked as if he might have been; he looked as if he might have edited the letters of Erasmus, or some early Christian Father. The right sort of librarian.

In the meantime something else had happened: a Great Event. The time was the last year of the war - the First World War - and all sorts of astonishing things were happening. I well remember standing in the bookshop - first floor, Educational Department - and gazing out of the window at the sky, and meditating, not on the imminent crash of empires, the tramplings and the chaos of mankind, but on the news that Mr Turnbull had just died, and bequeathed his library to the country, or anyhow to the Government of New Zealand. And I remember romance taking charge again, and a great mark of interrogation confronting me in the sky that Wellington morning: should I abandon my career as a bookseller and become instead the librarian of the Turnbull Library? It was an attractive prospect, after Mr Wilson's discouraging comments; it seemed to indicate that there was some force in the Cosmos working for an ultimate justice. After an interval, however, I gathered that the question was not one that I should answer; neither the Prime Minister nor the Governor sent for me; and when the Fates, as cosmic instruments, finally made up their minds and impelled the

Government of New Zealand to do something about the bounty that had fallen so prematurely into its lap, they were seen to have come down on the side of Mr Johannes C. Andersen. Well: one could hardly be surprised at that. Anyway, by then I had read H. G. Wells's Outline of History, that first electrifying edition in parts, and I was off in a fresh direction. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, to be young, to be reading the Outline of History in weekly parts. Mr Andersen could have the Turnbull Library.

Let me now clearly announce that in celebrating this fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the public function of the Turnbull Library I should not be taking the lead. I know of only one man who should be doing that, apart from the Turnbull's own officers, and I have neither the intimacy nor the breadth of Dr McCormick's scholarship. I really know very little about Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull or the history of his library, either while he was building it up or since it came into the hands of the State. I have been a hanger-on, an outsider - though taken in with enormous hospitality and allowed a free run by the staff, even when some of my opinions on the destiny of the library differed from theirs; I have been a sort of profiteer; I have tended to regard the place as a private preserve of my own, to which I have been willing to allow a few other people access I have been not at all pleased to find, once or twice, all the seats taken. You can be an outsider and still feel all that. I do hold it up as a virtue in myself that I never robbed the library. For when I came into it first I felt like Robert Clive confronted by the treasury of Bengal. You know that he stood astonished at his own moderation. I stand astonished at my total abstinence. There I was, hit between wind and water, once again, by a salvo of romance, practically sunk. I had only to fill my pockets with the most delectable pieces of figured gold, fantastic jewellery, and walk out. I could be gloating over them at home now. The confounded puritan upbringing that dogs so many of us! There is strong reason for thinking that in that early time there were visitors less restrained by the rules of an immoderate morality. Still, there were plenty of books left. You could hardly emerge from the front door with the Kelmscott Chaucer or Johnson's Dictionary under your arm, unwrapped, without being noticed by somebody; and there was a rule, I think, against taking in suitcases or cabin-trunks.

Mr Andersen was, also, as you are no doubt well aware, an author; and on a larger scale that Mr Wilson. He wrote a large book on the history of Canterbury, and another on Polynesian myths and legends; he had written verse of a rather embarrassing nature and was about to publish, I think, on English prosody; he wrote, at length, on Maori string figures and on place names; he was the Polynesian Society's editor, and had a large volume coming up on Polynesian music; he

had this excellent hobby of the study of New Zealand bird-song, and the reproduction of it from his own lips. I have wondered how he had time to be a librarian; and indeed that magnificent main Turnbull room with its Persian carpet and the shapely products of Mr Kupli's cabinet-making, full of first editions - now, alas! for so many years a stack room - did look as if it had become Mr Andersen's private study. I may be wrong: you must remember that these were the impressions, gathered upwards of fifty years ago, of a young man, appropriately dazzled, humbly seeking permission to study Captain Hobson and the New Zealand Company for an ma thesis. Was it in fact a Persian carpet? Was the treasure house in fact as staggering as I thought it was? It was staggering enough for me, anyhow, as I laid my eyes on folios and quartos; saw, as it were, an endless vista of morocco bindings; had realised for me, solidified, the abstract words of Andrew Lang in that delightful book. I never thought of calling the building a temple, in its semi-Jacobean red brick, so different from the rest of Bowen Street, and the old Turnbull dwelling behind it, and nineteenth-century colonial Lambton Quay just around one corner, and the nineteenthcentury wooden Terrace just round the other; none the less there it was, centrally situated but rather removed from the interests of Lambton Quay as well as its architecture, something distinct, not religious, but of the spirit; and inside was the sort of high priest, ministering to I am not quite sure what. I left him alone, and he left me alone; and before very long I had the magical, the transforming experience of laying hands on my first historical manuscript, the brief diary kept by Colonel Wakefield on his passage to New Zealand in the Tory. It did not cast a flood of light on anything; but it was a manuscript, it was enchantment.

Talking about libraries, or 'the library', and in a supplementary way about librarians, I find I am talking primarily about New Zealand, and Wellington. I could, of course, describe my emotions on first entering the Reading Room at the British Museum, and, under that enormous dome, feeling so much nearer the centre of the Cosmos. I suppose someone wrote a sonnet on it once, in the days when the production of sonnets was a thriving branch of British industry, about the time of 'Give a man a pipe he can smoke' and Mr Gladstone's first government, and any words of mine would be as otiose as an addendum to Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge. I am equally not called to discuss the Laurentian Library in Florence, or the Vatican Library or the Library of Congress or the Library of the Abbey of Melk. So I can return to New Zealand, and Wellington. Adding together the Wellington libraries I have mentioned, and the collections I have not mentioned because I do not want to become too complicated, the remaining part of our so-called National Library and our city library, I think we could say that as general readers we are not badly off for books. That is not at

all the same as saying that we are well off, as students or special readers. Add all our books and manuscripts together, add all the libraries in New Zealand together, and we still should not get more than a small fraction of a library of real size and scope. We should still have to send away for microfilms and xerox copies. We are of course an odd people. I do not need to adduce to you the history of the National Library to prove that; and you are acquainted with the fact that as our university population rises, together with the extension of research and the pursuit of higher degrees - which mean, or should mean, the satisfaction of special needs - our universities are being urged to spend less and less on books, while the huge rise in prices, added to by devaluation, makes it imperative to spend more and more. It is not much comfort to reflect that most peoples are in some way odd, and that the British Museum is chronically short of money. But how odd can we be, and still respect ourselves as a community? It depends, I suppose, on what we respect ourselves for. I suppose we could respect ourselves for having, not a healthy provincial, but a crudely unabashed colonial, mind. I hope, on the other hand, that we are past that point; that we do assume naturally that we are a healthy province. It is no use trying to persuade ourselves, even with the most painstaking snobbery in the world, that we are a metropolis - even if the Turnbull does have a Milton collection that a metropolis might envy.

Of course I do not think that possession of a large number of books necessarily makes us more than crudely colonial. But it does tend to help the health of the mind. It is, on the whole, an aid to the intellectual activity of the community. We do need more than the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress and James Bond, even as an aid to our prose style. I was conversing a few weeks ago with Sir Harold White at the National Library of Australia at Canberra. You know they have a very good new monumental building there, in an expanse of lawn, overlooking a lake, with sculpture by Henry Moore outside, and a fountain, and a ring of fountains and trees in the distance; and I said to Sir Harold, 'What about expansion? Have you your plans for expansion laid down?' He answered, 'I don't think we need worry about that yet. There's room for ten million books underneath.' I understand the combined contents of our New Zealand libraries, of all sorts except school libraries, add up to something over ten and a half million volumes. We must not say combined resources, because two copies of the same book do not exactly double resources. Well: if you suggested a national library in New Zealand by the end of this century, in one place, of ten million volumes, would you get a very good reception from the financier concerned? Yet by the end of this century we expect to have our population attaining its third million. That would work out at three-plus books - or titles, in library terminology - per person. That

doesn't seem so extravagant to me. Perhaps I am naive. Perhaps I am, once again, romantic. When I was young I dreamed dreams, and now -though possibly it is just that something has gone wrong with my eyes, through too much use of microfilms - perhaps I see visions. I even see a vision of Henry Moore outside our new National Library. That elementary bit of play with numbers brings me back to thinking about the Turnbull, in its relations with other libraries. A great collector of books can either specialize, or he can just amass books; or he can do something in between, he can drive his tastes in double harness. Alexander Turnbull belonged to this third class: he was interested in English literature - first editions and so forth; he was interested in New Zealand and the Pacific; and just before he died, I gather, he had added a third horse to his team, in the form of the history of the stage and drama. His great contemporaries or near-contemporaries stuck much more closely to one theme: Hocken in New Zealand, David Scott Mitchell and Sir William Dixson in Sydney. Hocken worked on New Zealand, Mitchell and Dixson on the whole Pacific, and Mitchell picked up things that certainly ought to be in New Zealand. With everybody no doubt there is a marginal area. But the Turnbull, in the sphere of Oceania, could never be a rival to the Mitchell; and now that

the Dixson collection has gone under the same roof in Sydney as the Mitchell, I doubt if there is anything else, outside the British Museum, that will ever be. On the other hand, you will look in vain, in the Mitchell, for the folio sermons of John Donne, the Gibbon quartos, the first editions of Paradise Lost or Hyperion or Lord Jim. And those are things we desperately need, if we are to see truly the development of the English, and hence the New Zealand, mind. I almost, at this point, bring out a theory of my own on the influence of book sizes on the development of English prose, but that might be too violently parenthetical. I assure you, all the same, that Donne's sermons are just as important for us as the journals of Captain Cook. Now, Turnbull could have extended this side of his collection enormously, to our advantage, if he did not run too far into the sands of Swinburne and that sort of thing - and he may have had every intention of doing so: though I feel a little bit dubious when I remember the large unopened packing cases which, I was told, contained his first orders on the history of the stage. I do not condemn the history of the stage: I simply speculate about the ultimate value, comparatively, in the life of the community and of scholarship, of the specialized library, the 'learned library', and of the more general library. Which is going to bring us closer to the heart of the Cosmos and do we want to get there? Should we give our collectors orders on what to collect, or should we let them have their fun? Should we encourage them to collect manuscripts as well as books, and prints, and maps? You see these collections, when

they come into public ownership (and we must assume public spirit and generosity on the part of our collectors, even without the inducement of the American tax system), are going to determine the future patterns of research. Would it be a good thing to invent a system, and pick on promising young men with a bent for collecting, and allot them fields - seventeenth-century poets for one, eighteenth-century geography for another, twentieth-century lecture manuscripts for a third - and have them all heavily subsidized by the state? Would this be anything more, really, than the subsidy by public subscription through which the British Museum was enabled to buy the Codex Sinaiticus? It might be a trifle expensive, since the Americans and the Russians introduced their policy of scouring the Old World and buying up whole libraries, but what great achievements were realized without great efforts? When one thinks of the Old World, indeed, is one not driven to other sorts of disquiet? Would it not be sensible of the British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Abbey of Melk (I cannot run through all Europe) to export all their collections to New Zealand as a preservative measure for when the bombs go off? It would stimulate scholarship here and bring a lot of money into the country and add to the prestige of our universities: it might even offset some of the ruin we face when the United Kingdom goes into the E.E.C. Of course they would have to face the risk of some misguided Frenchman putting his finger on the button at the wrong moment at Mururoa and sinking us and European civilization together.

What I am driving at in this roundabout way, you will perceive, is the statement, not very original, that New Zealand has - we as New Zealanders have - a responsibility towards civilization; and I see it much more in terms of the library than of fighting in someone else's backyard. I think this statement is a true one; and I think I see our realization of its truth in terms of our history. It is the history of a colony, a dependency, living politically and intellectually at second hand, that turned into something else. What that something else is it is hard to define, and this is not the sort of lecture that calls for precise political definition, either of New Zealand's status or of that of any other political community. Few of the old definitions work any longer. But there are elements of independence in it, and elements of maturity. Our concern with the library - let me give the thing a generic name - has these elements. It has them in common with another institution of some intellectual significance in our country, the university. The library is no longer a few hundred books of fiction and miscellaneous uplift attached to a Mechanic's Institute. The university is no longer a small gathering of imported teachers and underworked students picking their way through a minimum of text-books for examination by some allegedly eminent professor overseas. They have both become large

ingredients in the national consciousness over the last thirty or forty years, the library developing rather later, I think, than the university: certainly both becoming serious institutions. You cannot cut them arbitrarily apart. The university has three functions: to spread knowledge, to preserve knowledge, to extend knowledge; or, if you prefer it put more actively, to teach men to think, to preserve the results of former thinking, to foster that sort of thinking called research. Are not the functions of the library the same? - though fundamentally it may be devoted to providing the means of thought rather than training in thought. You may say: Ah, but what about the laboratories and the computers of the physicist and the chemist and the engineer? Haven't they a primary, a superlative importance in the modern world? And does the Turnbull or the Hocken or the G.A.L. or the Country Library Service provide these? No, none of them does; but the demands those fellows, physicist, chemist, engineer, make on the library in the course of their work is quite astonishing; and they are quite as self-righteous in their demands as the classical scholar, the economist, the historian. You may like to warn me that I am talking too much in terms of scholarship, that I have forgotten the works of imagination, the story, the play, the poem. No, I have not forgotten them, I do not wish to maim the library, I wish to see in it all the nobility, the exultations and anguish and meditations of the human mind; and I think we can classify them as knowledge: more important than some of its other departments, yes. You may like to bring into the discussion a country's archive collection; and I should say Of course, and say it eagerly, if I were discussing the preservation and utilization of all the records of the country's development and identity, all its links with humankind. The historian, or certain sorts of historian, may lean on both library and archives, possibly equally on both. I should agree that we have very lately come by a sense of responsibility in relation to archives. But archives and library are not the same thing; and I am discussing the library.

I am driving at something else, in relation to the library, in relation to its seriousness, in relation to our responsibility to civilization. I am driving from a different direction at the development of the library in New Zealand, in the development of the librarian. I hark back in the first place to my own no doubt tedious memories of literary life in colonial Wellington, of Andrew Lang among my father's books, my romance-sodden youth, my uncertainties, the librarians who were such significant figures to me, the summary of a librarian's qualifications by my much-admired schoolmaster. When I look back at those librarians I have to smile - not, quite certainly, in a scornful or patronising way. If I did so I should deserve scorn myself. Then in what way? In the way - I fumble with these words - in which one looks back at practitioners

in a simple time and place of an immensely difficult art, who had leisure for all that writing, who (so far as I know) showed no sign of discontent with their conduct of their jobs. True, Horace Ward did not indulge himself as a litterateur or a savant: he had not the temperament for those agreeable callings; he worked instead long hours of invigilation, and did produce, in his immaculate script, a card catalogue of his library. I do not know what zeal the others had in cataloguing. No doubt they all liked a life spent among books. Would not you, with your knowledge of the modern profession of librarianship, with your strong respect for the proceedings of the New Zealand Library Association, regard them all as amateurs? Would you, if they came before you now, appoint any of them to equivalent positions? You would not; you would reject them all with the same instantaneous unanimity as you would reject me, if I continued to retain the last sad tattered garment of romance. I remember now, I too was, for a few weeks, a librarian - at least a temporary student-assistant to the reverend gentleman, whom I came to like very much. What I did, I must confess, I have not the faintest idea, except wrap up - or was it unwrap? - some parcels, and sit at the raised desk and enjoy a sense of power, and receive a small salary. Perhaps that is what makes men librarians still: the desire to exercise power, and to receive a small salary. But the librarian - I continue to drive, however erratically - the directing genius, has indeed become professional. He also is part of our growing maturity. He is at once product and indication. He may know a little about a lot of things, and we should not wish to deprive him of a wide-ranging intelligence; but he must also know a great deal about one thing, and that is the library.

Night wears on. If it did not I could say more about this I mean about the mature librarian administering the mature library in the mature society. I could give you a philosophy of history where I have merely touched on history. I could bring in wars and depressions and international institutions, a centenary and the state of the wool market, the dairy industry and the influence of America, the Statute of Westminster, 1931; Mary Parsons, the angel of light, who founded our library school; Peter Fraser, the prime minister, who sent for people and hammered so many things together. The inter-relations are illimitable, as our country part struggles, part is dragged and heaved and bullied, into this maturity or near-maturity of which I have been talking. The horse and buggy are gone with our colonial status the green alluvial paddocks of the Hutt Valley sustain a load of houses and factories and civic advancement; the Terrace inexorably becomes a multi-storey steel and concrete money-hallowed wind-tunnel. Lambton Quay as inexorably curves into the future, and Wellington is a fringe to a multi-laned motorway. Yes, our maturity is upon us. If you look

carefully, with a mind that remains library-orientated, you will descry somewhere in the hurly-burly the figure of Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, the pattern of Pacific exploration, the glint of gold on a leather binding. At this point I realize, with alarm and depression, how completely I have let you down. These large generalizations, this trivial self-centred reminiscence, masquerading as a lecture on the library: and now it is too late to pour out a stream of constructive thought, such as should issue from the realities of this contemporary scene, carry you excitedly to the basic demands of commercial and technical information, information retrieval, all the electronic glories of our modern blood and state. I was even wondering how I could work up to another piece of poetry, on the plea that it was written by a librarian. I realize only too well that the historian, however confidently he may talk, has few certainties to offer you. You should have got someone who knew something to address you. - And what about the Cosmos? you may enquire: have I no word of explanation or benediction for, can I retrieve no information about the Cosmos, before I sink into oblivion? Isaac Disraeli does not seem to have examined it. I have dragged it in where I could. If you press me, I explain that I added it to my title just to make you think the lecture might be interesting. We are all part of the Cosmos. The Library is part of the Cosmos. My librarian-poet, preliminary to his declaration of love, thought of a second quatrain:

Knowing how unsure is all my knowledge, doled To sloven memory and to cheated sense, And to what majesty of stars I hold My little candle of experience . . .

Well, all our candles are little ones. Without the Library, should we have anything worth calling a candle at all?