ed to that which we
have just considered; besides harking back to what is oldest it looks
forward to what is newest. It may stir us by awakening dim racial
recollections; but it may also thrill us by adding to the store of what is
already in the mind. In fact, we like to assimilate new ideas, to think
new thoughts, to do new acts; we like to read or hear something that we
could not have produced ourselves. When we are young and ignorant,
therefore, we like music or art or literature that appears trivial to us
as we grow older and have developed our own creative powers. A poem that
is no better than one a man might dash off himself he likes no longer; he
prefers to be confronted with something that is above and beyond his own
powers, though not above his comprehension. Thus, as he grows, his zone of
enjoyment shifts upward, and the library covers the whole moving field.
When Solomon John Peterkin, pen in hand, sat down to write a book, he
discovered that he hadn't anything to say. Happy lad! He had before him
all literature as a field of enjoyment, for all, apparently, was beyond
his creative efforts.

Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended the
relations between the tonic and the dominant chords? I have heard a small
boy at a piano play these alternately for hours. Such a performance is
torture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it is
new and has just come into his sphere of creative power. When he is
thoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandons
it for something newer and a little higher. The boy who discovers, without
being told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces a
certain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par with
Wagner's searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that are
often beyond technical explanation.

The child who reads what you think is a trivial book, re-reads it, and
reads others like it, is doing this same thing in the domain of
literature--he is following the natural course that will bring him out at
the top after a while.

When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but
potential. A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface,
but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of
which we have touched on but a few--the invisible ancestral memories of
centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our old