You Could Look It Up (56 page)

“Good cataloging,” writes John Overholt, the curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection at Harvard, “is the foundation stone of librarianship. If you have an item and can’t find it, you don’t really have it.” When administrators propose cutting cataloging staff, Overholt cautions, “Saving money on cataloging only externalizes the costs in public services staff labor, duplicate purchases, and patron frustration.”
27
The same sentiment was put more poetically a century and a half earlier: “A library is not worth anything without a catalogue,” said Thomas Carlyle; “it is a Polyphemus without any eye in his head.”
28

CHAPTER
21 ½

INDEX LEARNING

Is Google making us stupid?

That was Nicholas Carr's question in 2008. “Over the past few years,” he worried, “I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” In the Google age, the danger is that “we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”
1
The logic is that ease of access is incompatible with profound contemplation—as information access gets easier, we'll take it increasingly for granted, and then knowledge itself will become superficial. Because I can know any fact I want to know in seconds without even getting off the sofa—Mount Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet (5,895 m) high; the B side of Elvis Presley's “Heartbreak Hotel” was “I Was the One”; cricket was first played in India in 1721—I need not take the time to stock my brain with knowledge, and without deep knowledge, I can never aspire to wisdom.

This anxiety about ready access to information has a long history. Centuries before people worried about Google and Wikipedia, they worried about reference books and other scholarly apparatus. The first alphabetical indexes date to the fourteenth century,
2
and the paraphernalia of learning, which had long been the preserve of classical scholars, began showing up in the modern languages in the seventeenth century. In eighteenth-century Britain, some readers felt particularly threatened by the rise of indexes, glossaries, and concordances, all of which let the merest impostor appear as learned as the greatest sage. Alexander Pope dismissed this kind of knowledge as mere “Index-learning”:

How Prologues into Prefaces decay,

And these to Notes are fritter'd quite away:

How Index-learning turns no student pale,

Yet holds the eel of science by the tail.
3

Someone who depends on indexes is getting erudition on the cheap. In his bizarre satire on “modern” learning,
A Tale of a Tub
, Pope's friend Jonathan Swift took aim at all literary aids to comprehension, including marginalia, footnotes, dictionaries, and indexes—especially indexes. He blames those superficial scholars who hope “to get a thorough Insight into the
Index
, by which the whole Book is governed and turned, like
Fishes
by the
Tail
.” The satirical
Grub Street Journal
complained in 1735 that “One of the principal causes of the decay of Learning is … the over great care that has been taken to preserve it… . The multitude of
Abridgements
, of
New Methods
, of
Indexes
, of
Dictionaries
, have damped that lively ardour which made scholars; and they have thought to know, that without any study, which they were assured might be learned with but moderate pains.”
4
And the novelist Samuel Richardson wrote to a friend in 1750 complaining about “this age of dictionary and index learning, in which our study is to get knowledge without study.”
5
The index, that is to say, amounts to cheating. “An index,” literary historian Paul Tankard writes, “as an (albeit institutionalized) short cut, is always subversive; it suggests the possibility of avoiding the author's prose, of undermining the linearity of the text, of re-writing it. An index treats all prose as (mere) rhetoric.”
6

Actually, the fear is even older than the index—it is as old as writing itself. We see exactly the same anxiety in one of Plato's dialogues composed around 370
B.C.E.
Socrates lectures Phaedrus about “a famous old god, whose name was Theuth,” an inventor, whose greatest creation was writing. Theuth offered to share the gift of letters with the Egyptian people: “This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.” The Egyptian king, though, is unconvinced. Writing sounds like a gift, he says, but it will simply “create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” The result will be
a race of dilettantes: “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
7
Two and a half millennia later, and we continue to fret about the inevitable decline.

CHAPTER
22

THE GOOD LIFE

The Arts and High Society

Many reference books are grimly utilitarian, concerned only with what we
need
to know: legal codes to settle the penalty for adultery, logarithm tables to aid artillery batteries, dictionaries to settle Saxon etymologies. But reference books can also tell us things we
want
to know. They can be just as useful in helping us find
le mot juste
for a poem, guiding us through the world’s great museums, or advising us on which wine is worth a week’s salary. Reference books, that is to say, can help us live the good life.

George Grove was born in Clapham, just south of London, in 1820. Though far from rich, he managed to get a decent education, and at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a Scottish civil engineer. Soon he began working on the Birmingham–London railway. His passion, though, was music. His earliest musical memories were of hearing his mother play parts of Handel’s
Messiah
on the piano. As a boy he was a regular at the Clapham parish church—partly, no doubt, for the doctrine, but largely to hear the music there, since the organist was especially fond of Johann Sebastian “Bawk.”
1
When he worked in London, he heard as many concerts as he could, and he spent hours at the British Museum copying out long-neglected scores.

When he finished his apprenticeship he qualified as a graduate of the
Institution of Civil Engineering and traveled first to Glasgow, then to Jamaica and Bermuda, working as an engineer on building projects. Jamaica was under direct British rule in the heyday of the Empire, and Grove played his part in the imperial project. As his biographer tells the story—in an attempt to make him sound humane—“It is characteristic of Grove’s considerateness that he was most anxious to get his white men away from the spot on the earliest possibility before the setting in of the unhealthy season.”
2
Grove was a product of his age, when a white European life was worth more than a brown or black life.

Back in England, Grove worked on the new railway station at Chester, but he also made a point of hearing as much music as possible at the cathedral. When he heard the organist there playing a Bach fugue, he knew he had found a kindred spirit, and the two became fast friends. Together they started a singing club. Eventually Grove came into contact with some of the highest-profile civil engineers working in Britain, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel. On their urging—he facetiously says “they forced me”
3
—he became secretary of the Society of Arts in London at a time of great cultural excitement, since London was preparing for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Grove was responsible for much of the planning, and after the Exhibition, he became secretary in charge of the Crystal Palace, the gigantic glass structure that had been built for the event. He spent the rest of his life hosting concerts—first with a wind band, then with a full orchestra—at the Crystal Palace. He routinely chose the program and wrote program notes for the concerts, signing them simply “G.”

Grove had many notable friends—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Morton Stanley, Benjamin Jowett, Clara Schumann, Arthur Sullivan (“a constant visitor at his house”)
4
—and he hosted a wide range of programs, including the great Germans and Austrians of the Classical period, the French Romantics, and up-and-coming British composers. Bach—no longer “Bawk”—was a particular passion. Bach’s reputation among the general public was not high in the mid-nineteenth century; he was regarded as learned but difficult. But for Grove, writing in the
Spectator
for a music-loving audience, Bach was marked not by learning but by “feeling, tender passionate sentiment, a burning genius, and a prodigious flow and march of ideas.”
5
Grove also championed Franz Schubert, then
little known in Britain. Sullivan and Grove traveled to Vienna to track down Schubert manuscripts and discovered music thought lost, which was first played at one of Grove’s Crystal Palace concerts.

His writing talent made him a natural to become assistant editor of the
Bible Dictionary
being prepared by William Smith. He threw himself into the task, quickly providing a list of two hundred topics he might write on that started with just the letters
A
and
B
. He even paid two visits to the Holy Land to do research for the project, and as he worked on his contributions, often sat up until sunrise. He ultimately contributed around eleven hundred pages to the dictionary. He became the editor of
Macmillan’s Magazine
, one of Victorian England’s most popular periodicals, and did the job for fifteen years, securing contributions from the likes of Bret Harte, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. H. Lecky, Thomas Henry Huxley, George Eliot, George Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Margaret Oliphant, William Morris, and even the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev.
6

As Grove later recalled, “One dictionary led to another.”
7
In 1874, the Macmillan publishing house approached him with an idea for a new dictionary of music, and he resigned his secretaryship of the Crystal Palace to devote himself to the project. In January 1874, Macmillan published a prospectus for a two-volume
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
. The publishers noted that interest in music had grown by leaps and bounds over the previous twenty-five years—the years, by no coincidence, during which Grove had been proselytizing in London—and that people were now curious about an art they had long neglected. But where to get answers? “There is no book in English,” they wrote,

from which an intelligent inquirer can learn, in small compass, and in language which he can understand, what is meant by a Symphony or Sonata, a Fugue, a Stretto, a Coda, or any other of the technical terms … or from which he can gain a readable and succinct account of the various branches of the art, or of the use and progress of the pianoforte and other instruments, or the main facts and characteristics of the lives of eminent musicians.
8

Grove was able to draw on his network of musical acquaintances to assemble an unimpeachable roster of contributors, as well as authorities whose names appear nowhere in the dictionary but who answered Grove’s queries by mail or in person. He established a few principles: to minimize technical language; to make the musical examples available to readers, rather than locked away in libraries; and to cover European music broadly, with particular attention to English musicians. He began his coverage in 1450, “the most remote date to which the rise of modern music can be carried back.” Anything earlier he dismissed as “mere archæology.”
9
In this he was a creature of his age: early music was not yet in vogue.