The Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

Libraries are a sort of débris of the world, but the spiritual substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed by that oblivion which chases humanity; all the time wasted in the wrong-headedness of arch?ology would be saved; for there would be nothing of the past except its influence on the immediate present, and nothing but the pure human ingot would finally be left of the long whirlings in the crucible of history. Some one has said that all recent literature is one gigantic plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a channel, and is colored by all the ores of its banks, but it would be absurd for it to attempt to take the channel up and carry it along with itself out into the sea. Why should the tinted water of life attempt to carry along with it not only the tint, but also the bank, ages back, from which the tint proceeds?
As the world goes on, the multitude of books increases. They grow as grows the human race,--but, unlike the human race, they have a material immortality here below. Fossil books, unlike fossil rocks, have a power of reproduction. Every new year leaves not only a new inheritance, but generally a larger one than ever before. What is to be the result? The ultimate prospect is portentous. If England has produced ten thousand volumes of fiction (about three thousand new novels) during the last forty years, how many books of all kinds has Christendom to answer for in the same period? If the British Museum makes it a point to preserve a copy of everything that is published, how long will it be before the whole world will not be sufficient to contain the multitude thereof? At present all the collections of the Museum, books, etc., occupy only forty acres on the soil, and an average of two hundred feet towards the sky. But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, going to read them? Surely the green earth will be transformed into a wilderness of books, and man, reduced from the priest and interpreter of Nature to a bookworm, will be like the beasts which perish.
The eye of fancy lately witnessed in a dream the vision of an age far in the future. The surface of the earth was covered with lofty rectangles, built up coral-like from small rectangles. There was neither tree nor herb nor living creature. Walled paths, excavated ruts, alone broke the desert-like prospect, as the burrows of life. Penetrating into these, the eye saw men walking beneath the striated piles, with heads bent forward and nervous fingering of brow. There the whole world, such as we have known it, was buried beneath volumes, past all enumeration. There was neither fauna nor flora, neither wilderness, tempest, nor any familiar look of Nature, but only one boundless contiguity of books. There was only man and space and one unceasing library, and the men neither ate nor slept nor spoke. Nature was transformed into the processes and products of writing, and man was now no longer lover, friend, peasant, merchant, naturalist, traveller, gourmet, mechanic, warrior, worshipper, but only an author. All other faculties had been lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his universe. Anon some wrinkled, fidgety, cogitative being in human form would add a new volume to some slope or tower of the monstrous omni-patulent mass, or some sharp-glancing youth, with teeth set unevenly on edge, would pull out a volume, look greedily and half-believingly for a few moments, return it, and slink away. "What is this world, and what means this life?" cried I, addressing an old man, who had just tossed a volume aloft. "Where are we, and what about this? Tell me, for I have not before seen and do not know." He glanced a moment, then spoke, like a shade in hell, as follows:--"This is the world, and here is human life. Man long enjoyed it, with wonderful fulness and freshness of being. But a madness seized him; everybody wrote books; the evil grew