The Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

would thus be swept into and dissolved in
the current, and the waters would have been deepened and colored by
their dissolution. 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 archæology 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.