Well, whatever the perplexities of our Library we may be sure
they will never break down that tradition of service, help and
courtesy which is, among its fine treasures, still the first. But
we have seen that Mr Jenkinson's perplexities are really but a
parable of ours: that the question, What are we to do with all
these books accumulating in the world? really _is_ a question:
that their mere accumulation really _does_ heap up against us a
barrier of such enormous and brute mass that the stream of human
culture must needs be choked and spread into marsh unless we
contrive to pipe it through. That a great deal of it is meant to
help--that even the most of it is well intentioned--avails not
against the mere physical obstacle of its mass. If you consider
an Athenian gentleman of the 5th century B.C. connecting (as I
always preach here) his literature with his life, two things are
bound to strike you: the first that he was a man of leisure,
somewhat disdainful of trade and relieved of menial work by a
number of slaves; the second, that he was surprisingly
unencumbered with books. You will find in Plato much about
reciters, actors, poets, rhetoricians, pleaders, sophists, public
orators and refiners of language, but very little indeed about
books. Even the library of Alexandria grew in a time of decadence
and belonged to an age not his. Says Jowett in the end:
He who approaches him in the most reverent spirit shall reap
most of the fruit of his wisdom; he who reads him by the
light of ancient commentators will have the least
understanding of him.
We see him [Jowett goes on] with the eye of the mind in
the groves of the Academy, or on the banks of the Ilissus,
or in the streets of Athens, alone or walking with Socrates,
full of those thoughts which have since become the
common possession of mankind. Or we may compare him
to a statue hid away in some temple of Zeus or Apollo, no
longer existing on earth, a statue which has a look as of the
God himself. Or we may once more imagine him following
in another state of being the great company of heaven
which he beheld of old in a vision. So, 'partly trifling but
with a certain degree of seriousness,' we linger around the
memory of a world which has passed away.
Yes, 'which has passed away,' and perhaps with no token more
evident of its decease than the sepulture of books that admiring
generations have heaped on it!