In the brevity of life and the perishableness of material things the
moral philosophers have always found one of their happiest themes.
“Time, which antiquates Antiquities, hath an Art to make dust of all
things.” There is nothing more moving than those swelling elegiac organ
notes in which they have celebrated the mortality of man and all his
works. Those of us for whom the proper study of mankind is books dwell
with the most poignant melancholy over the destruction of literary
treasures. We think of all the pre-Platonic philosophers of whose
writings only a few sentences remain. We think of Sappho’s poems, all
but completely blotted from our knowledge. We think of the missing
fragments of the “Satyricon,” and of many other precious pages which
once were and are now no more. We complain of the holes that time has
picked in the records of history, bewailing the loss of innumerable
vanished documents. As for buildings, pictures, statues and the
accumulated evidence of whole civilizations, all destroyed as though
they had never been, they do not belong to our literary province, and,
if they did, would be too numerous to catalogue even summarily.
But because men have once thought and felt in a certain way it does not
follow that they will for ever continue to do so. There seems every
probability that our descendants, some two or three centuries hence,
will wax pathetic in their complaints, not of the fragility, but the
horrible persistence and indestructibility of things. They will feel
themselves smothered by the intolerable accumulation of the years. The
men of to-day are so deeply penetrated with the sense of the
perishableness of matter that they have begun to take immense
precautions to preserve everything they can. Desolated by the
carelessness of our ancestors, we are making very sure that our
descendants shall lack no documents when they come to write our history.
All is systematically kept and catalogued. Old things are carefully
patched and propped into continued existence; things now new are hoarded
up and protected from decay.
To walk through the book-stores of one of the world’s great libraries is
an experience that cannot fail to set one thinking on the appalling
indestructibility of matter. A few years ago I explored the recently dug
cellars into which the overflow of the Bodleian pours in an unceasing
stream. The cellars extend under the northern half of the great
quadrangle in whose centre stands the Radcliffe Camera. These catacombs
are two storeys deep and lined with impermeable concrete. “The muddy
damps and ropy slime” of the traditional vault are absent in this great
necropolis of letters; huge ventilating pipes breathe blasts of a dry
and heated wind, that makes the place as snug and as unsympathetic to
decay as the deserts of Central Asia. The books stand in metal cases
constructed so as to slide in and out of position on rails. So ingenious
is the arrangement of the cases that it is possible to fill two-thirds
of the available space, solidly, with books. Twenty years or so hence,
when the existing vaults will take no more books, a new cellar can be
dug on the opposite side of the Camera. And when that is full—it is only
a matter of half a century from now—what then? We shrug our shoulders.
After us the deluge. But let us hope that Bodley’s Librarian of 1970
will have the courage to emend the last word to “bonfire.” To the
bonfire! That is the only satisfactory solution of an intolerable
problem.
The deliberate preservation of things must be compensated for by their
deliberate and judicious destruction. Otherwise the world will be
overwhelmed by the accumulation of antique objects. Pigs and rabbits and
watercress, when they were first introduced into New Zealand, threatened
to lay waste the country, because there were no compensating forces of
destruction to put a stop to their indefinite multiplication. In the
same way, mere things, once they are set above the natural laws of
decay, will end by burying us, unless we set about methodically to get
rid of the nuisance. The plea that they should all be preserved—every
novel by Nat Gould, every issue of the _Funny Wonder_—as historical
documents is not a sound one. Where too many documents exist it is
impossible to write history at all. “For ignorance,” in the felicitous
words of Mr. Lytton Strachey, “is the first requisite of the
historian—ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and
omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” Nobody
wants to know everything—the irrelevancies as well as the important
facts—about the past; or in any case nobody ought to desire to know.
Those who do, those who are eaten up by an itch for mere facts and
useless information, are the wretched victims of a vice no less
reprehensible than greed or drunkenness.
Hand in hand with this judicious process of destruction must go an
elaborate classification of what remains. As Mr. Wells says in his
large, opulent way, “the future world-state’s organization of scientific
research and record compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean
liner beside the dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer.” With
the vast and indiscriminate multiplication of books and periodicals our
organization of records tends to become ever more heliolithic. Useful
information on any given subject is so widely scattered or may be hidden
in such obscure places that the student is often at a loss to know what
he ought to study or where. An immense international labour of
bibliography and classification must be undertaken at no very distant
date, if future generations of researchers are to make the fullest use
of the knowledge that has already been gained.
But this constructive labour will be tedious and insipid compared with
the glorious business of destruction. Huge bonfires of paper will blaze
for days and weeks together, whenever the libraries undertake their
periodical purgation. The only danger, and, alas! it is a very real
danger, is that the libraries will infallibly purge themselves of the
wrong books. We all know what librarians are; and not only librarians,
but critics, literary men, general public—everybody, in fact, with the
exception of ourselves—we know what they are like, we know them: there
never was a set of people with such bad taste! Committees will doubtless
be set up to pass judgment on books, awarding acquittals and
condemnations in magisterial fashion. It will be a sort of gigantic
Hawthornden competition. At that thought I find that the flames of my
great bonfires lose much of their imagined lustre.