The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864. Various
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catch the merest glimpse of it amid the Christian legends and credulities of the Middle Ages,—but the Arabs would have kept a stronger hold on it; he would see it in the background after the revival of learning, till, gradually, as modern commerce opened the East, scholars, also, discovered that there were wonders behind the classic nations; and finally he would see how modern research, rushing back through comparison of language-roots, through geological data, through ethnological indications, through antiquarian discoveries, has rooted out of the layers of ages all the history attendant upon its original production. He would find the records of this long history in the library around him. In every age, the thought, born of pain, has been reproduced with travail. It did not do its mission at once, penetrate like a ray of light into the heart of the race, and leave a chemical effect which should last forever. No, the blood of man's spirit was not purified,—only an external application was made, and that application must be repeated with torture upon every generation. Was this designed to be the function of thought, the mission of heavenly ideas?
This is the history of his thought in books. But let us conceive what might have been its history but for the books;—how it might have been written in the fibres of the soul, and lived in eternal reason, instead of having been written on papyrus and involved in the realm of dead matter. His idea, thrilling his own soul, would have revealed itself in every particle and movement of his body; for "soul is form, and doth the body make." Its first product would have been his own quivering, animated, and animating personality. He would have impressed every one of his associates, every one of whom would in turn have impressed a new crowd, and thus the immortal array of influences would have gone on. Not impressions on parchment, but impressions on the soul, not letters, but thrills, would have been its result. Thus the magic of personal influence of all kinds would have radiated from it in omnipresent and colliding circlets forever, as the mighty imponderable agents are believed to radiate from some hidden focal force. He would trace his idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,—in the elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the Greeks,—in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,—and so on through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not by dead and unsymbolical letters. It has had life, and not merely duration. It has been perpetuated in cordate, not in dactylate characters. Its history must not be sought away from the circle of life, but may be seen in the current generation of men. The man whom you should meet on the street would be the product of all the ideas and influences from the foundation of the world, and his slightest act would reveal them all vital within him. The libraries, which form dead recesses in the river of life, 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. Man long enjoyed it, with wonderful fulness and freshness of being. But a madness seized him; everybody wrote books; the evil grew more and more; nought else was an object of pursuit; till at last the earth was covered with tomes, and for long ages now it has been buried beyond the reach of mortal. All forms of life were exterminated. Man himself survives only as a literary shadow. Each one writes a book, or a few books, and dies, vanishing into thin air. Such is life,—a hecatomb!"
But even if it be supposed that mind could survive the toil, and the earth the quantity of our accumulating books, there are other difficulties. There are other imperative limitations, beyond which the art of writing cannot go. Letters themselves limit the possibilities of literature. For there is only a certain number of letters. These letters are capable of only a certain number of combinations into words. This limited number of possible words is capable only of a certain number of arrangements. Conceive the effect when all these capabilities shall be exhausted! It will no longer be possible for a new thing to be said or written. We shall have only to select and repeat from the past. Writing shall be reduced to the making of extracts, and speaking to the making of quotations. Yet the condition of things would certainly be improved. As there is now a great deal of writing without thinking, so then thinking could go on without writing. A man would be obliged to think out and up to his result, as we do now; but whether his processes and conclusions were wise or foolish, he would find them written out for him in advance. The process of selection would be all. The immense amount of writing would cease. Authors would be extinct. Thinkers could