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.