Each To Him Seems
Great In His Day, But The Ages Roll, And They Shrink Till They Become
Triturated Dust, And You Might, As It Were, Put A Thousand On Your
Thumb-Nail.
They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic,
and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time
they will make a new earth and a new life.
So I think I may say there are
no books; the books are yet to be written.
Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise,
the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a
large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein they failed,
judged by the monograph standard, but gave a subtle food for the mind.
Some of this I would fain see now inspiring the works and words of our
great men of science and thought - a little alchemy. A great change is
slowly going forward all over the printing-press world, I mean wherever
men print books and papers. The Chinese are perhaps outside that world at
present, and the other Asian races; the myriads, too, of the great
southern islands and of Africa. The change is steadily, however,
proceeding wherever the printing-press is used. Nor Pope, nor Kaiser, nor
Czar, nor Sultan, nor fanatic monk, nor muezzin, shouting in vain from
his minaret, nor, most fanatic of all, the fanatic shouting in vain in
London, can keep it out - all powerless against a bit of printed paper.
Bits of printed paper that listen to no command, to which none can say,
'Stand back; thou shalt not enter.' They rise on the summer whirlwinds
from the very dust of the road, and float over the highest walls; they
fall on the well-kept lawns - monastery, prison, palace - there is no
fortress against a bit of printed paper. They penetrate where even
Danae's gold cannot go. Our Darwins, our Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays - all
the immense army of those that go down to nature with considering
eye - are steadfastly undermining and obliterating the superstitious past,
literally burying it under endless loads of accumulated facts; and the
printing-presses, like so many Argos, take these facts on their voyage
round the world. Over go temples, and minarets, and churches, or rather
there they stay, the hollow shells, like the snail shells which thrushes
have picked clean; there they stay like Karnac, where there is no more
incense, like the stone circles on our own hills, where there are no more
human sacrifices. Thus men's minds all over the printing-press world are
unlearning the falsehoods that have bound them down so long; they are
unlearning, the first step to learn. They are going down to nature and
taking up the clods with their own hands, and so coming to have touch of
that which is real. As yet we are in the fact stage; by-and-by we shall
come to the alchemy, and get the honey for the inner mind and soul. I
found, therefore, from the dandelion that there were no books, and it
came upon me, believe me, as a great surprise, for I had lived quite
certain that I was surrounded with them. It is nothing but unlearning, I
find now; five thousand books to unlearn.
Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social
institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old
mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after
peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth - thus writing, as it
were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost remaking the soul. It
seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn.
Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me
in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a
moral life. I hope in the days to come future thinkers will unlearn us,
and find ideas infinitely better. How marvellous it seems that there
should be found communities furnished with the printing-press and fully
convinced they are more intelligent than ants, and yet deliberately
refusing by a solid 'popular' vote to accept free libraries! They look
with scorn on the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the
college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times those! A good
thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and
free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to
unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only
books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first
books - the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so
deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or
of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection
of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which
do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the
chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes - I
wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet
in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the
sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and
beautiful as a summer morning: -
Such the golden crocus,
Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white,
And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty
Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear;
The ox-eye, the sweet-smelling flower of love,
The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth,
And the low-growing violet, to which
Dark Proserpine a darker hue has given.
They come nearest to our own violets and cowslips - the unsown beauty of
our meadows - to the hawthorn leaf and the high pinewood.
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