THE LIBRARY PAST AND FUTURE 223 



was but a myth, will enter new worlds, bearing with them to far-off 

 students the benefit of their ancient wisdom. The electric post or the 

 air-ships will have then shortened distances, the telephone will 

 make it possible to hear at Melbourne a graphophone disk asked for, 

 a few minutes earlier, from the British Museum. There will be few 

 readers, but an infinite number of hearers, who will listen from their 

 own homes to the spoken paper, to the spoken book. University 

 students will listen to their lectures while they lie in bed, and, 

 as now with us, will not know their professors even by sight. Writ- 

 ing will be a lost art. Professors of paleography and keepers of 

 manuscripts will, perhaps, have to learn to accustom their eye to 

 the ancient alphabets. Autographs will be as rare as palimpsests are 

 now-. Books will no longer be read; they will be listened to; and 

 then only will be fulfilled Mark Pattison's famous saying: " The 

 librarian who reads is lost." 



But even if the graphophone does not produce so profound a 

 transformation as to cause the alphabet to become extinct and effect 

 an injury to culture itself; even if, as we hope will be the case, the 

 book retains its place of honor, and instructions through the eyes 

 be not replaced by that through the ears (in which case printed 

 books would be kept for the exclusive benefit of the deaf) , still these 

 disks, now so much derided, will form a very large part of the future 

 library. The art of oratory, of drama, of music, and of poetry, the 

 study of languages, the present pronunciation of languages and dia- 

 lects, will find faithful means of reproduction in these humble disks. 

 Imagine, if we could hear in this place to-day the voice of Lincoln 

 or of Garibaldi, of Victor Hugo or of Shelley, just as you might hear 

 the clear winged words of Gabriele d' Annunzio, the moving voice 

 of Eleonore Duse, or the drawling words of Mark Twain. Imagine 

 the miracle of being able to call up again the powerful eloquence of 

 your political champions, or the heroes of our patriotic struggles; 

 of being able to listen to the music of certain verses, the wailing of 

 certain laments, the joy that breaks out in certain cries of the soul. 

 The winged word would seem to raise itself once more into the air as 

 at the instant when it came forth, living from the breast, to play upon 

 our sensibilities, to stir up our hearts. It is not to be believed 

 that men will willingly lose this benefit the benefit of uniting 

 to the words the actual voices of those who are, and will no longer 

 be, and that they should not desire that those whose presence has 

 left us should at least speak among us. 1 We may also believe that 

 certain forms of art, such as the novel and the drama, will prefer 

 the phonetic to the graphic reproduction, or at least a union of the 

 two. And the same may be said of poetry, which will find in modern 



1 A Phonographic Pantheon has been founded in the Laurentian Library, ac- 

 cording to this proposal. 



