Under the dome

A.L. Rowse

That Noble Cabinet. A History of the British Museum Edward Miller (Andre Deutsch. £4.80) I have never been — unlike so many of the eminent — an habitué of the BM, as so many of its devotees affectionately call it. But I have put in a great many hours elf research at manuscripts in the Writing Room, in the days when it was not uncomfortably overcrowded by people whose research does not amount to much. This marginal experience gives one an interesting angle on this excellent and, on the whole, very readable book.

This is the right moment to have written the history of this wonderful institution, of which the nation has such reason to be proud. For, Mr Miller tells us, "within a short space of time, the British Museum as it has been known for well over two hundred years will have ceased to exist and new organisations, based upon it, yet developing along very different lines, will come into being." In the course of its fascinating history the British Museum developed a strong corporate personality, with distinguished public figures familiar in the world of scholarship and culture. "Then all knew each other, at least by sight and, for the most part, to speak to. Now faces come and go with bewildering frequency and one scarcely knows the members even of one's own department."

How like the facelessness of the contemporary demotic world!

Even the curmudgeonly Karl Marx paid tribute to the BM's spirit by presenting it with a copy of the second edition of Das Kapital (corrected, I hope). And the Soviet government might recognise what it owes to Lenin's reading here, by presenting this impoverished nation with a set of all its publications gratis. It would be no more than a fair return.

But this would go to a new set-up called the British Library, if ever it comes into existence. This appears now somewhat doubtful, it would cost so many millions; and with the priority given in demotic society to universal TV sets, perambulators for the insane population explosion, bulging shopping bags (and you should see the rubbish they buy!), with the populace careering pointlessly round in motorcars, consuming petrol and wasting their time, it is evident that the interests of any real culture will be sacrificed.

I pay no attention to the humbug about universal educability, and I doubt whether the British Library will ever be built — I gather they enjoy staff-trouble too, reducing the hours in which readers can read. Another symptom of the time: only the elect are willing to do any work.

One notices in the past the elect who read there to some purpose. In the eighteenth century, the poet Gray, the lawyer Blackstone, the philospher Hume, the archaeologist Dr Stukeley. In the mid-nineteenth century it is Carlyle, or the historian Creighton; even the scruffy revolutionary, Louis Blanc, read to some purpose: he wrote a history of the French Revolution. What is the point of the reading of people who read to no purpose? Libraries today are too full of people who simply come there to fill in time: they should be kept out in the interest of those who know how to use theirs. In the later nineteenth century whole groups of interesting people torm among the readers and help each other's form among the readers and help each other's, work — work which was of significance, not trivial: as Leslie Stephen helped Hardy; or there were Swinburne and Gosse, Masefield and Hall Caine, and even the crapulous Corvo.

Not to mention Samuel Butler and Miss Savage. That famous friendship — with their brilliant letters to each other — was made in the BM, where Butler's books were mostly written. Mr Miller should have made something of those Letters — one never forgets the scene of Butler offering his bag of cherries to lame Miss Savage, and their munching in silence along the Museum pavement in the lunch-hour. And Mr Miller misses a point in failing to mention or quote Louis MacNeice's poem, 'The British Museum Reading Room', which sums it all up:

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge — Honey and wax — the accumulation of years — Some on commission, some for the love of learning. Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears:

And so on to the concluding line: The gutteral sorrow ot the refugees.

There was not much gutteral sorrow in the formidable Panizzi, who created the Reading Room and largely made the Victorian BM what it was. Mr Miller describes him as "the greatest administrative librarian who has ever lived": it was greatly to the credit of the Whig aristocrats who appointed him, and upheld him against the sniping of the newspapers and the usual envy of the inferior. The book gives us plenty about these officials, with their variegated characters — honeyed like Garnett, or Binyon, or cantankerous like Madden. On the whole they have been a distinguished lot and contributed immensely to the stock of knowledge and the world's culture.

Even more interesting is the account of the fabulous collections that have come to the nation, and — sometimes no less dramatic — those missed. Mr Miller is right to rub in the greatest artistic loss the country ever suffered — the dispersal of Charles I's marvellous collections, about the finest ever assembled, by the Puritan Commonwealth after the idiocy of the Civil War. Some splendid chances have been missed, many taken — a few perhaps over-taken. I cannot myself believe that the Codex Sinaiticus —.what was left of it — was worth E100,000 in the 'thirties: the Soviet government got the best of that bargain. On the other hand, the Eumorfopoulos Collection bought for that sum must now be worth a hundred times more.

The historical significance of the story is most revealing — the way the Museum reflects the situation, the prospects and chances, of the country in general. The small island-country was far behind, compared with the libraries and rich collections of France, Italy, Spain or even Prussia. Then with the success, the prosperity and expansion of the empire, the Pacific voyages of Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, the collections began to roll in. In the nineteenth century the British Museum itself took the lead in archaeological exploration in Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the results for all to see. Then came exploration in Africa. Many of these treasures left on the spot would have been destroyed, as many in Greece were ground down for lime, and inscribed slabs and steles and tablets broken up all over the Turkish Empire.

The expansion of empire meant the expansion of knowledge, along with medical and other benefits. We need not doubt what contraction will lead to — cultural along with. material impoverishment, after the Rake's Progress of the Welfare State since 1945.

A. L. Rouse is a Fellow of All Soul's, Oxford