Of Unwritten Books

HAZLITT has told us of an unforgetable evening at Lamb’s, when the talk was all of persons one would wish to have seen; when they called up Sir Thomas Browne, that “solemn and inviting personage,” and had Garrick in to play for them, and watched Pope drive by “in a coronet coach beside Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” Did the same company of friends, one asks one’s self, never, at some equally notable, though unrecorded gathering, play again with possibilities, and talk of books that ought to have been written? After Ayrton had solemnly lusted after a second work from the author of the Essay on the Human Understanding, one can hear Lamb slowly produce “subjects” for his well-loved Kit Marlowe; and might not Hazlitt, the legend kindled for him by Italian painters, have wished that Chaucer had set hand to the story of St. Christopher, — that story that now shines for us so vaguely and dimly in the strange, sober volumes of Caxton’s Golden Legend ?

For the fanciful reader is tormented by regrets vainer, yet more provocative, than the old lament for vanished lyrics, and for stories “left half told,” — the regret of the books that might have been, the books that were left unwritten. If only Sidney, beside those to his mistress, had but written “certaine sonets” to his friends, in the manner of the author of Underwoods! If only Blake had been given a place among Pater’s Appreciations! I would have it just the length, or rather just the shortness, of the essay on Lamb. So in one’s favorite fields one’s crop of wishes grows fast.

For my own part, I can never open the pages of Men and Books without an odd sense of disappointment, an unreasonable feeling of being even a little cheated, not to find in that gallery of good portraits the face of George Borrow. For who, save the author that traveled through France with a donkey, could properly “do” for us that older writer who drove through Devon in the cart of the Flaming Tinman, and learned from Jasper Petulengro why the Romany Chal would wish to live forever ? Why, again, did Stevenson perversely fail to finish the once-talked-of essay on that William Hazlitt who had always so ready an ear for a sentence, whether it were his own or somebody’s else ? Hazlitt the boy, who tramped ten miles into Shrewsbury, and brought back “at one proud swoop” ParadiseLost and Burke’s French Revolution,— “I was set up for one while,”— and Hazlitt the man, who, after the long, shabby years so drearily wanting in both good luck and good humor, could yet, as he lay dying, turn to Lamb and say, “Well, I’ve had a happy life.” For had not he, too, adventured round “ Western Islands,” climbed his “ peaks,” and “stared at the Pacific”? “Ariel" and “ Puck ” and the “ Shorter Catechist ” would never have forgiven the lamentable failure Hazlitt made of more than one human relationship; they would have been hard on him, just as they were hard on Burns and on Thoreau: and yet,— one pricks up one’s ears at the mere thought of the author of Walking Tours and A Gossip on Romance talking to us of the writer of Old Books and of Going a Journey.

And why, side by side with the talk on Dumas, was not one vouchsafed us on the novels of George Meredith ? One has but to think of it to cap it straightway with the wish for a second one on the same subject by Mr. Henry James. (Yet here, perhaps, it is rather an impatience than a regret that torments us.) Thus it is that the voracious reader grows arrogant, would turn to his masters and command them, “Pile me a palace straight.”

I still remember a morning’s drive in blue July weather, from brown, little Bibbiena up to Saint Francis’s mountain of Verna; we wound through scrubby oak woods all alight with yellow broom, into the open, rolling, upper slopes, up and up into the very kingdom of the sun. And as we looked back on the narrow valley of the Casentino under the ranks of the Apennines, the world behind us, the solid world of town and crag and castle, grew vaguer, grew brighter, lost itself in the color and light and heat. Only one man, — Claude Monet, — we said, could capture the gold in the air between us and the purple files of the Apennines, and make it shine out on his canvas; only one man — the Italian — could make it bloom again in his pages. And even as we said the words, round a jutting ridge of the hill, on a thin-necked English horse, came riding that same Signor d’Annunzio who, in Rome, a few weeks back, on the night of Victor Hugo’s centenary, had filled the Theatro Valle with the fire of his voice and his lines. Wandering forestieri that we were, we yet felt we had somehow uttered a spell.

But it is not only lost “subjects” that prick the desire of the fanciful reader; it is also the thought of the books within books, golden apples that hang clear to one’s eyes, and only just out of reach of one’s hand. How one longs to open the covers, “alluringly red,” of the volume that made Dr. Hugh, on the beach at Bournemouth, forget both his companions and the morning shine of the sea. I, too, would like to drop into the sand and dip deep for myself into The Middle Years. Now Mr. Bernard Shaw, though not an author whose habit it is pleasantly to flatter his readers’ desires, has yet actually given us “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” of his young Don Juan; and sometime, on the crowded shelves of the second-hand shop, — shelves that blacken one’s fingers and kindle one’s hopes, — where one finds so much, — and finds it so divinely cheap that one grows to fancy one can find everything, — there, amid the odd juxtapositions of the shelf devoted to “fiction,” between, say, a Loti, yellow and “impudently French,” and a brown, last-century copy of the Vicar “by the late Dr. Goldsmith,” I hope, no, expect, to chance upon an early work of the Master’s, and a tale by John Delavoy.