But I will confess the state of the remains did surprise and
disappoint me.
His story of great literary enterprises, holograph and conducted in
the profoundest secrecy, tallied so completely with, for example,
certain reservations, withdrawals that took him out of one's company
and gave him his evident best companionship, as it were, when he was
alone. It was so entirely like him to concoct lengthy books away from
his neatly ordered study, from the wise limitations of Miss Bathwick's
significant cough and her still more significant back, that we all, I
think, believed in these unseen volumes unquestioningly. While those
fine romances, those large, bright plays, were being conceived in a
publicity about as scandalous as a royal gestation, publicly planned
and announced, developed, written, boomed, applauded, there was, we
knew, this undercurrent of imaginative activity going on, concealed
from Miss Bathwick's guardian knowledge, withdrawn from the stately
rhythm of her keys. What more natural than to believe he was also
writing it down?
Alas! I found nothing but fragments. The work upon which his present
fame is founded was methodical, punctual and careful, and it
progressed with a sort of inevitable precision from beginning to end,
and so on to another beginning. Not only in tone and spirit but in
length (that most important consideration) he was absolutely
trustworthy; his hundred thousand words of good, healthy,
straightforward story came out in five months with a precision almost
astronomical. In that sense he took his public very seriously. To have
missed his morning's exercises behind Miss Bathwick's back would have
seemed to him the most immoral--nay, worse, the most uncivil of
proceedings.
"She wouldn't understand it," he would say, and sigh and go.
But these scraps and fragments are of an irregularity diametrically
contrasting with this. They seem to have been begun upon impulse at
any time, and abandoned with an equal impulsiveness, and they are
written upon stationery of a variety and nature that alone would
condemn them in the eyes of an alienist. The handwriting is always
atrocious and frequently illegible, the spelling is strange, and
sometimes indecently bad, the punctuation is sporadic, and many of the
fragments would be at once put out of court as modern literature by
the fact that they are written in pencil on _both sides of the paper_!
Such of the beginnings as achieve a qualified completeness are of
impossible lengths; the longest is a piece--allowing for gaps--of
fourteen thousand words, and another a fragment shaping at about
eleven. These are, of course, quite impossible sizes, neither essay
nor short story nor novel, and no editor or publisher would venture to
annoy the public with writings of so bizarre a dimension. In addition
there are fragments of verse. But I look in vain for anything beyond
the first chapter of that tremendous serial, "The Wild Asses of the
Devil," that kept on day by day through June and July to the very
outbreak of the war, and only a first chapter and a few illustrations
and memoranda and fragments for our "Mind of the Race," that went on
intermittently for several years. Whole volumes of that great
hotchpotch of criticism are lost in the sandbanks of my treacherous
memory for ever.
Much of the matter, including a small MS. volume of those brief verses
called Limericks (personal always, generally actionable, and
frequently lacking in refinement), I set aside at an early date. Much
else also I rejected as too disjointed and unfinished, or too
eccentric. Two bizarre fragments called respectively "Jane in Heaven"
and "An Account of a Play," I may perhaps find occasion to issue at a
later date, and there were also several brief imitations of Villiers
de l'Isle Adam quite alien to contemporary Anglo-Saxon taste, which
also I hold over. Sometimes upon separate sheets, sometimes in the
margins of other compositions, and frequently at the end of letters
received by him I found a curious abundance of queer little drawings,
caricatures of his correspondents, burlesque renderings of
occurrences, disrespectful sidenotes to grave and pregnant utterances,
and the like. If ever the correspondence of George Boon is published,
it will have to be done in _fac-simile_. There is a considerable
number of impressions of the back of Miss Bathwick's head, with and
without the thread of velvet she sometimes wore about her neck, and
quite a number of curiously idealized studies of that American reading
public he would always so grotesquely and annoyingly insist on calling
"Her." And among other things I found a rendering of myself as a
short, flattened little object that has a touch of malignity in it I
had no reason to expect. Few or none of these quaint comments are
drawn with Indian ink upon millboard in a manner suitable for
reproduction, and even were they so, I doubt whether the public would
care for very many of them. (I give my own portrait--it is singularly
unlike me--to show the style of thing he did.)
[Illustration]
Of the "Mind of the Race" I may perhaps tell first. I find he had
written out and greatly embellished the singularly vivid and detailed
and happily quite imaginary account of the murder of that eminent
litterateur, Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole, with which the "Mind of the Race"
was to have concluded; and there are an extraordinarily offensive
interview with Mr. Raymond Blathwayt (which, since it now "dates" so
markedly, I have decided to suppress altogether) and an unfinished
study of "the Literary Statesmen of the Transition Years from the
Nineteenth to the Twentieth Centuries" (including a lengthy comparison
of the greatness of Lords Bryce and Morley, a eulogy of Lord Morley
and a discussion whether he has wit or humour) that were new to me.
And perhaps I may note at this point the twenty sixpenny washing books
in which Boon had commenced what I am firmly convinced is a general
index of the works of Plato and Aristotle. It is conceivable he did
this merely as an aid to his private reading, though the idea of a
popular romancer reading anything will come to the general reader with
a little shock of surprise.
[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Aristotle _(in modern dress), from the
washing books_.
(_When asked_, "Why _in modern dress?" Boon replied simply that he
would be._)]
For my own part and having in memory his subtle and elusive talk, I am
rather inclined to think that at one time he did go so far as to
contemplate a familiar and humorous commentary upon these two pillars
of the world's thought. An edition of them edited and copiously
illustrated by him would, I feel sure, have been a remarkable addition
to any gentleman's library. If he did turn his mind to anything of the
sort he speedily abandoned the idea again, and with this mention and
the note that he detested Aristotle, those six and twenty washing
books may very well follow the bulk of the drawings and most of the
verse back into their original oblivion....
[Illustration: _Boon's idea of_ Plato, _from the washing books_.
(Boon absolutely rejected the Indian Bacchus bust as a portrait of
_Plato_. When asked why, he remarked merely that it wasn't like him.)]