He would feel like an
interviewer and like a spy. It would have to be done in a noble,
self-denying sort of secrecy, amassing and recording day by day; and he
would never be able to let his hero suspect what was happening, or the
gracious spontaneity would vanish; for the essence of such a life and
such talk as I have described is that they should be wholly frank and
unconsidered; and the thought of the presence of the note-taking
spectator would overshadow its radiance at once.
There is a task for a patient, unambitious, perceptive man! He must be
a man of infinite leisure, and he must be ready to take a large risk of
disappointment; for he must outlive his subject, and he must be willing
to sacrifice all other opportunities of artistic creation. But he might
write one of the great books of the world, and win a secure seat upon
the Muses' Hill.
XLVI
I have been reading all the old Shelley literature lately, Hogg and
Trelawny and Medwin and Mrs. Shelley, and that terrible piece of
analysis, _The Real Shelley_. Hogg's _Life of Shelley_ is an
incomparable book; I should put it in the first class of biographies
without hesitation. Of course, it is only a fragment; and much of it is
frankly devoted to the sayings and doings of Hogg; it is none the worse
for that. It is an intensely humorous book, in the first place. There
are marvellous episodes in it, splendid extravaganzas like the story of
Hogg's stay in Dublin, where he locked the door of his bedroom for
security, and the boy Pat crept through the panel of the door to get
his boots and keep them from him, and a man in the room below pushed up
a plank in the floor that he might converse, not with Hogg, but with
the man in the room above him; there is the anecdote of the little
banker who was convinced that Wordsworth was a poet because he had
trained himself to write in the dark if he woke up and had an
inspiration.
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