The Significance of Literary Papers                  15

evolutionists, we feel blessed and encouraged when we can read
in the manuscripts of our writers—and sometimes in books col¬
lating these manuscripts—the successive states of a many-sided
conception. I know that for my part, I enjoy dreaming over the
pages of the earlier Madame Bovary, the two versions of Words¬
worth's Prelude, and the five drafts of Beddoes' Death's Jest Book.
I do not regard this occupation as antiquarian trifling, but as a
refinement upon perception, an enhancement of my own powers
of thought.

What we are cclebratingr here this evenino- strikes me therefore
exactly as it does you: it is a fitting and an auspicious occasion.
It is a storing tip of pleasure for years to come. And by virtue of
him whose papers we are receiving, it is an uncommonly rich
hoard that we are adding to the resources of retrospection laid up
for future generations.

Consider: here are the papers of a man who has united in him¬
self, with noble ease and unquestioned success, the diverse powers
of the teacher, the scholar, the maker of fiction, the critic, the
anthologist, and the poet. If he has been fair to his many brilliant
selves, he must have kept drafts and notes and documents and
correspondence relating to each of these adventures. My curio.sity
at this point verges on the unseemly. I want to find out, right now
—or at least when the Library opens tomorrow morning-how
Mark went about organizing his book on Dryden—a dissertation,
as you know, but a masterpiece of a dissertation, which redeems
thousands of its fallen sisters.

Being interested in translation, I want to know how iVIark con¬
ceived the idea and executed the stupendous task of editing a large
anthology of world poetry in E.nglish-a volume of which the
foreign sections can be read without wincing.

There is more, much more that I want to see—secrets I want to
rifle (as it were) professionally, as a kind of dividend from my
expensive education. AVhat, for instance, permitted the book on
Hawthorne to be so compact? Did it start long and was then cut or