UNFINISHED BOOKS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 30, 6 February 1933, Page 6

UNFINISHED BOOKS.

ANOTHER NOTABLE CLASSIC

(By W. R. KINGSTON.)

John Galsworthy's death, adds yet another classic to that tragic list of unfinished books which grows longer each year. Only a month or two ago he published "Flowering Wilderness, which was meant to be the second book of a trilogy dealing with the Cherrill family, a trilogy which would have ranked alongside his Forsyte books. Now the last volume will never be written, and thousands of readers throughout the world will be left wondering what happened to poor Diiinv. .»_ • The last great example of an unfinished book is the "Chapters of Autobiography" left by the late Earl of Balfour when iho died a year or two ago. In this case the loss is. particularly striking, as "A-JJB.'s" memoirs would have been one of the literary and political treasures of the age. But his strength failed him, and we are left with a tantalising fragment ending in 1886; The list of uncompleted books of even the last few decades must run into the thousands, and includes works 'by the leading men of their day. How many people know that the great Huxley published only the first volume of his "Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy," or that instead of ten volumes of the English translation of Diderot's "Encyclopaedia only one was published? There are many examples of writers wfho. conceived a plan so large that no one could hope to carry it through in an ordinary lifetime, and consequently the work was destined to be uncompleted even before it was begun. Such was the case of Sir Walter Raleigh's great attempt, "The History of the World," upon which he worked for years during his imprisonment in the Tower, yet without bringing the work any further than a little before the commencement of the Christian era. Macaulay wrote his uncompleted "History of England under a dual disadvantage, for he undertook this laborious and lengthy task when he was well on in middle life. The first two volumes appeared when he was forty-nine, and the second two seven years later. Then there is # . Buckle s colossal scheme of the "History of Civilisation." The three volumes which he published, although they form really only an introduction to the work as he had .mentally planned it, represent the research of twenty years. , In novels, Thackeray's "Denis Duval and Dickens' "Edwin Drood" are well-known examples, the latter having furnished endless material_ for discussion, correspondence and suggested solutions. Romances like "St. Ives" by R. L. Stevenson can occasionally be finished by another hand, but no one has done for "Weir of Hermiston" what Sir A. Quiller-Couch did so aptly for the former. Among the poets the most notable cases of uncompleted works are "Kubla Khan" and Cliristabel" by Coleridge, "Hyperion" by Keats and the lost six books of Spencer's "Faerie Coleridge fully intended to complete "Kubla Khan," but a visitor called while he was working at it, and he was unable to recall his own theme. How much valuable and irreplaceable information has been lost by the demise of authors before completing their works we will never know. For example, there was a certain John White, who was employed by the New Zealand Government to compile a complete history of the traditions of the Maori race. Before his death in 1888 he had completed only four volumes of his "Ancient History of the Maori," and, of course, Maori lore that was readily available fifty years ago is gone for ever now. It is fascinating to think what wealth might have been secured had a Mr. A. B. Granville lived to publish the second volume of his masterpiece, "The Great London Question of the Day—Can Thames Sewerage Be Converted Into It was to be in two parts, historical and practical, but in 1860 part one only was published. Some books remain unfinished for reasons other than the death of the author or the lack of financial support. There is William Hals' "Compleafc History of Cornwall," of which we are told that "The scurrilous details he inserted caused a discontinuance of the publication." In 1858 London was promised four volumes of "The Life of P. B. Shelley," but only the first two appeared because Shelley's representatives withdrew, for unknown family reasons, the materials on which the biographer, T. J. Hogg, had depended and volumes three and four have not yet appeared.