One would
look in the earlier volumes for entries about New Zealand and
evolution and in the later ones for entries about the Odyssey and the
Sonnets, but there is no attempt at arrangement and anywhere one may
come upon something about Handel, or a philosophical reflection,
between a note giving the name of the best hotel in an Italian town
and another about Harry Nicholls and Herbert Campbell as the Babes in
the Wood in the pantomime at the Grecian Theatre. This confusion has
a charm, but it is a charm that would not, I fear, survive in print
and, personally, I find that it makes the books distracting for
continuous reading. Moreover they were not intended to be published
as they stand ("Preface to Vol. II," p. 215 post), they were
intended for his own private use as a quarry from which to take
material for his writing, and it is remarkable that in practice he
scarcely ever used them in this way ("These Notes," p. 261 post).
When he had written and re-written a note and spoken it and repeated
it in conversation, it became so much a part of him that, if he
wanted to introduce it in a book, it was less trouble to re-state it
again from memory than to search through his "precious indexes" for
it and copy it ("Gadshill and Trapani," p. 194, "At Piora," p. 272
post). But he could not have re-stated a note from memory if he had
not learnt it by writing it, so that it may be said that he did use
the notes for his books, though not precisely in the way he
originally intended.
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