A
few more points of pleasant, trivial pedantry:
(1)
Judging by the dates of publication, VN might well have included the following
studies in his copious reading:
The Language of
Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Arthos,
John
Dryden's Aeneid, and
its Seventeenth Century Predecessors
Proudfoot L
(2) Four
years ago (August 12, 2003)
It is a
regrettable fact that at certain aberrant moments when I write four I mean
three.
(3) The
same applies to my spelling of insignificance as insignifance.
I must have been
distracted by what lay about me in my infancy.
(4) No doubt AS would be happy to
make a similar point in connection with his letter to: Dear Stan Kelly-Bottle.
(5)
As I’d suspected, Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete & Provincial
English, 1858, contains not the slightest hint of the “common cant sense” referred to by Ingram &
Redpath, and that they must have been talking through some joint private orifice
of their own. Well, it stands to reason that no-one in 1858 would even venture
to mention such a sense. The dictionary was re-issued in 1886 and 1904, but it
is unlikely that it had been revised or expanded in the direction of increased
salacity for those editions.
(6) Alexander Pope was, of course,
unoozily following in the confident footsteps of Dryden. It occurs to me that
the name Shade contains more than an echo of Shadwell. Everyone will be familiar
with Dryden’s merciless demolition of Shadwell, pseudonymously
addressed as Og in Absalom &
Achitophel, and every schoolboy can quote:
He
never was a poet of God's making;
The
midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With
this prophetic blessing-- Be thou dull ;
Although, perhaps,
less conversant with
……. do
anything but write:
I see,
I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For
treason botch'd in rhyme will be thy bane;
Rhyme
is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis
fatal to thy fame and to thy neck
(7) The more I think about it the
more I grow certain that VN had most thoroughly digested Carroll’s “Poeta fit
non nascitur”, and that he had become highly conscious of the undeniable truth
of that well-known aphorism, in reverse. I’ll change my mind if contrary
evidence is offered; but, as Dr Johnson once pompously remarked, when opposed on
some point in discussion: I can find you an argument, but I cannot find you an
understanding.
(8) Since VN seems to have approved
of Coleridge, I’m prompted to comment on STC’s celebrated definition of
poetry: “I wish our clever young
poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is,
prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.”
This has always struck me as a singularly useless definition. What does
Coleridge mean by “best”? Brian Boyd, in VNAY, p.418, says: “Nabokov has written
of Pope’s genius for placing the best possible words in the best possible
order”. The marriage of Pope with Coleridge seems curious to me, but I don’t
know where or in what context VN made this remark. BB also remarks, p 354, on
“Nabokov’s detested eighteenth century”, and I take it that somewhere VN
expresses this detestation, as well as his appreciation of Pope’s genius.
Apologies for two postings on the
same day.
Charles