Taboo. A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir (James Branch Cabell) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. notes)

Notes

[1]

Ackermann reads "Sardinian." It is not certain whether the adjective employed is σαρδανιος or σαρδανικος. I suspect that Oriphyles here makes an intentional play upon the words.

[2]

Such at least is the generally received rendering. Ackermann, following Bülg's probably spurious text, disputes that this is the exact meaning of the noun.

[3]

It is a gratifying tribute to the permanence of æsthetic canons to record that Dr. Brander Matthews (connected with Columbia University) has, in an article upon "Alien Views of American Literature," contributed to the New York Times of 14 November, 1920, accepted these three qualifications as the essential groundwork for a literary critic even to-day; although Dr. Matthews is inclined, as a concession to modernism, to add to the list an ability to recite Webster's Reply to Hayne. Since Dr. Matthews frankly states that he has been incited to this recital of a critic's needs by (in his happy wording) "the alien angle" of "standards domiciled in the midst of us," it is sincerely to be hoped that his requirements may be met forthwith.

[4]

Sævius Nicanor does not record the wonder-working surnames employed to produce this ancient, ante-Aristotlean καθαρσις, and they are not certainly known. But, quite unaided, I believe, by old Nicanor's hint, Dr. Stuart Pratt Sherman (the accomplished editor of divers contributions to literature, and the author of several books) has discovered, through a series of interesting experiments in vivisection, that the one needful endowment for a critic of American letters is the power to induce within himself "a profound murmur of ancestral voices, and to experience a mysterious inflowing of national experience, in meditating on the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin, and Bradford." Compare "Is There Anything To Be Said for Literary Tradition," in The Bookman for October, 1920. Any candid consideration of Dr. Sherman's phraseology, here as elsewhere, cannot fail to suggest that he has happily re-discovered the long-lost critical abracadabra of Philistia.

[5]

Codman annotates this: "Synonyms, since P.E.M. is obviously Persicum Esculentum Malum—that is, the peach; 'which,' says Macrobius, 'although it rather belongs to the tribe of apples, Sævius reckons as a species of nut.'"