Christopher Ricks's review of J. A. Cuddon's A Dictionary of Literary
Terms was published in the TLS of August 12, 1977.
The first page of J. A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms quotes Dr
Johnson on the lexicographer as a “harmless drudge”, with not quite enough
sense of the difference between Johnson’s enterprise and its own. “Certainly
there is drudgery. Whether or not it is harmless must depend on how accurate
or inaccurate you are.” Moved by the news (announced under “sonnet”) that
“Coleridge also wrote two splendid sonnets: Ozymandias and England in 1819”,
I made a list of this book’s original thoughts, one of which is that Edward
Young is the author of something called Conjectures on Original Thoughts. My
copy of A Dictionary of Literary Terms will be sent to the first reader to
provide a list of the fancies which hitherto passed for facts but have now
been rectified into the following:
Authors and others: Georges Barnanos (“I do care for the novels of . . .
Georges Barnanos”) Robe-Grillet (alias Robe Grillet); Jean le Carré; Marie
Renault; Peter Quenell; Eleanor Fargeon (and her namesake Herbert Fargeon);
Nicholas Montserrat; Eugene O’Neil; Edward Bedlowes; George Macbeth; Gaugin;
Gerald Manley Hopkins; Sidney Smith; Fuselii; Nabbe; Rosamund Tuve; Charles
Dyer; William Goodwin; Herman Hesse; Alan Ramsay; Thomas Nash; Laurence
Durrell; William Burrough; MacKenzie; Anne Radcliffe; Anne Jellicoe; Arthur
Whaley; Quintillian; Betham; Bernard Spenser; Malcom de Chazal; Jacques
Tatti; Wilfred Gibson; Gerard Hauptmann; and Malaperte (sic).
Works: Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came; Mr Morris Changes Trains (Changes
names? What is your name? N. or M.); Caligrammes; The Lotus-Eaters; Mulloy;
Mauberly; Esther Walters; Iron Hell; A Winter’s Tale; Madhouse, Cells; Spelt
from Sybil’s Leaves (spelt?); Sweathearts; L’Assomoir.
Dates: The Lady of Shalott (1852); The Rainbow (1929); T. S. Eliot’s Anabasis
(1960); “Amiel’s Journal Intime which he kept for thirty-odd years from
1947” (just in time for this reference in 1977) . . . .
Quotations: “Now a lush-kept plush-capped sloe / Will . . .” (Hopkins); “The
general end therefore of all the books is to fashion a gentleman” (Spenser);
“So glistened the dire snake” (Milton); “Gazing at the Lydian daughter of
the Gardy lake below / Sweet Catullus’s all-but-island, olive-silver
Sirmio!” (Tennyson, thrice-wronged, especially as — after mangling the
rhythm of the second line — the entry continues: “It can be seen (and heard)
at once what a difficult meter it is to manage”); “Or who Biserta sent from
Afric shore” (Milton); “And the feaceless fellow waving from her crotch”
(Berryman); “Lord who createst man in wealth and store” (Herbert); “Pack
with you peddling poetry to the stage” (Jonson); “Nor beauty born of its own
despair” (Yeats); “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally
discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that
kind of reception it meets in the world” (Swift); “The basest week outbraves
his dignity” (Shakespeare); “No worst, there is none. Pitched past grief”
(Hopkins); “Then beautie brought t’unworthie wretchednesse / Through unvies
snares” (Spenser); “fearful, no-man-fathomed” (attributed to no man,
fortunately).
No doubt nobody who had anything to do with the book (from the general editors
Eric Partridge and Simeon Potter, through the editor Mr Cuddon, down to all
at André Deutsch) credits what the book says in all these and all the other
cases; but the book says these things all the same and many of its mistakes
it repeats. It is a long book, nearly 800 pages, and no such book can escape
error. But here there is a perversity of carelessness . It is perverse to
have wrongly indented so many passages from poems (e g, under “quatrain”,
the In Memoriam stanza has a shape which matters, as does that of The
Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám), and to have mispunctuated so frequently. . . . It
is perverse to illustrate an entry on the heroic couplet with a passage
which breaks off, at a comma, in mid-couplet. There is no consistency such
as matters importantly to a reference book: why say Death in Venice but Der
Prozess and Das Schloss? . . . Why provide long lists which are not
alphabetical or chronological or even a matter of a suggested merit ? For
instance: “Most English hymns of repute date from the 17th to the 19th c,
their authors being: John Keble, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Brady, John Mason
Neale, Reginald Heber, Isaac Watts, and Charles and John Wesley”. There are
innumerable simple inconsistencies: Apologie for Poetry/Apologie for
Poetrie; Essay of Dramatic Poesy/Essay on Dramatic Poesie; Shelley’s Defence
of Poetry (1820)/(1821); Pamela (175O)/(174O)/(1740-41); The Duchess of
Malfi (c 1613)/(c 1614); Tropismes (1938)/(1939).
Then there are the absurdities of nomenclature: Luis Borges, Charles
Swinburne, Mackworth Praed, John Wilmot Rochester, and Wystan Hugh Auden
(why suddenly so?). There are too many misprints : “hamatia”, “elegiac”,
“abberrations “, “obsorbing”. Then there is so much
which is, to put it mildly, misleading. It is misleading to say: “During
recent years the life and health of the novel in Britain have been sustained
by a wide diversity of gifted writers. Some of the more eminent are: James
Aldridge, Laurence Durrell, Angus Wilson, . . . Vladimir Nabokov . . .
Melvyn Bragg. Outside Britain . . .”. Likewise with “Richard II sums it up
in one of the soliloquies that Shakespeare gives him”, when it is Mr Cuddon
who is doing the giving; Richard does not speak to himself alone when he
begins “No matter where. Of comÂfort no man speak”. Keats’s “Bright star”
should not be described as his “last poem of all”, and it should not be said
that “Keats felt that poetry must be born as naturally as leaves falling
from a tree”.
Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy should not be listed flatly as a black comedy,
and Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland should not be described as an
“outstanding volume of essays”. If an “omnibus edition” is defined thus:
“Such an edition of an author’s work includes in one volume everything that
he has written”, then it is not true that the works of H. G. Wells “have
been concentrated in such a form”. “Touchstone” is defined simply and solely
as “A term used by Matthew Arnold in The Study of Poetry (1880) to denote a
test or standard by which a work may be evaluated”; such an entry is worse
than useless, and Arnold did not use the term so; lines and expressions of
the great masters were to be the touchstones which Arnold urged each of us
to adduce for himself.
I hesitated over the choice of a favourite entry, and then plumped for
“intentional fallacy”, not just because it is bland, null and uninformative
(not a word about Wimsatt and Beardsley), but because it ends:
As Henry James put it succinctly in The Art of the Novel (1934): “Never trust
the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the
tale from the artist who created it.”
That date of 1934 is misleading enough (for the posthumous reprinting of
James’s Prefaces), but it burgeons less than does the wresting away of those
classic words from Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature.
Never trust the editor? It is likely enough that three-quarters of the things
said even in this book are true. But which quarters are they? Perhaps Mr
Cuddon is to be believed when he says, about German naturalism, that “Here
the principal luminaries of the movement were G. M. Conrad, Holz and Schlaf,
the Hart brothers, Bleibtreu and Bolschce”; I don’t know enough to know. But
the snag would still be that of which A. E. Housman spoke when he was
perturbed by Garrod’s Manilius:
The commentary . . . contains much more truth than error, but it contains so
much error that the only readers who can use it with safety are those whose
knowledge extends beyond Mr Garrod’s; though even a student quite ignorant
of the subject must discover, if intelligent and attentive, that some things
which the editor tells him, for instance at 361-70, cannot possibly be true.
Meanwhile Macmillan’s new 1977-78 list of titles in English Language and
Literature says about the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, with
surprising candour, that “Now in a revised and enlarged edition, this work
reinforces its claim to be the most complete and inaccurate reference source
of its kind.” But A Dictionary of Literary Terms will make it look from its
laurels.
