March, 1971

NOTES AND

lJ
I ana greatly indebted to The Clarendon Press
for information regarding Oxford Book of Victorian
Verse correspondence and for permission to quote
brieay from Q's letter of 29 October 1912.
11
See e.g. Wade, P. 361, 382, 383, 385, 394, 470,
483, 486 «nd 491.
" Ibid., p. 3J9.

the latest one is dated 28 October 1911."
On the other hand Yeats is known to have
stayed at the Nassau at least as far back as
April 1899. The trouble is that regrettably
no evidence has been uncovered" so far to
establish beyond doubt Yeats's whereabouts
on either of the dates in question; none of
the available evidence is as precise as one
would like it to be and while some pointers
indicate 1900 rather than 1912 the handwriting in this particular letter is somewhat
different in character from that of the two
1898 letters and indeed is not unlike the
penmanship exhibited in a letter of 1915
(facsimile in Wade, p. 596)." The evidence
for preferring either 1900 or 1912 is thus
suggestive rather than conclusive.
F. G. ATKINSON.

The University of New England,
New South Wales.
19
1 gratefully acknowledge in this connection the
assistance of Professor A. N. Jeffares who kindly
supplied several other dales of stays by Yeats at tbo
Nassau: none of these, however, was later than
January
1911.
If
I am indebted to Professor William M. Murphy
of 1New
York
University for this information.
7
1 am grateful to Mr. J. C. Maxwell for bringing to my attention these facts about his handwriting.

Readers* Queries
'THELLING
AND SHOWING—Wayne C.
21
Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
discusses at length the antithesis between
telling and showing in a novel. For this
precise formulation, he cites no writer earlier
than Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of
Henry James (1918). In 1908, George
Saintsbury wrote, in the Introduction to the
volume of the Oxford Thackeray containing The Wolves and the Lamb and other
pieces, that in Denis Duval there is " a
certain too great proneness to ricit—to
telling us wha; t has happened instead of
showing it to us in the happening " (p. xiii).
Did any earlier critic use these two verbs
antithetically to the same purpose?
EDD.

"WICTRXX
CAUSA DEIS PLACUIT,
v
SED VICTA PUELLIS".—In cL 8
of The Water Babies, Charles Kingsley
describes this " legend " as being inscribed

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letter is the anxiously-awaited reply to
Quiller-Couch's request then it could be
dated 6 October 1900, which was in fact a
Saturday. Everything that is known about
Yeats, however, scarcely makes it likely that
by 1912 he had become any less dilatory in
dealing with his correspondence than he
undoubtedly was in 1900: although there is
at least some evidence that things ran
relatively smoothly for Quiller-Couch when
negotiating with Yeats for The Oxford Book
of Victorian Verse. In the extant correspondence over this anthology" there are no
complaints about Yeats but merely a brief
note from Quiller-Couch to Carman, dated
29 October 1912, accompanying the final
instalment of " make-up" and stating
simply that Yeats, " JE", Synge and
James Stephens are " certified all right".
So it would appear that Yeats caused
Quiller-Couch and the Press no difficulties
in 1912. Quiller-Couch also adds that
" there may be small fees" {italics mine)
whereas Yeats in his letter has made it clear
that there will be fees.
Another possible objection to 1912 as the
date for Yeats's letter is that by that time
the poet's business affairs, major and minor,
had been handled for more than a decade by
A. P. Watt. Yeats placed great reliance on
this agent and in his published letters is
constantly referring correspondents to Watt
rather than commit himself on matters of
royalties, translation-rights and the like."
It seems odd, therefore, that in 1912 Yeats
should not have referred Quiller-Couch to
Watt, rather than to Unwin or Bullen, over
a matter involving fees: in 1900, on the
other hand, Yeats was not yet in association
with Watt, the first meeting between them
having taken place in 1901."
As far as can be ascertained from the
available evidence Yeats seems not to have
stayed at the Nassau Hotel in South
Frederick Street, Dublin, after 1911. He
stayed there often, as is well known, en
route to and from Ireland, but of twentynine letters from that address in Wade's
collection, covering a period of nine years,

109

QUERIES

110

NOTES AND QUERIES

dialectal categories are no more precise than
" Northern " and " Southern ", does not and
indeed is not qualified to make.
To this minor poem of 364 lines she has
devoted an expansive edition of over 250
pages, concerned mostly with the establishment and explication of the text. It exists
EDD.
in five manuscripts, one of them incomplete,
and their variations and imperfections certainly provide scope for the textual editor.
Mrs. Miskimin's introduction includes an
excursus (pp. 20-41) on the theory of textual
ROSSETTI SONNETS (ccvi. 32).— criticism and an attack on the traditional
The sonnets are printed in Letters of method, described as that of " recension "
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed. Doughty and (though recension in the strict sense is only
part of the process). But she gives only a
Wahl), IV, 1952-1953.
crude and derivative account of the classical
COURCE WANTED (cxcvii. 173).—The method, which, properly applied, does not
quatrain is a chapter heading in as she alleges, seek to establish " priorities "
Kipling's The Naulahka. See Chapter 2, or between manuscripts (she can never have
see Rudyard Kipling's Verse. Definitive read Housman's attacks on editors who rely
on the authority of a " good " manuscript),
Edition (London, 1940), p. 536.
but to establish their relationships so that
ANTHONY W. SHIPPS.
one may know which are independent witIndiana University Libraries,
nesses and which are not, and, in suitable
Bloomington, Indiana 47401, U.S.A.
cases, to permit of the logic of recension.
Nor does the classical method admit agreements in right readings as evidence (p. 31),
though inexpert or confused editors have
often done so; the orthodox theory asserts
clearly that only agreements in error (nonSUSANNAH:
AN
ALLITERATIVE original readings) can be admitted as proof
POEM OF THE FOURTEENTH CEN- of genetic relationships. It seems doubtful
TURY, edited by Alice Miskimin. New whether Mrs. Miskimin has ever read a
Haven and London: Yale University careful exposition, such as Paul Maas's, of
the classical doctrine. It does not discredit
Press, 1969; pp. xviii, 255; $7.50.
GUSANNAH, more generally known as a method to give a false account of it, nor is
^ The Pistill of Susan, is a treatment in it discredited by being misapplied by its
bob-and-wheel stanzas, with strong allitera- practitioners, as was obviously the case in
tion, of the story of Susannah and the previous editions of this poem, since three
Elders. It is competent but undistinguished. of Mrs. Miskimin's predecessors have drawn
Andrew of Wyntoun, in his Cronykil of three mutually inconsistent stemmas (all of
Scotland, attributed it and other works to them in fact wrong). One may observe that
" Huchon of the Awle Ryale", whose the " direct" method of editing used by
identity is a vexed question into which Mrs. Professor Kane, and here commended and
Miskimin refuses to enter. It is perhaps followed, is even more liable to misuse by
relevant that Susannah, on the evidence of the unskilful, since there is no control at all
various features of its language, would seem over the editor's judgement. In this text the
to have been written in the southern part of relationships of the manuscripts are comthe North of England (e.g. in southern plicated by cross-agreements produced
Yorkshire), somewhere along the border either by independent coincident error or
between ME. a and p as the reflexes of OE. (less probably) by contamination, but the
a, but not in the further North and certainly problem is not as insoluble as Mrs. Misnot in Scotland {though it has previously kimin herself thinks. From her figures on
been published as a Scottish text); but this is pp. 34-5 it appears that the MSS. PVA agree
a judgment which Mrs. Miskimin, whose together in presumed error no less than 102

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in " lockets of Charles the First's hair".
Has this any basis in fact? At any rate
this adaptation of Lucan's line about Cato
(Bell Civ., I. 128) remained sufficiently
current to be used by Naomi Mitchison as
epigraph to The Conquered {1923).

March, 1971