Kermode - Pieces of my mind: essays and criticism 1958-2002

The Art of the Dance in French Literature (1952).

It is quite untrue, by the way, that Fenollosa and Pound introduced the Noh plays; interest in them is at least as old as this century.

Mr Ian Fletcher directs my attention to Sabine Baring-Goulds periodical The Sacristy (1871-2) where liturgical dancing is discussed with other matters such as liturgical lights and symbolic zoology, and to later ecclesiastical contributions.

Still thought of as a female disorder; Freuds Vienna paper on a male hysteric brought him a reproof from a senior who said that if Freud had known any Greek he would have seen that male hysteria is an impossibility. (E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life & Work I (1953), p. 254)

Jones traces the development of Freuds psychoanalysis from this point. By 1892 he knew that sexual disturbances constitute the sole indispensable cause of neurasthenia (I. 282) (he gave up this word later) and by 1895, nine years after his studies with Charcot, the pattern was taking psychoanalytical shape. It was formed by 1897 (I. 294).

She was a friend of Marinetti and wrote on the place of women in Futurism. Like Florence Farr, she eventually retreated to the East.

This story may not be absolutely true. In the Magazine of Art for 1894 there is an article by Percy Anderson, a man so anxious to harry the short skirt from the English stage that he made, for an opera called The Nautch Girl (Savoy, 1889) a copy of an eastern dancing-dress in the Indian Museum. The great quantity of material used, in order that the dancers might envelop themselves in billowy folds of drapery, seemed to be an obstacle, but the result was curiously graceful. A clever American dancer, who was engaged at the Gaiety Theatre, saw that the idea might be even further developed; so, with the practical instincts of her race, she sped across the ocean and appeared at the New York Casino Theatre in the now famousSerpentine dance which has set the impressionable Parisians frantic with delight All this was the result of one dress, which is lying hidden in the security (or obscurity) of the Indian Museum. This seems a more likely story, though Mr Nicol doesnt accept it, and Fuller was not appearing as a dancer at the Gaiety in 1889. The truth may be that her having such a good idea owed a little more than she admitted to other dancers (like Kate Vaughan) and their dresses. But she made it her own.

I ought to say that this passage will make more sense to anybody who has read my Romantic Image (1957).

See S. H. Butcher, Aristotles Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1951), p. 33 1n.

See M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England (1950).

Milton, Paradise Regained, i. 269.

Christopher Burney Solitary Confinement (1952) (2nd edn, 1961).

Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (1965).

Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (1959).

John Denham, Coopers Hill (1642).

Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Don Quixote (1914).

J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (1963), pp. 17ff.

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941).

See Eliots letters to Sarah Hennell and John Blackwood, quoted in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (1959), p. 250.

Joseph Frank, Spatial Form in Modern Literature in The Widening Gyre (1963).

Arnold Goldman, The Joyce Paradox (1966).

Philip Larkin, Reference Back in The Whitsun Weddings (1964).

Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (1920), ii. 384; quoted by Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1969), p. 358. Hyness book not only characterizes the general mood of the period but provides much helpful detail on the whole Condition of England.

Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903).

H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908).

But one should mention John Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman (1969), and William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980).

These quotations are all from Roger Gard, Henry James: The Critical Heritage (1968), pp. 149, 269, 347, 382, 349ff.

Gard, Henry James, pp. 401 7.

With the consequence, as Brownell hinted, that the reader gave up James instead: I know of nothing that attests so plainly the preponderance of virtuosity in Mr Jamess art as the indisposition of his readers to re-read his books (Gard, Henry James , p. 404).

Quoted in John D. Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (1940), pp. 306 8.

Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (1962), p. 40.

Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (1966), p. 74.

See Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, pp. 185ff.

Dudley Barker, The Man of Principle: A Biography of John Galsworthy (1969), pp. 22-3.

Reported in Anonymous [Cecil Chesterton], G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism (1909), p. 202.

From a late article reprinted in the Penguin edition.

Ian Fletcher, Bedford Park: Aesthetes Asylum? in Fletcher, ed., Romantic Mythologies (1967).

Cecil Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, p. 142.

Quoted by Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (1970), p. 106.

Brumm, p. 108.

It is true that Thomas Maule wrote The Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695 a Quaker attack on the Puritan establishment and its witch-hunts that Hawthorne would have known; and that the Revd Thomas Pyncheon elicited from the novelist an apology for the use of his name. This only shows how serviceable were the names Hawthorne invented.