A Rejoinder by Ian Fletcher

170 Finneran is to be commended, along with the contributors, for the labor and success of Recent Research on Anglo-Irish Writers. We shall all miss the work of Helmut E. Gerber on George Moore In future volumes. I have agreed to follow him in editing the chapter; I cannot adequately succeed him or replace him. Please remember the kindly spirit with which he helped each of us and send me copies of any works which touch upon Moore and should be Included in the next volume. Jack W. Weaver Winthrop College 6. A REJOINDER BY IAN FLETCHER To review the reviewer is often an act of vanity and youth. I have no claim to either of these qualities and my rejoinder to Dr. Wendell Harris' amiable notice of the Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson (second, revised and augmented edition) in 26:4 (1983) stems merely from a wish to defend the publishers and from a fear that readers may be faintly misled by the review and even perhaps by the amiability of Dr. Harris. Dr. Harris damns the barely majuscule computerized or wordprocessed or whatnot text and contrasts that with the elegance of the first, unreconstructed edition of Johnson that I published thirty years ago. He also throws in the suggestion that what is really needed is a selected Johnson since only the specialist reader requires the whole of Johnson's text. Such refined specialists are few, and like the libraries on which they depend must pay for their refined speculations in terms both of dollars and of type. Dr. Harris (like myself) may deplore the new typography but who are we to peer Into the mysteries of costing, producing and marketing? Dr. Harris, still amiable, passes to my notes and chastens me gently for the many brisk biographies of those dedicatees that Johnson attaches to most of his poems. I have been told that these lives, now painfully restored to presence, constituted one of the more valuable services offered by the First edition and indeed, not immodestly, I may claim to be the very John Aubrey of the fin de siècle. I may add that the Second has corrected some howlers in the First edition and added data on several dedicatees of whose history I was then innocent. But—ever amiably Dr. Harris proceeds—these biographies usurp annotation on the poems themselves and Johnson is indeed a learned poet. From such a comment the reader might not gather that there are eighty-eight pages of notes in more miniscule type, many of them given over to comment of various kinds: textual, metrical and the clarifying of allusion. Still, Dr. Harris raises a cardinal question. In our fragmented culture, it is indeed difficult to establish who is likely to know what, and of annotation there need be no end. We may assume that the Classics and the Bible are not so well known as they once were and I have gone some way towards meeting this blankness . But two examples of my abstention from comment that Dr. Harris cites are not fortunate. Why, he sternly asks, is there no explanation of the line in Johnson's poem on Lucretius which alludes to Lucretius' madness and suicide ? I can only invoke Dr. Harris' specialist reader. We might excuse him perhaps for being a little shaky as to the implications of the title "Quisque suos Manes" which secures virtually a page of commentary but our specialist might surely be expected to know Tennyson's splendid offering on the Roman 171 poet, whose hinge is precisely that piece of Aberglaube about the wife's jealousy, the love potion and the subsequent madness. Dr. Harris then enquires : why no gloss on Munster: 1534, but 0, my Harris, there is! on page 329 and I even furnish the titles of two books for those who might be amused by those hideous theocrats. Dr. Harris was fooled because the note relating to the Anabaptists was part of a general note on Johnson's three sonnets about various antinomians and did not appear under the actual head of the poem. While one does not expect notes to be read with a Fundamentalist ferocity of attention...