Read The Devil's Details for Free Online

Footnote in Annotation and Its Texts
,” ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 138. See also Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 111-8.

* Bentley, it has to be said, deserved some firm correction, if not Pope’s bullying. Milton has Adam and Eve leave Eden with some reluctance. “They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” Bentley, a stickler for facts, reminds us that Eve “had professed her Readiness and Alacrity for the journey …” and that “there were only the two of them in Eden, and they were not more solitary now than they had been before.” But facts are not drama, and Bentley’s revision of Milton’s verse loses something:
Then hand in hand with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heav’ly Comfort Cheer’d.
See R. J. White,
Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 216.

* For the sake of comparison: A two-volume edition of the nineteenth-century heavyweight War and Peace weighs three and a half pounds; a Remembrance of Things Past edition is four pounds. The latter, opened, is a perfectly adequate eight by twelve inches.

* The story of Bardot’s disrobing is part of moviemaking lore. Apparently Goddard’s financial backers insisted on it; they undoubtedly had in mind the American market of young, intellectual males.

* Contemporary writers might well envy the seventeenth century’s orthographic independence; to separate everybody into every body in this context supplies a sensuous reverberation that has to be appreciated by the most intellectualized reader (or film critic).

* The source of this quotation eludes me. To ask readers for help is one of the best uses to which a footnote can be put. Ignorance is as much a part of scholarship as knowledge; both should be acknowledged .

* Gibbon wasn’t about to let his bête noire rest with just one sour note. Several volumes later, immersed in the Crusades when so much un Christian behavior was exercised on behalf of Christian doctrine, a note turns the reader to Shakespeare’s Henry IV for a more genuine and appropriate expression of love for country and mayhem. Fair enough, until he manufactures an excuse to refer to Dr. Johnson’s edition of the play, and to Dr. Johnson’s own notes, “the workings of a bigoted though vigorous mind, greedy of every pretense to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed.”

* Hume would have labeled this digression “commentary” and hustled it to the back of the book. But digression, as Bayle demonstrated conclusively, is as much a part of the thought process as a metaphor or a well-chosen example or, for that matter, logic’s excluded middle, which Hume was so inordinately fond of.

* That the footnote is not just an artifact of scholarship nor its survival the concern of the scholar is a major theme of this book. Humanism and the layperson have as much at stake as scholars in the struggle to keep the footnote alive.

* Poor Tom Jones has had questions raised about his picaresque status—he seems always to have his status questioned. Common sense, however, should convince us that a hero who travels as much as Tom, and who suffers as many pratfalls as Tom, is picaresque. For a contrary view and fuller discussion of this, see Stuart Miller,
The Picaresque Novel
(Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), pp. 131-5.

* “Indeed, [Abelard] communicates a singing quality to topics ordinarily unmelodious. Few other Scholastics remain as readable and alive”: Paul Edwards, editor in chief,
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(New York and London: Macmillan and The Free Press, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, p. 6.

* Ranke after a time became a firm supporter of the