"James Lipton - ExaltationOfLarks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lipton James)
Introduction
Most introductions are written in the forlorn expectation that they will be blithely ignored. Not this one. Let me say hastily that this is not an argument for its quality as belles-lettres; nor is its subject arcane; but the terrain we will cover has not been widely traveled and I think a glance through this introductory Baedeker will heighten the traveler's enjoyment of his journey.
I strongly suspect that the reader's first reaction, after eagerly opening the cover with its nicely provocative (and I swear not really misleading) subtitle, and arriving not in Gomorrah but Academe, is one of disappointment. This is probably not the anticipated venereal game. Still, I hope that I can appease the disgruntled reader with a titillation nearly as satisfying as the expected one.
This venereal game is played with language (ours) and words (non-four-letter, that once were ours) and, caveat lector!, poetry (that ought to be ours, perhaps). I will begin by quickly admitting that I am not the first explorer in these parts: I see other footprints around me, few and faint, but discernible. Let's begin our journey by following one of these trails. It leads, in a manner of speaking, to Baker Street.
In 1906, having rid himself once and for all of Holmes and Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned to the literary form with which he had begun his career fifteen years earlier, producing an historical novel, Sir Nigel. In it the young Nigel comes under the tutelage of Sir John Buttesthorn, the Knight of Dupplin, head huntsman to the King, and England's greatest authority on the hunt. In Chapter XI, the sublimely immodest old knight says to Nigel: "'I take shame that you are not more skilled in the mystery of the woods, seeing that I have had the teaching of you, and that no one in broad England is my master at the craft. I pray you to fill your cup again whilst I make use of the little time that is left to us.'"
There follows a lengthy disquisition on the chase, "with many anecdotes, illustrations, warnings and exceptions, drawn from his own great experience" and finally the knight says, "'But above all I pray you, Nigel, to have a care in the use of the terms of the craft, lest you should make some blunder at table, so that those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed.'
"'Nay, Sir John,' said Nigel. 'I think that after your teaching I can hold my place with the others.'
"The old knight shook his white head doubtfully. 'There is so much to be learned that there is no one who can be said to know it all,' said he. 'For example, Nigel, it is sooth that for every collection of beasts of the forest, and for every gathering of birds of the air, there is there own private name so that none may be confused with another.'
"'I know it, fair sir.'
"'You know it, Nigel, but... none can say that they know all, though I have myself pricked off eighty and six for a wager at court, and it is said that the chief huntsman of the Duke of Burgundy has counted over a hundred... Answer me now, lad, how would you say if you saw ten badgers together in the forest?'
'A cete of badgers, fair sir.'
"'Good, Nigel - good, by my faith! And if you walk in Woolmer Forest and see a swarm of foxes, how would you call it?'
"'A skulk of foxes.'
"'And if they be lions?'
"Nay, fair sir, I am not like to meet several lions in Woolmer Forest.'
"'Ay, lad, but there are other forests besides Woolmer, and other lands besides England, and who can tell how far afield such a knight errant as Nigel of Tilford may go, when he sees worship to be won? We will say that you were in the deserts of Nubia, and that afterward at the court of the great Sultan you wished to say that you had seen several lions... How then would you say it?'
"...'Surely, fair sir, I would be content to say that I had seen a number of lions, if indeed I could say aught after so wondrous an adventure.'
"'Nay, Nigel, a huntsman would have said that he had seen a pride of lions, and so proved that he knew the language of the chase. Now, had it been boars instead of lions?'
"'One says a singular of boars.'
"'And if they be swine?'
"'Surely it is a herd of swine."
"Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know... No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine; that is the peasant speech. If you drive them it is a herd. If you hunt them it is other. What call you them then, Edith?'
"...'But surely you can tell us, Mary?'
"'Surely, sweet sir, one talks of a sounder of swine.'
"The old knight laughed exultantly. 'Here is a pupil who never brings me shame!... Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?'
"'Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants.'
"'Good Nigel - a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe. But a covey of pheasants! What sort of talk is that?'"
What sort indeed! This quotation from Conan Doyle makes, for me, the central point about the first two parts of this book: the terms you will discover here are genuine and authentic; that is, each of them, as fanciful - and even frivolous - as some of them may seem, was at one time either in general use as the only proper term for a group of whatever beast, fish, fowl or insect it designated, (Then, as now, as the quotation from Conan Doyle indicates, one would show truly ludicrous ignorance by referring to a herd of fish or a school of elephants.) or had acquired sufficient local currency to warrant its inclusion in a list with the well-established hunting terms.
Obviously, at one time or another, every one of these terms had to be invented - and it is equally obvious that much imagination, wit and semantic ingenuity has always gone into that invention: the terms are too full of charm and poetry to suppose that their inventors were unaware of the possibilities open to them, and unconscious of the fun and beauty they were creating. What we have in these terms is clearly the end result of a game that amateur semanticists have been playing for over five hundred years.
Bear in mind that most of these terms were codified in the fifteenth century, (The Egerton Manuscript, the earliest surviving list of them, dates from about 1450; The Book of St. Albans, the most complete and important of the early lists (and the seminal source for most subsequent compilations), appeared in 1486.) a time when the English language was in the process of an expansion - or more accurately, explosioin - that can only be compared in importance and scope to the intellectual effusions of Periclean Greece or cinquecento Italy.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as "peculiar to English... the extreme receptiveness of its vocabulary to borrowings from other languages." The inhabitants of the island we now call Britain have always shown an astonishing verbal amenability, a quite childlike open-mindedness to and delight in the new. Elizabeth Drew, Chairman of the Department of English at Smith College, has written about the English language, "... no other can communicate such subtle shades of thought and feeling, such fine discriminations of meaning. The riches of its mingled derivations supply a multitude of synonyms... so that fatherly is not the same as paternal, nor fortune as luck, nor boyish as puerile..."
I admit to a prejudice toward my own language (and a regrettable inability to read Tolstoi, Dante and the T'ang poets in their original tongues), but I think a good case can be made for English as the preeminent literary language. Compare it to any other, for example, French. Set the starting point of our literary race at the year 1500, the finish-line at 1700. Who shall represent France? - Rabelais, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Jodelle, Montaigne, Malherbe, Corneille, Pascal, Moliere, Ma Rochefoucauld, Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Madame de Sevigne and La Bruyere. This list of two hundred years of French literary genius is generous and quite complete. Now, let us handicap English by giving French a hundred years' head start; we will set the English starting line at 1600. In the hundred years that followed it, the English literary genius produced Campion, Donne, Dekker, Beaumont, Lovelace, Jonson, Herrick, Webster, Herbert, Shakespeare, Suckling, Crashaw, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Bacon, Raleigh, Bunyan, Walton, Pepys, and the forty-seven inspired translators of the King James Bible. (Excluded from the list as a further handicap are such giants as Pope, Defoe and Swift whose major works appeared after 1700)
I am well aware that this kind of contest is in a sense invidious; how do you compare one writer's genius with another's, Moliere's, for example, with Shakespeare's, or Dante's with Cervantes'? The answer, of course, is that you don't and shouldn't. But the oeuvre of two different periods, or two nations, can be compared, and on this basis I think that the literary production of any nation, ranged alongside English, will suffer by comparison. And, finally, I think that this eminence of English as a literary language can best be explained by the unique flexibility and omnivorous word-hunger of the generations of Britons who forged the uncommonly keen sword wielded by our belletristic heroes.
An accident of geography played a large part in the process. The British Isle, lying fat and fecund behind a low, beckoning coastline and narrow, unforbidding moat, was an irresistable lure to the peoples of the mainland. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, in his History of England, a book as admirable for its exquisite literary style as for its historiology, says, "The temptation to invade the island lay not only in the pearls, the gold and the tin for which it seems to have been noted... long before the foundations of Rome; temptation lay also in its fertile soil, the rich carpet of perennial green that covered the downs and every clearing in the forest, the absence of long interludes of frost that must have seemed miraculous in a land so far to the North before men knew the secret of the Gulf Stream."
And with each new wave of traders or invaders came new semantic blood, new ideas and new ways of expressing them. The narrow, languid brook of the Celtic tongue suddenly acquired a powerful tributary as the splendid geometry of the Latin language burst into it, bringing such lofty sounds and concepts as intellect, fortune, philosophy, education, victory, gratitude. From 449 on, the blunt, intensely expressive monosyllables of the Anglo-Saxons joined the swelling stream, giving is the names of the strong, central elements of our lives: God, earth, sun, win, lose, live, love and die. Then, in the eleventh century, with the Norman Conquest, a great warm gush of French sonorities - emotion, pity, peace, devotion, romance - swelled the torrent to a flood-tide that burst its bands, spreading out in broad, loamy deltas black with the rich silt of WORDS.
It was in precisely this word-hungry, language-mad England that the terms you will encounter in this book were born. They are prime examples both of the infinite subtlety of our language and the wild imagination and verbal skill of our forebears. The terms were codified during the period when the river of words was approaching its greatest breadth, beginning in about 1450 with The Egerton Manuscript.
These terms and phrases, like the other verbal inventions of their time, were not idle made, but were intended for, and in many cases achieve, wide currency and acceptance. As you will see in Part I of this book, a number of them have down to this day, and are accepted, taken-for-granted figures of speech. What is most remarkable to me about this rich repository of poetry is that all the terms in it can be said to be correct, proper, and usable. The lyrical fanciful Exaltation of Larks has credentials as good as the mundane and universally accepted School of Fish, since both terms offer as provenance the same source, the list in The Book of St. Albans. The fact is that An Exaltation of Larks is the 18th term in the list and A School of Fish is the 132nd. Such whimsies as a Shrewdness of Apes and a Cowardice of Curs also precede the more familiar fish term (109th and 117th). (There are a number of expressions in our contemporary speech that have the form of these terms and obviously derive from the order. We will let one stand for them all: a chorus of complaint.
So, one can certainly argue with good logic that every one of the terms you will find in the first two parts of this book has an equal claim on our respect and loyalty. The fact that many of them have slipped out of our common speech can only, I think, be described as lamentable. There is little enough poetry in our speech (and lives) to continue to ignore a vein as rich as this. The purpose of this book is to try, in an admittedly modest measure, to redress the balance. The thesis of this book can be summed up very simply: when a group of ravens flaps by, you should, if you want to refer to their presence, say, "There goes an unkindness of ravens." Anything else would be wrong.
The reader may have noticed that, until this moment, I have avoided giving a single, comprehensive collective term to these collective terms. This is because there isn't any. Oddly enough, the compilers of the numerous lists of these words, though obviously enthusiastic philologists, have never felt compelled to settle on a group term for them. The explorer in this field will find these words variously referred to as "nouns of multitude," "company terms," "nouns of assemblage," "collective nouns," (I hold this to be a misnomer since, obviously, it can be confused with the strictly grammatical term referring to such words as "majority." The same may be saud of "nouns of multitude." "group terms," and "terms of venery." This last seems to me best and most appropriate, and itself warrants some explanation.
"Venery" and its adjective, "venereal," are most often thought of, of course, as signifying love, and more specifically physical love. From Venus, we have the Latin root ven which appears in the word venari, meaning "to hunt game." Eric Partridge, in his etymological dictionary Origins, asserts that the ven in venari has its original meaning: "to desire (and therefore) to pursue," and he sees a close connection between it and the word "win," from the Middle English winnen, and even the Sanskrit vanoti, "he conquers." It is in this sense that venery came to signify the hunt, and it was so used in all the early works on the chase, including the earliest known on the subject of English hunting, Le Art [sic] de Venery, written in Norman French in the 1320's by the huntsman of Edward II, Master William Twici.
So, if all the earlier and far greater experts in this field have left it to someone of the twentieth century to select the proper term for these proper terms, I (cautiously and with boundless and well-founded humility) pick up the gauntlet and declare for "terms of venery"; if for no more cogent reason than that it allows of such disingenuous derivative delights as "venereal," "venerealize," and "venerealization" (vide Part III of this book).
So be it. Henceforward we are talking about terms of venery or venereal terms.
Before beginning the list of the authentic venereal terms themselves, a word is in order on the various types of terms. Etymologically speaking, the order of venereal terms seems to me to break down into six families, according to the apparent original inspiration for the term. I would list the six families as:
1: Onomatopoeia: for example, a murmuration of starlings, a gaggle of geese.
2: Characteristic: a leap of leopards, a skulk of foxes. This is by far the largest family.
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