John Rea:  I was a bit startled (pleasantly) to find Humbert, at the bottom of p210 and top of 211 in Appel's _Annotated...._ referring "to a mural, a name and a title stating that, "[I] supposed that all had been derived from some common source..."

 

The Annotated Lolita ( Penguin) Ch.13, page 200:

I assumed that the playlet was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal legend. Nothing prevented one, of course, from supposing that in quest of an attractive name the founder of the hotel had been immediately and solely influenced by the chance fantasy of the second-rate muralist he had hired, and that subsequently the hotel's name had suggested the play's title. But in my credulous, simple, benevolent mind I happened to twist it the other way round, and without giving the whole matter much thought really, supposed that mural, name and title had all been derived from a common source, from some local tradition, which I, an alien unversed in New England lore, would not be supposed to know. In consequence I was under the impression (all this quite casually, you understand, quite outside my orbit of importance) that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsy for juvenile consumption, arranged and rearranged many times, such as Hansel and Gretel by Richard Roe, or The Sleeping Beauty by Dorothy Doe, or The Emperor's New Clothes by Maurice Vermont and Marion Rumpelmeyer — all this to be found in any Plays for School Actors or Let's Have a Play! In other words, I did not know — and would not have cared, if I did — that actually The Enchanted Hunters was a quite recent and technically original composition which had been produced for the first time only three or four months ago by a highbrow group in New York."

 

Jansy: J. Rea compared HH's  vague idea about a common source to the names of hotel, mural and play *  and Sir W. Jones'  Eighteenth Century establishment of a proto-language, when he traced a reference to a "common source" as being, itself the common source for HH's assumption of a link between distinct items, and Oriental Jones' sentence about proto-language. Nevertheless we soon discover that HH was mistaken about this communal source for, a few sentences later, he acknowledges that the title of the playlet was "quite recent and technically original", i.e, totally unrelated to a tradition or a legend.  

 

So, after my own simple benevolent musings, I realized that I couldn't understand J. Rea's point ( or irony! ) at all : 

(a) is there an intentional reference by VN to Sir W. Jones traceable through the expression  "common source" ?

(b) If not,  would this source in common implicate a coincidence that VN, himself, would enjoy?  

[ I have in mind that Lolita, herself, believed Quilty had named his play in her honor ( Cf. Appel, ch13,n.202/1) ]

 

*"a banal legend", "some local tradition", i.e " The Enchanted Hunters"