`Always verify your references'

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

By what is a mere coincidence my old friend Malcolm Muggeridge has been writ- ing about the new edition of Bartlett while I have just finished reading right through the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I take a kindly view of Bartlett because it once attributed to me a brilliant verse of which I am not the author, (I thought that Mark Twain was, but Bartlett had not been able to find anybody but me.)

Across the plains where once there roamed The Indian and the scout, The Swede, with alcoholic breath, Sets rows of cabbage out.

The difficulties of finding attributions were once illustrated, at my expense, in the New Yorker under the title 'Brogan Slogan'. Someone had phoned up the information service of the Columbia Broadcasting Station to ask who had said, 'Man does not live by bread alone'. The answer was, 'D. W. Brogan in The American Character'. (What I had written was, 'Man does not live by bread alone, not even pre-sliced bread'.) So I have sympathy with the editors of the Oxford Dictionary even if some of the attri- butions are wrong. Indeed, they end with a false attribution: the title 'J'Accuse' which headed Zola's famous article in L'Aurore on the Dreyfus Case was not invented by him, but by Clemenceau.

Then the dictionary has annoyed me by some bogus pedantry: for example the Declaration of Independence is declared to be by our old friend Anon. It is, in fact, by Thomas Jefferson. True, as a note under Jefferson shows, there was an earlier draft, and a committee revised Jefferson's text; but the Declaration, as he claimed in his famous epitaph, is Jefferson's. If we are going to have this principle of correction applied generally, the editors will have to go through the dictionary with more care than they have done. Thus, at random, I notice that they attribute to Oliver Goldsmith some well known lines from 'The Travel- ler':

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or sure!

which are, as most people know, the work of Samuel Johnson. And the most eloquent passage in the First Inaugural of a great American master of prose, Abraham Lin- coln, comes not from Lincoln, but from his Secretary of State, William H. Seward.

Nevertheless, the Oxford Dictionary is a book in which I have read repeatedly, of which I have owned three copies, and which is, I think, one of my best investments as a way of passing the time or showing off my bogus erudition. It is a treasure house of the 'index lore that turns no student pale'— a line not in the dictionary. But 'You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!' (Dr Martin Joseph Routh) is.

Of course. the index lore requires a great deal of research some of which may be sterile and barren of results. There seem to me to be too many examples in the Oxford Dictionary of either inadequate research or an inability to remember on one page what has been printed on another. Thus, we have 'all dressed up and no place to go' on page 108, and on page 556, 'all dressed up, with nowhere to go'. The attribution of the first quotation is simply Benjamin Hapgood Burt who is described as 'nineteenth century', while the quotation is described as 'title of a song'. Unless my memory totally fails me, this was a celebrated song in what was a celebrated musical comedy, Mr Manhattan, produced in London just before the war of 1914, with Raymond Hitchcock as its star singing this song. The second quotation is from that eminent political journalist, William Allen White.

At a presumably higher level, we have an example of superfluity in a translation by Thomas Campion of one of the most famous poems of Catullus which appears later, under Catullus, in Latin with a better if not brilliant translation by Sir W. Maris (sic). The translations are very seldom impressive for their elegance and they have a fault which I think is hard to defend: they often add to the text. Thus a well known line from du Bellay, Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage is translated, 'Happy the wanderer, like Ulysses who has come happily home at lase; and famous lines of Goethe, Grau, teurer Fraund, ist alle Theorie Und grlin des Lebens goldner Baum

are rendered, 'all theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green'. And perhaps the editors might have looked at the discussion in Maurice

Baring's Have Yau Anything to Declare? on how to translate Horace:

Cui &limn religas Simplex munditiis For whom, Oh! dazzling snare! So carelessly you twist your hair In any simple knot?

In the dictionary this appears as 'For whose eyes dost thou braid those flaxen locks, so trim, so simple?'

The dictionary is a little parochial in the sense that it is too purely 'Anglo-Saxon'. And it devotes too much space to now for- gotten popular songs and hymns of the past and not nearly enough to popular songs, slogans, and the like of the present or the recent past.

De gustihus is, of course, a very reason- able motto which must be used in self- defence by editors of books like this, and the book has given me so much pleasure in the past and in the present that I do not want to seem too censorious. But it seems to me that more authors, especially more foreign authors, could have been quoted if some of the selections from authors of second or third rank had been cut down.

For all of the very long selections here, only two authors seem to me to stand the amount of space they are given (leaving God out of it because there is very little waste matter in the space given to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer). But even Milton and even Keats are given too much space. This is a dictionary of quotations, not an anthology like the Oxford Book of English Verse. Yet nearly the whole of Lycidas, a poem I adore just this side of idolatry, and nearly the whole of the 'Ode to a Nightingale', which I adore on the other side of idolatry, are given here.

More serious is the giving of a great deal of space to authors of merit, but not of outsanding merit. There is, for example, too much of Robert Bridges. He is a poet of merit, but surely there were few more mis- guided campaigns than the attempt to launch The Testament of Beauty as a great poem after The Waste Land and the later Yeats.

I don't think there is enough of Yeats. What there is is often, I think, the wrong part of Yeats: there is far too little of the late great Yeats. 'Innisfree' we must have—after all, it was one of Yeats's chief sources of income for a long time. But there is still too much Celtic Revival and there is not nearly enough of the great, bitter poems he wrote up to a few years before his death. And perhaps it should have been noted that 'When you are old and gray and full of sleep' is a free rendering of a very celebrated poem by Ronsard. True, Mrs Yeats has denied that her husband was imitating Ronsard, but I am afraid her memory must have betrayed her.

And surely another great modern Irish writer is foolishly and almost insolently treated. The only quotation attached to the

name of James Joyce is, 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', the title of a

book. Why not, 'Yes, I said, yes I will, Yes'?

After all, we have the other side of the medal in Lord Kitchener's message to the

ate in 1914 which ordered the troops to treat French 'women with perfect courtesy' but to 'avoid any intimacy'. As 'Mademoi- selle from Armentieres' (to which there is a refemence in the dictionary) indicated, this order was not universally obeyed.