TABLE TALK

Ghosts in the treasure house

DENIS BROGAN

The appearance of the fourteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is, of course, a deserved tribute to a great American institution. Like the United States, Bartlett has its grave faults, but like the United States, it is probably indispensable. It is natural to compare it with its much younger rival, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. and there is something to be said for each of them.

I have owned various editions of Bartlett, including one of the early ones, and if I could find them today I should possibly write a powerful and learned piece on the changes in American taste and American curiosity, but my earlier Bartlett's have been lent, or borrowed, or stolen. (In university towns, these three words mean much the same thing.) The choices are re- %eating both of the purposes of the pub- lisher and of the clientele they are aiming at. In the brilliant introductory essay which Bernard Darwin contributed to the first edition of the Oxford Dictionary, there was a most charming crossword puzzle approach to the problems of such a dictionary. Quota- tion was a spiritual resource and a literary diversion. A dictionary of quotations was not designed to produce specific historical and cultural information. It was designed to refresh failing memories, to bring back into mind old favourites, and to give a general feeling and appearance of culture which might be half genuine.

Bartlett has a different purpose. It is more utilitarian in the sense that it contains many more quotations of temporary and, indeed, transient interest which the readers of the fourteenth edition may welcome. This par- ticular reader does not really welcome them, but he is presumably not a representative reader of Bartlett although he is. and has been for a very long time, a user of it.

There are a great many modern political quotations of contemporary interest to .1mericans and of little interest to anybody eke. Modern progress has made the prob- lem of quoting from statesmen extra- ordinarily difficult. There is an old story of Iirahms saying to Billow, 'Never criticise a prince's music. You never know who wrote The same is true of a great deal of modern oratory. In these days, it is often the work of tome industrious hack or is men consciously or unconsciously plagiari- ed from the work of some earlier hack. Sometimes the text plagiarised is not the Work of a hack, for one could hardly de- scribe a future President of the United States as a hack. Yet with bland humour the editors of this edition of Bartlett point out to us that one of the most famous phrases in President Kennedy's inaugural speech had been used in much the same words by Senator Harding in 1916.

It is notorious that a great deal of modern American political oratory and, in- deed, writing is the work of what the French call negres, or ghost writers, our more dignified term. So when it was pro- posed to erect a dreadful monument to FDR ol Washington with quotations from his numerous. speeches, it was said that this Would be more a monument to Sam Rosen- man who wrote the speeches than to FDR. And a great many of the quotations from

the oratory or writings of recent American statesmen, of some interest at the time they were uttered, have not only lost that in- terest but cast little light on the tempera- ment or judgment of the man who bought them from a hack, as some idle parsons used to buy barrels of sermons.

Page after page of Bartlett is filled with what is at best leading article prose. As an old writer of leading articles, I can affirm that there can be few less permanent con- tributions to literature than they. However, it is worth while pointing out that one quotation here attributed to a great man has been denied by him as coming from him in any shape or form. Sir Winston Churchill once assured me, with some vehemence, that he had never made the remark attributed to him in varying forms, that Mr Attlee was and ought to be a modest man. He asserted, 'I have the highest admiration for Mr Attlee and never said anything in the least like that.' In any case, people who knew Mr Attlee did not think that modesty was his most striking char- acteristic.

I have an interest in problems of attribu- tion in Bartlett since I appear in an earlier edition as the author of an admirable set of verses which, alas, I did not write. They ran as follows: Across the plains where once there roamed The Indian and the scout.

The Swede with alcoholic breath Sets rows of cabbage out.

In vain I protested that I did not write these lines, that all I had done was quote from memory, and my memory suggested I had read them somewhere in Mark Twain. But Christopher Morley. who was then the editor, could not run down any source other than my memory, and alas this excellent summation of the winning of the West has disappeared from Bartlett. The fact that there are four quotations from me in this edition does not console me, since my quoted remarks are almost as banal as if they were the work of a ghost writer, and I would like to have written about cabbages and Swedes.

The editors of this Bartlett have been extremely industrious and on the whole usefully industrious, but I hope they are wrong in hinting that the real author of 'Take, 0 take those lips away' is Fletcher, not Shakespeare—a heresy to which the Oxford Dictionary gives no countenance. This is one of my favourite Shakespearean quotations, and I shall be reluctant to give it up to Fletcher.

In one way, Bartlett is more inter- nationally minded and appeals to a wider

nnge of cultural interest than the Oxford Dictionary. We have a great many quota- tions from oriental authors. There are eight quotations from the most widely read of all oriental authors, Chairman Mao, and they do not excite much interest in me, any more than the rest of the chairman's works do. There are quotations from Japanese and Indian authors. There is a column of Kahlil Gibran, the Syrian seer, whose drisel is still immensely popular in the United States and is published by that highbrow firm Arthur A. Knopf. who also have published me in the past. Reading from Gibran is enough to put one off all oriental wisdom, including the wisdom of Chairman Mao. It is the soapy American answer to Omar Khayyam.

But the problems of this wide cultural sweep are made evident in the difficulty of translating poetry, and when the only reason for having a poet in this dictionary is that he wrote great or good or extremely bad poetry, it is boring to have to read a great many platitudes which are much more than platitudes, no doubt, in the original tongue. For example. everyone who knows Russian thinks it a language of the greatest rich- ness and subtlety. They also think that the greatest master of that difficult but rich tongue is Pushkin. Alas, the quotations from Pushkin here are of a maddening banality, worthy of a bad opera libretto: For he possessed the happy gift Of unaffected conversation: To skim one topic here, one there, Keep silent with an expert's air In too exacting disputation.

I am sure that Pushkin didn't, in any real sense, write this drivel. Only a quotation from 'The Bronze Horseman', the famous address to Peter the Great as Pushkin con- templates the statue erected by Catherine II to her predecessor: reads anything like poetry and suggests any justification for Pushkin's reputed greatness.

Nevertheless, the Bartlett is indispens- able if only for its very wide range in the Anglo-American tongue. Not all of the American authors quoted here are familiar to me, and one or two are quoted at length for what must be purely patriotic reasons, as I cannot see any justification for taking up so much paper with their lucubnttions. The sentiments are worthy, but so are the sentiments of Wilhelmina Stitch and, in- deed, of the late Mr Tupper and of the Sweet Singer of Michigan. And one is glad to have again the great poem about the West being West, a sentiment I sometimes tend to share. One variation on the attrac- tions of the West has the statement that there 'men are men, and women are glad of it.' There is another variation which, even with the general absolution from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I cannot bring myself to write. And the famous line 'Only God can make a tree' has also led to a ribald English joke at the expense of the unfortunate Mr Kilmer.

But if reading through Bartlett is not such an entertainment as reading through the Oxford Dictionary (one reason is that there is not very much of Samuel Johnson, and I don't think the Shakespearean quota- tions are as well chosen). still Bartlett is a treasure house. And to end on a warmer note, I am more than delighted that in the section on Keats. the editors have not con- fined themselves to his poetry but have skil- fully used his letters.