The wit and wisdom of mankind
A. N. Wilson
tracquotations — 'quotes', as schoolboys
call them — may be defined as any ex-
from a work of literature, or any famous saying, which puzzlers over The Times crossword might reasonably be ex- pected to recognise. 'The boy stood on the burning —'; 'If you can talk with — and keep your virtue'; 'It was a summer even- ing, old — 's work was done'; and so on. Every now and then one of these gobbets from our common cultural heritage slips the memory, and that is presumably the mo- ment to reach for the Dictionary of Quota- tions.
Bertie Wooster said it all in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: 'I don't know if you hap- pen to be familiar with a poem called "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by the bird Tennyson whom Jeeves had mentioned when speaking of the fellow whose strength was as the strength of ten ... The thing goes, as you probably know,
Turn tiddle umpty-pum Turn tiddle umpty-pum Turn tiddle umpty-pum and this brought you to the snapperoo or pay-off which was `Someone had blundered'.
Normally, of course, Bertie's powers of recall are infinitely less precise, and most of the allusions to our great writers which fall from Jeeve's lips are lost on his fat-headed employer. 'There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn — season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'. 'Season of what?"Mists, sir, and mellow fruit- fulness'. 'Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you'.
The habit of speaking, even of thinking, in quotations is almost dying out. One will never forget the young don on Kaleido- scope who criticised a novel by J. I. M. Stewart, set in the late 1920's because one of the characters (an undergraduate) quotes from The Waste Land. That, claimed the academic, was impossible, since T.S. Eliot was at that stage 'not on the English Syllabus'. The idea that poetry might stay in someone's brain, or that some people, regardless of English syllabuses, might once have read poetry for pleasure had passed this wiseacre by. It is not surprising. The Times crossword has fewer and fewer quotations, because you can no longer ex- pect anyone to have read anything. Say, `The boy stood on the burning deck' or `Barkis is willing' or 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' to most people under the age of 20 and you will get looks as blank as Bertie Wooster's. School-children doing 'A' level sometimes complain that they are asked to learn 'Shakespeare quotes'. Most human beings, who had not suffered an education, would, after reading or seeing a play by Shakespeare, remember certain lines quite naturally. But the habit of memorising poetry has more or less gone out among schoolchildren here. When you see the unmemorable 'verse' they are given to read, this is perhaps not surprising. Who wants to memorise Ted Hughes? We do not live in a world where the old word-hoard is being renewed — where 'quotes' froth Southey and Mrs Hemans are being replac- ed by sayings from Tom Stoppard or Jack Kerouac. The common store no longer ex- ists. 'Long life to thy fame and peace to thY soul, Rob Burns', wrote Sir Walter Scott to hisjournal. 'When I want to express a senti- ment which I feel strongly, I find the phrase in Shakespeare or thee'. What was true of Scott was also true of P. G. Wodehouse. Jeeves will be as unread, and as incorn- prehensible, to future generations as Jonathan Oldbuck is to our own. The com- mon store has not been replaced; it has be scattered. 'Things', as someone once observed, 'fall apart, the centre cannot hold'.
It is not surprising, given all this, that the, great breeding ground for dictionaries 01 quotations should have been the United States. In spite of — no, because of — the large numbers of Professors of American Literature, we can be sure that there never was such a thing. There have been American books, but not a cohesive thing which we may label 'American literature'. The multifarious backgrounds of most mid' twentieth century Americans makes it irn" possible to think of them as a single entitY in the way that we might think of the French or the Magyars. Since they all have different backgrounds, and watch more television than they read books, modern men, and in particular modern Americans, need 'books of quotes', in a vain attempt to get a potted version of what they have been missing. It is what we do not know, and not, what we know, which needs to be enveloped by the hard covers of a work of reference. H. L. Mencken's Dictionary or Quota' tions, is from this point of view, a verY good work of reference, 'a classic selection', as it says on the cover, 'of the wit and wisdom of mankind'. Mencken bega°,, work on it in 1918, it was published in 1944 and it has now been reissued by Collins for the umpteenth time. It is made up of 1341 pages of bon mots, wise saws, sayings which are famous and sayings which Men- cken thought should be famous. The entries are categorically arranged, starting with Saint Benedict on Abbots and ending with Mary Lamb on the Zoo. Only a proportion of these 'quotations' are really of 'The boy stood on the burning deck' variety. Sir Walter Scott, Jeeves, and all others who think and speak in quotations, allude con- stantly to poets. The preponderance of ' Mencken's choice are prose extracts, often translated from other languages. (`No man is so virtuous as to marry a wife only to have children'. Martin Luther Table Talk cclvii 1569). Doubtless the capricious selec- tion was made, or begun, chiefly as an ex- tended common-place book which reflected Nevertheless, own idiosyncratic interests. Nevertheless, it smacks a little of the Rotary club. Here are 'quotes' to be copied on to Post-cards, for those who were afraid that !heir post-prandial rhetoric would run dry. Was it not Wendell Phillips who said, "All that is valuable in the Constitution is one thousand years old?" ' Well, everyone flows it was Wendell Phillips if the speaker says it was; he has been looking up Con- stitution, American on p. 214 of Mencken. American public speakers, more than English, retain the use of this quaint for- mula. President Reagan's speech-writers often have Mencken to hand, to judge from ‘‘'hat he reads so fluently from his teleprompter. Even for those of us, however, who have not got to prepare speeches for Women's Guilds in Minneapolis, or Rotarians in Nebraska, Mencken provides rich possi- bilities of delight. Buy Mencken and get rid °I Your television set. There is enough Material here for a thousand Nemo's Almanacs. Those who enjoy the puzzle of Identifying the source of quotations will be able to sit on one side of the hearth, while [ someone else fires the questions. Who said, I an oyster is a fish built like a nut'. Or 'a Mule is an animal that has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity'? The answer is unknown to Mencken, who says, 'Author unidentified'. If you think that's cheating, °I. if you are the author unidentified, there 're Plenty of straight questions to ask. Here is re round of quotations for the I richophile. Whose hair was 'bright as locks/yang star when it riseth'? Whose 'sunny i„ocks/Hang on her temples like a golden fleece'? And whose hair 'had the smells of all the sunburned South'?
, When you have lost all your friends by
have this sort of quiz-game, you will still ave Mencken to console you. For, his h °°k is, among other things, an admirable anthology, a wonderful rag-bag for the bed-side table. A sensibly large number of Papal bulls and decrees are quoted. One Barely wants to wad through whole en- jeelicals between one nightmare and the ,xt. But to be able to switch on the lamp rcl to read snippets from the popes is a ,cinating antidote to one's own thoughts. kwhY did they never make Leo XIII a Saint? :II of Rerum Novarum is good, but this rg jives its gist: 'Every man has by nature the one to possess property of his own. This is Ile of the chief points of distinction bet- d.,,eu enman and ve the lower animals'. Or, thon a lifert lel, what do we make of is, from the fifteenth century Pope Eugenius IV: 'We decree and order, that, from now on and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them'? Presumably this decree, since it was made for all time, is still binding on Christian consciences. One can think of more than one Catholic household where it must cause agonies of conscience every time they sit down to dinner. Devout people for- tunate enough to have chlorinated pools, must, of a summer evening, have some awkward lines to speak during swimming- parties. 'You've had long enough in the pool, Margaret Mary; let Mrs Rabinowitz have her turn'.
But, when all is said, Mencken's Dic- tionary of Quotations belongs to the same world as Reader's Digest. A compendium for a world that read books would be dif- ferently constituted. Yet the Boy stands there in Mencken's tome, whence all but he had fled. The Dictionary was at least begun before the dissolution of things, before schoolboys had forgotten 'quotes', when, as Bertie Wooster put it, 'the snail was on the wing and the lark on the thorn — or rather the other way round — and God was in His heaven and all right with the world'.
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