Where's That Quotation?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 503, 11 February 1949, Page 12

Where's That Quotation?

BENHAM’S BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, PROVERBS, AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS. By Sir Gurney Benham, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S. New and Revised Edition, with Supplement. George Harrap and Co. Ltd. HERE are three ways of using a book of quotations. You can verify what is in your mind; you can look for a passage to illustrate what you are writing or speaking about; or you can browse in it. The first is the best for spontaneity. As a rule the most appropriate quotations flow easily from the mind and are not searched for. Quoting is like flavouring in cooking; too much spoils the dish. How fitting to his text were the lines from Christing Rossetti that C, E. Montague used in Disenchantment to illustrate the deflation of idealism by the time victory came in 1918. Too late for love, too late for joy, Too late, too late! You loitered on the road too long, You trifled at the gate; The enchanted dove upon her branch Died without a mate. .. . Montague may have verified the lines, but we may be sure he didn’t discover them in a quotation book. All three purposes are well served by the re-issue, revised and with a supplement, of this established storehouse. The story of it is a romance. Some sixty years ago, as a young journalist, Sir William Gurney Benham began to collect quotations. The first collection was declined by a publisher, but a book was published in 1907. It won popularity quickly, and edition after edition was called for. Although Benham was a very busy man-editor of a county newspaper, director of companies, and an acknowledged authority

sayings. The British and American quotations are grouped according to authors, a system adopted by the Oxford Book of Quotations, published in 1941. It has the obvious disadvantage that if you want a quotation on a given subject, you cannot go to that heading, but have to use the index. On the other hand it enables you to read what is chosen from an author in one piece, and to compare the space allocated to authors, which gives a rough idea of the editor’s esti-

mate of their importance. The Oxford’s heavy drawing on Tennyson and Kipling was instructive. Sir Gurney Benham gives Tennyson over ten pages to Pope’s twelve, Milton’s thirteen and a-half, and Wordsworth’s eleven and a-half. Kipling has two and a-half. Swinburne, whose reputation has suffered a good deal in the last generation, gets four- pages, On the other hand, W. B. Yeats goes into half a page, which seems to this reviewer quite inadequate, One is struck again by the small proportion a book like this must bear to the vast number of notable things that have been written and said. The book contains 1,380 pages of small printe’but anyone can easily think of passages from his favourite author\that are not here. There are about three pages of Shaw, less than one of his prefaces. Shaw must have said a thousand things worth remembering. Chesterton, another most quotable author, is given less than a page. In most quotation books there is a lot of dead wood-so many commonplaces and platitudes, saved in some cases, it is true, by the way in which they are expressed. Some day, perhaps, an editor will ruthlessly reject many of these references to the brightness of the sun, the shortness of life, the disposition of men to lying, and the frailty of women, and set a really high standard for his entries. However, it would only be his standard after all, and editors of quotation books probably take the line that as much as possible they should serve everybody. If you consider that there is a good deal that is dull in a book like this, you must also agree that there are

great riches. Part of its value is that it gives you many odds and ends that you cannot easily find elsewhere and of which you are interested to know the origin. "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," is apparently the original of many versions. Who said it and when? Who "looked wiser than any mam ever was?" Where. does the expression "steal my thunder" come from? "What' has posterity

done: for us?" That famous maker of "bulls," Sir Boyle Roche, is deprived of the honour of this ’ one. Sir Gurney Benham clearly spent a lot of time tracing sayings to their source and noting parallels. Apart from other uses, one could spend a pleasant evening by a fire over this book, with or without a pipe. One is mo more obliged to read all its fifty thousand items than to go right through a dictionary or encyclopaedia,

A.

M.

on the history of Essex-he went on collecting and revising until shortly before his death in 1944, an impressive example of what a hobby can produce in a full life, Besides quotations from British and American, classical and foreign writers, there are "Waifs and Strays" of many kinds; such as proverbs, epitaphs, political phrases and allusions; toasts, book and bell inscriptions, jokes from Punch, and London street