From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
You Can Look It Up
Or can you? Bartlett's arrives in a new edition. Who's in, who's out and why.
In "My Early Life," Winston Churchill had praise for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. "An admirable work," he declared. "The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts." Churchill believed that browsing through Bartlett's made one "anxious to read the authors and look for more."
Perhaps. In any book of quotations there are dozens of authors whom one intends to read, someday. Indeed, the ideal source of the perfect quotation--the classic epigram, the witty rejoinder, the ironic aperçu--is one's own reading and not the index to a reference book. But most of us do not have world enough and time (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress").
Enter Bartlett's. The first edition of that venerable compendium of quotations appeared in 1855; the latest will be published next week. Some readers may view Bartlett's as Churchill did, but I suspect that many will follow P.G. Wodehouse, who regarded it as a literary tapas bar, to be raided for choice nuggets. Real meals are not on the menu.
Wodehouse is justly famous for his expert deployment of literary quotation. He freely sprinkled his stories with snippets from Shakespeare, the Bible, Omar Khayyám, Bret Harte and others. His readers assumed this was evidence of the Master's wide reading. But Wodehouse himself cheerfully drew attention to the importance of Bartlett's, "that indispensable adjunct to literary success."
Part of its purpose is also simple memory-prompting. How exactly did that quotation about Kipling go? And who, come to think of it, was its source? You're in luck with that one, because a peek in the index of any edition of Bartlett's, back at least to the 1950s, will lead you to James K. Stephen's immortal lines about the end of literary brashness: "When the Rudyards cease from kipling / And the Haggards ride no more."
Stephen, a master of light verse, was the nephew of the great Victorian man of letters Leslie Stephen and hence Virginia Woolf's cousin. Woolf is lavishly represented in Bartlett's, but J.K.'s father, the journalist and jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, never made the cut. Stephen was the author of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (1873), a devastating attack on the liberalism of John Stuart Mill. His absence from books like Bartlett's (he doesn't make it into the Oxford book of quotations either) is a pity, for he is full of pungent observations: "Complete moral tolerance," he wrote, "is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other--that is to say, when society is at an end."
Of course, dictionaries of quotations are by nature selective. Good things will necessarily be missing. When John Bartlett, a Cambridge bookseller, published the first edition, it was a mere 285 pages. The new one, the 17th, weighs in at nearly 1,500. The current editor is the biographer Justin Kaplan, who also edited the previous edition of Bartlett's, which appeared in 1992 and stretched to some 1,400 pages.
John Bartlett's stated aim was to show "the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations." His agenda was literary, informational, his criterion for inclusion either currency or intrinsic interest. Mr. Kaplan introduced an element of politics, or political correctness, into the formula.
Soon after the 16th edition of Bartlett's appeared, Adam Meyerson wrote an essay for the journal Policy Review called "Mr. Kaplan, Tear Down This Wall." The reference was to Ronald Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Shortly thereafter, down it came, and with it the Soviet Union.
As Mr. Meyerson noted, that quotation was not in Mr. Kaplan's Bartlett's. Indeed, Mr. Reagan was represented by just three remarks--a shocking fact explained but not justified by Mr. Kaplan's confession to The Philadelphia Inquirer that he "despise[d] Ronald Reagan."
In fact, Mr. Kaplan's Familiar Quotations, unlike John Bartlett's, betrayed a heavy ideological bias. In were all manner of demotic pop sayings and quotations from politically OK writers; out was any thoughtful effort to include phrases from conservative writers, especially contemporary ones.
In the 16th edition of Bartlett's, Mr. Kaplan had room for Toni Morrison, John Kenneth Galbraith, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Sesame Street ("Me want cookie"), The Rolling Stones, Alfred Kazin and John Hersey. But readers looked in vain for Allan Bloom, Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Russell Kirk, V.S. Naipaul or George Will. Surely William F. Buckley's declaration that his magazine National Review "stands athwart history, yelling Stop" deserved a place, as did Irving Kristol's observation that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been "mugged by reality."
Have things improved with the 17th edition? Not really. Mr. Reagan now has six quotations, including the one about the Berlin Wall. But none of the conservative writers mentioned above makes it into the new Bartlett's. William Brennan is there (three items) but not Robert H. Bork, whose observation that "the judge's authority derives entirely from the fact that he is applying the law and not his personal values" is worth a library full of judicial opinions.
We are treated to the wisdom of Jesse Jackson, Malcolm X, Alice Walker and the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka (né Leroy Jones). But where is Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell or Stanley Crouch? You'll find three quotations from the feminist Gloria Steinem but nothing from Gertrude Himmelfarb, Midge Decter or, well, just about any contemporary woman who dissents from the feminist orthodoxy.
The bias of Bartlett's goes beyond the matter of inclusion. As Mr. Meyerson noted, even when Mr. Kaplan quotes conservatives, "he usually leaves out their most ideologically powerful statements." So Margaret Thatcher makes the cut but with only three lackluster comments.
Mr. Kaplan has not mucked about too much with the text he inherited. Still, there are some unfortunate cuts. Aldous Huxley has been reduced from eight quotations to three, none from "Brave New World," his masterpiece and a book of relevance to the current debate over cloning and other biotech wonders. Max Beerbohm has been cut from 12 entries to nine, and the great Victorian critic George Saintsbury, who boasted eight entries in 1955, has been eliminated entirely.
That is a shame because, quite apart from his critical acumen, Saintsbury was sound on the subject of good wine, which, he wrote, "pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people." Now that is wisdom for the ages. Surely Churchill would have agreed.
Mr. Kimball's new book is "The Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence From Hegel to Wodehouse."
