Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

WHO SAID WHAT?  

I’m in one of those petty moods today where I will give vent to my annoyance about something that is not world-shattering but is still annoying. I am referring to the habit some people have, through sheer ignorance, of attributing well-known quotations (or “quotes”, as the semi-literate say) to the wrong people.

I am not talking about “famous words” that were probably never said by anyone in the first place. We must be aware that in ancient times, historians would summarise some eminent person’s ideas by recording them as if they were direct speech.  Hence, outside the books that he actually wrote, what Julius Caesar is said to have said is really what some scribe or historian thought he should have said. Direct speech was given when historians were simply conveying the general gist of somebody’s ideas. Read Plutrach’s Lives some time, and see the long and detailed speeches he attributes to so many people whose words were never actually recorded in their lifetime.

Doubtless it annoys some people to learn this, but until about 200 years ago, and certainly before the age of general literacy, the famous orations said before battle, the famous eulogies and the famous speeches given in senates and parliaments – unless written down and published by the orator himself – were mainly made up by people other than the supposed speaker.  What desperate stratagems are used now in attempts to authenticate fictitious “famous words”. Item – Queen Elizabeth I probably made a speech at Tilbury, but we have only the vaguest knowledge of what she actually said. The received version we have first appeared about 20 years after her death. But, oh dear, look it up on line and see how many patriotic English historians, wanting to uphold a national myth, have endorsed the following phrases, even though they are probably apocryphal:  "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too".

Now this sort of fictitious speech is annoying enough, but what really irritates me is what is misattributed – a statement quite clearly made first by one person, but too often quoted as if it were made by another.

 

One of the most notorious is “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (“Let them eat cake” – and yes, pedant, I am aware that “brioche” does not directly translate as “cake”, but this is the translated form in which we have received the statement). One still finds the occasional twit who attributes this to Queen Marie Antoinette, though no serious historian would now do so. The statement came from the fictitious story of a wicked princess, first used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a book published in 1767, long before the French Revolution and long before Marie Antoinette was queen of France. Yet, as I noted when reviewing John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards on this blog, Saul spends two pages analysing and deploring the statement in the clear belief that it was said by the queen and was therefore typical of aristocratic contempt for the lower orders. Beware the apparent polymath who has a feeble grasp of the fine details of history.

Some misattributions are less resonant than this, but still annoying. In reviewing Simon Schama’s essay collection Wordy on this blog, I noted that Schama misattributed to Noel Coward the bon mot “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles”. Actually this witticism was coined by the Hungarian Anglophile and humourist George Mikes in his little book How to be an Alien published in 1946. Why would Schama have made this mistake? Partly, I think, because people have the habit of assuming that something witty must have been said by the first famous witty person they can think of. You would be amazed (or perhaps not) at how many witticisms by lesser mortals have been ascribed to Samuel Johnson, Voltaire (who NEVER said “I disagree with your opinions but I will defend to the death your right to express them.”) Sydney Smith, Talleyrand, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, G.K.Chesterton, Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker or any other notable coiner of witty phrases.

And what is true of wits is also true of resonant phrases supposedly made by illustrious statespersons. In Tom Scott’s recent “biography” of Charles Upham Searching for Charlie (a book without notes to authenticate or verify sources), we are told the familiar anecdote of the Chinese statesman who, when asked what he thought were the long-term consequences of the French Revolution, replied “It is too early to tell”. Scott goes on to say the story is probably apocryphal, but he still manages to misattribute it to Mao Tse-Tung (Mao Zedong in the new style). The story has always been attributed to  Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai). Research tells us that Chou En-lai either never said it OR it was a mistranslation and he was in fact being asked, not about the French Revolution but about the Paris riots of 1968, which were still in the news when he was being interviewed.

Elsewhere in Tom Scott’s book we are told that Winston Churchill said the man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, and the man who is still socialist at forty has no brain. Possibly Churchill did say this at some stage, but he would have been quoting a familiar sentiment which dates back to the nineteenth century at least. It was first found in print in a French version in the 1875 and has been attibuted to an obscure jurist called Batbie (yes, obscure people can say witty things); and of course the original witticism did not refer to “socialism” but to (French) republicanism and radicalism. Engish versions of the statement were already circulating when Churchill (born 1874) was still in the nursery. Is worth noting that there is a whole website devoted to quotations falsely attributed to Churchill.

When I was kid, TV had an American series called Slattery’s People (I’ve just checked – it lasted for two seasons, 1964-65). It was about state politics in the USA and starred Richard Crenna. Every episode began with the admonition "Democracy is a very bad form of government. But I ask you never to forget: All the others are so much worse." I have heard this intelligent idea attributed to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Charles de Gaulle to [inevitably] Winston Churchill. The best anyone can come up with is that it was first recorded as being said by Churchill but, as he himself admitted, he was quoting an unacknowledged source and did not use exactly those words. I didn’t say that Churchill never said anything pungent.

At this point I could descend into quotational trivia. No, John Lennon did not originate the comment that “Life is what happens when you are planning other things”. He did quote it in one of his songs, but the remark was commonplace in the 1950s when Lennon was an unknown kiddie and the earliest published source so far found is a comment by the journalist Alan Saunders in an issue of the Reader’s Digest from 1957. No, it was not a young New Zealand journalist who first said that “The nearest we will ever get to a time machine is the cinema”. This piece of wisdom was well-known long before any New Zealander got hold of it. No, as I once heard stated on an RNZ broadcast, it was not 19^th century John Stuart Mill who first decribed the original state of natural man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The phrase was coined by 17^th century Thomas Hobbes.

And so on, and so on. You see I could ramble idly about on this topic for hours. My main point is that misattributions happen because people assume resonant phrases must have been made by celebrities they have heard of, and don’t bother to check any sources.

So, in the words of Shakespeare, “That’s all folks!”