On Verifying One's Quotations

Extract

It was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, I believe, who once defended misquotation on the ground that it was proof of a far greater and more affectionate intimacy with the writer quoted than the meticulousness which verified all references. What he had in mind was clearly the verbal slips of which even the most deeply-read scholar or most tenacious memory can be guilty. It takes a real lover of Dickens—the author to whom Mr. Chesterton particularly referred—to misquote him, precisely because it takes a real lover of Dickens to quote him spontaneously and at random at all.

But there is another sort of misquotation which, although it is not wholly bad, cannot be defended so easily—the misquoted epigram or catchword. It is true, not only of to-day, but of all ages, that men’s minds are largely influenced, their minds made up, by catchwords. Every hoarding says, ‘Billson’s tea is the best,’ and the world believes it; every popular history says, or used to say, forgetting that the saying was first mentioned in 1789, ‘Galileo’s immortal words, “And yet it moves,”’ and the whole world conjures up an heroic picture of a martyr to the Inquisition. The process is the same in both cases, and it is a question whether the second kind of iteration is not the more powerful in its effect and sinister in its results. In any case one of the most useful services the newspapers could perform would be the revision of popular historical sayings, the scrutiny of their credentials, just as the credentials of commercial advertisers are scrutinised. It is not often nowadays that a reputable newspaper can, without protest at least, talk of ‘} esuitical ‘as synonomous with ‘cunning,’ or refer to ‘doing evil that good may come’ as characteristic of members of the Society of Jesus.