A BOOK FOR THE BLACKOUT

Evening Star, Issue 24079, 27 December 1941, Page 3

A BOOK FOR THE BLACKOUT

[Written by Panache for the ‘ Evening Star.’] Unless you are a wise man who built his house upon a rock, your garden will by now be a ruin, scored with trenches. Put if you if ere pnidont, building on rock that nothing but blasting will shift, you will have saved your dahlias, at a price, the price being the communal shelter of the Caversham tunnel in default of the comforts of a home trench. People who took short-cuts through the tunnel some years ago remember it as very damp, with clammy walls on either hand, squelching mud underfoot, and mossy drippings from the roof. They recommend shelterers to take, in addition to the inevitable thermos, goloshes and an umbrella. But when I queue up for the old tunnel I’ve got the perfect air-raid companion, a magic carpet of a book, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. It consists of nearly 900 quarto pages, is solid but not bulky, and costs only a guinea and a-half. And thirty-one and sis is not much for a book that has in it everything quoted and quotable from authors writing in English, with special sections for the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Nursery Rhymes, and ‘ Punch,’ as well as foreign quotations, with translations, unobtrusively at the end where they will not embarrass such as have only their own tongue. It is a most exciting and stimulating dictionary, and. while' it is too diverting to have lying about in the house while there is work to he done, it is ideal for entertaining a crowd of people in enforced seclusion. Highbrow? Nonsense. Here are ‘ Yankee Doodle.’ ‘ Alexander’s Ragtime Band,’ ‘Are You a Bromide?’ ‘ All Dressed Up and No Place to Go,’ ‘ Now We Shan’t Be Long,’ and pathetic couplets such as She was one of the early birds, And I was one of the worms, to temper the eight double-column pages devoted to ‘ Hamlet.’ There is a great deal of both Pope and Swift, but even. more, of hymn writers. Until this book came into my hands I did not know who asked the insulting question, “Who’s your fat friend? nor which poet asserted that the Prince of Darkness was a Gentleman ; nor that it was Swift who wrote “ with my own fair hands ” ; and I had attributed the remark about God’s ability to make a better berry than the strawberry to the wrong Butler. Most articles referring to colonies to-day allude to the haves and the have-nots. 1 wonder how many of the writers know that it is Cervantes they quote. “ There are but two families" in the world, as my orandmothor used to say, the Haves and the Havenots.” The index, as the compilers point out, takes up about a third of the book. It is almost as fascinating as the main body, and if you are enduring the blackout alone you can have very good games with yourself. Look up. for example, “ Anabaptist,” and see if you can score 100 per cent, by quoting the two wellknown lines, “ As certain Anabaptists do falsely boast,” from the Book of Common Prayer, and Marjorie Fleming’s “ An annibaptist is a thing I am not a member of.” It is a relief to be assured by the index that only one memorable thing ba.s been written about proscrastimition, while there are more than one'hundred things about kissing considered quotable. Dust takes up a column in the index, but roses beat it; and twice as many, good things have been said about wine as about duty. The section headed “ Anonymous ” is so short that it is a tribute to the tracking powers of the compilers. It is strange rending, because, as the writer of the preface remarks, “ alphabetical order makes strange bedfellows.” Here are some of our most memorable lines gathered up in a kind of literary left luggage office, and rubbing shoulders most incongruously; “ Sumer is icumer in ” lies 'between' “Spheres of influence” and “That Krnschen feeling,” while the most poignant of all love songs, Western wind, when, wilt thou blow, The small rain down can rain ? Christ, if my love were in my arms Arid 1 in my bed again! is followed by the line from the recruiting placard, “ What did you do in the Great War, daddy?” In his preface to the dictionary Bernard Darwin imagines the more or loss illustrious shades looking over one another’s pale shoulders at the first copy that reaches the asphodel. He visualises their indignation after counting the pages allotted to them, and the jealousies to which they succumb. If great -divines are susceptible to jealousy and indignation, Richard Hookey will suffer horrible pangs, for ‘ Ecclesiastical Polity,’ a work on which professors of English used to expatiate for a week, has only three quotations, the same number as Laurence Hope’s ‘ Indian Love Lyrics.’ and half as many as the Dolly Dialogues of Anthony Hope. If this book gives rise to some indignations and jealousies, it also causes the greatest satisfaction, and I rejoice that all the kings and presidents together do not occupy as much space, as Lewis Carroll. I have discovered, and in all modesty affirm it, that 1 am of those from whom a national emergency evokes the best and the most unselfish of unsuspected traits. In the weak piping time of peace . (Shak. Rich, iii.) I should have kept this treasure of a dictionary to myself, and not offered to share it with all who can squeeze into the old Caver.sham tunnel. 1 should have kept it to myself because it means the end of my prowess at the only game in which I have ever excelled—the quoting game. Now you all knbw all the answers, for every"one is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The only thing left unsaid is the trans-Stygian epigram of Oscar Fingal O’Flaherfie Wills Wilde of finding himself next to Ella Wheeler Wilcox.