Letters to the Editor
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week" paragraphs.— Ed. SeEcntroa.i SAYINGS THAT WERE NEVER UTTERED [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,— The usual misquotation of Bishop Butler in a daily paper reminds me of the innumerable pithy sayings which were never said. Butler is always quoted as saying : " Things are what they are, and consequences will be what they will be." This is a mere piece of fatalism, quite devoid of originality or helpfulness. What the Bishop said was : " Things and actions arc what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be : why_ then Should we desire to be deceived ? " He was pointing out the futility of men who, like Balsam, do wrong and hope to escape the consequences of their actions.
The above is a mere misquotation, but a more interesting. form of inaccuracy is the groundless attribution of a phrase to sonic distinguished character. The favourite situation or utterance with our purveyors of news is " dramatic," and usually it is difficult to discover any analogy with tragedy, comedy, or even farce in the " dramatic " scenes which they hastily report. But everyone feels that a striking situation deserves appropriate letterpress, and so to many of them a pungent saying is appended, which, alas ! is almost always fictitious. Scnie of these legendary speeches serve to show with how little research our historians manufacture their histories. There is a reputed letter of Queen Elizabeth to Coxe, Bishop of Ely, which is quoted in Green's Short history and accepted without question by Froude. The acquisitive Queen was trying to induce the Bishop to give up some valuable London property belonging to the See—hence Ely Place—and she was successful. She is said to have reminded him that " I who made you what you arc, can unmake you ; and if you do not forthwith fulfil your engagement, by I will unfrock you." The earliest authority for this is the Annual Register of 176], and the Editor states that it is a letter from the Queen to the Bishop of Ely (Heaton) and taken from the Register of Ely.
It never occurred either to Green or Froude to examine the Ely Register, but the fact that the document is undated, that it is signed merely Elizabeth, that the verb unfrock was not then current, and that the name is wrong—Heaton is most to history—might have roused suspicions in the most confiding chroniclers. Further, Eliiabeth by such a letter would have stultified her whole ecclesiastical policy, seeing that one serious trouble was that the adversary declared that her Bishops were not properly consecrated, but " made " by her instead of receiving consecration by a properly qualified prelate. The letter is a palpable forgery.
The saying, L'Etat c'est moi, was almost certainly never uttered by Louis XIV. He did indeed make a speech to the Parlement in 1655, and in it occur the words Mon Etat, but that seems to be the only ground upon which the legende, as Lavisse rightly calls it, is built. Nothing is more unlikely than that the boy King, barely seventeen years of age, who was then and for years afterwards completely dominated by Mazarin, should have. adopted such a haughty tone. - Many historians and all journalists attribute to Walpole -the saying, " Every man has his price." Anyone but a historian would have suspected an error in the fathering upoir SO shrewd a man as Walpole such a palpable falsehood. The true version is accessible to everyone. Hervey tells us that in 1733 he wrote to George II that " as to the revolters, he knew the reasons and the price of every one of them." But it would be too much to expect historians to consult contem- porary authorities. The foundation of this astonishing axiom is a confused recollection of Coxe who says : " Flowery oratory he despised ; he ascribed to the interested views of themselves or their relations, the declarations of pretended patriots, of whom he said, ' All these men have their price.' " Lord Morley, in his short life of Walpole, states the matter
correctly. .
It is a real pleasure. to turn to sayings that really were delivered according to the textbooks. Almost our solitary instance is afforded by the heroic death of General Wolfe. The, picturesque Green gives substantially the same account as innumerable others. The striking features are his comment upon Gray's "Elegy" and the shout they run. Both episodes are well authenticated. Thackeray, indeed, in his anxiety to strip " the mask and cothurnus " from the Muse of History, makes Barry the Virginian say that he learned "from the testimony of a brother aide-de-camp who was by his. side, that the General never spoke at all after receiving his death:: wound, so that the phrase which has been put into the mouth of the dying hero may be considered no more authentic than an oration of Livy or Thucydides." .
Three or four eye-witnesses testify to his dying words, and the remark on Gray's "Elegy" is equally authentic. It was not, of course, made during the night attack, when strict silence was essential, but a Scot named Robison afterwards a professor in his native land—Who served as- a Midshipman in the expedition, heard Wolfe say that he Would-ratlier be the author of that poem than take Quebec. He said it the night before the battle while making the rounds.
Louis XV is a much misrepresented monarch, and the fixing upon him of the saying, " Apres moi (or nous) le Deluge," is one instance. We may always suspect an anecdote which is told of two or more persons, and Madame de Pompadour also said to have used the expression. In each case the evidence is most flimsy. More probable but impossible to verify is Voltaire's comment upon Habakkuk, the Prophet, as capable de tout.
A most malignant falsehood is that laid upon Foulon, who was alleged to have said : "Si cette canaille n'a pas de pain, elle mangera du foin." It is strange, if such were his-sentiments; thas he should have expended 60,000 francs in providing work for the unemployed. The scoundrel Mirabeau paid several hundred thousand francs—not his own money—to incite the mob against Foulon, and thus effected his brutal murder. The Court and Foulon and all well-disposed men in authority were cordially hated by the ...Orleanists and Revolutionists because they took measures against grain-hoarders. These " patriots " profited by corners in food and also desired scarcity as tending to make the people discontented and revolutionary. They, therefore, spread reports that Foulon and his friends were doing the very thing of which they themselves were guilty. It is not surprising that they should have taken in the rabble, but that they should have taken in and continue to take in our historians, is much stranger.
The Duke of Wellington is credited with a speech that has become a household word : " Up Guards, and at them ! " Indeed, on the strength of it, a racehorse was named " Up Guards." It is certain that the Duke never said it, but what he did say is harder to discover. He himself thinks that he may have said, " Stand up, Guards." The only remark which can be certainly accredited to him at the crisis is, " That's right, Colborne ; go on." This commander of the gallant Fifty-Second was the first to take advantage of the recoil of the French Guard. Thomas Hardy gives an accurate
version :
"COLBOil:se (Shouting): Forward! Right shoulders forward, Fifty-Second ! WELLINGTON : Ha, Colborne—you say well ! Go on ; go on ! You'll do it now ! "
Hardy is equally accurate in his treatment of another Waterloo mot, almost equally famous. The intrepid Cambronne was reported to have said, La Garde mort, et ne se rend pas." The single word which he uttered, when offered quarter, is correctly given by Hardy.
To conclude with another ludicrous misattribution—it used to be stated that Pitt's last words were, " My country ! How I leave my country ! " There is some reason to believe that his last coherent remark was " I think that I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies." In fact (except on the stage), dying men seldom make speeches. Their death is usually preceded by a stupor of considerable duration. •
We may gather from the history of the various mots that a suitable impromptu rarely comes at the right moment and has to be invented subsequently.—I am, Sir, 15 Stratton. Sired, Piccadilly, 11'.1.1 W.- A. Masa%
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