different, both to our inward and our outward vision, will the gray embattled city look when we see it again, all this misery being overpast! May Verdun then be an outpost no longer, but a fortress safe in the heart of France that stretches eastward beyond Metz and Strassburg.

We turn with peculiar feelings of distress and anxiety to the description of those towns and villages which have so long been under the cloud of tyranny. A fog of horror kept them hidden from our straining sight. What was happening in those martyred provinces of the northeast? What was life like in those rich mercantile cities in Lille, in Douai, in Charleville, in Roubaix? We shuddered when there came over us a sense of the invisible terror of their captivity. Here, in the wealthiest section of industrial France, the Germans were holding Frenchmen and Frenchwomen as slaves, waging in their insolence an implacable war with the soul of the French nation. They rushed toward Paris, six years ago, hoping by one gigantic felon stroke to destroy all that the noble Western civilization had built up in the centuries. They dreamed of a rapid and final conquest of everything that makes France the splendor among the nations. They aimed what they believed would prove a deadly blow at the heart of intelligence, religion, industry, beauty, and gallantry. Treacherous as was the blow, and menacing in its sudden brutality, by the mercy of God it was warded off. The hordes that dashed down on Paris

were swept back-back until they disappeared, as the enemies of France fled five hundred years ago before Joan of Arc at Patay.

Now, what better occupation can we English readers find than to make ourselves more and more completely acquainted with the landscape and the industries, the material wealth and the spiritual organization of our noble sister and Ally? France has been born again in anguish and anxiety; she will resume her station at the head of the nations, waving her sword, with a charming gesture, before she sheathes it-let us hope, for ever.

Her energy is not less than her sunlit hope, her ardent desire; and in the coming age all the countries of the world will gather round her in her serene and splendid courage. The ridiculous legend of the 'frivolity' of France has been silenced forever. To become better and better acquainted with the real nature of French character and the actual conditions of French soil is to realize more and more clearly the logical seriousness of this marvelous race. France will not have suffered in vain. If there was a moment when her glory seemed about to be swept away out of the joyous Provinces which she had held for so many centuries, that awful flash of time has only served to give steadiness to her eye and hand, and to secure us perfect confidence in her strength. The darkness is over, the dawn is at hand; the Angelus of victory is chanted in every happy commune of 'la douce France.'

[The Outlook] QUOTATIONS

BY J. C. SQUIRE

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a

Most dictionaries of quotations are large and fat volumes. Only gamekeepers have pockets large enough to hold them, and they, therefore, have the drawback that they can only (unless their contents be memorized) be used in the home or the office. This apparently has struck Mr. Norman MacMunn, who has brought out a Companion Dictionary of Quotations,* which is of handy size. I have wasted but that is an offensive word good deal of time over it since my copy reached me. It is full of so many good things. All you have to do is to think of a subject, turn to its entry (the work is alphabetically arranged), and find the totally surprising or the terribly inevitable things the greatest of the world's philosophers and poets have said about it. Who, looking up 'Madness,' would expect to find the only quotation these lines from Dryden's The Spanish Friar:

There is a pleasure In being mad which none but madmen know.

Many of the entries are like that, and where there is more than one they usually contradict each other. Take 'Failure.' You get You get Keats saying Keats saying "There is not a fiercer hell than the failure of a great object,' and George Eliot: "The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.' The sages are just like the populace which produces proverbs. You can justify any course of action with a proverb, and buttress it with advice from the august. This dictionary is, as it were, a picture of the mental confusion of man faced with the many-sidedness of

* De la More Press, 2s. 6d. net.

truth. A weak-minded reader might be utterly demoralized by it. In a book like this, somehow, all voices seem to speak with equal authority and every proposition seems to have the same weight.

I like dictionaries of quotations. I have a taste for wisdom in a phrase, and any assembly of extracts from authors will hold me. I have been known to spend half a morning reading a calendar, one of those fat calendars from which it is such agony to tear off March 1 or March 2, because it means putting into the waste-paper basket or the fire that sentence of Bacon or Epictetus which struck one as being so true, so profound, so precisely what one has always thought oneself. I always read the 'Thoughts of the Day' in the Westminster Gazette, that elevating sentiment from Wordsworth or Mazzini, and nothing in the Observer pleases me more than that little cage of 'Sayings of the Week' in which the best things of our wits rub shoulders with the most alarming predictions of our geologists and eugenists. I have, in fact, a passion for scraps, and I can read a dictionary of quotations as easily as any work in the world. But I do not regard it as a dictionary, and I never gull myself into a belief that it is of the slightest practical utility to me. And I doubt if the greater part of any dictionary of quotations is useful to, or used by, anybody. There are remarkably few of us who ever think of quoting anything at all. Those who do almost invariably use hack quotations. And nobody would dare to quote, even in print, even in an anonymous leading article, most of the apt allusions given by the- I'm sorry quotational lexicographers.

These dictionaries are used by journalists to verify quotations they know already, quotations the use of which

is almost a matter of sacred ritual on certain occasions. Somebody dies. It occurs to an obituarist that once again a man has died, upon whose like, take him for all in all, we shall not look again. He does n't want to risk misquotations and he starts a hunt, usually prolonged, through the dictionaries, ultimately running his quarry down under a heading where it has been least expected. Or 'The child is father of the man' comes in an author's head, and he can't remember whether it was Mark Twain or Tennyson who wrote the sentence, or has a vague idea that there were other words after those which would also be worth quoting. A reference to Dr. Brewer and Mr. MacMunn will put him straight. But don't tell me that there are many people who habitually, when writing articles or letters, look up the 'subject' in a dictionary and use whatever quotation comes to hand. All Mr. MacMunn's quotations are interesting, but I cannot conceive occasions on which I shall dare use any but a few of them. Imagine the sensation which would be made if, when the fact of somebody being away was mentioned in conversation I remembered my MacMunn and poignantly delivered myself of:

Absence! is not the soul torn by it

From more than light, or life, or breath? 'Tis Lethe's gloom, but not its quiet

The pain without the peace of death.

And if I could not use it in conversation I am sure that I could not in correspondence. There are times and seasons when I am sure that I should find a perfect expression of my feelings in another sentence from Mr. MacMunn's first page, the sentence from Sadi's Gulistan:

If the man of sense is coarsely treated by the vulgar, let it not excite our wrath and indignation; if a piece of worthless stone can bruise a cup of gold, its worth is not increased, nor that of the gold diminished.

When, I ask, accurate though it is, am I to use this observation of the sagacious Oriental? In what controversy? At the foot of what retort? It can't be done. And if I, a professional litterateur, with incorrigible leanings to the bookish, the flowery, the highfalutin, should find my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth when I had got as far as 'If the man of sense,' what would be the feelings of the less specialist person, though he might have learned his MacMunn by heart? Our optimistic compiler thinks he may be of assistance to school children, and 'to the busy man or woman who occasionally may wish to use appropriate quotations.' But what would one think of a grocer who should apologize for the sugar shortage with "The sweetest meats the soonest cloy,' or a housemaid who should demurely shield off a rebuke with:

Be to her faults a little blind
And to her virtues very kind.

Lawyers are referred to as among those who are to be assisted. It is true that Sir E. Marshall Hall and others have a remarkable gift for bringing in Shakespeare. But even Sir Edward would scarcely have described his late client's sufferings in the words of Shakespeare that Mr. MacMunn gives under the heading "Tears':

The big round tears

Cours'd one another down his innocent nose In piteous chase.

Who would dare quote this? When? Where?

The range of possible quotation, except in meditative essays, is rare. And perhaps it is just as well. If everybody indulged in free quotation and used a dictionary as a crutch, all the best things that ever were said would be as stale as 'To be or not to be,'