Yes, of course, without hesitation, an old-fashioned scholar says: we don’t have history without solid, documentable facts. But a newer-fashioned scholar may object: we also need to trace why there are variations on the facts. I have been scrupulous in tracing the different versions of the Hopkins-Garfield quotation. But many other writers, among them the two who published the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, simply assumed that their version of the quotation was accurate. Should whoever edited these two pieces for the Chronicle be indefatigable in seeking not simply a published source verifying quotations like this, but a believable published source? Surely, because this quotation is in the public domain, it doesn’t really matter all that much what the exact words were? Or that Ingalls may have improved what Garfield said, if, in fact, Garfield, rather than Hopkins himself, said the original words?
If one is litigious, I suppose a case can be made that Ingalls, while improving the lackluster original words of Garfield and Hopkins, committed a minor form of plagiarism. The fact that his revision sounds better than Garfield’s is beside the point if the main question is distinguishing the difference between what is true and what someone would like the truth to be.
Now, someone will counter-argue, there’s quite a difference between out-and-out plagiarism and polishing up a quotation. Isn’t what Ingalls did to the quotation by the deceased Garfield similar to what speechwriters do for a living president every time they write a speech? Ted Sorensen apparently wrote some of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, but history has no problem attributing “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” to Kennedy. There is, one assumes, little chance that Sorensen will sue the Kennedy estate for infringement of copyright, because presumably the Kennedy estate, not Sorensen, owns the words attributed to the president in the inaugural address, and because the public has entered into an agreement with history (and with Sorensen) to attribute the words to Kennedy.
With famous or so-called familiar quotations, we often do not know how the words became famous or familiar. Some of the best-remembered quotations have been said or written by that ever ubiquitous and always untraceable writer, Anonymous. Anyone who quotes familiar words risks the danger of being at least somewhat unfamiliar with the actual quotation. Quotations involving familiar words are something like stock market quotations–they are subject to unpredictable changes.
The dishonest or simply lazy student should not be allowed to claim credit for stolen words. But it seems that any of the versions of the Hopkins quotation I’ve cited can be legitimately claimed as genuine. A very good argument can be made that Ingalls’s version, because it is snappier, is the “right” one. If we insist on quoting the Ingalls version despite knowing that there are alternative wordings, we seem to be indulging in revisionist history. But if this is true, all of us are revisionists.
This may sound as if I am paying too much attention to the rhetorical effects of this quotation and not enough attention to its existence as a document. Perhaps I sound like a deconstructionist or postmodern critic. But I think deconstructionists might unwittingly destroy, rather than just deconstruct this quotation, because they would have us pay attention to all of the possible interpretations of a text. If I understand deconstructive hermeneutics correctly, the various interpretations of a text are the text. No interpretation, no text. No, it’s more complicated even than that: no interpreter, no text. If a quotation is uttered in a forest and no one hears it, does that quotation exist? If a quotation is published but no one reads it, does that quotation exist? Some politically correct literary critics insist they can only teach “the controversy” about a work of literature, not just one perspective on that work. If this is the proper way to approach a complex and controversial work of literature like Heart of Darkness, then why not other famous, but comparatively minor texts–such as the Hopkins quotation–as well?
At this point in what I take to be deconstructionist reasoning, I give up. I am tempted to assert rather than argue, to kick a stone, as Samuel Johnson purportedly did when told that Hume didn’t believe the real world existed, and reply to those who insist that all of these Hopkins quotations are in some sense correct, “I refute you thus.” The stone I just kicked is quite solid: if a phrase rolls nicely off the tongue, people are more likely to remember it. The general educated public, because it is more pleased by well-formulated words than by awkward ones, is much more likely to remember some combination of words including Mark Hopkins, a student on a log, and a college, university, or a liberal education, rather than a combination of the less memorable set of words that includes Hopkins, a student, a pine bench, a library, the vague word “apparatus,” and classrooms.
I think we can conclude that if a saying is to be familiar it is necessary to construct it well. There is very little chance an awkwardly written group of words will be remembered better than an alternative set with a nice ring to them. Even if the bons mots were not said by a famous person, they may be attached to a famous person’s name. This is due to the fascination we have with famous people. We assume that because they are famous for performing certain deeds, they may also be famous for saying or writing memorable words. It is sometimes the case that an otherwise unknown person may achieve a certain fame simply for saying something uncommonly well. However, even when no famous or unknown author can be found, there is a mysterious creative process at work in the vox populi that often imagines, shapes, revises, and polishes otherwise unmemorable words until they become memorable. If John Ingalls is the actual final author of the Hopkins quotation, as Ralph Keyes suggests, most people don’t know that. A few more may know, or think they know, that James A. Garfield said “the ideal college is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other.” But there are many other quotations where we will never know the name of the person who takes on Ingalls’s job of revision. We don’t always know the name of a speechwriter who made a president’s words more presentable. There are many unnamed people who have a gift for words. That’s what’s so fascinating about collaborative or collective authorship. It is frustrating to a historian, archivist, biographer, or reference librarian who wants to get all the facts right, but it is a wondrous thing for the literary critic and the historian of ideas to speculate about. The common folk often speak with native elegance–probably because they were taught by a patient teacher like Mark Hopkins.
References
- Frederick Rudolf, Mark Hopkins and the Log: Williams College, 1836-1872 (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College, 1996); D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1972), 64-65.
- Scott Smallwood, “Me and My Professor: Oxford Style Tutorials,” Chronicle of Higher Education 43 (Feb. 15, 2002): A16-A18.
- James J. O’Donnell, “Tools for Teaching: Personal Encounters in Cyberspace,” Chronicle of Higher Education 44 (Feb. 13, 1998): B87.
- John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1992), 516.
- Burton Stevenson, The Home Book of Quotations: Classical and Modern, 10th ed. (New York: Dodd, 1967), 2069.
- Ralph Keyes, Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 170-72.
- Carroll A. Wilson, “Mark Hopkins,” Colophon (Spring 1938), 194-208.
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