Old authors, and even some few careful writers down to the present day, show their appreciation of this responsibility in quotation by intrenching themselves behind an apud in cases where, from any cause, they are unable to verify the correctness of the passage cited; thus throwing the burden of proof on the reporter named by them.
A remarkable instance of the neglect of some such precautions as are here mentioned may be found in a somewhat familiar citation made—and, we may add, made celebrated—by no less a literary authority than Mr. Carlyle.
It occurs in one of his most admirable productions, entitled The State of German Literature.
This essay, which originally appeared, in 1827, as an article in the Edinburgh Review, is rich in literary research and vigorous thought.
It is valuable not only for what it says concerning German literature, but concerning all literature, and is most generally enjoyed and best remembered by reason of its eloquent pillorying and remorseless flagellation of one Père Bouhours, who, as Mr. Carlyle informs us, propounded to himself the pregnant question: Si un Allemand peut avoir de l'esprit? Indignantly the great Scotch essayist thus bursts out upon the unfortunate Frenchman: "Had the Père Bouhours bethought him of what country Kepler and Leibnitz were born, or who it was that gave to mankind the three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion, it might have thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known the Niebelungen-Lied, and where Reinecke-Fuchs, and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths of all the popular mythology, humor, and romance to be found in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took its rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich Hutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logan, or even Lobenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, all of whom had already lived and written even in his day; had the Père Bouhours taken this trouble, who knows but he might have found, with whatever amazement, that a German could actually have a little esprit, or, perhaps, even something better? No such trouble was requisite for the Père Bouhours. Motion in vacuo is well known to be speedier and surer than through a resisting medium, especially to imponderable bodies; and so the light Jesuit, unimpeded by facts or principles of any kind, failed not to reach his conclusions; and, in a comfortable frame of mind, to decide negatively that a German could not have any literary talent."
Now, if Père Bouhours really said what is here attributed to him, this fulmination, all obvious as it is, cannot be looked upon as unprovoked, and we may listen with sense of satisfied justice to the dreadful sentence pronounced upon him, which is substantially that, incarcerated in the immortal amber of this one untimely joke, the helpless Jesuit be doomed therein to live; "for the blessing of full oblivion is denied him, and so he hangs suspended to his own noose, over the dusky pool which he struggles toward, but for a great while will not reach." To these remarks Mr. Carlyle adds the very sensible reflection: "For surely the pleasure of despising, at all times and in itself a dangerous luxury, is much safer after the toil of examining than before it."
This condemnation and sentence are based on a detached phrase separated from its contexts, and Mr. Carlyle fails to tell us in what connection or in what work was made the unfortunate speech for which the French writer is thus beaten with many stripes.
Might it not be that, read in its proper relation, his words signify something very different from the interpretation placed upon them as here severed? So true is this that what Père Bouhours really wrote has a very different signification. Investigation demonstrates this and more, and shows that Père Bouhours not only did not mean to express what is here attributed to him, but that he did not even use the words thus thrust upon him as his own.
Indeed, the ill-used Bouhours is introduced and dispatched so very summarily, that the reader of the Edinburgh essay scarcely obtains more than a glance of a literary criminal rapidly judged and sent to swift execution.
Let us see for a moment what manner of man this Bouhours appeared to the people of his day and generation. As then known, he was a writer of high reputation (hors ligne) and the author of several works, some of which are still read and republished. We find certain of his books on the shelves of our largest American libraries, and a few days since, in looking casually through a catalogue of publications made (1869) at the Armenian convent in Venice, an interesting spot well known to American travellers, we noted two editions of Bouhours's Christian Meditations, one in French and one in a Turkish translation.