CHAPTER XXI.—“SO CAREFUL OF THE TYPE.”

Why the chapter is a short one—Straw essential to brick-making—A suggestion regarding the king in “Hamlet”—The Irish attendant—The overland route—“Susanna and the editors”—“The violets of his wrath”—The clergyman’s favourite poem—A horticultural feat—A tulip transformed—The entertainment of an interment—The autotype of Russia—A remarkable conflagration and a still more remarkable dance—Paradise and the other place—Why the concert was a success—The land of Goschcn—A sporting item—A detective story—The flora and fauna—The Moors dictum—Absit omen!

IF this chapter is a short one, it is so for the best of reasons: it is meant to record some blunders of printers and others which impressed themselves upon me. It would obviously be impossible to make a chapter of the average length out of such a record. The really humorous faults in the setting up of anything I have ever written have been very few. In the printing of the original edition of my novel Daireen one of the most notable occurred in a first proof. Every chapter of this book is headed with a few lines from Hamlet, and one of these headings is from the well-known scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,

Gull.—The King, sir——

Hamlet.—Ay, sir, what of him?

Gull.—Is in his retirement marvellous distempered.

Hamlet.—With drink, sir?

Gull.—No, my lord, rather with choler.

This was the dialogue as I had written it. The humorous printer added a letter that somewhat changed the sense. He made the line,—

“No, my lord, rather with cholera.”

This was probably an honest attempt on the compositor’s part to work out a “new reading,” and it certainly did not appear to me to be more extravagant than the scores of attempts made in the same direction. If this reading were accepted, the perturbation of Claudius during the players’ scene, and his hasty Bight before its conclusion, would be accounted for.

Another daring new reading in Hamlet was suggested by a compositor, through the medium of a comma and a capital. In the course of a magazine article, he set up a line in the third scene of the third act, in this way,—

Hamlet.—Now might I do it, Pat!

It is somewhat curious that some attempt has not been made before now to justify such a reading. Could it not be suggested that Hamlet had an Irish servant who was in his confidence? About the time of Hamlet, the Danes had an important settlement in Ireland, and why might not Hamlet’s father have brought one of the natives of that island, named Patrick, to be the personal attendant of the young prince? The whole thing appears so feasible, it almost approaches the dimensions of an Irish grievance that no actor has yet had the courage to bring on the Irish servant who was clearly addressed by Hamlet in the words just quoted.

So “readings” are made.

Either of those which the compositors suggested is much more worthy of respect than the late Mr. Barry Sullivan’s,—

“I know a hawk from a heron. Pshaw!”

But if compositors are sometimes earnest and enterprising students of Shakespeare, I have sometimes found them deficient on the subject of geography. Upon one occasion, for instance, I accompanied a number of them on an excursion to the Isle of Man. The day was one of a mighty rushing wind, and the steamer being a small one, the disasters among the passengers were numerous. There was not a printer aboard who was not in a condition the technical equivalent to which is “pie.” I administered brandy to some of them, telling them to introduce a “turned rule,” which means, in newspaper instructions, “more to follow.” But all was of no avail. We reached the island in safety, however, and then one of the compositors who had been very much discomposed, seeing the train about to start for Douglas, told me in a confidential whisper that he had suffered so much on the voyage, he had made up his mind to return to Ireland by train.

Quite a new reading, not to Hamlet, but to one of the lyrics in The Princess, was suggested by another compositor. The introduction of a comma in the first line of the last stanza of “Home they brought her warrior dead” produced a quaint effect.

“Rose a nurse of ninety years,

Set his child upon her knee,”

appears in every edition of The Princess. But my friend, by his timely insertion of a comma, made it read thus:

“Rose, a nurse of ninety years.”

Perhaps the nurse’s name was Rose, but Tennyson kept this a secret.

One of the loveliest of Irish national melodies is that for which Moore wrote the stanzas beginning:—

“Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy waters!”

The title of this song appeared in the programme of a St. Patrick’s Day Concert, which was published in a leading London newspaper, as though the poem were addressed to one Mr. O’Moyle,—“Silent, O’Moyle.”

Another humorist set up a reference to “Susanna and the Elders,”

“Susanna and the Editors,” which was not just the same thing. Possibly the printer had another and equally apocryphal episode in his mind’s eye.

I felt a warm personal regard for the man who made a lecturer state that a critic had “poured out the violets of his wrath upon him.” The criticism did not, under these circumstances, seem particularly severe.

I must frankly confess, however, that I had nothing but reprobation for the one who made a clergyman state in a lecture to a class of young ladies, that his favourite poem of Wordsworth’s was “Invitations to Immorality.” Nor had I the least feeling except of indignation for the one who set up the title of a picture in which I was interested, “a rare turnip,” instead of “a rare tulip.” The printer who at the conclusion of an obituary notice was expected to announce to the readers of the paper that “the interment will take place on Saturday,” but who, instead, gave them to understand that “the entertainment will take place on Saturday,” did not, I think, cause any awkward mishap. He knew that the idea was that of entertainment, whatever the word employed might be.

The compositor who caused an editor to refer to “the autotype of the Russian people,” when the word autocrat was in the “copy” before him, was less to be blamed than the reader who allowed such a mistake to pass without correction.

When I read on a proof one night that the most striking scene in The Dead Heart at the Lyceum was “the burning of the Pastille and the dance of the Rigmarole,” I asked for the “copy” that had been telegraphed; and I found that the printer was not responsible for this marvellous blunder.

It will be remembered that at one of his lectures in the United States, Mr. Richard A. Proctor remarked that in the course of a few million years something remarkable would happen, but that its occurrence would not inconvenience his audience, as he supposed they would all be in Paradise at that time.

In one paper the reporter made him say that he supposed his audience would all be in Paris at that time.

The next evening Mr. Proctor turned the mistake to a good “scoring” account, by stating that he fancied at first an error had been made; but that shortly afterwards, he remembered that the tradition was, that all good Americans go to Paris when they die, so that the reporter clearly understood his business.

The enterprising correspondent who sows his telegrams broadcast is a frequent cause of the appearance of mistakes. I recollect that one sent a hundred words over the wire regarding some village concert, the great success of which was due to the zeal of the Reverend John Jones, “the locus standi of the parish.” He had probably heard something at one time of a pastor loci, and made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the phrase.

Another correspondent telegraphed regarding the arrival of two American cyclists at Queenstown, that their itinerary would be as follows: “They will travel on their bicycles through Ireland and England, and then crossing from Dover to Calais they will proceed through Europe, and from Turkey they will pass through Asia Minor into Xenophon and the Anabasis, leaving which they will travel to Egypt and the Land of Goschen.”

The reference to Xenophon was funny enough, but the spelling of the last word, identifying the country with the statesman, seemed to me to represent the highwater mark of the flood-tide of modernism. A few years before, when the correspondent was doubtless more in touch with the vicissitudes of the Children of Israel than with the feats of cyclists from the United States, he would probably have assimilated Mr. Goschen’s name with the Land of Goshen; but soon the fame of the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer had become of more immediate importance to him, and it was the land that changed its name in his mind to the name of the ex-Finance Minister.

It was probably the influence of the same spirit of modernism that caused a foreman, in making up the paper for the press, to insert under the title of “Sporting,” half a column of a report of a lecture by a clergyman on “The Races of Palestine.”

It was, however, the telegraph office that I found to be responsible for a singular error in the report of the arrest of a certain notorious criminal. The report should have stated that “a photograph of the prisoner had been taken by the detective camera,” but the result of the filtration of the message through a network of telegraph wires was the statement that the photograph “had been taken by Detective Cameron.”

Some years ago a too earnest naturalist was drowned when canoeing on a lake in the west of Ireland. An enterprising correspondent who clearly resided near the scene of the accident, forwarded to the newspaper with which I was connected, a circumstantial account of the finding of the capsized canoe. In the course of his references to the objects of the naturalist’s visit to the west, the reporter made the astounding statement that “he had already succeeded in getting together a practically complete collection of the flora and fauna of Ireland,”—truly a “large order.”

I feel that I cannot do better than bring to a close with this story my desultory jottings, which may bear to be regarded as a far from complete collection of the flora and fauna of journalism. Perhaps my researches into these highways and byways may induce some more competent and widely experienced brother to publish his notes on men and matters.

“Not a jot, not a jot,” protested the Moor.

Am I setting the omen at defiance in publishing these Jottings? Perhaps I am; though I feel easier in my mind on this point when I recall how, on my quoting in an article the proverb, “Autres temps, mitres mours” a wag of a printer caused it to appear, “Autres temps, autres Moores!”

THE END.