I
It is hoped that Divine Justice may find some suitable affliction
for the malefactors who invent variations upon the letters of the
alphabet of our fathers—our Roman fathers. Within the past thirty
years our current literature has become a spectacle for the gods.
The type-founder, worthy mechanic, has asserted himself with an
overshadowing individuality, defacing with his monstrous creations and
revivals every publication in the land. Everywhere secret, black and
midnight wags are diligently studying the alphabet to see how many of
the letters are susceptible to mutation into something new and strange.
Some of the letters are more tractable than others: the O, for example,
can be made as little as you please and set as far above the line as
desired, with or without a flyspeck in the center or a dash (straight
or curved) below. Why should one think that O looks better when thrown
out of relation to the other letters when Heaven has given him eyes to
see that it does not?
Then there is the M—the poor M, who for his distinction as the
biggest toad in the alphabetical puddle is subjected to so dreadful
though necessary indignity in typoscript—the wanton barbarity of his
treatment by the type-founders makes one blush for civilization, or
at least wish for it. There are two schools of M-sters; when their
warfare is accomplished we shall know whether that letter is to figure
henceforth as two sides of a triangle or three sides of a square. In
A the ruffians have an easy victim; they can put his cross-bar up or
down at will; it does not matter, so that it is put where it was not.
For it must be understood that all these alterations are made with no
thought of beauty: the sole purpose of the ruffians is to make the
letters, as many as possible of them, different from what they were
before. That is true generally, but not universally: in the titles of
books and weekly newspapers, and on the covers of magazines, there is
frequently an obvious revival, not merely of archaic forms, but of
crude and primitive printing, as if from wooden blocks. Doubtless it
is beautiful, but it does not look so. In our time the reversionaries
have so far prevailed against common sense that in several periodicals
the long-waisted s is restored, and we have a renewal of the scandalous
relations between the c and the t.
The most fantastic and grotesque of these reversions (happily it has
not yet affected the text of our daily reading) is the restoration of
the ancient form of U, which is now made a V again. This would seem
to be bad enough, but it appears that it has not sated the passion
for change; so the V also has again become a U! What advantage is
got by the transposition those who make it have not condescended to
explain. Altogether the unhappy man who conceives himself obliged to
read the literature of the day—especially the part that shouts and
screams in titles and catalogues, headlines, and so forth—may justly
claim remission of punishment in the next world, so poignant are his
sufferings in this.