_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.
End of Project Gutenberg’s A Journalists Note-Book, by Frank Frankfort Moore