Literary Blunders Part 2

Goldsmith was a very remarkable instance of a man who undertook to write books on subjects of which he knew

nothing. Thus, Johnson said that if he could tell a horse from a cow that was the extent of his knowledge of zoology; and yet the _History of Animated Nature_ can still be read with pleasure from the charm of the author's style.

Some authors are so careless in the construction of their works as to contradict in one part what they have already stated in another. In the year 1828 an amusing work was published on the clubs of London, which contained a chapter on Fighting Fitzgerald, of whom the author writes: ''That Mr. Fitzgerald (unlike his countrymen generally) was totally devoid of generosity, no one who ever knew him will doubt.'' In another chapter on the same person the author flatly contradicts his own judgment: ''In summing up the catalogue of his vices, however, we ought not to shut our eyes upon his virtues; of the latter, he certainly possessed that one for which his countrymen have always been so famous, generosity.'' The scissors- and-paste compilers are peculiarly liable to such errors as these; and a writer in the _Quarterly Review_ proved the _Mmoires

de Louis XVIII_. (published in 1832) to be a mendacious compilation from the _Mmoires de Bachaumont_ by giving examples of the compiler's blundering. One of these muddles is well worth quoting, and it occurs in the following pa.s.sage: ''Seven bishops--of _Puy_, Gallard de Terraube; of _Langres_, La Luzerne; of _Rhodez_, Seignelay-Colbert; of _Gast_, Le Tria; of _Blois_, Laussiere Themines; of _Nancy_, Fontanges; of _Alais_, Beausset; of _Nevers_, Seguiran.'' Had the compiler taken the trouble to count his own list, he would have seen that he had given eight names instead of seven, and so have suspected that something was wrong; but he was not paid to think. The fact is that there is no such place as Gast, and there was no such person as Le Tria. The Bishop of Rhodez was Seignelay-Colbert de Castle Hill, a descendant of the Scotch family of Cuthbert of Castle Hill, in Inverness-s.h.i.+re; and Bachaumont misled his successor by writing Gast Le Hill for Castle Hill. The introduction of a stop and a little more misspelling resulted in the blunder as we now find it.

Authors and editors are very apt to take things for granted, and they thus fall into errors which might have been escaped if they had made inquiries. Pope, in a note on _Measure for Measure_, informs us that the story was taken from Cinthio's novel _Dec_. 8 _Nov_. 5, thus contracting the words decade and novel. Warburton, in his edition of Shakespeare, was misled by these contractions, and fills them up as December 8 and November 5. Many blunders are merely clerical errors of the authors, who are led into them by a curious a.s.sociation of ideas; thus, in the _Lives of the Londonderrys_, Sir Archibald Alison, when describing the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul's, speaks of one of the pall-bearers as Sir Peregrine Pickle, instead of Sir Peregrine Maitland. d.i.c.kens, in _Bleak House_, calls Harold Skimpole Leonard throughout an entire number, but returns to the old name in a subsequent one.

Few authors require to be more on their guard against mistakes than historians, especially as they are peculiarly liable to fall into them. What shall we think of

the authority of a school book when we find the statement that Louis Napoleon was Consul in 1853 before he became Emperor of the French?

We must now pa.s.s from a book of small value to an important work on the history of England; but it will be necessary first to make a few explanatory remarks. Our readers know that English kings for several centuries claimed the power of curing scrofula, or king's evil; but they may not be so well acquainted with the fact that the French sovereigns were believed to enjoy the same miraculous power. Such, however, was the case; and tradition reported that a phial filled with holy oil was sent down from heaven to be used for the anointing of the kings at their coronation.

We can ill.u.s.trate this by an anecdote of Napoleon. Lafayette and the first Consul had a conversation one day on the government of the United States. Bonaparte did not agree with Lafayette's views, and the latter told him that ''he was desirous of having the little phial broke over his head.'' This _sainte ampulle_, or holy vessel, was an important object in the

ceremony, and the virtue of the oil was to confer the power of cure upon the anointed king. This the historian could not have known, or he would not have written: ''The French were confident in themselves, in their fortunes; in the special gifts by which they held the stars.'' If this were all the information that was given us, we should be left in a perfect state of bewilderment while trying to understand how the French could hold the stars, or, if they were able to hold them, what good it would do them; but the historian adds a note which, although it contains some new blunders, gives the clue to an explanation of an otherwise inexplicable pa.s.sage. It is as follows: ''The Cardinal of Lorraine showed Sir William Pickering the precious ointment of St. Ampull, wherewith the King of France was sacred, which he said was sent from heaven above a thousand years ago, and since by miracle preserved, through whose virtue also the king held _les estroilles_.'' From this we might imagine that the holy Ampulla was a person; but the clue to the whole confusion is to be

found in the last word of the sentence.

As the French language does not contain any such word as _estroilles_, there can be no doubt that it stands for old French _escroilles_, or the king's evil. The change of a few letters has here made the mighty difference between the power of curing scrofula and the gift of holding the stars.

In some copies of John Britton's _Descriptive Sketches of Tunbridge Wells_ (1832) the following extraordinary pa.s.sage will be found: ''Judge Jefferies, a man who has rendered his name infamous in the annals of history by the cruelty and injustice he manifested in presiding at the trial of King Charles I.'' The book was no sooner issued than the author became aware of his astonis.h.i.+ng chronological blunder, and he did all in his power to set the matter right; but a mistake in print can never be entirely obliterated. However much trouble may be taken to suppress a book, some copies will be sure to escape, and, becoming valuable by the attempted suppression, attract all the more attention.

Scott makes David Ramsay, in the

_Fortunes of Nigel_ (chapter ii.), swear ''by the bones of the immortal Napier.'' It would perhaps be rank heresy to suppose that Sir Walter did not know that ''Napier's bones'' were an apparatus for purposes of calculation, but he certainly puts the expression in such an ambiguous form that many of his readers are likely to suppose that the actual bones of Napier's body were intended.

Some of the most curious of blunders are those made by learned men who without thought set down something which at another time they would recognise as a mistake. The following pa.s.sage from Mr. Gladstone's _Gleanings of Past Years_ (vol. i., p. 26), in which the author confuses Daniel with Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, has been pointed out: ''The fierce light that beats upon a throne is sometimes like the heat of that furnace in which only Daniel could walk unscathed, too fierce for those whose place it is to stand in its vicinity.'' Who would expect to find Macaulay blundering on a subject he knew so well as the story of the _Faerie Queene_! and yet this is what he

wrote in a review of Southey's edition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_: ''Nay, even Spenser himself, though a.s.suredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. . . . One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the _Fairy Queen_. We become sick of Cardinal Virtues and Deadly Sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first Canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast.''[5] Macaulay knew well enough that the Blatant Beast did not die in the poem as Spenser left it.

[5] _Edinburgh Review_, vol. liv. (1831), p. 452.

The newspaper writers are great sinners, and what with the frequent ignorance and haste of the authors and the carelessness of the printers a complete farrago of nonsense is sometimes concocted between them. A proper name is seldom given correctly in a daily paper, and it is a

frequently heard remark that no notice of an event is published in which an error in the names or qualifications of the actors in it ''is not detected by those acquainted with the circ.u.mstances.'' The contributor of the following bit of information to the _Week's News_ (Nov. 18th, 1871) must have had a very vague notion of what a monosyllable is, or he would not have written, ''The author of _Dorothy, De Cressy_, etc., has another novel nearly ready for the press, which, with the writer's partiality for monosyllabic t.i.tles, is named _Thomasina_.'' He is perhaps the same person who remarked on the late Mr.

Robertson's fondness for monosyllables as t.i.tles for his plays, and after instancing _Caste, Ours_, and _School_, ended his list with _Society_. We can, however, fly at higher game than this, for some twenty years ago a writer in the _Times_ fell into the mistake of describing the entrance of one of the German states into the Zollverein in terms that proved him to be labouring under the misconception that the great Customs- Union was a new organisation. Another source of error in the papers is the hurry

with which bits of news are printed before they have been authenticated. Each editor wishes to get the start of his neighbour, and the consequence is that they are frequently deceived. In a number of the _Literary Gazette_ for 1837 there is a paragraph headed ''Sir Michael Faraday,''

in which the great philosopher is congratulated upon the t.i.tle which had been conferred upon him. Another source of blundering is the attempt to answer an opponent before his argument is thoroughly understood. A few years ago a gentleman made a note in the _Notes and Queries_ to the effect that a certain custom was at least 1400 years old, and was probably introduced into England in the fifth century. Soon afterwards another gentleman wrote to the same journal, ''a.s.suredly this custom was general before A.D. 1400''; but how he obtained that date out of the previous communication no one can tell.

The _Times_ made a strange blunder in describing a gallery of pictures: ''Mr.

Robertson's group of 'Susannah and the Elders,' with the name of Pordenone, contains some pa.s.sages of glowing colour

which must be set off against a good deal of clumsy drawing in the central figure of the chaste _maiden_.'' As bad as this was the confusion in the mind of the critic of the New Gallery, who spoke of Mr Hall's _Paolo and Francesca_ as that masterly study and production of the old Adam phase of human nature which Milton hit off so sublimely in the _Inferno_.

A writer in the _Notes and Queries_ confused Beersheba with Bathsheba, and conferred on the woman the name of the place.

It has often been remarked that a thorough knowledge of the English Bible is an education of itself, and a correspondence in the _Times_ in August 1888 shows the value of a knowledge of the Liturgy of the Church of England. In a leading article occurred the pa.s.sage, ''We have no doubt whatever that Scotch judges and juries will administer indifferent justice.'' A correspondent in Glasgow, who supposed _indifferent_ to mean _inferior_, wrote to complain at the insinuation that a Scotch jury would not do its duty. The editor of the _Times_ had little

difficulty in answering this by referring to the prayer for the Church militant, where are the words, ''Grant unto her [the Queen's] whole Council and to all that are put in authority under her, that they may truly and indifferently minister justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of Thy true religion, and virtue.''

The compiler of an Anthology made the following remarks in his preface: ''In making a selection of this kind one sails between Scylla and Charybdis--the hackneyed and the strange. I have done my best to steer clear of both these rocks.''

A leader-writer in a morning paper a few months ago made the same blunder when he wrote: ''As a matter of fact, Mr.

Gladstone was bound to b.u.mp against either Scylla or Charybdis.'' It has generally been supposed that Scylla only was a rock.

A most extraordinary blunder was made in _Scientific American_ eight or ten years ago. An engraving of a handsome Chelsea china vase was presented with the following description: ''In England no

regular hard porcelain is made, but a soft porcelain of great beauty is produced from kaolin, phosphate of lime, and calcined silica. The princ.i.p.al works are situated at Chelsea. The export of these English porcelains is considerable, and it is a curious fact that they are largely imported into China, where they are highly esteemed. Our engraving shows a richly ornamented vase in soft porcelain from the works at Chelsea.''

It could scarcely have been premised that any one would be so ignorant as to suppose that Chelsea china was still manufactured, and this paragraph is a good ill.u.s.tration of the evils of journalists writing on subjects about which they know nothing.

Critics who are supposed to be immaculate often blunder when sitting in judgment on the sins of authors. They are frequently puzzled by reprints, and led into error by the disinclination of publishers to give particulars in the preface as to a book which was written many years before its republication. A few years ago was issued a reprint of the

translation of the _Arabian Nights_, by Jonathan Scott, LL.D., which was first published in 1811. A reviewer having the book before him overlooked this important fact, and straightway proceeded to ''slate'' Dr. Scott for his supposed work of supererogation in making a new translation when Lane's held the field, the fact really being that Scott's translation preceded Lane's by nearly thirty years.

Another critic, having to review a reprint of Galt's _Lives of Players_, complained that Mr. Galt had not brought his book down to the date of publication, being ignorant of the fact that John Galt died as long ago as 1839. The reviewer of Lamb's _Tales from Shakespeare_ committed the worst blunder of all when he wrote that those persons who did not know their Shakespeare might read Mr.

Lamb's paraphrase if they liked, but for his part he did not see the use of such works. The man who had never heard of Charles Lamb and his _Tales_ must have very much mistaken his vocation when he set up as a literary critic.

These are all genuine cases, but the

story of Lord Campbell and his criticism of _Romeo and Juliet_ is almost too good to be true. It is said that when the future Lord Chancellor first came to London he went to the editor of the _Morning Chronicle_ for some work. The editor sent him to the theatre. ''Plain John''

Campbell had no idea he was witnessing a play of Shakespeare, and he therefore set to work to sketch the plot of _Romeo and Juliet_, and to give the author a little wholesome advice. He recommended a curtailment in parts so as to render it more suitable to the taste of a cultivated audience. We can quite understand that if a story like this was once set into circulation it was not likely to be allowed to die by the many who were glad to have a laugh at the rising barrister.

CHAPTER III.

BLUNDERS OF TRANSLATORS.

THE blunders of translators are so common that they have been made to point a moral in popular proverbs. According to an Italian saying _translators are traitors_ (''I traduttori sono traditori''); and books are said to be _done_ into English, _traduced_ in French, and _overset_ in Dutch. Colton, the author of _Lacon_, mentions a half-starved German at Cambridge named Render, who had been long enough in England to forget German, but not long enough to learn English. This worthy, in spite of his deficiencies, was a voluminous translator of his native literature, and it became a proverbial saying among his intimates respecting a bad translation that it was _Rendered_ into English.

The Comte de Tressan translated the

words ''capo ba.s.so'' (low headland) in a pa.s.sage from Arios...o...b.. ''Cap de Capo Ba.s.so,'' on account of which translation the wits insisted upon calling him ''Comte de Capo Ba.s.so.''

Robert Hall mentions a comical stumble made by one of the translators of Plato, who construed through the Latin and not direct from the Greek. In the Latin version _hirundo_ stood as _hirdo_, and the translator, overlooking the mark of contraction, declared to the astonished world on the authority of Plato that the _horse- leech_ instead of the swallow was the harbinger of spring. Hoole, the translator of Ta.s.so and Ariosto, was as confused in his natural history when he rendered ''I colubri Viscontei'' or _Viscontian snakes_, the crest of the Visconti family, as ''the Calabrian Viscounts.''

As strange as this is the Frenchman's notion of the presence of guns in the canons' seats: ''L'Archevque de Cantorbery avait fait placer des _canons_ dans les stalles de la cathdrale.'' He quite overlooked the word _chanoines_, which he should have used. This use of a word

similarly spelt is a constant source of trouble to the translator: for instance, a French translator of Scott's _Bride of Lammermuir_ left the first word of the t.i.tle untranslated, with the result that he made it the Bridle of Lammermuir, ''La Bride de Lammermuir.''

Thevenot in his travels refers to the fables of _d.a.m.n et Calilve_, meaning the _Hitopodesa_, or Pilpay's Fables. His translator calls them the fables of the d.a.m.ned Calilve. This is on a par with De Quincey's specimen of a French Abb's Greek. Having to paraphrase the Greek words '''' (Herodotus even while Ionicizing), the Frenchman rendered them ''Herodote et aussi Jazon,''

thus creating a new author, one Jazon.

In the _Present State of Peru_, a compilation from the _Mercurio Peruano_, P. Geronymo Roman de la Higuera is transformed into ''Father Geronymo, a Romance of La Higuera.''

In Robertson's _History of Scotland_ the following pa.s.sage is quoted from Melville's _Account of John Knox_: ''He was so active and vigorous a preacher that he was like

to ding the pulpit into blads and fly out of it.'' M. Campenon, the translator of Robertson into French, turns this into the startling statement that he broke his pulpit and leaped into the midst of his auditors.

A good companion to this curious ''fact''

may be found in the extraordinary trope used by a translator of Busbequius, who says ''his misfortunes had reduced him to the top of all miseries.''

We all know how Victor Hugo transformed the Firth of Forth into the First of the Fourth, and then insisted that he was right; but this great novelist was in the habit of soaring far above the realm of fact, and in a work he brought out as an offering to the memory of Shakespeare he showed that his imagination carried him far away from historical facts. The author complains in this book that the muse of history cares more for the rulers than for the ruled, and, telling only what is pleasant, ignores the truth when it is unpalatable to kings. After an outburst of bombast he says that no history of England tells us that Charles II. murdered his brother the Duke of Gloucester. We should be sur

prised if any did do so, as that young man died of small-pox. Hugo, being totally ignorant of English history, seems to have confused the son of Charles I. with an earlier Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), and turned the a.s.sa.s.sin into the victim.

After these blunders Dr. Baly's mention of the cannibals of _Nova Scotia_ instead of _New Caledonia_ in his translation of Mller's _Elements of Physiology_ seems tame.

One snare that translators are constantly falling into is the use of English words which are like the foreign ones, but nevertheless are not equivalent terms, and translations that have taken their place in literature often suffer from this cause; thus Cicero's _Offices_ should have been translated _Duties_, and Marmontel never intended to write what we understand by _Moral Tales_, but rather tales of manners or of fas.h.i.+onable life. The translators of Calmet's _Dictionary of the Bible_ render the French ancien, ancient, and write of ''Mr.

Huet, the ancient Bishop of Avranch.''

Theodore Parker, in translating a work by De Wette, makes the blunder of con

verting the German word _W

Some men translate works in order to learn a language during the process, and they necessarily make blunders. It must have been one of these ignoramuses who translated _tellurische magnetismus_ (terrestrial magnetism) as the magnetical qualities of Tellurium, and by his blunder caused an eminent chemist to test tellurium in order to find these magnetical qualities.

There was more excuse for the French translator of one of Sir Walter Scott's novels who rendered a welsh rabbit (or rarebit, as it is sometimes spelt) into _un lapin du pays de Galles_. Walpole states that the d.u.c.h.ess of Bolton used to divert George I. by affecting to make blunders, and once when she had been to see Cibber's play of _Love's Last s.h.i.+ft_ she called it _La dernire chemise de l'amour_. A like translation of Congreve's _Mourning Bride_ is given in good faith in the first edition of Peignot's _Manuel du Bibliophile_, 1800, where it is described as _L'pouse de Matin_; and the translation which Walpole

attributes to the d.u.c.h.ess of Bolton the French say was made by a Frenchman named La Place.

The t.i.tle of the old farce _Hit or Miss_ was turned into _Frapp ou Mademoiselle_, and the _Independent Whig_ into _La Perruque Indpendante_.

In a late number of the _Literary World_ the editor, after alluding to the French translator of Sir Walter Scott who turned ''a sticket minister'' into ''le ministre a.s.sa.s.sin,'' gives from the _Bibliothque Universelle_ the extraordinary translation of the t.i.tle of Mr. Barrie's comedy, _Walker, London_, as _Londres qui se promne_.

Old translators have played such tricks with proper names as to make them often unintelligible; thus we find La Rochefoucauld figuring as Ruchfucove; and in an old treatise on the mystery of Freemasonry by John Leland, Pythagoras is described as Peter Gower the Grecian. This of course is an Anglicisation of the French Pythagore (p.r.o.nounced like Peter Gore).

Our versions of Eastern names are so different from the originals that when the

two are placed together there appears to be no likeness between them, and the different positions which they take up in the alphabet cause the bibliographer an infinity of trouble. Thus the original of Xerxes is Khshayarsha (the revered king), and Averrhoes is Ibn Roshd (son of Roshd). The latter's full name is Abul Walid Mohammed ben Ahmed ben Mohammed.

Artaxerxes is in old Persian Artakhshatra, or the Fire Protector, and Darius means the Possessor. Although all these names--Xerxes, Artaxerxes, and Darius--have a royal significance, they were personal names, and not t.i.tles like Pharaoh.

It is often difficult to believe that translators can have taken the trouble to read their own work, or they surely would not let pa.s.s some of the blunders we meet with. In a translation of Lamartine's _Girondins_ some courtly people are described as figuring ''under the vaults'' of the Tuileries instead of beneath the arched galleries (_sous ses voutes_). This, however, is nothing to a blunder to be found in the _Secret Memoirs of the Court of

Louis XIV. and of the Regency_ (1824).

The following pa.s.sage from the original work, ''Deux en sont morts et on dit publiquement qu'ils ont t empoisonns,'' is rendered in the English translation to the confusion of common sense as ''Two of them died with her, and said publicly that they had been poisoned.''

This is not unlike the bull of the young soldier who, writing home in praise of the Indian climate, said, ''But a lot of young fellows come out here, and they drink and they eat, and they eat and they drink, and they die; and then they write home to their friends saying it was the climate that did it.''

Some authors have found that there is peril in too free a translation, thus Dotet was condemned on Feb. 14th, 1543, for translating a pa.s.sage in Plato's Dialogues as ''After death you will be nothing _at all_.'' Surely he who translated _Dieu dfend l'adultre_ as _G.o.d defends adultery_ more justly deserved punishment! Guthrie, the geographical writer, who translated a French book of travels, unfortunately mistook _neuvime_ (ninth) for _neuvelle_ or

_neuve_, and therefore made an allusion to the twenty-sixth day of the new moon.

Moore quotes in his _Diary_ (Dec.

30th, 1818) a most amusing blunder of a translator who knew nothing of the technical name for a breakwater. He translated the line in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_,