Part 14

There is a passage in Selden's "Table-Talk" which, if I recollect it aright, may be paraphrased in some such form as this: The Lion, reeking of slaughter, met his neighbour the Sheep, and, after exchanging the time of day with her, asked her if his breath smelt of blood. She replied "Yes," whereupon he snapped off her head for a fool. Immediately afterwards he met the Jackal, to whom he addressed the same question. The Jackal answered "No," and the Lion tore him in pieces for a flatterer. Last of all he met the Fox, and asked the question a third time. The Fox replied that he had a cold in his head, and could smell nothing. _Moral_: "Wise men say little in dangerous times." The bearing of this aphorism on my present subject is sufficiently obvious; the "times"--not _Times_--are "dangerous" alike for authors and publishers, and "wise men" will "say little" about current controversies, lest they should have their heads snapped off by Mr. Lucas and Mr. Graves, or be torn in pieces by Mr. Moberley Bell.

Thus warned, I turn my thoughts to Publishers as they have existed in the past, and more particularly to their relations with the authors whose works they have given to the world. How happy those relations may be, when maintained with tact and temper on both sides, is well illustrated by an anecdote of that indefatigable penwoman, "the gorgeous Lady Blessington." Thinking herself injured by some delay on the part of her publishers, Messrs. Sanders & Otley, she sent her son-in-law, the irrepressible Count D'Orsay, to remonstrate. The Count was received by a dignified gentleman in a stiff white cravat, whom he proceeded to assail with the most vigorous invective, until the cravated gentleman could stand it no longer and roundly declared that he would sacrifice Lady Blessington's patronage sooner than subject himself to personal insult. "Personal?" exclaimed the lively Count. "There's nothing personal in my remarks. If you're Sanders, then d---- Otley; if you're Otley, then d---- Sanders."

It is to be feared that a similar imprecation has often formed itself in the heart, though it may not have issued from the lips, of a baulked and disillusioned author. Though notoriously the most long-suffering of a patient race, the present writer has before now felt inclined to borrow the vigorous invective of Count D'Orsay. Some six months before American copyright was, after long negotiation, secured for English authors, Messrs. Popgood and Groolly (I borrow the names from Sir Frank Burnand) arranged with me for the publication of a modest work. It was quite ready for publication, but the experienced publishers pointed out the desirability of keeping it back till the new law of copyright came into force, for there was a rich harvest to be reaped in America; and all the American profits, after, say, five thousand copies were sold, were to be mine alone. A year later I received a cheque, 18s. 6d., which, I imagine, bore the same relation to the American profits as Mrs. Crupp's "one cold kidney on a cheese-plate" bore to the remains of David Copperfield's feast. On enquiry I was soothingly informed by Popgood and Groolly that the exact number of copies sold in America was 5005, and that the cheque represented (as per agreement) the royalty on the copies sold, over and above the first five thousand. That the publishers should have so accurately estimated the American sale seemed to me a remarkable instance of commercial foresight.

Not much more amiable are the feelings of the author towards the publisher who declines his wares; and I have always felt that Washington Irving must have had a keen and legitimate satisfaction in prefixing to his immensely popular "Sketch-Book" the flummery in which old John Murray wrapped up his refusal of the manuscript:--

"I entreat you to believe that I feel truly obliged by your kind intentions towards me, and that I entertain the most unfeigned respect for your most tasteful talents. If it would not suit me to engage in the publication of your present work, it is only because I do not see that scope in the nature of it which would enable me to make those satisfactory accounts between us which I really feel no satisfaction in engaging."

Now, surely, as Justice Shallow says, good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable. While Murray dealt in good phrases, his rival Longman expressed himself through the more tangible medium of good cheques. He was the London publisher, and apparently the financier, of the _Edinburgh Review_, and, according to Sydney Smith's testimony, his fiscal system was simplicity itself. "I used to send in a bill in these words, 'Messrs. Longman & Co. to the Rev. Sydney Smith. To a very wise and witty article on such a subject; so many sheets, at forty-five guineas a sheet,' and the money always came." Here is another passage from the financial dealings of the same great house, which during the last fifty years has caused many a penman's mouth to water. On the 7th of March 1856 Macaulay wrote in his diary: "Longman came, with a very pleasant announcement. He and his partners find that they are overflowing with money, and think that they cannot invest it better than by advancing to me, on the usual terms of course, part of what will be due to me in December. We agreed that they shall pay twenty thousand pounds into Williams's Bank next week. What a sum to be gained by one edition of a book! I may say, gained in one day. But that was harvest-day. The work had been near seven years in hand."

After that glorious instance, all tales of profit from books seem flat and insignificant. As a rule, we have to reckon our makings on a far more modest scale. "Sir," said an enthusiastic lady to Mr. Zangwill, "I admire 'The Children of the Ghetto' so much that I have read it eight times." "Madam," replied Mr. Zangwill, "I would rather you had bought eight copies." Even so, with our exiguous profit on eight copies duly sold, our state is more gracious than that of more deserving men. Here is a touching vignette from a book of travels, which was popular in my youth: "At _table d'hôte_ there is a charming old gentleman who has translated Æschylus and Euripides into English verse; he has been complimented by the greatest scholars of the day, and his publishers have just sent him in his bill for printing, and a letter to know what the deuce they shall do with the first thousand."

Such are the joys of publishing at one's own risk. Hardly more exhilarating is the experience of knocking at all the doors in Paternoster Row, or Albemarle Street, or Waterloo Place, and imploring the stony-hearted publisher to purchase one's modest wares. Old John Murray's soothing formula about "most tasteful talents" has been reproduced, with suitable variations, from that time to this. No one experienced it oftener than the late Mr. Shorthouse, whose one good book--"John Inglesant"--made the rounds of the Trade, until at length Messrs. Macmillan recognized its strange power. In their hands, as every one knows, the book prospered exceedingly, and the publishers who had rejected it were consumed by remorse. In this connexion my friend Mr. James Payn used to tell a story which outweighs a great many acrid witticisms about "Barabbas was a Publisher" and Napoleon's one meritorious action in hanging a Bookseller. Payn was "reader" to Smith and Elder, and in that capacity declined the manuscript of "John Inglesant." Some years afterwards this fact was stated in print, together with an estimate of what his error had cost his firm. Payn, who was the last man to sit down patiently under a calumny, told the late Mr. George Smith that he felt bound in self-respect to contradict a story so derogatory to his literary judgment. "If I were you," replied Mr. Smith, "I wouldn't do that, for, as a matter of fact, you did reject the manuscript, and we have lost what Macmillans have gained. I never told you, because I knew it would annoy you; and I only tell you now to prevent you from contradicting 'an ower true tale.'" Payn used to say that, in all the annals of business, considerate forbearance had never been better exemplified. Against this story of his failure to perceive merit Payn was wont to set his discovery of Mr. Anstey Guthrie. The manuscript of "Vice Versa," bearing the unknown name of "F. Anstey," came in ordinary course into his hands. He glanced at the first page, turned over, read to the end, and then ran into Mr. Smith's room saying, "We've got the funniest thing that has been written since Dickens's 'Christmas Carol.'" And the public gave unequivocal evidence that it concurred in the verdict.

Let a "smooth tale of love" close these reminiscences of Publishers. Some forty years ago, when all young and ardent spirits had caught the sacred fire of Italian freedom from Garibaldi and Swinburne and Mrs. Browning, a young lady, nurtured in the straitest of Tory homes, was inspired--it is hardly too strong a word--to write a book of ballads in which the heroes and the deeds of the Italian Revolution were glorified. She knew full well that, if she were detected, her father would have a stroke and her mother would lock her up in the spare bedroom. So, in sending her manuscript to a publisher, she passed herself off as a man. Her vigorous and vehement style, her strong grasp of the political situation, and her enjoyment of battle and bloodshed, contributed to the illusion; her poems were published anonymously; other volumes followed; and for several years the publisher addressed his contributor as "Esquire." At length it chanced that both publisher and poetess were staying, unknown to each other, at the same seaside place. Her letter, written from--let us say--Brighton, reached him at Brighton; so, instead of answering by post, he went to the hotel and asked for Mr. Talbot, or whatever great Tory name you prefer. The porter said, "There is no Mr. Talbot staying here. There is a Miss Talbot, and she may be able to give you some information." So Miss Talbot was produced; the secret of the authorship was disclosed; and the negotiations took an entirely new turn, which ended in making the poetess the publisher's wife.

XXXIII

HANDWRITING

When "The Book of Snobs" was appearing week by week in _Punch_, Thackeray derived constant aid from suggestive correspondents. "'Why only attack the aristocratic Snobs?' says one estimable gentleman. 'Are not the snobbish Snobs to have their turn?' 'Pitch into the University Snobs!' writes an indignant correspondent (who spells _elegant_ with two _l_'s)."

Similarly, if I may compare small things with great, I am happy in the possession of an unknown friend who, from time to time, supplies me with references to current topics which he thinks suitable to my gentle methods of criticism. My friend (unlike Thackeray's correspondent) can spell _elegant_, and much longer words too, with faultless accuracy, and is altogether, as I judge, a person of much culture. It is this circumstance, I suppose (for he has no earthly connexion with the Army), which makes him feel so keenly about a cutting from a newspaper which he has just sent us:--

"In a report just issued by the War Office on the result of examinations for promotion many officers are said to be handicapped by their bad handwriting. Some show of 'want of intelligence, small power of expression, poor penmanship--in fact, appear to suffer from defective education.'

"On the other hand, the work of non-commissioned officers shows intelligence and power of concise expression, while penmanship is good.

"But the percentage of failures among the officers shows a large decrease--from 22 per cent. in November 1904 to 13 per cent. in May last. The improvement is particularly noticeable among lieutenants. It is apparent, says the report, that a serious effort is being made by the commissioned ranks to master all the text-books and other aids to efficiency."

"This," says my correspondent, "is a shameful disclosure. Cannot you say something about it in print?" Inclining naturally to the more favourable view of my fellow-creatures, I prefer to reflect, not on the "poor penmanship" and "defective education" of my military friends, but on their manly efforts after self-improvement. There is something at once pathetic and edifying in the picture of these worthy men, each of whom has probably cost his father £200 a year for education ever since he was ten years old, making their "serious effort to master the text-books and other aids to efficiency," in the humble hope that their writing may some day rival that of the non-commissioned officers.

It was not ever thus. These laudable, though lowly, endeavours after Culture are of recent growth in the British Army. Fifty years ago, if we may trust contemporary evidence, the Uneducated Subaltern developed, by a natural process, into the Uneducated General.

"I have always," said Thackeray in 1846, "admired that dispensation of rank in our country which sets up a budding Cornet, who is shaving for a beard (and who was flogged only last week because he could not spell), to command great whiskered warriors who have faced all dangers of climate and battle." _Because he could not spell._ The same infirmity accompanied the Cornet into the higher grades of his profession--witness Captain Rawdon Crawley's memorandum of his available effects: "My double-barril by Manton, say 40 guineas; my duelling pistols in rosewood case (same which I shot Captain Marker) £20." And, even when the Cornet had blossomed into a General, his education was still far from complete: "A man can't help being a fool, be he ever so old, and Sir George Tufto is a greater ass at sixty-eight than he was when he entered the army at fifteen. He never read a book in his life, and, with his purple, old, gouty fingers, still writes a schoolboy hand."

But do Soldiers write a worse hand than other people? I rather doubt it, and certain I am that several of my friends, highly placed in Church and politics and law, would do very well to apply themselves for a season to those "text-books and other aids to efficiency" by which the zealous Subaltern seeks to complete his "defective education."

Mr. Gladstone was accustomed to say that in public life he had known only two perfect things--Sir Robert Peel's voice and Lord Palmerston's writing. The former we can know only by tradition; the latter survives, for the instruction of mankind, in folios of voluminous despatches, all written in a hand at once graceful in form and absolutely clear to read. "The wayfaring men" of Diplomacy, though sometimes "fools," could not "err" in the interpretation of Palmerston's despatches. The same excellence of caligraphy which Palmerston himself practised he rightly required from his subordinates. If a badly written despatch came into his hands, he would embellish it with scathing rebukes, and return it, through the Office, to the offending writer. The recipient of one of these admonitions thus recalls its terms, "Tell the gentleman who copied this despatch to write a larger, rounder hand, to join the letters in the words, and to use blacker ink."

If Lord Palmerston stood easily first among the penmen of his time, the credit of writing the worst hand in England was divided among at least three claimants. First there was Lord Houghton, whose strange, tall, upright strokes, all exactly like each other except in so far as they leaned in different directions, Lord Tennyson likened to "walking-sticks gone mad." Then there was my dear friend Mr. James Payn, who described his own hand only too faithfully when he wrote about "the wandering of a centipede which had just escaped from the inkpot and had scrawled and sprawled over the paper," and whose closest friends always implored him to correspond by telegraph. And, finally, there was the "bad eminence" of Dean Stanley, whose lifelong indulgence in hieroglyphics inflicted a permanent loss on literature. The Dean, as all readers of his biography will remember, had a marked turn for light and graceful versification. The albums and letter-caskets of his innumerable friends were full of these "occasional" verses, in which domestic, political, and ecclesiastical events were prettily perpetuated. After his death his sister, Mrs. Vaughan, tried to collect these fugitive pieces in a Memorial Volume, but an unforeseen difficulty occurred. In many cases the recipients of the poems were dead and gone, and no living creature could decipher the Dean's writing. So what might have been a pretty and instructive volume perished untimely.

Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, the brilliant dame who raised the Gordon Highlanders and who played on the Tory side the part which the Duchess of Devonshire played among the Whigs, had, like our English Subalterns, a very imperfect education; but with great adroitness she covered her deficiences with a cloak of seeming humour. "Whenever," she wrote to Sir Walter Scott, "I come to a word which I cannot spell, I write it as near as I can, and put a note of exclamation after it; so that, if it's wrong, my friend will think that I was making a joke." A respected member of the present Cabinet who shares Duchess Jane's orthographical weakness covers his retreat by drawing a long, involuted line after the initial letter of each word. Let the reader write, say, the word "aluminium" on this principle; and he will see how very easily imperfect spelling in high places may be concealed.

With soldiers this chapter began, and with a soldier it shall end--the most illustrious of them all, Arthur, Duke of Wellington. Let it be recorded for the encouragement of our modern Subalterns that the Duke, though he spelled much better than Captain Crawley, wrote quite as badly as Sir George Tufto; but that circumstance did not--as is sometimes the case--enable him to interpret by sympathy the hieroglyphics of other people. Is there any one left, "In a Lancashire Garden" or elsewhere, who recalls the honoured name of Jane Loudon, authoress of "The Lady's Companion to her Flower Garden"? Mrs. Loudon was an accomplished lady, who wrote not only on Floriculture, but on Arboriculture and Landscape Gardening, and illustrated what she wrote. In one of her works she desired to insert a sketch of the "Waterloo Beeches" at Strathfieldsaye--a picturesque clump planted to commemorate our deliverance from the Corsican Tyrant. Accordingly she wrote to the Duke of Wellington, requesting leave to sketch the beeches, and signed herself, in her usual form, "J. Loudon." The Duke, who, in spite of extreme age and perceptions not quite so clear as they had once been, insisted on conducting all his own correspondence, replied as follows:--

"F.M. the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to the Bishop of London. The Bishop is quite at liberty to make a sketch of the breeches which the Duke wore at Waterloo, if they can be found. But the Duke is not aware that they differed in any way from the breeches which he generally wears."

XXXIV

AUTOGRAPHS

From handwriting in general to autographs in particular the transition is natural, almost inevitable. My recent reflections on the imperfect penmanship of the British officer sent me to my collection of letters, and the sight of these autographs--old friends long since hidden away--set me on an interesting enquiry. Was there any affinity between the writing and the character? Could one, in any case, have guessed who the writer was, or what he did, merely by scrutinizing his manuscript? I make no pretension to any skill in the art or science of Caligraphy; and, regarding my letters merely as an amateur or non-expert, I must confess that I arrive at a mixed and dubious result. Some of the autographs are characteristic enough; some seem to imply qualities for which the writer was not famed and to suppress others for which he was notorious.

Let us look carefully at the first letter which I produce from my hoard. The lines are level, and the words are clearly divided, although here and there an abbreviation tells that the hand which wrote this letter had many letters to write; the capitals, of which there are plenty, are long and twirling, though the intermediate letters are rather small, and the signature is followed by an emphatic dash which seems to say more explicitly than words that the writer is one who cannot be ignored. This is the autograph of Queen Victoria in those distant days when she said, "They seem to think that I am a schoolgirl, but I will teach them that I am Queen of England."

Surrounding and succeeding Queen Victoria I find a cluster of minor royalties, but a study of their autographs does not enable me to generalize about royal writing. Some are scrawling and some are cramped; some are infantine and some foreign. Here is a level, firm, and rapid hand, in which the exigencies of a copious correspondence seem to have softened the stiffness of a military gait. The letter is dated from "The Horse Guards," and the signature is

"Yours very truly, GEORGE."

But here again we cannot generalize, for nothing can be more dissimilar than the Duke's hurried, high-shouldered characters and the exquisite piece of penmanship which lies alongside of them. This is written in a leisurely and cultivated hand, with due spaces between words and paragraphs, like the writing of a scholar and man of letters; it is dated May 29, 1888, and bears the signature of

"Your affectionate Cousin, ALBEMARLE,"

the last survivor but one of Waterloo.