LIV
During my service on the Evening Post, I made a curious blunder which circumstances rendered it necessary for others to exploit. The thing grievously annoyed me at the time, but later it only amused me as an illustration of a psychological principle.
Mr. Richard Grant White, writing in some newspaper or magazine in opposition to the proposed adoption of the metric system of weights and measures, had made an amusing blunder. He wrote that the old system was so fixed in men's minds as to admit of no possible mistake. He added something like this:
"Nobody has any difficulty in remembering that two gills make one pint, two pints one quart, four quarts one gallon, etc."
I cannot pretend to quote his utterance exactly, but that is the substance of it, the marrow of the matter being that in the very act of showing that nobody could have the least trouble in remembering the table of liquid measure, he himself got it wrong.
A Case of Heterophemy
The derisive comments of all the newspapers upon his blunder may be easily imagined. For reply he invented a word of Greek derivation, "heterophemy." He contended that it was a common thing for one to speak or write one thing when quite another thing was in his mind, and when the speaker or writer perfectly knew the thing he sought to say. He explained that when the mind has once slipped into an error of that kind it is usually unable, or at least unlikely, to detect it in the revision of proofs, or in any other survey of the utterance. His exposition was very learned, very ingenious, and very interesting, but it had no effect in silencing the newspaper wags, who at once adopted his newly-coined word, "heterophemy," and made it the butt of many jests.
About that time Mr. Alexander H. Stephens published in one of the more dignified periodicals of the time—the North American Review, perhaps—a very learned essay in which he sought to fix the authorship of the letters of Junius upon Sir Philip Francis. Mr. Stephens brought to the discussion a ripe scholarship and a deal of fresh and original thought that gave importance to his paper, and I reviewed it in the Evening Post as carefully and as fully as if it had been a book.
I was deeply concerned to have my review of so important a paper in all respects the best I could make it, and to that end I read my proofs twice, with minute attention, as I thought, to every detail.
The next day, if I remember correctly, was Sunday. At any rate, it was a day on which I remained at home. When I opened my morning newspapers, the first thing that attracted my attention was a letter in one of them from Richard Grant White, of which my article was the subject. Here, he said, was a conspicuous and unmistakable example of heterophemy, which could not be attributed to ignorance or inattention or anything else, except precisely that tendency of the human mind which he had set forth as the source of mistakes otherwise unaccountable. He went on to say that mine was an article founded upon adequate scholarship and evidently written with unusual care; that its writer obviously knew his subject and had written of it with the utmost attention to accuracy of statement in every detail; that he had evidently read his proofs carefully as not a slip appeared in the printed copy of the article, not even so much as a typographical error; and yet that in two or three instances this careful critic had written "Sir Philip Sidney" instead of "Sir Philip Francis." He pointed out that these slips could not have been due to any possible confusion in my mind of two Sir Philips who lived two hundred years apart, chronologically, and whose careers were as wholly unlike as it was possible to conceive; for, he pointed out, my article itself bore ample witness to my familiarity with Sir Philip Francis's history. Here, Mr. White insisted, was the clearest possible case of heterophemy, untainted by even a possible suspicion of ignorance or confusion of mind. Further, he urged, the case illustrated and confirmed his contention that, having written a word or name or phrase not intended, the writer is extremely unlikely to discover the slip even in the most careful reading of proofs. For in this case every appearance indicated a careful proofreading on the part of the author of the article.
When I read Mr. White's letter I simply could not believe that I had made the slips he attributed to me. Certainly there was no confusion in my mind of Sir Philip Francis with Sir Philip Sidney. I was familiar with the very different histories of the two altogether dissimilar men, and it seemed inconceivable to me that I had written the name of the one for that of the other even once in an article in which the right name was written perhaps a dozen times.
Richard Grant White's Triumph
It was a troubled and unhappy "day off" for me. I had no copy of the Evening Post of the preceding day in the house, and a diligent inquiry at all the news-stands in the remote quarter of Brooklyn in which I then lived, failed to discover one. But as I thought of the matter in troubled fashion, I became more and more convinced that Mr. White had misread what I had written, in which case I anticipated a good deal of fun in exposing and exploiting his error. As the day waned I became positively certain in my mind that no such mistake had been made, that no mention of Sir Philip Sidney could by any possibility have crept into my article concerning Sir Philip Francis.
But when I arrived at the office of the Evening Post next morning, I found the facts to be as Mr. White had represented them. I had written "Sir Philip Francis" throughout the article, except in two or three places, where the name appeared as "Sir Philip Sidney." I was so incredulous of the blunder that I went to the composing room and secured my manuscript. The error was there in the written copy. I asked the chief proofreader why he had not observed and queried it in view of the fact that my use of the name had been correct in most instances, but he was unable to offer any explanation except that his mind had accepted the one name for the other. The foreman of the composing room, a man of education and large literary knowledge, had read the proofs merely as a matter of interest, but he had not observed the error. I had no choice but to accept Mr. Richard Grant White's interpretation of the matter and call it a case of heterophemy.
There are blunders made that are not so easily accounted for. A leading New York newspaper once complained of Mr. Cleveland's veto messages as tiresome and impertinent, and asked why he persisted in setting forth his reasons for disapproving acts of Congress, instead of sending them back disapproved without reasons.
The Evening Post found it necessary to direct the newspaper's attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States expressly requires the President, in vetoing a measure, to set forth his reasons for doing so. In a like forgetfulness of Constitutional provisions for safeguarding the citizen, the same newspaper complained of the police, when Tweed escaped and went into hiding, for not searching every house in New York till the malefactor should be found. It was Parke Godwin who cited the Constitution in answer to that manifestation of ignorance, and he did it with the strong hand of a master to whom forgetfulness of the fundamental law seemed not only inexcusable, on the part of a newspaper writer, but dangerous to liberty as well.
Perhaps the worst case I ever knew of ignorance assuming the critical functions of expert knowledge, was one which occurred some years later. William Hamilton Gibson published a superbly illustrated work, which won commendation everywhere for the exquisite perfection of the drawings, both in gross and in minute detail. A certain art critic who had made a good deal of noise in the world by his assaults upon the integrity of art treasures in the Metropolitan Museum, assailed Gibson's work in print. Finding nothing in the illustrations that he could criticise, he accused Gibson of sailing under false colors and claiming credit for results that were not of his creation. He said that nearly everything of value in the illustrations of Gibson's book was the work not of the artist but of the engraver who, he declared, had "added increment after increment of value" to the crude original drawings.
The Demolition of a Critic
In a brief letter to the newspaper which had printed this destructive criticism without its writer's name appended to it, Mr. Gibson had only to direct attention to the fact that the pictures in question were not engravings at all, but slavish photographic reproductions of his original drawings, and that no engraver had had anything whatever to do with them.
The criticism to which so conclusive a reply was possible was anonymous, and its author never acknowledged or in any way sought to atone for the wanton wrong he had sought to inflict under cover of anonymity. But his agency in the matter was known to persons "on the inside" of literature, art, and journalism, and the shame of his deed rankled in the minds of honest men. He wrote little if anything after that, and the reputation he had made faded out of men's memory.