The fact is, that men seldom succeed well in doing more than one thing at a time. The itinerant musician who imitates the various instruments of a full band, may be detected in an occasional discord. Paley remarks that we cannot easily swallow while we gape; and, if any one will try the experiment, he will presently be satisfied that in this statement, at least, Paley was physiologically and philosophically correct.
Thus, in the haste of composition, ideas crowding upon us faster than the pen can give them permanence, we can bestow little thought on mere chirography, writing becomes mechanical, or even automatic; and we pay scarcely more attention to the forms that follow the pen, than we do to the contractions and dilatations of the vocal organs when engaged in conversation with an entertaining friend.
Let school training and practice be the same, yet such are the differences of physical conformation that handwritings are as various as the individuals that produce them; running through all degrees of the scale, from an elegance transcending the engraver’s skill, down to misshapen difficulties and puzzling deformity. {p20}
But however widely our handwriting may vary from Wrifford, Spencer, or Dunton, it is generally legible to ourselves, and soon becomes familiar to our friends and acquaintances. Hence comes the danger that we shall cease to bestow any care upon it when others than ourselves and acquaintances are concerned, and hence it is, that, with scarcely any consciousness of our shortcomings, we are liable to impose on an utter stranger the task of deciphering a piece of manuscript in which not only the letters have no proper characterization, but which is smutched with erasures, deformed by interlineations, and obscured by frequent and needless abbreviations.
The loss of time spent in endeavoring to read such a document, is reckoned among the “small things” of which “the law takes no cognizance”; were it otherwise, many of us who fancy that our manuscript is above reproach, would be astonished at the number of bills collectible outstanding against us.
The opinion of the “statists,” spoken of in Hamlet, that it is “a baseness to write fair,” seems prevalent even in our day. Most men, on leaving school, instead of endeavoring to improve their chirography, allow it to deteriorate, and seem to take pride in its deteriority, and many learned men write as if afraid that legibility would be considered a proof of intellectual weakness.
In all other cases of encroaching on the time and patience of another,—as, for instance, our failure to fulfill an appointment, or calling at an unseasonable hour, or seeking advice in an affair wholly our {p21} own,—we feel bound to make due apology, nay, sometimes even acknowledge a sense of shame; but who ever felt regret on hearing that he had put some one to the trouble of studying, and guessing at, a puzzling intricacy of cramped writing; his victim being obliged to seek aid from dictionaries, gazetteers, directories, and even experts? We never heard of a man’s suffering compunction on this score.
We say this, referring to ordinary business transactions between man and man, where bad writing, except in rare and extreme cases, does not involve pecuniary loss. But when we are writing for the press, our duty to write legibly becomes imperative; indeed, a failure in this respect trenches so closely upon a violation of the eighth commandment, that it can seldom happen but from a want of thought as to the relation between those who write and those who print.
Compositors usually work by the piece, and are paid a fixed rate per thousand ems. If a line of type be divided by vertical lines into equal squares, these squares show the number of ems in the line. Suppose there are twenty such squares; then fifty lines would contain one thousand ems. To set, correct, and distribute six thousand ems, is considered a fair day’s work. With plain, legible copy, this can ordinarily be done; and, at the close of the week, the compositor receives full wages; all parties are satisfied, and no one is entitled to complain.
But if, at the end of the week, notwithstanding the closest application, the compositor has averaged {p22} but four thousand ems per day, whereby he receives but two-thirds of the sum he is capable of earning under favorable conditions, who is morally responsible to him for the lacking third? We need not go far to ascertain: a glance at his “copy” answers the question. He has been laboring upon bad manuscript. To show the difficulties which have been in his way, we will put a supposititious case,—closely paralleled, however, in the experience of almost every compositor who has worked in a book-office.