CHAPTER XVII—HONORARY EDITORS AND OTHERS.
Our esteemed correspondent—The great imprinted—Lord Tennyson’s death—“Crossing the Bar”—Why was it never printed in its entirety?—The comments on the poem—Who could the Pilot have been?—Pilot or pilot engine?—A vexed and vexing question—Erroneous navigation—Tennyson’s voyage with Mr. Gladstone—Its far-reaching results—Tennyson’s interest in every form of literary work—“My Official Wife”—Amateur critics—The Royal Dane—Edwin Booth and his critic—A really comic play—An Irving enthusiast—“Gemini and Virgo”—“Our sincerest laughter”—The drollest of soliloquies—“Eugene Aram” for the hilarious—The proof of a sincere devotion.
THE people who spend their time writing letters to newspapers pointing out mistakes, or what they imagine to be mistakes, and making many suggestions as to how the newspaper should be conducted in all its departments, constitute a branch of the profession of philanthropy, to which sufficient attention has never been given.
I do not, of course, allude to the type whom Mr. George Du Maurier derided when he put the phrase J’écrirai à le Times into his mouth on being compelled to pay an extravagant bill at a French hotel; there are people who have just grievances to expose, and there are newspapers that exist for the dissemination of those grievances; but it is an awful thought that at this very moment there are some hundreds—perhaps thousands—of presumably sane men and women sitting down and writing letters to their local newspapers to point out to the management that the jeu d’esprit attributed in yesterday’s issue to Sydney Smith, was one of which Douglas Jerrold was really the author; or that the quotation about the wind being tempered to the shorn lamb is not to be found in the Bible, but in “the works of the late Mr. Sterne”; or perhaps suggesting that no country could rightly be regarded as exempted from the list of lands forming a legitimate sphere for missionary labour, whose newspapers give up four columns daily to an account of the horse-racing of the day before. A book might easily be written by any one who had some experience, not of the letters that appear in a newspaper, but of those that are sent to the editor by enthusiasts on the subject of finance, morality, religion, and the correct text of some of Burns dialect poems.
When Lord Tennyson died, I printed five columns of a biographical and critical sketch of the great poet. I thought it necessary to quote only a single stanza of “Crossing the Bar.” During the next clay I received quite a number of letters asking in what volume of Tennyson’s works the poem was to be found. In the succeeding issue of the paper I gave the poem in full. From that day on during the next fortnight, no post arrived without bringing me a letter containing the same poem, with a request to have it published in the following issue; and every writer seemed to be under the impression that he (or she) had just discovered “Crossing the Bar.” Then the clergymen who forwarded in manuscript the sermons which they had preached on Tennyson, pointing out the “lessons” of his poems, presented their compliments and requested the insertion of “Crossing the Bar,” in its entirety, in the place in the sermons where they had quoted it. All this time “poems” on the death of Tennyson kept pouring in by the hundred, and I can safely say that not one came under my notice that did not begin,
“Yes, thou hast cross’d the Bar, and face to face
Thy Pilot seen,”
or with words to that effect.
After this had been going on for some weeks a member of the proprietorial household came to me with a letter open in his hand.
“I wonder how it was that we missed that poem of Tennyson’s.” said he. “It would have done well, I think, if it had been published in our columns at his death.”