And now that I have taught you this lesson from Job I will return to the matter of inaccuracy.
Inaccuracy is also the breeder not only of good native phrases, but of excellent tales, like the well-rubbed, polished, ancient, and now immutable story of the boy in buttons who got nervous at the grandeur of the bishop, and said, when the sleepy bishop asked who was knocking: "It's the Lord, my boy."
And inaccuracy is the parent also of that still older and still more immutable story about the Pyramids of Egypt and their builders, which I cannot print here.
It was inaccuracy which made the guide-book man so angry at the phrase, "Our Lord God, the Pope," his translation of "Divus Papa," put before the title of some canonised pope of the past.
And it was inaccuracy that made the mediæval story-teller talk of the "Emperor Pliny" and of Virgil's brazen tower. And what a picture I get of the Emperor Pliny sending for the Magician Virgil who builds the brazen tower! Inaccuracy is a mighty mother of works.
It pleases me also especially in this, that you cannot teach it; you cannot make a man inaccurate. There is no way of becoming inaccurate by industry, and if you deliberately try to be inaccurate you fail. Inaccuracy is perhaps the most spontaneous and the freest of the gifts offered by the Spirit to the wit of man. It is even more spontaneous and more free than the gift of writing good verse, or that rarer gift which I have also written of here—the gift of writing abominably bad verse; exceptionally bad verse; criminally bad verse; execrable verse.
And inaccuracy is a great leveller—like Love and Death and other less commonly quoted levellers—like Wine and War and Repentance.
For there is no one, whoever he may be, however learned or however ignorant, who may not suddenly be found inaccurate. And, what is more, the same man will be inaccurate in one period and accurate in another, entirely as the Spirit chooses and not as he chooses.
Lastly, inaccuracy has this great and noble quality attached to it, that it breeds real tragedy; and that is a finer thing than breeding mere stories or even noble words. Try shouting "port" down the decks when you mean "starboard," in some narrow crowded fairway against a racing tide, and you will find out what I mean. Or again, inaccuracy in the setting of a range; repeating (as I heard a man do at Châlons) 113 millimetres for 13 millimetres—and they plugged a village church miles and miles outside the camp.
In these matters, that which was but a trifle or a comic accident takes on majesty. Inaccuracy becomes a solemn thing.