THE BLUNDERS OF AUTHORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 50, 27 August 1938, Page 27

THE BLUNDERS OF AUTHORS

The fact that "Ouida's" biographer, in a book just published, has nailed to the counter the lie that Mile de la Ramee was ever guilty of writing of a university boat-race. "All rowed fast, but none rowed faster than he," will perhaps make people chary of loose accusations of this sort against painstaking novelists, says the "Manchester Guardian." But there is no denying that "Ouida" asked for it. The well-known music critic Mr. W. R. Anderson has pointed out several howlers in her treatment of musical matters, concerning which she seems to have known next to nothing. In "Strathmore" she mentions a violin falling down and its "keys" being smashed. One of. her heroines sings "glorious harmonies" all by herself, and there is a passage referring to "the C string of a highly-tuned violin," although the normal tuning of that instrument is G, D, A, E. A writer who can be as reckless as this on matters within common knowledge lays herself open to the exaggerations of the unscrupulous anecdotalist —though why the latter should bother to invent

when the genuine source is so rich in specimens is incomprehensible. '

R. L. Stevenson made' occasional blunders, too, but he hastened to "debunk" them himself. Referring to "The Master of Ballantrae," he wrote to Marcel Schwob, who was translating it into French: "Pray do not let Mrs. Henry thrust the sword up to the hilt in the frozen ground, one of my inconceivable blunders, an exaggeration to stagger Hugo. Say she sought to. thrust it into the ground." It was Anatole France who pointed out the almost incredible slip committed by Cervantes in making Sancho mount his ass to go and look for that very same ass, which had gone astray. Even Flaubert, who spent days searching for the right word, at least once emerged from the ordeal with the wrong one— the ludicrously wrong one. "A fine phrenological head," he wrote, "all painted blue, and marked with figures down to the thorax."

In such company as this "Ouida" could afford to make a fool of herself over such things as music, racing, and fields sports generally.