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New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 1, 4 January 1923, Page 30

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The Printed Word Many a writer and many a speaker has uttered unpublishable words on seeing in print a reporter’s or printer’s version of some of his choice remarks. We all know the story of the reporter whose pencil turned the quotation: Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis arnica veritas, into : “I may kiss Plato, I may kiss Socrates, said Major Yerikus.” A writer in The Gael gives us a few instances that are new to, us and are worth repeating. Once he sent in to an Irish paper an account of the Consecration of a Bishop and to his surprise found that the public were told on his authority that the ceremony took place in the Court House,” which was the best guess the staff could make at his copperplate writing of the word “Cathedral.” He recalls a lecture by the late Professor Ball on “The Transit of Venus” being published under the heading “The Inquest of Venus.” A- speaker at a Dublin Diocesan Synod who said that in our time the clergy were . expected to have the wisdom and learning of a Jeremy Taylor, read next day that the standard he set for his brethren was the learning and wisdom of a “journeyman tailor.” 'Still more to be pitied was the scribe who complained about the dusty windows of the local church, and was reported as saying that; “Our widows want washing —they are a disgrace to the town.” Another beautiful guess turned Tennyson’s rather hackneyed phrase, “The white flower’.of a blameless life”, into “The white flour of a blameless loaf.” Bulls and Chestnuts The same writer in The Gael gives us some fresh specimens of “bulls” of the legless and hornless variety. An eloquent M.P., in Ireland’s talking days, referring to a derelict'farm said: “The only animals on it at present are the seagulls that fly over it.” Another, attacking the Government, said it was “so antediluvian that it .was worthy of the Middle Ages.” It was a Scot who implored the House not to “take that whiteelephant under your wing”, and condemned the War Office as being “absolutely iron-bound in Bed Tape.” Back to Ireland we go again for the orator who in fin© frenzy denounced' a land-agent and said: “Mr. Speaker, sir, if you were to plant that man down on a desert island the first thing he would do would be ’to put his rapacious hand into the pockets of the naked savages.” Probably it was .the same . Demosthenes who declared that as long as Ireland remained silent England would be deaf to her cries, and wound up with the’ remarkable peroration; “The cup of Ireland’s misery is overflowing, but believe me it is not full yet.” Genial Ned Kelly, M.P. for South Wicklow, used to claim, ®n no sound grounds, for hfmself the credit of replying to a supercilious Briton seeking information as to Irish “bulls” :/ “If you saw three cows lying down in a field and one of them standing up, that one would be an Irish bull.” An Irish jarvey, when asked by a tourist about the absentee landlords; replied that the “country was full of them.”. Another was asked by a new agent if his predecessor was a bad man. “Divil a worse we: ever had.” . How l was it he was hot shot,, then “Well, I suppose, what’s ; every- ;

body’s business' is nobody’s.'” One of the best stories ever, told by Father Healy was against ; himself. His barber was bibulous, arid one morning he cut the Father’s chin. “John, John,” said his reverence,' “the drink again!” “It makes the skin terrible tender, Father,” said John with a grin. A New Chesterton Book • It is good to find Mr. Chesterton as young and incurably romantic as ever (says A.S.'W., in the Manchester Guardian). No paltering here with the probabilities, no sign of the beginnings’of-a cramping common sense. ■ Once only we suspected,' in the story of the Trees of Pride, that he was about actually to bring an exciting tale to a rational and logical end. At first the total disappearance of bluff Squire Vane on the night he spent, in a boastfully materialistic spirit, in a grove of trees with a weird tradition seemed due to supernatural causes; Then it had several possible crime motives. Then it looked like petering out as a mere practical joke. But no! We were relieved to learn that the Squire was really spirited away because- only by establishing the palpable truth of what is usually reckoned superstition can you hope to make any progress at all in this dull world. We find the same authentic Chesterton, militant and unashamed, in the tale called “The Hole in the Wall,” in which Lord Buhner also vanishes utterly in the midst of a medieval fancy dress house party he is giving at his place—Prior’s Hall. He goes skating over what the present generation believes to be a two-feet-deep pond. But an evil-minded archaeologist has thinned the ice at a spot beneath which he knows there is a deep holy well, ans so Sir Bulmer goes to a death that mystifies the moderns. Horne Fisher, the Man Who Knew Too Much, elucidates this mystery, as he does several others equally baffling and fantastic. When he is asked how he manages to be so acute he replies: “After all, it needs very little poking about in the past to find that hole in the wall, that great breach in. the defences of English history.’ It lies just under the surface of a thin sheet of sham information and instruction, just as the black and blood-stained well lies just under the floor of shallow water and flat weeds. Oh, the ice is thin, but it bears. It is strong enough to support us when we dress up as monks and dance on it in mockery of the dear old Middle Ages.” Horne Fisher, the successor of Father Brown, is not all the time so frankly a propagandist of the medievalism as this. But there is a strong Jingoistic strain about him. When he find that a British general on whose, good name there hangs our prestige in the East has committed a murder, he contents himself with exposing it to his own satisfaction, and then hushes it up, on the ground that if ths Empire is “really tottering, God help it, it must not be we who tip it over.” When he discovers that the real murderer of two English officers in pursuit of an Irish rebel is not the rebel but one of their own colleagues .who is jealous of them, he condones the pensioning of the murderer and the imprisonment of the innocent man because the Prime Minister, who is his personal friend, might fall if the scandal were known. He is a profound cynic, \. this Horne Fisher, who is constantly stumbling on the queerest of crimes in high places, unravelling them with a lackadaisical indifference that is reminiscent of Holmes (though nothing else about him is), and then refusing to expose them because he is connected with the set in which they occur. Yet in the end he kills his . own uncle to save England. It is a crisis in which the invader has landed (like the Turks did in The Flying Inn). But the country is pulled through because: •" “The men of Somerset and the western counties came pouring into the market placesthe men who died with Arthur and stood fast with Alfred. The Irish regiments rallied to-them, after a scene like a riot, and marched eastward out- of the town singing Fenian songs. . There was all that is not understood about the dark laughter of that people.' .l .” There is much that “is not understood,” and that would be wrecked by mere understanding, about the ,»gaiety, the, fantasy, and the. magnificent - wrong-headed-’ ness of this most amusing collection of whimsical tales.