THE PROOF-SHEET. "In the reproof of chance Lies the true proof of men.”—SHAKSPEARE. I was awakened the other morning, at ten o'clock, from the charms of a soothing morning dream, succeeding a feverish night, by my servant at my door, "Sir, if you please, Mr. has sent, for the third time, for the proof-sheet of that Essay on the Influence of Kant's Philosophy, for the New Monthly.". -The printer's devil, and Kant's Philosophy, at such a moment! The shade of Dido was not more unwelcome to Eneas, or the apparition of Banquo to Macbeth. "Tell him, it shall be ready in two hours."" But, Sir, he says, the press is waiting; and the compositors and overseer swore they would horsewhip him if he came back without it."—" He must be horsewhipped then, and I'll remunerate him, when the next number is out." A respite of a few hours was thus obtained. I laid myself down, readjusted my pillow, drew over me the comfortable duvet, which, notwithstanding Coleridge's abuse, I always sleep under since I passed the winter at Weimar, and again "addressed myself to sleep," or dreaming. But the charm was dissolved, the fairy tissue was destroyed, and could not be rewoven. Nothing remained but to slip on my dressing-gown, and arm myself for the encounter with the dreadful sheet, by a strong cup of Mocha coffee, and a French roll. The morning-paper, fresh with the dews of the printing-press, was on my table; a blooming Edinburgh, in blue and yellow costume, wooed me with irresistible virgin charms. The very idea, at this moment, of the proof-sheet, of the horrible corrections, the revisions, the expungings, the interlineations, which it would entail on me, gave me an indescribable frissonnement, a cold ague fit. Even the known accuracy of Messrs. Bentley's compositors could not re-assure me. In the mean time, while I poured out my coffee, my sage of a servant, with that sort of Mentor-like prudence and consideration, which an old servant, who knows a young master's ways, acquires, of his own accord, looked out for the dreaded object, on which he deemed it fitting that his master should be employed. "You need not poke your nose into all the table-drawers. Pshaw! there it is, tied up with red tape."—" No, Sir, if you please, that's the print of that there poetry book, that Lady Basked you to write a review on, before it was published."—" Blockhead! what is that bundle in the window?"" Oh, that's the article prophesying that Bonypart would reign half as long as Louis XIV., which was to be printed in the Review, when you know, Sir, the Duke drubbed him at Waterloo," After a bouleversement of sundry bundles of embryo MS. and half-finished sketches, and various piles of Quarterlies and Blackwoods, the hateful little neat packet of the printing-office was dragged to light, from the bottom of a chaotic mountain of uncut blue-covered tomes, just fresh from the Leipsic fair. The silver ink-stand and the long pen, the paper-case and blotting-paper, speedily succeeded the Dresden coffee-cups, and breakfast service of claw china. It was now too late to recede. I was fairly taken for two hours' brain-racking correction, and final polishing of an illegible, perhaps in some instances unintelligible MS. "Dimond, if any one calls, I am engaged," was pronounced with that firm voice of fixed resolution, with which a man endeavours to brave a disaster, from which he can not withdraw. I fell to work vigorously, determined not to admit a thought of all the gaiety of the night before. Blue eyes, black eyes, swimming forms, and the voluptuous sounds of Payne's quadrilles, in vain assailed me with solicitous recollections: I was firm and invulnerable. ""Tis pleasant, sure, to see oneself in print,' thought I, with Lord Byron, as I surveyed myself in the ample page: doubly pleasant to see oneself clad in that bold, elegant, fashionable type, which adorns the heroes of Mr. Colborn's and Mr. Murray's windows; that dress which makes a modern author "the very rose of courtesy, and the pink of fashion," which is to the old barbarous smutty costume of Caxton or Tottill, what a young nobleman by Sir Thomas Lawrence is, compared to a Burgomaster by Albert Durer,-or a radical pantalooned beau at Almack's compared to the black portentous figures of Roland of Triermain, or Goetz of Berlechingen. The printer it is who consummates the author's conceptions. The mechanic puts the finishing stroke to the finest dreams of imagination. He gives to "airy nothing a local habitation and a name." Without the compositor and the printer's devil, what a poor dreaming, fruitless, futile thing, is a wit. He is a soul without a body-a soldier, with "lots of courage," and no sword-a lawyer, with brass and black letter, but no briefs-a parson, brim-full of divinity, without a pulpita statesman, well read in Machiavel and Locke, without a voice in Downing-street. An author in MS. is a half-fledged sloven, unseemly to look upon; but, when turned out from the various hands, who conspire to dress and powder him for the public, what an Adonis he walks forth! what a typographical dandy! When the happy wight has gone through the beautifying hands of compositor, devil, printer, sewer, and boarder those Hobys, Stubses, Allens, and Bicknalls of literature-then and then only, does he become fit to lounge gracefully on the commode in the boudoirs of Grosvenor-square, and to meet the embrace of fair hands, who pat and admire his spruce blue or green coat, and to delight brilliant eyes with all the concentrated blaze of wit well-dressed, and satire and sentiment in the costume of Bond street. Pope was a driveller, when he said that criticism was the Muse's handmaid. The lines should be "The printer then the Muse's handmaid proved, To dress her charms and make her more beloved." The The critic is the malicious and indelicate wretch, who delights to unstrip the dandy! He has no respect for hot-pressed paper, or Mr. Davison's most interesting of types. He delights to dispel the illusion of costume, and show the poor author in naked deformity. He ill-naturedly detects all the glass eyes, ivory teeth, and elegant cork calves, of the literary Lotharios. delight of seeing my mind reflected in the flattering mirror of a neat proof-sheet, accompanied me through the first page or two, which were tolerably flowing and correct; when, about the fourth, I began to find all the anticipated horrors thicken round me. That my friend Kant should be invariably printed Cant, was not extraordinary, and that his Critical Categories should be metamorphosed into his Christian Catechism, with a humble query of the compositor, did not surprise me, when I recollected that the Christian Observer and the Churchman's Magazine issued from the same press; but presently I found such dreadful jostling and jangling between the objective and the subjective, the quantitative and the qualitative, the consequence so often produced the cause, and the end the means, that I began to think chaos was come again; and all the lucidus ordo, with which I fully hoped to have made the Categories very interesting light reading for young ladies, had totally evaporated in the press. "What ails the blockheads to-day? the MS. never could be thus confused," I rang the bell, and Dimond was called in to assist in collating it; and he began to read in an audible voice. Alas! I found that 66 the compositors had not deviated from their wonted accuracy. Metaphysicians have no business at masquerades," I thought silently to myself. After an hour's toilsome pruning and interlining, and assisted by Dimond's lungs, and with many a stet, dele, rider, and reference, I succeeded in reducing the metaphysical chaos to something like "pure reason," ex fumo dare lucem. Having thus squared all accounts with Priscian, and succeeded in making metaphysics intelligible in one part of my MS., another part which abounded in bold and original opinions, personal anecdotes, pungent satire, and brilliant persiflage, gave me many a pause, many a reflective "vivos et roderet ungues," on widely different grounds. What a serious and weighty piece of business is this "going to press!" What an irrevocable, irremediable step! What a passing the Rubicon! The "damned spot" of ink will not out-there is no locus penitentiæ, as lawyers say. What a gulf between an author and a thinker!-between the snug proprietor of his own ideas, and the man who is "rubrick on the walls," from having put them forth, with malice prepense, to amuse or instruct the public. Glaring publicity! heavy responsibility! thought I to myself, as I sat in judgment, with the despotic pen in hand, over every separate sentence. "To print, or not to print, that is the question." A man correcting a proofsheet is on the edge of a precipice-the gulf of publicity yawns below him, and lures him, as the pellucid flood does Goethe's fisherman, to plunge headlong into the tide. Fame, hope, curiosity, beckon him forward. The publisher tempts, the printer's devil urges. What consequences often hang upon the proof-sheet! How much of good and of evil depends on this last award of the author! If Rousseau had thrown the proof-sheets of the "Contrat Social" into the fire, instead of returning them by the printer's devil to the press the French revolution might never have unhinged Europe. If Wilkes had cancelled the proof of a few numbers of the "North Briton," the freedom of our persons and papers might not, to this day, have been secured by the declared illegality of general warrants. If Lord Byron had nipped in the bad the proof of his "Poems of a Minor," we should never have been delighted with the best of modern satires. But without having the vanity to see the possible germ of revolutions, or the fire-brand of political controversy, in my humble pages, how many other doubts, apprehensions, and misgivings distracted me as I weighed every sentence and line, with the scrupulous timidity of authorship. One sentence would, perhaps, rouse the fury of the Attorney-General, another might "poison the liking" of a whole coterie of subscribers; a smart observation, which I had chuckled at, as a curiosa felicitas, might turn the stomach of the saints; a hint at Buonaparte's glory, would infallibly ruin us with the clerical wits of Rivington's, and exclude us from half a score tory book-clubs; some praise of Voltaire would damn us at Weimar: and a good word to Kant and Fichte, would annihilate us at the Institute. However, I remembered the old man and his ass and his sons. An author said, I boldly must brave evil report and good report. Provided there is no sentence that can "with all its "Give virtue scandal, innocence a fear, Or from the soft-eyed virgin steal a tear," "Tout le reste m'est égal," it must e'en go to press imperfections on its head," and maugre all possible chances of broken heads, latitats, damages, attorney's bills, and anonymous letters. I thus administered a narcotic to my scruples. I let the sense of my sentences stand, coute qui coute, and confined myself to polishing up the dress and the style. In this I soon determined to be expeditious and decisive-not to be "bound in by saucy doubts and fears." A brilliant gleam of the wintry sun broke in upon my papers and books, and the shining bleached pavement looked highly inviting, when a crabbed collocation of consonants grated on my ear;-it was nervous and expressive. Many a rough sentence, not squaring with the rules of euphony, I suffered to stand untouched" a man may polish too much." -I like a sort of Dryden asperity-it is not necessary to write ad unguem-give me nerve, strength, the tiger-spring of the first rough idea. Lord Byron never retouches. Dimond, with his intuitive knowingness, at the first gleam of sunshine, had, of his own accord, spread the neat olive-coloured great coat on the back of a chair, and placed the smooth beaver by the side, with the kid gloves neatly laid across it. The wax-taper soon paled its feeble flame; the proof was laid in a neat half-sheet of cartridge-paper; and, as I folded up the corners, I took a last affectionate farewell of the offspring I was launching forth into the ocean of literature, beset with the shoals of criticism. “Vix sustinuit dicere lingua Vale!" The single decisive rap of the inexorable devil presently struck on the door. "There it is, Dimond. I! secundo omine.” " As I heard the little black Mercury tramp down stairs, and slam the door after him, I felt myself eased of an indescribable loadthank Heaven!-freedom for a full fortnight—a fortnight of literary revelling-with nothing to do but to pay visits, devour Scotch novels, and rifle the uncut volumes from Leipsic. D. C. THE SPARE BLANKET. COLD was the wind, and dark the night, By ardour in the cause of Zion, And housed him at the Golden Lion. His chamber held another bed, But, as it was untenanted, Our hero, without fear or doubt, Undress'd, and put the candle out. And, Morpheus making haste to drop his Drowsiest soporific poppies, Sleep soon o'ertook the weary elf, Who snored like-nothing but himself. |