The other day I was writing in other fields than these, ploughing another land (to which, for the honour I bear it, I again give no name), and I had occasion to speak about the Nereids who swim about in the sea. I very pompously announced their appearance in the Sixteenth Book of the Iliad. I should have said the Eighteenth Book.

Why did I say the Sixteenth Book? I cannot tell. I have awaited, since the appearance of that article, letters written to me privately, written to the paper itself, written to other papers, all saying: "Why do you talk about things you know nothing of? You call it the Sixteenth Book; it is the Eighteenth Book."

So far no letters have come either to me or to the paper in question. Nor has any one even written to any of the great daily papers on the subject. So perhaps it will blow over. But my mind returns to the matter. Why did I write "Sixteenth" when I meant "Eighteenth"? What is inaccuracy? What are its sources? Whence does it spring? What makes one man more inaccurate than another, or rather (and much more truly) why is one man inaccurate in some things and another in others? What the devil is it all due to, anyhow?

I know very well why accuracy is such an anxious matter with men. It is because, alone of all the factors of learning, it is easily and mechanically attainable. It is no good a man trying to be just in judgment about a great and broad matter on which he is ignorant. It would be no good, for instance, my trying to look learned through a just judgment of Russian poetry—for I cannot read Russian. No man can mechanically, and as a matter of course, set himself right in the major factors of learning. But both he and others can get references right, now that there are so many printed books of reference. And therefore men study accuracy in published book-details, because they say to themselves: "Fool I may be, and ignorant I may be; but anyhow, I can be accurate—with the help of a public library." And at the same time they say to themselves: "General ignorance it is easy to hide; but if I am inaccurate, the biggest fool born can find me out: with the help of a public library."

So far so good. I know well enough why one bothers so absurdly about accuracy in such details; or, to put it otherwise, why mere slips of the pen and misspellings frighten us so much. But what I do not understand is how and why they take place in subjects which one knows as well as one's own name.

I remember once writing a long book about Paris; a long, long book, to pay my first quarter's rent as a young man. And in that book I found myself perpetually saying "North" when I meant "South" in the matter of the immortal hill—in the matter of the hill of the University. I always talked of going up that hill as going "North," whereas if you go up that hill you walk due South.

And I knew a man once who whenever he went into a shop to buy razor blades for his patent razor always said "railway blades." Yet in other respects he was an ordinary man.

I will not attempt to solve the problem. It is not fatigue that does it, still less is it real ignorance; for you will notice that a man is inaccurate about things he knows thoroughly well, and that the mistakes he makes are always of an absurd kind which he would be the first to spot in others; for instance, calling Nottingham Northampton, and the other way about. All one can say is that it happens as variations happen in the generation of animals, or as any other fluke happens. Some God guides it.

Inaccuracy is a very fruitful and powerful creator of things. It not only creates legends, it creates words. There are hosts and crowds of words which have come in through the talent of men for inaccuracy and through the inspiration of inaccuracy, which is blown into men by this God of whom I speak. Hence what is called metathesis, the very fruitful parent of many admirable words from Turmut to Hercules. Hence also the naturalisation of French and other foreign words. It is a pity, I think, that so much printing, and the foolish pride of those who can read, checks the process nowadays. I live in hopes that it will not check the process for long, and that our coming barbarism will return to these popular words.

"Chauffeur" should be "shover," and "asparagus"—which I like to hear called "grass"—has, I hope, taken root forever as "sparrow-grass"—a very good name for it; for it is a grass and sparrows have no particular bond with it. They well might have, if they only knew how good it was; but they are stupid little beasts, and good for nothing. And if you tell me that thus to branch off upon the matter of sparrows is disturbing to the reader, and that one ought to keep the main thread of one's discourse, I answer you with a book always well praised and in parts quite on the highest level, called "The Book of Job." If you will read "The Book of Job" you will find that, in the catalogue of strange beasts which the writer brings forward in defence of the majesty of God, he gets to the ostrich. But hardly has he mentioned the ostrich when the inane habits of that enormous fowl prove too much for him. He forgets all about God and creation and the rest of it, and allows himself a little separate diatribe against the idiocy of the ostrich before getting back to his theology. So I with sparrows.

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.

And of all the forms by which inaccuracy builds up tragedy the best I know is that form whereby the God causes two letters to be put each into the envelope meant for the other. Out of one such error as that you might get another Trojan War!