May 6 Friday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Chatto & Windus, enclosing an article intended to “excite public curiosity about the Fable, & make people hunt around & get hold if it and circulate it everywhere.”

listed in American Book Prices- Current Vol. 21 p.753 (1915) . See also Dolmetsch, 187 -9, 337n9 for the claim that this piece was written in Feb. of 1898. The article was about France’s treatment of Monaco. It was for:

“…people who cannot believe that any conduct can justify one nation in interfering with the domestic affairs of another. Those people can get light through Object-lessons only; they can get a Fable through their heads” [See also MTHHR 385n2].

Sam requested the article be sent to the London Chronicle, and if they didn’t want it to other papers. He also supplied a list of persons he wished the Fable sent to, including Ambassador John Hay, Joe Twichell, Henry C. Robinson, Edward Bunce, Secretaries of State, War, and The Navy; J.B. Pond; a half dozen each to the Lotos Club and The Players, Poultney Bigelow, the Savage Club in London, William Gillette, and Lieut. Chamberlain in Vienna [MTP].

Note: this last was likely Houston Steward Chamberlain (1855-1927). Dolmetsch describes him as a racial-purity advocate, and a “renegade English Germanophile who divorced his Viennese Jewish wife and married Richard Wagner’s daughter” [163]. A day after sending the article, Sam telegraphed C&W asking it be returned. On May 13 he noted in another letter to C&W that he had rec’d it back, and gave reasons for the return. MTP cites the Walpole Galleries catalog for a two-page letter from Livy to Chatto & Windus that she wanted “The New War-Scare” suppressed. Livy is likely the reason for Sam’s change of mind.

Sam put this date on a short essay, which Paine later titled “Comment on Tautology and Grammar.” In part:

I do not find that the repetition of an important word a few times—say three or four times—in a paragraph, troubles my ear if clearness of meaning is best secured thereby. But tautological repetition which has no justifying object, but merely exposes the fact that the writer’s balance at the vocabulary bank has run short and that he is too lazy to replenish it from the thesaurus—that is another matter. It makes me feel like calling the writer to account. It makes me want to remind him that he is not treating himself and his calling with right respect; and—incidentally—that he is not treating me with proper reverence. At breakfast, this morning, a member of the family read aloud an interesting review of a new book about Mr. Gladstone in which the reviewer used the strong adjective “delightful” thirteen times. Thirteen times in a short review, not a long one….

I suppose we all have our foibles. I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness; but that reviewer cares for only the last mentioned of these things. His grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise. It flaunts itself in the reader’s face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable [AMT 1:119-20; MTA 172-4]. Note: William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four time Prime Minister of England. See the former source for the full text.