April Day

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 14, 2 April 1903, Page 1

April Day

It is April day as these lines pass under the cylinders in our press-room. Exuberant youth all over the world are busy over what 'the philosopher of the Sandwich Isles' calls 'phuling.' The genuine fools are usually the tricksters. The 'April fools' are simply their unwary victims. La Rochefoucauld says that no fool is so

troublesome as the clever fool. April day usually passes off uneneventfully because clever fools are almost as rare as a white walrus. They are nearly all dead. But sometimes the dull and silly monotony of ' sending the fool farther' is relieved by a bit of deception that makes a record and the usual small retail folly is worked on a wholesale scale. Some years ago, for instance, wo told how, on the first of April, 1809, Theodore Hookpunster, wit, practical joker, and 'little pet lion of the green-room'— deceived the Lord Mnyor of London, the Duke of Gloucester, and some odd thousands of people in humble station, and .raiiixned, jammed, and cianinied such a collection of vehicles of« every sort into Berners Street, that there arose a tangled crush and deadlock of wheels and shafts and horsemeat and swearing drivers such as no city in the world probably ever witnessed before or since. It takes its place in history as the Berners Street Hoax.

A few other instances of clever fooling have also found their way into odd corners of local history. On April 1, 1835, for instance, the New York 'Sun' dropped into what Artemus Ward calls 'a comikjl mood.' This was in tho days before submarine cables put an electric girdlo round the earth. The 'Sun' — or, rather, Richard Alton Locke, one of its writers — described a wondrous telescope which (it foaid) had ju&t been invented by Sir John Herschel and Sir David Brewster. A glance at tho moon through its wondrous lenses showed verdant trees, flowing rivers, basaltic rocks adorned with nodding scarlet poppies, goats, sheep,, pelicans, unicorns, and a creature shaped like a man, but with the membraneswings of a bat. The American scientific world ' bit.' So did the newspaper press : it went into acute panegyrics, sounded the loud timbrel over the latest triumph of science, and covered Herschel and Brewster with what Tom Sawyer calls 'cords of glory.' It is Edgar Allen Poe who tells the tale of the hoax ; and he declares that not one person in ten discredited the story, or saw the moonshine in the 'Sun's ' fine-spun fairy tale.

'A quarter of a century elapsed before another historic piece of Ajxril fooling came around. Here is how Jt is described in Chambers' 'Book of Days' : In March, 1860, a vast multitude of people received through the post a cat d having the following inscription, with a seal marked by an inveited sixpence at one of tho jingles, thus having, to superficial observation, an official appearance: "Tower of London Admit Beat or and Fnend to view the Annual Ceieniony of Washing tho White Lions, on Sunday, April Ist, 1800 Admit only at the White Gate It is particularly req/iestod that no giatiuties ho given to the Wardens or then Assistant " This tuck,' the 'Book of l>avs ' adds, 'is caul to have been highly successful Cabs wore iattlmg about Tower 11)11 all that Sunday nunnuig, vainly cndeavoimg to diseo\er the 'White date " ' Some.years ago the 'New York Graphic' perpetrated a ciuel Apul hoax that lecalls the earlier ex|)loit of its contempor ai v, tho "Sun ' It was another story of inventive science It credited Edison with having devised a wondrous machine which n.ade honest hock, claret, and other wines out of water and evolved ceiea.l fooe's f1 om clods of common eaith Once more the editors swallowed the golden legend at a Ri'lp, and took down their harjs and sarg hosannas to science and to Edison ' Millions,' said one pane^viist, ' will rise up and call him blessed.' The world (another declared) should be thankful that genius 'cannot now be blighted and cnppled by snpei stit ion and bigot ly, as in the day a of Galileo ' And so on When the rolling chorus was completed the 'CJiaphic' cruelly quoted tho most inflated passages fiom its deluded contempoi am s and smilmcdv let the cat out of the bag. And none was so Boeotian ns not to understand .