Puslapio vaizdai
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And raise the hue and cry, and vow
The hand that wrote them now doth send
them,

You'll aid them much by this relief,
And bring confusion on the thief!''

Here" thief" is plagiarius, and a thief the rival poet is, for he gives himself out to be the author of another's book, and steals it ready-made.

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This is the only perfect plagiarism, according to the definition-namely, the claiming of a work of art which belongs to another man. Now, plainly this kind of plagiarism is rare, nor would it be easy to mention a case in which it has been successful. In a number of novels we meet the story of a man who comes into possession of a book in manuscript, perhaps the deposit of a friend, and who publishes the work as a performance of his own. Such a man is a blagiarius; he casts his net (plaga) over the property of another. In real life it might be impossible to find an example of success in this kind of robbery. There are, unluckily, plenty of men and women who take credit, among their relations and friends, for the authorship of anonymous books which have been successful. They are “claimants,' like the Tichborne pretender, rather than successful plagiarists. The case of George Eliot and "Adam Bede is well known. There was a person named Liggins who gave himself out for the author, and even reaped some social if not pecuniary benefit. In the same way, but on a smaller scale, there were various pretenders to the honor of having written a certain essay in the Saturday Review, "The Girl of the Period." According to the actual writer, one of the pretenders was a clergyman. About twelve years ago an admired poet had great trouble with a married lady who asserted that the poet's real name was her assumed nom de guerre. Her husband, naturally, was well deceived by this fair retiaria and caster of the plaga over other people's poems. Though it has nothing to do with the question of plagiarism, let us commiserate unlucky persons of letters whose real names, somehow, sound like assumed names. It is a misfortune they can scarcely recover from, and probably many people in the country still believe that Lord Lytton wrote

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"Evan Harrington'' and Richard Feverel.''

Mr. Liggins did not succeed in the long run, nor does literary history, perhaps, contain a single example of the triumph of a literary Perkin Warbeck. Only in very unusual and fantastic circumstances could he hope to keep the goods he stole ready-made. In the last novel on this situation, the pretender had every reason to believe that the true author of the MS. was drowned at sea. Unlucky and ill-advised pretender! The sea invariably gives up her deadin novels. Short of such an unexpected accident as the sea's not giving up her dead, how is the true plagiarist to feel comfortable with his stolen goods? Almost his only chance, and that a bad one, would be by way of translation from some little-known language. Not long ago a story or novel by a modern author was published in a periodical. Presently the editor got a letter from a correspondent, offering to furnish "the sequel of your little tale from the Basque,' or whatever the original language may have been. Yes, it is very difficult to find a language safe to steal from. Let me confess that, in a volume of tales written by way of holiday tasks, I once conveyed a passage from the Zulu. There could not have been a more barefaced theft, and no doubt, in the present inflamed condition of the moral sense, somebody would have denounced me, had the tale been successful. But as long as you do not excite the pretty passion of envy, you may drive the Zulu cows unnoticed. There were only about three lines in the passage after all. The coolness of plagiarism has occasionally been displayed on a larger scale, as when a novelist boldly took a whole battle scene out of Kinglake's "History of the Crimean War." He was found out, but he did not seem to care much. Probably this particularly daring theft was a mere piece of mischief-a kind of practical joke. What other explanation can be given of Mr. Disraeli's raid on M. Thiers, and the speech about General Saint-Cyr? Of course, Mr. Disraeli could have made a better speech for himself. Thefts of this kind, like certain literary forgeries, are prompted by the tricksy spirit of Puck. But the joke

is not in good taste, and is dangerous to play, because the majority of mankind will fail to see the fun of it, and will think the thief a thief in sober earnest. Only a humorous race would have made a God of Hermes, who stole cattle from the day his mother cradled him.

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From these and similar cases, the difficulty, the all but impossibility, of successful plagiarism becomes manifest. If you merely use old ideas (and there are no new ideas), and so produce a fresh combination, a fresh whole, you are not a plagiarist at all. If you boldly annex the novel ready-made, either by way of translation, or publication of a manuscript not your own, you are instantly found out, and probably never get back your reputation. It appears that Mr. Charles Reade, in the Wandering Heir, "bodily appropriated" twenty or thirty lines of a little-known poem of Dean Swift's, descriptive of fashionable life in Dublin. Mr. Reade appears to have used this poem in such a way as to make the public think it was his own composition. If he did, he acted, to say the least, with very great rashness. He reckoned without the unsuccessful novelist, and the unsuccessful novelist's family. Of course he was denounced as a plagiarist by two anonymous writers, who afterward turned out to be a not very successful rival novelist and his wife." These "lynx-eyed detectives" do, pretty often, turn out to be" unsuccessful novelists and their kinsmen. Mr. Reade then uttered loud cries of wrath, and spoke of "masked batteries manned by anonymuncula, pseudonymuncula, and skunkula.” *

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He contended that to transplant a few lines out of Swift, and to weld them with other topics in a heterogeneous work, was not plagiarism, but one of every true inventor's processes, and that only an inventor could do it well." The whole affair was not worth much consideration, but Mr. Reade's theory of what a true inventor might lawfully do was certainly a little advanced. A lump of such a brilliant manufactured article as a poem by Swift would be apt to look incongruous even in a true inventor's prose, and certainly was ap

"How Charles Reade Worked;" St. James's Gazette, May 3, 1887.

propriated ready-made. If Swift's notions about Dublin society had been adopted, and had informed the prose of Mr. Reade, a legitimate use would have been made of the material. Or, if Mr. Reade had said, "the Dean of St. Patrick's wrote thus on the subject,' then once more the propriety of the quotation would have been unimpeachable. But perhaps the former of these suggestions will be demurred to by our moralists. There appears to be an idea that a novelist must acknowledge, in a preface or in footnotes, every suggestion of fact which comes to him from any quarter. For example, I write a novel in which a man is poisoned by curari. Am I to add a note saying, "These details as to the Macusi tribe are extracted from Wallace, from Bates, and from Brett's Indians of Guiana (London: Bell and Daldy. 1878). I have also to acknowledge the kind assistance of Professor Von Selber of Leiden. For another and earlier example of a somewhat similar use of this drug, the curious may consult Le Crime de l'Omnibus,' by M. Fortuné du Boisgobey, to whose practice, however, science may urge certain pathological objections.

This kind of thing is customary and appropriate in books of learning, but it seems incredible pedantry to demand such explanations from authors of works of fancy. When the scene of a story and the manners of the people described are not known to a novelist by personal experience, he must get his information out of books. For example, any reader of the first volume of Mr. Payn's “By Proxy" might fancy that Mr. Payn had passed his life in the Flowery Land. But this is believed to be a false impression, caused by the novelist's ingenious use of works of travel. Is he bound to acknowledge every scrap of information in a preface or a note? The idea is absurd. A novel would become a treatise, like Bekker's "Charicles.'' The effect of this conscientiousness may be studied in the "Epicurean'' of the late Mr. Thomas Moore, where there are plentiful citations, on every page, of Egyptologists-for the most part exploded. The story would be better without the notes, which are useless in the age of Maspero and Mariette. Of

course, if any novelist can make his notes as delightful as Sir Walter Scott's, the more he gives us the better we shall be pleased-provided they come at the end of the volume.

All ideas are old; all situations have been invented and tried, or almost all. Probably a man of genius might make a good story even out of a selected assortment of the very oldest devices in romance. Miss Thackeray made capital stories out of the fairy tales, that are older than Rameses II., and were even published by a scribe of that monarch's. Give Mr. Besant or Mr. Stevenson two lovers, and insist that, in telling these lovers' tale, the following incidents shall occur:

A Sprained Ankle.

An Attack by a Bull.

he stole the Cyclops almost ready-made.* There are, doubtless, exceptions to this rule of the universality and public character of the stock of fiction. These exceptions are rather of an empirical sort, and should be avoided chiefly for the sake of weak brethren, who go about writing long letters in the newspapers.

A few instances may be given from personal experience. A novelist once visited the writer in high spirits. Certain events of a most extraordinary nature had just occurred to him, events which would appear incredible if I ventured to narrate them. My visitor meant to make them the subject of a story, which he sketched. But you can't," I said; "that's the plot of 'Ferdinand's Folly,'"' and I named a book which had just arrived sub luminis

A Proposal in a Conservatory, watched oras. He had not heard of "Ferdiby a Jealous Rival.

A Lost Will.

An Intercepted Correspondence. Even out of these incidents it is probable that either of the authors mentioned could produce a novel that would soothe pain and charm exile. Nor would they be accused of plagiarism, because the ideas are, even by the most ignorant or envious, recognized as part of the common stock-in-trade.

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nand's Folly," but he went away sad,
for he was a young man that had been
robbed of great opportunity. But he
was presently consoled by receiving a
letter from another author, a gentleman
of repute in more than one branch of
literature. "I have just read your
'Daisy's Dream,' said this author,
" and I find that there is a scene in it
which is also in my unpublished work,
'Psamathöe.' " He then described the
scene, which certainly did appear of
glaring originality-if anything could be
original. Nobody will believe two
people could have invented this; and
what am I to do?" said the second un-
fortunate author; and indeed I do not
know what he did, or whether "Psama-
thöe" was punished by an early doom
for her unconscious plagiarism.
study of the diffusion of popular tales
seems to show that there is no incident
which may not be invented over and
over
over again-in Siberia, or Samoa.
These coincidences will also occur in
civilized literature; but some examples
are so astonishing that the small fry of
moralists are certain to shout "Stop
thief." On the whole, an author thus
anticipated had better stop before they
shout, but it was the merest accident
that gave pause to the two novelists of
these anecdotes. Alas! unconscious of

Now, it is a fact that almost every notion and situation is as much part of the common stock-in-trade as those old friends. The "Odyssey," for example, might be shown to contain almost all the material of the romance that is accepted as outside of ordinary experience. For instance, in "She" we find a wondrous woman, who holds a man in her hollow caves (note the caves, there are caves in Homer), and offers him the gift of immortality. Obviously this is the position of Odysseus and Calypso. Rousseau remarked that the whole plot of the "Odyssey" would have been ruined by a letter from Odysseus to Penelope. Rousseau had not studied Wolf; but had letters been commonly written in Homer's time, the poet would have bribed one of Penelope's women to intercept them. Homer did not use that incident, because he did not need it; but all his incidents were of primeval antiquity, even in his own time; he plagiarized them from popular stories; der Odyssee.”

* Gerland:

The

'Alt-Griechische Märchen in

their doom, the little victims might have. published.

Another very hard case lately came under my notice. A novelist invented and described to me a situation which was emphatically new, because it rested on the existence of a certain scientific instrument, which was new also. The author was maturing the plot, when he chanced to read a review of some new work (I never saw it, and have forgotten its name), in which the incident and the instrument appeared. Now, may this author write his own tale, or may he not? If he does (and if it succeeds), he will be hailed as an abandoned rogue; and yet it is his own invention. Probably it is wiser to "endure and abstain; otherwise, the "lynx-eyed detectives' will bring out their old learning, and we shall be told once more how Ben Jonson stole "Drink to me only with thine eyes" from-Pisistratus! This 1 lately learned from a newspaper. Thus it appears that, though plagiarism is hardly a possible offence, it is more discreet not to use situations which have either made one very definite impression on the world of readers, or which have been very recently brought out. For example: it is distinctly daring to make a priest confess his unsuspected sin in a sermon. The notion is public property; but every one is reminded of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter." Thus the situation is a thing to avoid; as certain measures-that of In Memoriam" for example-are to be avoided in poetry. The metre is everybody's property, but it at once recalls the poem wherein the noblest use was made of it. Again, double personality is a theme open to all the world: Gautier and Poe and Eugène Sue all used it; but it is wiser to leave it alone while people have a vivid memory of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is not inconceivable that an author might use the old notion as brilliantly and with as much freshness as Mr. Stevenson has done; it is certain that if he tries, he will be howled at by the moral mob. A novelist may keep these precautions in his mind; but if, though he writes good books, he is not a bookish man, he will be constantly and unwittingly offending people who do not write good books, although they are bookish. Thus it lately happened

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to me to see an illustration of an unpublished work, in which a wounded and dying warrior was using his last force to break, with singular consequences, the weapon that had been his lifelong companion. I knew (being bookish) the incident was perfectly familiar to me, but I could not remember where I had met it before. It haunted me like the names which you try to recover from faithless memory, and one day it flashed on me that this incident was at least eight hundred years old. But I leave (not its source, for the novelist who is no bookman had probably never tasted of that literary fountain), but the place of its early appearance, to be remembered or discovered by any one who is curious enough to consult his memory or his library. But here another question arises: let it be granted that the novelist first found the situation where I found it, and is there any reason in the world why he should not make what is a thoroughly original use of it? The imagination or invention needed for this particular adaptation was at least as vivid and romantic as the original conception, which, again, might occur, and may have occurred, separately to minds in Japan and in Peru.

I have chiefly spoken of plagiarism in fiction, for there is little need to speak of plagiarism in poetry. Probably no man or woman (apart from claiming a ready-made article not their own) ever consciously plagiarized in verse. The smallest poetaster has too much vanity to borrow on purpose. Unconsciously even great men (Scott confesses in one case) have remembered and repeated the ideas or the rhythm of others. a recent Jubilee Ode one reads (indeed it is quoted in a newspaper article on plagiarism):

In

"Deep-based on ancient right as on thy people's will

Thy rule endures unshattered still." The debt to the Laureate's verse is not to be mistaken; but no less unmistakable is the absence of consciousness of this in the author. When I was a freshman, and when Mr. Swinburne was the new poet, I wrote a (most justly unsuccessful) Newdigate, in which I thought there was a good line. Somebody's hands were said to be

"Made of a red rose swooning into white."

This seemed "all wery capital," like matrimony to Mr. Weller, till I found, in "Chastelard," somebody's hand “Made of a red rose that has turned to white." The mind of the unconscious plagiarist had not been wholly inactive, as the word "swooning" shows, but it was a direct though unintentional robbery. No robberies, in verse, are made, I think, with more malice prepense than this early larceny.

On the whole, then, the plagiarist appears to be a decidedly rare criminal, whereas charges of plagiarism have always been as common as blackberries. An instructive example is that of Molière and Les Précieuses." Everything in it, cried Somaise and De Villiers, is from the Abbé de Pure, the Italians, and Chapuzeau. But somehow none of these gallant gentlemen did, in fact, write Les Précieuses Ridicules," nor anything that anybody,except the Molièr

iste ever heard of.

The laudable anxiety of the Somaises of all time for literary honesty would be more laudable still if they did not pos

sess a little vice of their own. It is not

a vice of which any man is the fanfaron: the delicate veiled passion of Envy. Indeed, these lynx-eyed ones have a bad example in their predecessor, Mr. Alexander Pope.

Mr. Pope had a friend who became an enemy-Mr. Moore, who took the name of Smythe. This Mr. Moore Smythe wrote a comedy, "The Rival Modes," played in 1727, wherein the persons occasionally dropped into poetry, printed in italics. On March 18, 1728, an anonymous correspondent in the Daily Journal accused Mr. Pope of having plagiarized certain verses from this comedy, and published them in the third volume of his "Miscellanies :" "'Tis thus that vanity coquettes rewards,

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards" and so forth. There was no doubt that these verses, after appearing in the

"Rival Modes,' "Rival Modes," came out in Pope's "Miscellanies. But in 1729, in the enlarged edition of the "Dunciad," Pope quoted the anonymous letters the verses were his own, and that Moore(there were two), and maintained that Smythe was the plagiarist. He had given Smythe leave to use them (the men had once been on good terms), and had suggested their withdrawal later. Pope then, on a quarrel with Smythe, published them, and antedated them (1723), in order to found or support the charge of plagiarism against Smythe. And Mr. Alexander Pope himself

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Twist") was his own anonymous ac(like Conkey in "Oliver self, that he might retort it on the luckcuser, bringing the charge against himless Moore-Smythe. But Mr. MooreSmythe was in one respect well advised : he made no reply.

Though it appears from this anecdote, as told in Mr. Carruthers' Life of Pope, that people who bring charges of plagiarism are not invariably of a delicate morality, yet a review of the whole topic cannot but console the moralist. Mr. Matthew Arnold assigns to morality but a poor seven-eighths in the composition of human life. But we see that morality has far more interest and importance than this estimate allows. A fiction might be published (I wish it masterpiece of mere art in poetry or were probable) without exciting one hundredth part of the interest provoked by the charge of stealing half a page. Thus we learn that Art is of no importance at all in comparison with Conduct. A good new book is murmured about at a few dinner parties. A wicked new action-say the purloining, real or alleged, of twenty lines-is thundered about from the house-top, and flashed along all the network of electric wires from London to San Francisco. While men have this overpowering interest in morals, who can despair of humanity? Contemporary Review.

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