wit and humour may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changing
facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling
sea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the
ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its
irrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as
gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on
the robbery of our mental wealth?--or let it take its exercise as a
madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing the
populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackened
ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at
which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and
disfigure them into butts of mockery?--nay, worse--use it to degrade the
healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be
degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds
matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion
preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a
second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever
thrilled with light?
This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of
every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less
of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm
and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by
which man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may
demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for
his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that
moral currency be emptied of its value--let a greedy buffoonery debase
all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the
desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling
emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one
with social virtue.
And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their children
ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous "illustrations") of
the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry
them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or
solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which,
with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their
primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious
preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what
might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains of
compassion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these parents have
deposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be
independent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finest
images being degraded and the finest words of genius being poisoned as
with some befooling drug.
Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through this
turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous
laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours? On the contrary.
That delightful power which La Bruyère points to--"le ridicule qui est
quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâce et d'une manière
qui plaise et qui instruise"--depends on a discrimination only
compatible with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight,
and with the justice of perception which is another name for grave
knowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected from faculties on the
strain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowest
incongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected of
a sharper, watching for gulls in a great political assemblage, that he
will notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his
observation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all our
psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we
are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and
habits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in any
particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which we
are continually applying to them. We soak our children in habits of
contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that--as Clarissa
one day said to me--"We can always teach them to be reverent in the
right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to
see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of
cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among
their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the
prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative
of the _Apology_ which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of
ages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:--a new
Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a
moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the
most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. And
here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring
to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt à
baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd en
trois semaines le résultat de plusieurs siècles. La civilisation, la
_vie_ est une chose apprise et inventée, qu'on le sache bien: '_Inventas
aut qui vitam excoluere per artes_.' Les hommes après quelques années de
paix oublient trop cette verité: ils arrivent à croire que la _culture_
est chose innée, qu'elle est la même chose que la _nature_. La
sauvagerie est toujours là à deux pas, et, dès qu'on lâche pied, elle
recommence." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to
learn) that our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric,
is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or
ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a
community, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous
"Swing" were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted to
the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I
see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with
rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with
slang and bold _brusquerie_ intended to signify her emancipated view of
things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I
am sorely tempted to hiss out "_Pétroleuse!_" It is a small matter to
have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense
of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the
promise of life--penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by
images of repulsiveness. These things come--not of higher education,
but--of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgarity
which reverses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to call all things
common and unclean. It comes of debasing the moral currency.
The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenaeus,
becoming conscious that their trick of laughter at everything and
nothing was making them unfit for the conduct of serious affairs,
appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The god
prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective if
they could carry it through without laughing. They did their best; but
the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in this
way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe a
quick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and dignity to a people
who in a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the mercy of a poor
jest.
XI.
THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB
No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to
communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard
to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is
disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original
authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed,
insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a
medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or
statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this
championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He
is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than
is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain
proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real
inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination,
it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the
universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual
products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the
infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the
massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on
that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or
modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically
speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused
for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper
subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or
combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race,
must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or
populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or
Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their
right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author.
One may admit that such considerations carry a profound truth to be
even religiously contemplated, and yet object all the more to the mode
in which Euphorion seems to apply them. I protest against the use of
these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity and
justify the non-payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined or
enforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the large
views as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile an
able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were his
own, when this spoliation is favoured by the public darkness, never
hinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition and
applause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen in
the public ways, those conquerors whose battles and "annexations" even
the carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgment
of a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may never
be asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility to
"debts of honour" would be suitably transferred. There is no massive
public opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations of
thinkers and investigators--relations to be thoroughly understood
and felt only by those who are interested in the life of ideas and
acquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention or
discovery which has an immediate market value; to vamp up a
professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one
already produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copy
somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it
about among friends as an original "effusion;" to deliver an elegant
extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised
eloquence:--these are the limits within which the dishonest
pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bring
more or less shame on the culprit. It is not necessary to understand
the merit of a performance, or even to spell with any comfortable
confidence, in order to perceive at once that such pretences are not
respectable. But the difference between these vulgar frauds, these
devices of ridiculous jays whose ill-secured plumes are seen falling
off them as they run, and the quiet appropriation of other people's
philosophic or scientific ideas, can hardly be held to lie in their
moral quality unless we take impunity as our criterion. The pitiable
jays had no presumption in their favour and foolishly fronted an alert
incredulity; but Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has an audience
who expect much of him, and take it as the most natural thing in the
world that every unusual view which he presents anonymously should be
due solely to his ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruous
feathers awkwardly stuck on; they have an appropriateness which makes
them seem an answer to anticipation, like the return phrases of a
melody. Certainly one cannot help the ignorant conclusions of polite
society, and there are perhaps fashionable persons who, if a speaker
has occasion to explain what the occipat is, will consider that he has
lately discovered that curiously named portion of the animal frame:
one cannot give a genealogical introduction to every long-stored item
of fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revelation for the large
class of persons who are understood to judge soundly on a small basis
of knowledge. But Euphorion would be very sorry to have it supposed
that he is unacquainted with the history of ideas, and sometimes
carries even into minutiae the evidence of his exact registration of
names in connection with quotable phrases or suggestions: I can
therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases
of larger "conveyance" by supposing that he is accustomed by the very
association of largeness to range them at once under those grand laws
of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are
resolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particular
obligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the
earth to the solar system in general.
Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were
brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of
explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as
necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well
known--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for
mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might
injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark
casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has
furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate.
No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the
non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as
well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics
whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of
the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound
learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and
disguised his references to it under contractions in which _Us. Knowl._
took the place of the low word _Penny_. Works of this convenient stamp,
easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich
but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and
whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance
on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this
frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to
our self-love--when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to
be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is
always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or
Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has
been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which
seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may
pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object
except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his
figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must
weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask
themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the
particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of
service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to
him.
After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation is
more difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of a
plagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberate
reproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittal
are obvious and strong:--the inevitable coincidences of contemporary
thinking; and our continual experience of finding notions turning up in
our minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came; so that
if we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we accept
them at once as a new inspiration. Then, in relation to the elder
authors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then of
remembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of
the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long ago
reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry
which is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we were
ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and
proving our honesty in a ruinously expensive manner. On the other hand,
the evidence on which plagiarism is concluded is often of a kind which,
though much trusted in questions of erudition and historical criticism,
is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our daily judgments, especially
of the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas,
whether St Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus
must have known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points on
which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to justice and
charity than an erroneous confidence, supported by reasoning
fundamentally similar, of my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a case
where I am personally concerned. No premisses require closer scrutiny
than those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must have
known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on
the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the
easiest of all things to the human mind is _not_ to know and _not_ to
read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout,
grin, or hiss--these are native tendencies; but to know and to read are
artificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safe
supposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits.
An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagining
his condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we are
all apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must be
general, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes,
and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent
persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent author
happen to be alive to practical teaching he will soon learn to divide
the larger part of the enlightened public into those who have not read
him and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in polite
society, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wish
to conceal this negation and speak of his "incomparable works" with that
trust in testimony which always has its cheering side.
Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of
plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on a
construction of probabilities which a little more attention to everyday
occurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be really
worthless, considered as proof. The length to which one man's memory can
go in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly
find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an
agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you,
with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the first
to elaborate in public; yet any one who listens may overhear such
instances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your peculiar
connection with your acquaintance's judicious views; but why should
_he_? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an
additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember; and a sense of
obligation to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us
in our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is felt
to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want of
polite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day of
celebration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we must recognise as the
first weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember best
is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory of
our neighbours. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour who
borrows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up again
forgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself so
much the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons
cannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, and
have no mental check to tell them that they have carried home a
fellow-visitor's more recent purchase: they may be excellent
householders, far removed from the suspicion of low devices, but one
wishes them a more correct perception, and a more wary sense that a
neighbour's umbrella may be newer than their own.