I have had many literary enthusiasms, some of them transient, some of
them lasting, but Pope was never one of them. He seems to me to
dwell in a walled-in garden, very perfectly kept, amazingly neat and
tidy with the box-hedges trimmed to a nicety and shaped here and
there into cocks and other fantasies; but airless and stuffy. I like
to take a stroll down his trim couplets now and then, but I am soon
content to pass out to the landscapes where the Miltons and Shelleys
and Wordsworths and Shakespeares fill the lungs with the great winds
and feast the eye with the great spaces. I do not therefore feel any
particular horror at Professor Karl Pearson's discovery that Pope is
a plagiarist. I should not be disturbed if he proved he was a bad
plagiarist. He has not done that, but he has found that Pope's
aphorism, "The proper study of mankind is Man," is lifted from Pierre
Charron--"La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homme c'est
l'Homme." It seems to me a rather poor, pedestrian thing to
steal--so commonplace indeed as to defy paternity. Anybody might
have said it without feeling that he had said something that anybody
else could not have said as well.
If this were the worst charge of plagiarism that could be brought
against Pope--and I shall show presently that it is not--few
illustrious poets would have so clean a record. If we damned him for
so trivial a theft as this, what sort of punishment would be left for
the colossal borrowings of a Shakespeare or a Burns? Take, for
example, that most exquisite of Burns's songs, "O, my luve is like a
red, red rose." There is not a single stanza that is not lifted from
old ballads and chapbooks. Compare, as an illustration, the third
stanza:
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear.
While the sands o' life shall run.
with this from _The Young Man's Farewell to his Love_ in the
Motherwell collection of chapbooks:
The seas they shall run dry,
And rocks melt into sands;
Then I'll love you still, my dear,
When all those things are done.
Even the fine change from "melt into sands" to "melt wi' the sun" is
traceable to another source. Wordsworth and Milton, proud and
austere though they were, were not above enriching their verse with
borrowed thoughts. Milton's borrowings from Dante are abundant, but
they are done in the grand manner, as of a prince taking a loan from
an equal, not because he needs it, but as a token of their high
companionship and their starry discourse. To be plagiarised by
Milton would be no grievance, but a crowning distinction. It would
be a title-deed for immortality. The two most beautiful lines in the
poem on the daffodils by Ullswater are Dorothy Wordsworth's, and in
sending _The Ettrick Shepherd_ to the _Athenæum_ for publication
Wordsworth acknowledged that in the lines:
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits
Or waves that own no curbing hand.
he was indebted to a now unknown poet, G. Bell, who in speaking of
Skiddaw said, "Yon dark cloud _rakes_ and shrouds its noble brow."
One can imagine G. Bell being famous in the Elysian Fields as the man
from whom Wordsworth once borrowed a thought.
The indebtedness of Keats to others is indebtedness for words rather
than ideas, but it is an immense debt. You can almost trace his
reading by the perfumed words that he has ravished from other
gardens, and to which he has given a new and immortal setting. When
he writes: "Oh Moon! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee," we know that
he has been dipping into Beaumont and Fletcher, and so we may track
him through Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Sandys'
_Ovid_ and Thomson's _Seasons_, and a score of other luxuriant
gardens of long ago. But this plucking of verbal flowers can hardly
come within the scope of plagiarism. For that accusation to hold
there must be some appropriation of ideas or at least of rhythm and
form. Often the appropriation may be so transfigured as to rob it of
any element of discredit. Thus, Tennyson's:
Our little systems have their day.
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
is clearly traceable to the magnificent image in Shelley's _Adonais_:
The One remains; the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
In both we have the idea of Heaven's light streaming down upon the
"broken lights" of our earthly tabernacle, and being splintered into
many-coloured fragments, but the later poet's employment of the idea,
however inferior, is sufficiently original and fresh to warrant the
spoliation. And, indeed, Shelley himself must have had a great
phrase of St. Augustine's in mind when he wrote his immortal stanza.
Often the apparent plagiarism is unintended, even unconscious. Some
minds are tenacious of good things and quite honestly forgetful of
the source. I don't refer to cases like that of the late Canon
Fleming, who preached and published a sermon of Dr. Talmage's as his
own, and when exposed declared that he had been so impressed by it
that he had written it out and then forgotten it was not his own.
Nor do I refer to such thefts as that of Disraeli from Thiers. In
that case Disraeli, like Fleming, explained that he had copied the
passage into his commonplace book and mistaken it for his own. But
as Thiers did not speak English, the explanation, as Herbert Paul
remarks, was not felt to be explanatory. I refer to honourable men
who would not stoop to these depths of brazen effrontery. In the
instance I have quoted from Tennyson, it is of course obvious that
the poet knew the source. He probably knew Adonais by heart, and he
would certainly not have been shocked to find that others had noted
the similarity. He quite deliberately invited criticism and
comparison. In another case in which he appropriated a picturesque
image from Shakespeare, it is difficult to suppose that he was
unconscious of what he was doing. "Heigho! an it be not four by the
day, I'll be hanged," says the Carrier, calling up the sleepy ostler
in _Henry IV._, "Charles's Wain is over the new chimney and yet our
horse not packed. What, ostler!" In the _May Queen_ we read:
And we danced about the maypole and in the hazel copse
Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney tops.
But, to take a recent instance, I do not imagine that Rupert Brooke
was conscious of any indebtedness to Thoreau when he wrote:
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
_And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes._
Yet I do not think it would be possible to deny to these lines an
indisputable echo of Thoreau's:
_I hearing get who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before;_
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern who had but learning's lore.
It is conceivable that Brooke had not read Thoreau, though not
probable. What is probable is that he had read the lines and that
their vivid comparison of physical and spiritual apprehension had
taken seed in his fertile mind and germinated in due season.
It would not be easy for a man who wrote much to escape reminiscences
of this sort. Even if he read nothing he would still inevitably hit
on many ideas, similes, images, that others had used before him. The
charge of plagiarism is only valid where the borrowing is deliberate
and employed without creating new thought and new effects. Perhaps
the most familiar illustration is that of Macaulay's New Zealander in
the essay on Ranke's _History of the Popes_. It has been traced to
many sources. It is found in Mrs. Barbauld and in Volney's _Ruins of
Empires_. But the most exact parallel is this from Shelley's
introduction to _Peter Bell the Third_:
Hoping that the immortality you have given to the Fudges you will
receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London is an
habitation of bitterns; when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall
stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled
marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of
islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their
broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator,
etc.
There is the whole vision complete, done in the spirit of comedy a
generation before Macaulay dressed it in the pomp of his martial
prose. Of course, Macaulay was familiar with the passage, and I
assume he would have said that the idea was so exploited that it was
common property which anybody was entitled to use who had a need and
a use for it. And that is the best excuse that can be urged for most
plagiarisms which are not mere cases of brazen theft or sheer
desecration. It is the latter offence which is the more inexcusable.
Honest stealing may be defended; but to steal and to degrade is past
forgiveness. What adequate punishment could one devise for that
queer ornament of the Church, Warburton, who in his _Enquiry into the
Causes of Prodigies and Miracles_ could, half a century after the
publication of the _Areopagitica_, write thus:
Methinks I see her, like a mighty eagle, renewing her immortal youth
and purging her opening sight at the unobstructed benign meridian Sun
who some pretend to say had been dazzled and abused by an inglorious
pestilential meteor; while the ill-affected birds of night would with
their envious hootings prognosticate a length of darkness and decay.
If this banal nonsense is compared with Milton's original it will not
be easy to deny it the distinction of being the most clumsy example
of plagiarism on record. And Pope himself could not only plagiarise
but belittle his plunder, as witness his appropriation of Jonson's
fine lines:
What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?
which he converts into:
What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps and points to yonder glade?
Mr. Kipling, who is not himself, I think, much given to borrowing
from others, is the most unequivocal advocate of free trade in
plagiarism:
When 'Omer smote his bloomin' lyre,
'E 'eard men sing by land and sea.
And what 'e thought 'e might require
'E went and took--the same as me.
Men knew he stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They never made no noise or fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
And 'e winked back--the same as us.
That may be the lawless law for the Olympians, but it will not serve
humbler folk. You must be a big man to plagiarise with impunity.
Shakespeare can take his "borrowed plumes" from whatever humble bird
he likes, and, in spite of poor Greene's carping, his splendour is
undimmed, for we know that he can do without them. Burns can pick up
a lilt in any chapbook and turn it to pure gold without a "by your
leave." These gods are beyond the range of our pettifogging meums
and tuums. Their pockets are so rich that a few coins that do not
belong to them are no matter either way. But if you are a small man
of exiguous talents and endeavour to eke out your poverty from the
property of others you will discover that plagiarism is a capital
offence, and that the punishment is for life. In
literature--whatever the case may be in life--there is one law for
the rich and another for the poor, and "that in the captain's but a
choleric word which in the soldier is flat blasphemy."