Thackeray was frequent in praise of Fenimore Cooper, hailing
Leatherstocking as better than any of "Scott's lot"; and this laudation
appeared in the 'Roundabout Papers' long after the British novelist had
paid to the American romancer the sincere flattery of borrowing from the
last words of Natty Bumppo the suggestion, at least, of the last words
of Colonel Newcome. Cooper's backwoodsman, hearing an inaudible
roll-call had responded "Here!" a score of years before Thackeray's old
soldier had become again a child to answer "Adsum!" Not less than a
score of years later an old sailor in one of the stories of Sir Walter
Besant made his final exit from this world with a kindred phrase, "Come
on board, sir!" And then, once more, in one of Mr. Kipling's 'Plain
Tales from the Hills,' we find the last dying speech and confession of a
certain McIntosh who had been a scholar and a gentleman in days gone by,
and who had sunk into irredeemable degradation in India. When his hour
came, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly, "Not guilty, my
Lord!" Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died.
There are criticasters not a few who would denounce Thackeray and Besant
and Mr. Kipling as arrant plagiarists; but critics of a more delicate
perception of the principles of art would rather praise these authors
for the ingenuity with which they had successively made use of Cooper's
original device. Indeed, the more delicate the perceptions of the critic
the less likely would he be to assert positively that all four authors
had not hit on the same effect independently. Thackeray may have taken
it over from Cooper, consciously or unconsciously; Besant may have
borrowed it from either his British or his American predecessor; and
Kipling may have been familiar with it in the pages of Cooper, of
Thackeray, and of Besant, and still have found amusement in giving a new
twist to an old trick. But it is perfectly possible that we have here an
instance of purely accidental similarity, such as keen-eyed readers can
discover abundantly in the highways and byways of literary history.
The theme of M. Paul Bourget's 'André Cornélis' is that of 'Hamlet,' but
in all probability the French novelist was not aware that he was
treading in the footsteps of the English dramatist until his own plot
had taken shape in his mind. A situation in 'Vanity Fair'--that of
Dobbin in love with the widowed Amelia and yet unwilling to break down
her belief in her dead husband's fidelity--was utilized in the
'Henrietta' of Mr. Bronson Howard, who was characteristically scrupulous
in recording on the playbill his indebtedness to Thackeray's novel; and
this same situation at about the same time had been utilized also in a
little one-act play, 'This Picture and That,' by an author who had never
doubted it to be of his own invention (altho he had read 'Vanity Fair'
more than once), and who did not discover how he had exposed himself to
the accusation of plagiarism until he happened to see the 'Henrietta'
acted, and to perceive the full significance of Mr. Howard's memorandum.
It deserves to be noted also that when Colonel Esmond broke his sword
before the unworthy prince whom he had served so long and so loyally, he
was only following an example which had been set by the noble Athos, who
had snapt his weapon asunder before Louis XIV because that inhuman
monarch had taken for himself Mlle. de la Vallière, the young lady
beloved by the Vicomte de Bragelonne, the son of Athos. And the same
effect is to be found also in the opera of 'La Favorite.' The book of
Donizetti's opera bears the names of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz;
but it is said to have been revised by Scribe. It was derived from a
forgotten play called the 'Comte de Comminges,' written by one
Baculard-D'Arnaud, and this in turn had been taken from a novel written
by the notorious Mme. de Tencin, the callous mother of D'Alembert. The
scene of the sword-breaking is not in the novel or the play; and quite
possibly it may have been introduced into the book of the opera by the
fertile and ingenious Scribe. 'La Favorite' was produced in 1840, when
Thackeray was in Paris preparing the 'Paris Sketch Book.' It was in 1850
that Dumas published the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne'; and it was in 1852
that Thackeray put forth 'Henry Esmond.' But it was back in 1829 that
the commandant Hulot in Balzac's 'Chouans' had broken his sword across
his knee rather than carry out an order that seemed to him unworthy.
This is not quite the same effect that we find in 'La Favorite'; but
none the less Scribe may have been indebted to Balzac for the
suggestion.
There is no denying that the striking situation which Thackeray used
with so much skill in his novel had already been utilized in the
stirring romance of Durras and in the pathetic libretto of Royer, Vaëz,
and Scribe. Did Thackeray borrow it from the romance or from the
libretto? Or did he reinvent it for himself, forgetting that it had
already served? He was in Paris when Donizetti's tuneful music was
first heard; and he was going to the opera as often as he could. He was
fond of Dumas's interminable tales of adventure; and he had a special
liking for Athos. It is in one of the 'Roundabout Papers'--'On a Peal of
Bells'--that he declared his preference. "Of your heroic heroes, I think
our friend, Monseigneur Athos, Comte de la Fère, is my favorite." Is
this a case of conveyance, such as is often carelessly called
plagiarism? or is it a case of unconscious reminiscence? That Dumas knew
what he was doing when he lifted the situation out of 'La Favorite' is
very likely, for it was not his custom to be overscrupulous in taking
what he could make his own. But Thackeray had been careful to credit the
suggestion of one or two of his earlier French sketches to the Parisian
story-tellers he had put under contribution. Besides he was a man of
transparent honesty; and it is therefore highly probable that he had no
consciousness that the scene was not original with him.
In one of his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe declared that Byron
had not known how to meet the charge of levying on the earlier poets.
The German sage asserted that the English bard should have been far
bolder in his own defence, and far franker also. Byron should have said:
"What is there, is mine; and whether I got it from a book or from life,
is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use
of it." And then Goethe added that in one of the Waverley novels Scott
had appropriated a scene from 'Egmont'; "and he had a right to do so;
and because he did it well, he deserves praise." Goethe seemed to think
that the privilege of using again what had been invented by another was
justified only when the later author improved on the earlier, or at
least attained to an equal level. He noted that Scott had taken Mignon
in 'Wilhelm Meister' as the model of Fenella in 'Peveril of the
Peak'--"but whether with equal judgment is another question."
Goethe was wise enough to know that human invention is finite and that
the number of possible effects is limited. He once told Eckermann and
Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of
only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken
much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to
find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected. "It
is almost impossible, in the present day," commented Goethe, "to find a
situation which is thoroly new. Only the manner of looking at it can be
new, and the art of treating it and representing it."
Unfortunately, we have not Gozzi's list of the three dozen situations,
nor Schiller's smaller catalog to compare with it. Gérard de
Nerval--that strangest figure of a strange period--considered the matter
anew in the fervid days of French romanticism, and decided that there
were in reality only twenty-four typical situations available for the
theater; but his classification has also failed to come down to us.
However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century an ingenious
Frenchman, M. Georges Polti, accepting the number originally proposed by
Gozzi, examined the plots of several thousand plays, classified the
result of his arduous investigation, and published a little book of two
hundred pages on the '36 Situations Dramatiques.'
Highly interesting as is M. Polti's book, there is not a little
difficulty in grasping the theory upon which he has assorted his immense
collection into exactly three dozen divisions. The logic of his grouping
is not immediately apparent, as it would have been had he taken the
passions, for instance, as the several foundations. His first situation,
for example, is that which we find in one of the earliest of Greek
plays, the 'Suppliants.' M. Polti entitles it 'To Implore,' and he
indicates varying possible subdivisions: (A1) Fugitives imploring
shelter against their enemies, as in the tragedy of Æschylus, the second
act of Shakspere's 'King John,' and repeatedly in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin';
(B1) the ship-wrecked imploring hospitality, as in more than one ancient
drama. But this first situation of his M. Polti finds to be infrequent
on the modern stage, altho often met with in the Greek theater. His
second situation, which we may call 'To Rescue from Imminent Danger,'
has been widely popular alike with the ancients and the moderns, so we
have in subdivision (A) a condemned person rescued by a hero, as in the
myth of Andromeda, the folk-tale of Bluebeard, and the first act of
'Lohengrin'; and in subdivision (B2) a condemned person rescued by a
guest of the house, as in the 'Alcestis' of Euripides.
These two situations, however, are far less effective in evoking the
special pleasure proper to the theater than the nineteenth on M. Polti's
list, "To kill unknowingly one of your own blood." The full force of the
theatric effect of this situation is dependent on the spectators'
complete knowledge of the relationship of slayer and slain, unsuspected
by the victims themselves; and the strength of the situation resides not
in the mere killing, which may indeed be averted at the last moment, but
in the steadily gathering dread which ought to accompany the
preparations for the evil deed. This situation in one or another of its
subdivisions we find in 'Nicholas Nickleby,' as well as in 'OEdipus
the King' and in 'Lady Inger of Ostraat'; in Sophocles it is a son who
murders his unknown father, and in Ibsen it is a mother who murders her
unknown son. It is to be found in the 'Semiramis' of Voltaire, in the
'Merope' of Alfieri, in the 'Ion' of Euripides, and again and again in
Victor Hugo's dramas. M. Polti points out that this single situation is
utilized as the culminating point at the very end of four of Hugo's
plays--the 'Burgraves,' 'Marie Tudor,' 'Lucrèce Borgia' and 'Le Roi
s'amuse' (which supplied the plot for the opera of 'Rigoletto') and he
insists further that one or another subdivision of this situation has
been employed by Hugo at least five times in the single drama of
'Lucrèce Borgia.' If there are still any who hold that Hugo as a
dramatist was "of the race and lineage of Shakspere," they may find
instruction in the fact that this highly artificial situation, which the
superb French lyrist was seemingly unable to leave out of his
arbitrarily complicated plots, was not employed even once by the great
English dramatist.
Probably nothing would have more disagreeably surprized Hugo--who held
himself to be extraordinarily prolific and various, and who indeed had
abundant reason for this belief--than the disclosure of the fact that he
had made use so often of a single situation. And this is evidence, if
any was needed, that the repetition of the same situation by the same
author, or even by a succession of authors down thru the ages, is more
often than not wholly unconscious, and that it is the result, not so
much of any poverty of invention, as of the absolute limitation of the
number of possible situations. The utmost of novelty that any plot-maker
may hope to attain now in the twentieth century is only the result of
his own shuffling of the same pack with which all the plot-makers of the
past have been playing. A new principle he can scarcely hope to invent
for himself; and all that he can safely claim for his most original
sequence of scenes is a patent on the combination.
M. Polti, indeed, has bravely offered to supply ten thousand new plots,
put together by combining and recombining the manifold subdivisions of
his thirty-six situations, some of which he has ascertained to have been
sadly neglected by the playwrights of our time. One may venture to doubt
whether there would be profit in taking advantage of this generous
offer, for if certain situations essayed in the past have not been
popular of late, there is warrant for wondering whether this neglect is
not due to an instinctive feeling on the part of the playwright of the
present that these situations would fail to excite the interest of the
playgoers of our own time and to evoke an emotional response. To insure
the success of a play, it is not enough that the author should combine
an ingenious sequence of striking scenes; he has always the spectators
to reckon with also, their likes and dislikes. The practical playwright
knows only too well, and often by sad experience, that the audience of
to-day does not relish certain situations which run counter to its
prejudices and its predilections, however pleasing these same situations
may have been to audiences of the past. The duty of personal vengeance,
for example--which was at the center of the tragedy-of-blood, ever
delightful to Tudor theatergoers--has been disestablished by the advance
of civilization; and it is therefore no longer acceptable as the
dominant motive of a drama of modern life.
There is not a little significance, however, in another of M. Polti's
suggestions--that perhaps a portion of the beauty and power we discern
in the great plays of the Greeks was directly due to the accepted
limitation of the themes which a tragic writer held himself authorized
to treat. The restriction of the number of available legends forced the
successive dramatists of Athens to handle again, each in his turn, the
dark stories already dealt with by his predecessors. The fateful lives
of OEdipus, for example, and of his family, of Agamemnon, and of his
unhappy offspring--these were shown in action in the orchestra of the
theater of Dionysus again and again, by Æschylus, by Sophocles, by
Euripides, and by many another poet-playwright of that splendid epoch
whose works have not descended to us. Of necessity, the dramatist was
nerved to keenest endeavor by the knowledge that his play had to
withstand a comparison with other plays presenting the same characters
in the same situations, and by the certainty that his personal
contribution would stand out sharply. A similar ordeal was undergone by
the great painters of the Italian Renascence, who tried their hands,
almost all of them, on the Madonna with the Holy Child, on the Descent
from the Cross, and on every other of the score of stock subjects then
in favor for the appropriate decoration of altar and alcove and dome.
There is wisdom in M. Brunetière's assertion that "just as obedience is
the apprenticeship of command, so is imitation the novitiate of
originality."
We may be assured that this narrow limiting of the number of themes
likely to be treated by the painters of Italy and by the playwrights of
Greece at once diminished the demand on them for mere invention and left
them free to put forth the utmost strength of their imagination, so that
the artist could express himself fully and interpret in his own fashion
a subject certain to be handled sooner or later by the chief of his
fellow-crafts-men. And if the descent from the sublime is not too
sudden, attention might here be called to the similar method of
measuring the skill of the individual performer which we perceive in a
later and more scientific development of what was once almost a game of
chance. In "duplicate whist," as it is called, identical hands are
played in turn by a succession of players, who are thus put to the test
sharply, each withstanding comparison with every one of his rivals.
A strange fascination there is in the wish that it might be possible to
apply to the art of fiction--which is often little more than a game of
chance--the comparative method of duplicate whist. It would be possible
for us to weigh the merits of the novelists far more exactly, if we
could only impose upon all of them, once in a way, the treatment of the
same theme, every successive story-teller making it his own for the
moment, assimilating it, handling it as he pleased, in accordance with
his own instincts and his own principles. It would enable us to note how
adroitly the artist in narrative could deal with a topic which he did
not feel to be sympathetic or stimulating; and on the other hand, it
would show us how much this author or that has been sustained by the
signal good fortune which put into his hands once at least the one
subject best suited to his method and his temperament. In time, it
would train the critical reader in the habit of distinguishing between
theme and treatment; and it would encourage him to face the task of
weighing the merits of each of these separately.
Altho we cannot insist that the novelists of the twentieth century shall
undergo this ordeal, we may amuse ourselves by guessing at the result if
the test had been applied to the novelists of the centuries that have
gone before. There is no difficulty in picking out a plot familiar to
all of us now and universal in its appeal--a plot which any story-teller
of any age might have chosen to develop in his own fashion. And perhaps
no story is better fitted for this experiment than the heart-rending
tale which Shakspere took from the Italian and transfigured by his
genius into the immortal tragedy of 'Romeo and Juliet.' Quarrels between
rival families have been frequent enough, and young couples there have
always been who loved wilfully in spite of a heritage of hate. There is
a never-fading enchantment in the story of their struggles, whatever the
country where they lived and died, and whatever their station in
society.
How would this tale have been told in the eighteenth century by the
author of 'Robinson Crusoe'? by the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe'? by the
author of 'Tom Jones'? by the author of 'Tristram Shandy'? How would it
have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to
it, or Thackeray? How would it be presented now in the twentieth century
if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James? We need not
ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the
Shepardson-Grangerford episode of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he could bring
out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the
humorous realist who was the son of the town drunkard. Nor have we to
inquire how it would have presented itself to Erckmann-Chatrian, because
the Alsatian collaborators made it their own in the somber pages of the
'Rantzau.'
It is not rash to assume that Defoe would have set up rival shopkeepers,
one with a son and the other with a daughter; and he would have
delighted in accumulating the minutest details of the daily life of the
competing tradesmen. The fathers would have been sturdy Englishmen, both
of them, obstinate and pious; and the preaching of a sound morality
would never have been neglected. The narrative would purport to be
truth; and probably it would be credited to the pen of one of the
partisans, setting down in the first person a conscientious record of
what he had seen with his own eyes. But if Richardson had wisht to make
our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he
would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe's
method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of 'Pamela'
felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the
letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to
Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse. The tenser the tragic gloom, the
more voluminous these letters would become, the more self-analytical,
and at the same time, the more pathetic. If Fielding had selected this
story as the basis of a prose-epic we should have a masterly structure,
perhaps distorted by an undue insistence upon Romeo's youthful intrigue
with Rosaline. And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic
tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet's parents, with
all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and after unending digressions
the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the
arms of the nurse.
To declare how Dickens might have presented the same theme is not
difficult. The tragedy would sink to tortuous melodrama, and there would
be much mystery-mongering, with a careful covering up of dark secrets to
be revealed only at an opportune moment. The large simplicity of the
theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate
pathos would be insisted upon. Probably Juliet would die in blank verse,
disguised as prose. But Mercutio, altho he would certainly cease to be a
gentleman, would be a most amusing personality whose whimsical behavior
would seem highly laughable; and the nurse might become another Mrs.
Gamp, with a host of peculiarities realized with riotous humor. And it
is possible also to make a guess at the treatment which would have been
accorded to the pitiful tale if Thackeray had undertaken it. The tragedy
would have softened into a tragi-comedy with a happy ending probably,
the loving couple being reprieved somehow in the final chapters just
before the kindly author put his puppets away, after preaching a last
gentle sermon on the vanity of life. The background would be the British
society of the middle of the nineteenth century; and some Lady Kew,
delightfully clever and selfishly arrogant, might be the chief of one
clan, and some Lord Steyne, bitter and masterful, might head the rival
house. And not improbably the narrator would be Mr. Arthur Pendennis
himself.
Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. March might constitute the chorus, if Mr. Howells
were to lay the scene here in New York, bringing one family from the
West, endowed somehow with a certain elemental largeness of mold, and
importing the other from that New England which could be held
responsible for the sensitiveness of their self-torturing consciences.
There would be no blinking of the minor selfishnesses of humanity; and
neither hero nor heroine would stand forth flawless. Their failures
would be very human; and the author would withhold all comment, leaving
the veracity of the portrayal to speak for itself. There would be
unrolled before the reader the broad panorama of the cosmopolitan
metropolis, infinitely variegated, often harsh in color, but forever
fascinating in the intensity of its vitality. The modern tragedy with
its catastrophe internal rather than external, would be laid before us
in a narrative containing endless miracles of delicate observation and
countless felicities of delicate phrasing.
Like many another distinguished painter, Mr. Henry James has at least
three manners, following one another in the order of time; and there is
no certainty at which stage of his career he might be tempted to the
telling of this tale. Early in his evolution as a novelist, he might
have seized upon it as the promising foundation for an international
complication, altho even then he would have attenuated the more violent
crudities of the original story. Later, he might have been lured into
essaying the analysis of Juliet's sentiments, as she was swayed by her
growing attachment for Romeo, and as she was restrained by her
indurated fidelity to the family tradition. More recently still, Mr.
James might have perceived the possibility of puzzling us by letting us
only dimly surmise what had past behind the closed doors that shut in
the ill-fated lovers, and of leaving us in a maze of uncertainty and a
mist of doubt, peering pitifully, and groping blindly for a clew to
tangled and broken motives.
Perhaps it is idle thus to wonder how any one of a dozen novelists of
distinctive talent would have treated this alluring theme had he taken
it for his own. But of this we may be certain, that any novelist of
individuality who had chosen it would have made it his own, and would
have sent it forth stamped with his own image and superscription.
Indeed, the same tale told by Richardson and by Sterne, altho they were
contemporary sentimentalists, would have had so little in common that
the careless reader might fail to see any similarity whatsoever; and
probably even the pettiest of criticasters would feel no call to bring
an accusation of plagiarism against either of them.
(1905.)