laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. All our plans,
managements, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom and love which
man represents, are equally imperfect and ridiculous. But we cannot
afford to part with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, as well
as by tears and terrors; explore the whole of nature,--the farce and
buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and
philosophers upstairs, in the hall,--and get the rest and refreshment of
the shaking of the sides. But the comic also has its own speedy limits.
Mirth quickly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon die of
inanition, as some persons have been tickled to death. The same scourge
whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was convulsing
Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to
obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming
his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him
to go to the theatre and see Carlini. He replied, "I am Carlini."
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
WHOEVER looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and
innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have
remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the
main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we
see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with
equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.
In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He
who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against
calamity. Like Plato's disciple who has perceived a truth, "he is
preserved from harm until another period." In every man's memory, with
the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books
which met his views. Of a large and powerful class we might ask with
confidence, What is the event they most desire? what gift? What but the
book that shall come, which they have sought through all libraries,
through all languages, that shall be to their mature eyes what many a
tinsel-covered toy pamphlet was to their childhood, and shall speak to
the imagination? Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough
of literature. If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask
him what books he read. We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in
proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.
And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not
less eager. "He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding," said
Burke, "doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his
own to the stature of that he contemplates."
We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our
debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our
protest or private addition so rare and insignificant,--and this
commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing,--that, in a large
sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old
and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that
is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by
delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts,
sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses,
tables and chairs by imitation. The Patent-Office Commissioner knows
that all machines in use have been invented and re-invented over and
over; that the mariner's compass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable
types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., have been
many times found and lost, from Egypt, China, and Pompeii down; and if
we have arts which Rome wanted, so also Rome had arts which we have
lost; that the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible by
means of vapor of coal-oil or paraffine was suggested by the Egyptian
method which has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years.
The highest statement of new philosophy complacently caps itself with
some prophetic maxim from the oldest learning. There is something
mortifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme economy argues a very
small capital of invention. The stream of affection flows broad and
strong; the practical activity is a river of supply; but the dearth of
design accuses the penury of intellect. How few thoughts! In a hundred
years, millions of men, and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory
of philosophy that offers a solution of the great problems, not an art
of education that fulfils the conditions. In this delay and vacancy of
thought we must make the best amends we can by seeking the wisdom of
others to fill the time.
If we confine ourselves to literature, 'tis easy to see that the debt is
immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not
original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very
archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the
second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think
of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how narrow are the limits of
human invention. The "Paradise Lost" had never existed but for these
precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon
of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its
native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but real
connection with our own Bibles.
Read in Plato, and you shall find Christian dogmas, and not only so, but
stumble on our evangelical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and,
long before, in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Whoso knows Plutarch, Lucian,
Rabelais, Montaigne, and Bayle will have a key to many supposed
originalities. Rabelais is the source of many a proverb, story, and
jest, derived from him into all modern languages; and if we knew
Rabelais's reading, we should see the rill of the Rabelais river.
Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to uninstructed and to
thoughtless persons: their originality will disappear to such as are
either well-read or thoughtful; for scholars will recognize their dogmas
as reappearing in men of a similar intellectual elevation throughout
history. Albert, the "wonderful doctor," St. Buonaventura, the "seraphic
doctor," Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor" of the thirteenth century,
whose books made the sufficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed
and he survives for us. "Renard the Fox," a German poem of the
thirteenth century, was long supposed to be the original work, until
Grimm found fragments of another original a century older. M. Le Grand
showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of
Molière, La Fontaine, Boccaccio, and of Voltaire.
Mythology is no man's work; but, what we daily observe in regard to the
_bon-mots_ that circulate in society,--that every talker helps a story
in repeating it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament of fact a
good fable is constructed,--the same growth befalls mythology: the
legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer, everybody
adding a grace or dropping a fault or rounding the form, until it gets
an ideal truth.
Religious literature, the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of
course of this slow growth,--a fagot of selections gathered through
ages, leaving the worse, and saving the better, until it is at last the
work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like an
old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of
years, until every word and particle is public and tunable. And whatever
undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic
inspiration, the stronger tendency we are describing is likely to undo.
What divines had assumed as the distinctive revelations of Christianity,
theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics
and poets of Greece and Rome. Later, when Confucius and the Indian
scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could
be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the
history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Rome
and England to the Egyptian hierology.
The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and
stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention
when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills
with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopædia of his
table-talk is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years ago, when
Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate filled the eyes and minds of
young men, you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster's three rules:
first, never to do to-day what he could defer till to-morrow; secondly,
never to do himself what he could make another do for him; and, thirdly,
never to pay any debt to-day. Well, they are none the worse for being
already told, in the last generation, of Sheridan; and we find in
Grimm's _Mémoires_ that Sheridan got them from the witty D'Argenson;
who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell of whom he first
heard them told. In our own college days we remember hearing other
pieces of Mr. Webster's advice to students,--among others, this: that,
when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents, took a
pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics,--what he knew and what
he thought,--before he read the book. But we find in Southey's
"Commonplace Book" this said of the Earl of Strafford: "I learned one
rule of him," says Sir G. Radcliffe, "which I think worthy to be
remembered. When he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any
subject, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and
disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read
the book; then, reading, compared his own with the author's, and noted
his own defects and the author's art and fulness; whereby he drew all
that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own
wants to supply them." I remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in
London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that a
lady having expressed in his presence a passionate wish to witness a
great victory, he replied: "Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a
great victory,--excepting a great defeat." But this speech is also
D'Argenson's, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to
Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, "What a
wonderful versatile mind has Brougham! he knows politics, Greek,
history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a
little of everything." You may find the original of this gibe in Grimm,
who says that Louis XVI., going out of chapel after hearing a sermon
from the Abbé Maury, said, "_Si l'Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de
religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout_." A pleasantry which ran
through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities
of a gifted family connection in New England, was only a theft of Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu's _mot_ of a hundred years ago, that "the world was
made up of men and women and Herveys."
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus's
egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais's dying words, "I am going to
see the great Perhaps" (_le grand Peut-être_), only repeats the "IF"
inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe's favorite
phrase, "the open secret," translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander,
"These books are published and not published." Madame de Staël's
"Architecture is frozen music" is borrowed from Goethe's "dumb music,"
which is Vitruvius's rule, that "the architect must not only understand
drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting "on the plan which pleased
his childish thought," is Schiller's "Tell him to reverence the dreams
of his youth," and earlier, Bacon's "_Consilia juventutis plus
divinitatis habent_."
In romantic literature examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse
in the old Scotch ballad of "The Drowned Lovers,"
"Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water,
Thy streams are ower strang;
Make me thy wrack when I come back,
But spare me when I gang,"
is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and Leander, where the
prayer of Leander is the same:--
"Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo."
Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of "John Barleycorn," and furnished
Moore with the original of the piece,
"When in death I shall calm recline,
Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear," etc.
There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and
betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human
mind. Such are "The Seven Sleepers," "Gyges's Ring," "The Travelling
Cloak," "The Wandering Jew," "The Pied Piper," "Jack and his Beanstalk,"
the "Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,"--whose
omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all
frontiers. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle
up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in
Greece in Plato's time. Antiphanes, one of Plato's friends, laughingly
compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon
as they were pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and
melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter.
It is only within this century that England and America discovered that
their nursery-tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it
appears that they came from India, and are the property of all the
nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled
between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years.
If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types
of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of
decoration,--if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the
capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our
walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences,--we
shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest.
Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the
existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature
eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our
body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? A more
subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has
befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men
do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look
at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and
happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so
they _quote_ the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse
yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts,
and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new
book we often discover, from the unguarded devotion with which the
writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect from him. If Lord
Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the "Instauration"
instead of the new book.
The mischief is quickly punished in general and in particular. Admirable
mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature
has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat,--an excellent
sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among
plants,--the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being
superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning
on an original. In literature quotation is good only when the writer
whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a
cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of
my road, I had better have gone afoot.
But it is necessary to remember there are certain considerations which
go far to qualify a reproach too grave. This vast mental indebtedness
has every variety that pecuniary debt has,--every variety of merit. The
capitalist of either kind is as hungry to lend as the consumer to
borrow; and the transaction no more indicates intellectual turpitude in
the borrower than the simple fact of debt involves bankruptcy. On the
contrary, in far the greater number of cases the transaction is
honorable to both. Can we not help ourselves as discreetly by the force
of two in literature? Certainly it only needs two well placed and well
tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private
enterprise! Shall we converse as spies? Our very abstaining to repeat
and credit the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each man of
thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as
well. Cannot he and they combine? Cannot they sink their jealousies in
God's love, and call their poem Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Theban
Phalanx's? The city will for nine days or nine years make differences
and sinister comparisons: there is a new and more excellent public that
will bless the friends. Nay, it is an inevitable fruit of our social
nature. The child quotes his father, and the man quotes his friend. Each
man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he
says has an enhanced value. Whatever we think and say is wonderfully
better for our spirits and trust in another mouth. There is none so
eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or qualifies
his own: and men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost absolute
ascendant over their nearest companions. The Comte de Crillon said one
day to M. d'Allonville, with French vivacity, "If the universe and I
professed one opinion, and M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should
be at once convinced that the universe and I were mistaken."
Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power, and we
value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as
much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us
just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not
so important to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided by these,
we know him as a benefactor, and shall return to him as long as he
serves us so well. We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is
Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the
writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their
radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts
like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon
as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there
are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is
charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: "Yet he was more
original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought
them into life." And we must thank Karl Ottfried Müller for the just
remark, "Poesy, drawing within its circle all that is glorious and
inspiring, gave itself but little concern as to where its flowers
originally grew." So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such
superiority that Dubuc said: "He is like the false Amphitryon; although
the stranger, it is always he who has the air of being master of the
house." Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up,
meditated upon it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and
writing. If De Quincey said, "That is what I told you," he replied, "No:
that is mine,--mine, and not yours." On the whole, we like the valor of
it. 'Tis on Marmontel's principle, "I pounce on what is mine, wherever I
find it"; and on Bacon's broader rule, "I take all knowledge to be my
province." It betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no
individual, but is the treasure of all men. And inasmuch as any writer
has ascended to a just view of man's condition, he has adopted this
tone. In so far as the receiver's aim is on life, and not on literature,
will be his indifference to the source. The nobler the truth or
sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never
troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a
sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought makes ridiculous the
pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word had been said
before. "It is no more according to Plato than according to me." Truth
is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye
to read its oracles. But the moment there is the purpose of display, the
fraud is exposed. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the
thoughts of others, as it is to invent. Always some steep transition,
some sudden alteration of temperature, of point or of view, betrays the
foreign interpolation.
There is, besides, a new charm in such intellectual works as, passing
through long time, have had a multitude of authors and improvers. We
admire that poetry which no man wrote,--no poet less than the genius of
humanity itself,--which is to be read in a mythology, in the effect of a
fixed or national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, or cities,
or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is language. Every word in the
language has once been used happily. The ear, caught by that felicity,
retains it, and it is used again and again, as if the charm belonged to
the word, and not to the life of thought which so enforced it. These
profane uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But a quick wit can
at any time reinforce it, and it comes into vogue again. Then people
quote so differently: one finding only what is gaudy and popular;
another, the heart of the author, the report of his select and happiest
hour: and the reader sometimes giving more to the citation than he owes
to it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the
current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from
previous quotations in English books; and you can easily pronounce, from
the use and relevancy of the sentence, whether it had not done duty many
times before,--whether your jewel was got from the mine or from an
auctioneer. We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he
selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes,
and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets,
well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals
say, "the italics are ours." The profit of books is according to the
sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as
in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. The
passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within
this century; and Milton's prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame
within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends by their favorite
poetry or other reading.
Observe, also, that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of
another book than in his own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for
your approbation; in another's, he is a lawgiver.
Then another's thoughts have a certain advantage with us simply because
they are another's. There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears a
fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at the wisdom, and is very
merry at heart that he has now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of
the new words into his own usual phrase, and he will wonder again at his
own simplicity, such tricks do fine words play with us.
'Tis curious what new interest an old author acquires by official
canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or
Hallam, or other historian of literature. Their registration of his
book, or citation of a passage, carries the sentimental value of a
college diploma. Hallam, though never profound, is a fair mind, able to
appreciate poetry, unless it becomes deep, being always blind and deaf
to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, like the Platonists, like
Giordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan; and Hallam
cites a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes a lyric of
Edwards or Vaux, and straightway it commends itself to us as if it had
received the Isthmian crown.