To: The Lucile Project Home Page
To: Index page for Reviews of Lucile

“Plagiarism and Plagiarists” from William S. Walsh, Handy Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1909), p891-899+. [Note: Two-thirds of page 892, all of pages 893-894, half of page 895, and pages 898 and after have been omitted; this text describes and discusses plagiarists generally less “criminal” than Lytton].    

Plagiarism and Plagiarists. Is plagiarism a crime? For ourselves we confess that we hold it only a venial offence -- unless, of course, it is found out. If a man thrill us with the joy and gladness of a great thought, what matter where he got it? We might have passed our lives in ignorance there of: The discoverer is as great a benefactor as the originator. And then, to be Irish, the originator may not have originated it. We have often wondered why it was that the stupid ogres and other monsters of the fairy-tales, who wished to give an impossible task to the prince they had got into their clutches, never set him to tracing an idea to its source. Not all the ingenuity of Prince Charming, aided by all the magic arts of all the Grateful Beasts and Enchanted Princesses and other adventitious allies, could have saved that tender young prince from gracing the ogre's larder.

“Of all forms of theft," says Voltaire, "plagiarism is the least dangerous to society." Not only that, it is often beneficial. In mechanics all inventions are plagiarisms. If inventors had not borrowed ideas from their predecessors, progress would come to a stand-still. Shall I refuse to own a timepiece because my watchmaker is not original? Shall I eschew the benefits of the modern railroad because I find the germ of the idea in the steam engine of the pre-Christian Hero? “A ship," says Emerson, "is a quotation from a forest." But inasmuch as it is not enclosed in quotation-marks a ship is rank plagiarism. Shakespeare stole plots, incidents, and ideas from his forerunners. Molière derived not only his plots, but the dialogues of whole scenes, from Italian comedies. Thank God that these great men had no literary conscience! Molière openly acknowledged he had none. "I conquer my own wherever I find it," he says, with magnificent candor. And we get a new regard for Pope when we find him openly acknowledging, “I freely confess that I have served myself all I could by reading."

[…large amount of text omitted…]

"Owen Meredith" (Lord Lytton) was one of the most consistent, indefatigable, and audacious plagiarists that ever lived. It is quite possible he never wrote an original line in his life. At all events, every apt or striking line, every pretty sentiment, and every unusual incident in everyone of his books has been traced to some original either in English or foreign literature. It was the latter to which he was chiefly indebted. Doubtless he held himseIf safer there, for when he first came upon the scene Englishmen had small acquaintance with the literature of other countries.

Yet English authors were not quite safe at his hands. Years ago an article in the North British Review called attention to the close resemblance of certain passages in his “Gyges and Candaules" to some of the finest lines in Keats's "St. Agnes." Verses from other English poets were cited, too, which had been adapted to his own use with very little change. The author of the article, with an urbanity rare in Scotch reviewers of British bards, alluded to this tendency as “the unconscious sympathy of the mocking-bird." Indeed, the entire British public has treated the noble pilferer with a leniency that is extraordinary when contrasted with its severity to other offenders. When it was first made known, for example, that "Lucile" was a barefaced bit of plagiarism, the English press, for some reason or other, was inclined to hush up the matter; and to-day there is a large circle of Owen Meredith's admirers who have never had their faith disturbed, never known that "Lucile" was George Sand's and not Lord Lytton’s, Yet so it is. The first part of that novel in verse is merely the prose story of “Lavinia" faithfully done into

galloping English anapests.

But George Sand is not the only foreign author whom milord laid under contribution. Here and there jewels were filched from Musset, from Heine, from some other of the great masters of lyric verse, and embedded in this literary crazy-quilt. Who, on first reading “Lucile," has not held his breath when he came to these splendid lines?--

Though divine Aphrodite should open her arms

To our longing, and lull us to sleep on her charms,

Though the world its full sense of enjoyment insure us,

Though Horace, Lucretius, and old Epicurus

Sit beside us and swear we are happy, what then?

Whence the answer within us that cries to these men,

“Let it be! You say well; but tbe world is too old

To rekindle within it the ages of gold:

A vast hope has traversed the earth, and our eyes

In despite of ourselves we must lift to the skies!"

The lines are merely a free translation of Musset, in his “Espoir en Dieu:”

Que Ia blonde Astarté, qu'idàtrait Ia Grèke,

De ses lies d'azur sort en m'ouvrant les bra;

*    *   *   *   *

Quand Horace, Lucrèce, et Ie vieil Epicure,

Assis à mes côtes, m'appelleraient heureux;

*    *    *   *   * 

Je leur dirais à tous, "Quoi que nous puissions faire,

Je souffre, il est trop tard; Ie monde s est fait vieux.

Une immense espérance a traversè  Ia terre;

Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut lever Ies yeux."

Mere plagiarism, however, is not the only literary offence of which Owen Meredith has been guilty. A very complicated bit of imposition has been brought home to him. He once held a diplomatic position in one of the Danubian principalities, On his return to England he published a volume entitled “Serbski Pesme." It consisted of a series of poems, ostensibly paraphrases from ancient Servian originals. Here it was not his originality which Mr. Lytton caned on the world to admire, but his learning, his indefatigable research, his sympathy with the unrecognized masterpieces of the world's literature. He was an explorer in a new field who had made valuable discoveries. At first the English public took him at his word. But it soon whispered that the very title of his book betrayed an extraordinary ignorance of the Servian language,-- that it had been constructed on the pnnciple that the philosopher in Pickwick found so useful when he conceived his essay on Chinese metaphysics: the poet had evidently hunted up in a dictionary the word for Servian and the word for poems, and joined them together without any regard for the grammatical laws of number and case. If the very title betrayed so much ignorance, what trust could be put in the body of the work? And, indeed, It was eventually proved that the poems were not Servian at all, nor translations from the Servian, nor even original. They had been boldly taken without acknowledgment from an impudent literary mystification which a Gallic author had foisted on the French public.

There is a little poem of Heine's, entitled “Ein Weib," which begins as follows:

Sie hatten sich Beide so herzlich lieb,

Spitzbübin war sie, er war ein Dieb.

It is well worth while to compare this with the opening lines of Meredith's “See-Saw:”

She was a harlot and I was a thief:

But we loved each other beyond belief.

His lordship did not always go unpunished. In a volume published anonymously a dozen years ago, entitled “The Heptalogia; or The Seven against Sense,” there is a parody of Owen Meredith which is also a fierce and bitter attack on his personal character as well as on his literary methods. The authorship of the book has never been acknowledged to this day; yet it has never been doubted. Aut Swinburne, aut diabolus,--that was the universal verdict. The poem, which is called “Last Words of a Seventh-rate Poet,” is too long to quote entire, but a few lines will give some idea of the wit and wickedness of the onslaught. The seventh-rate poet, stretched on his death bed, is speaking to a faithful attendant, whom he calls Bill:

There's a deity shapes us our ends, sir, rough-hew them, my boy, how we will,--

As I stated myself in a poem I published last year, you know, Bill,

Where I mentioned that that was the questlon,-- to be, or, by Jove, not to be.

Ah, it’s something -- you'll think so hereafter --- to wait on a poet like me.

Had I written no more than those verses on that Countess I used to call Pussy,--

Yes, Minette or Manon,-- and -- you'll hardly believe it -- she said they were all out of Musset.

Now I don't say they weren't,-- but what then? and I don't say they were,-- I'II bet pounds against pennies on

The subject,-- I wish I may never die Laureate, if some of them weren't out of Tennyson.

And I think -- I don't like to be certain, with death, so to speak, by me frowning--

But I think there were some -- say a dozen, perhaps or a acore -- out of Browning.

As for poets who go on a contrary track to what I go and you go,

You remember my lyrics translated -- like sweet Bully Bottom -- from Hugo?

Though I will say it's curious that simply on just that account there should be

Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me.

It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory

To hear critics assign to his hand the Confessional, Bill, and the Laboratory:

Yes, it's singular,-- nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark!

As that Countess would say),-- there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark

And it often has given myself and Lord Albert no end of diversion

To hear fellows maintain to my face it was Wordsworth who wrote The Excursion,

When they know that whole reams of the verses recur in my authorized works

Here and there, up and down! Why, such readers are infidels, heretics, Turks!

And the pitiful critics who think in their paltry presumption to pay me a

Pretty compliment, pairing me off, sir, with Keats,-- as if he could write Lamia!

While I never produced a more characteristic and exquisite book

One that gave me more real satisfaction, than did, on the whole, Lalla Rookh.

*     *     *    *  *

Nay, that epic of mine, which begins from foundations the Bible is built on,

"Of man’s first disobedience" – I’ve heard it attributed, dammy, to Milton.

Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say, to break spears

With the hlrelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was Shakespeare's,

When he that can run, sir, may read -- if he borrows the book or goes on tlck--

In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic,

There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole of The Bard,

Or that I didn't write half the EIegy, Bill, in a Country Church-Yard,

When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins, “Ruin seize thee!" and ends

With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends.

And I’ll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf, you

Will perceive it winds up with some lines on my myself-- and begins with the Curfew.

Now you'll grant it’s more probable, BilI,-- as a man of the world, if you please,--

That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have prigged from all these.

A little farther are the following lines:

As it's sometimes my whim to be vulgar, it’s sometimes my whim to be brief;
As when once I observed, after Heine, that "She was a harIot and I (which is true) was a thief.”

On the whole, Lord Lytton went too far. That would be the verdict even of the most lenient minds. Plagiarism is not always a virtue.

[Continued text omitted.]