XLI
Some Plagiarists I Have Known
The view taken by Stockton's perverse humor was much the same as that entertained by Benjamin Franklin with greater seriousness. He tells us in his Autobiography that at one time he regularly attended a certain church whose minister preached able sermons that interested him. When it was discovered that the sermons were borrowed, without credit, from some one else, the church dismissed the preacher and put in his place another whose sermons, all his own, did not interest Franklin, who thereupon ceased to attend the church, protesting that he preferred good sermons, plagiarized, to poor ones of the preacher's own.
I have since learned what I did not know at the time of the incident related, that there is a considerable company of minor writers hanging as it were on the skirts of literature and journalism, who make the better part of their meager incomes by copying the writings of others and selling them at opportune times. Sometimes these clever pilferers copy matter as they find it, particularly when its source is one not likely to be discovered. Sometimes they make slight alterations in it for the sake of disguise, and sometimes they borrow the substance of what they want and change its form somewhat by rewriting it. Their technical name for this last performance is "skinning" an article.
I have since had a good deal of experience with persons of this sort. When Horace Greeley died one of them—a woman—sold me a copy of the text of a very interesting letter from him which she assured me had never been seen by any one outside the little group that cherished the original. I learned later that she had simply copied the thing from the Home Journal, where it had been printed many months before.
One day some years later I had a revelation made to me of the ethics of plagiarism accepted by a certain class of writers for the minor periodicals. I found in an obscure magazine a signed article on the heroism of women, or something of that sort, the first paragraphs of which were copied verbatim from a book of my own, in which I had written it as a personal recollection. When the writer of the article was questioned as to his trespass upon my copyright, he wrote me an exceedingly gracious letter of apology, saying, by way of explanation, that he had found the passage in an old scrapbook of his own, with no memorandum of its authorship attached. He had thought it no harm, he said, to make the thing his own, a thing, he assured me, he would not have done had he known whose the passage was. This explanation seemed to satisfy his conscience completely. I wonder what he would have thought himself privileged to do with a horse or a cow found wandering along a lane without the escort of its owner.
A Peculiar Case of Plagiary
Sometimes the plagiarist is far more daring in his thefts, taking as his own much greater things and more easily recognized ones than scrapbooks are apt to hold. The boldest thing of the sort with which I ever came into personal contact happened in this wise. As literary editor of the Evening Post during the late seventies it was a part of my duty to look out for interesting correspondence. One day there came to me a particularly good thing of the kind—two or three columns of fascinating description of certain phases of life in the Canadian Northwest. The writer proposed to furnish us a series of letters of like kind, dealing with the trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, life among the trappers, Indians, and half-breeds, and the like. The letter submitted was so unusually good, both in its substance and in its literary quality, that I agreed to take the series on the terms proposed. A number of the letters followed, and the series attracted the pleased attention of readers. Presently, in addition to his usual letter our correspondent sent us a paper relating to the interesting career of a quaint personage who flourished in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in their territorial days. He was known as "Johnny Appleseed," because of his habit of carrying a bag of apple seeds in his wanderings and distributing them among the pioneers by way of inducing them to plant orchards.
Unfortunately that article had been written by some one other than our correspondent and published long before in Harper's Magazine. When my suspicion was thus aroused with regard to the integrity of the correspondent, I instituted an inquiry which revealed the fact that the letters we had so highly valued were plagiarized from a book which had been published in England but not reprinted here.
The daring of the man appalled me, but the limit of his assurance had not yet been revealed. When I wrote to him telling him of my discovery of the fraud and declining to send a check for such of the letters as had been printed and not yet paid for, he responded by sending me a number of testimonials to the excellence of his character, furnished by the clergymen, bankers, and leading men generally of the town in which he lived. Having thus rehabilitated his character, he argued that as the letters had proved interesting to the readers of the paper, we had got our money's worth, and that it made no difference in the quality of the literature furnished whether he had written it himself or had transcribed it from a book written by another person. Curiously enough there was a tone of assured sincerity in all this which was baffling to the understanding. I can explain it only by thinking that he plagiarized that tone also.
It was about that time that my work as literary editor of the Evening Post brought to my attention two cases of what I may call more distinguished plagiarism. Mrs. Wister, a gifted scholar and writer, was at that time rendering a marked service to literature by her exceedingly judicious adaptations of German fiction to the use of American readers. She took German novels that were utterly too long and in other ways unfit for American publication, translated them freely, shortened them, and otherwise saved to American readers all that was attractive in novels which, if directly translated, would have had no acceptability at all in this country. The results were quite as much her own as those of the German authors of the books thus treated.
I had recently read and reviewed one of the cleverest of these books of hers, when there came to me for review an English translation of the same German novel, under another title. That translation was presented as the work of an English clergyman, well known as one of the most prolific writers of his time. As I looked over the book I discovered that with the exception of a few initiatory chapters, it was simply a copy of Mrs. Wister's work. In answer to the charge of plagiarism the reverend gentleman explained that he had set out to translate the book, but that when he had rendered a few chapters of it into English Mrs. Wister's work fell into his hands and he found her version so good that he thought it best to adopt it instead of making one of his own. He omitted, however, to explain the ethical conceptions that had restrained him from practising common honesty in a matter involving both reputation and revenue. That was at a time when English complaints of "American piracy" were loudest.
A Borrower from Stedman
The other case was a more subtle one, and incidentally more interesting to me. As literary editor of the Evening Post, under the editorship of Mr. Bryant, who held the literary side of the paper's work to be of more consequence than all the rest of it put together, I had to read everything of literary significance that appeared either in England or in America. One day I found in an English magazine an elaborate article which in effect charged Tennyson with wholesale plagiary from Theocritus. The magazinist was disposed to exploit himself as a literary discoverer, and he presented his discoveries with very little of that delicacy and moderation which a considerate critic would regard as the due of so distinguished a poet as Tennyson. I confess that his tone aroused something like antagonism in my mind, and I rather rejoiced when, upon a careful reading of his article, I found that he was no discoverer at all. Practically all that he had to say had been much better said already by Edmund C. Stedman first in a magazine essay and afterwards in a chapter of the "Victorian Poets." The chief difference was that Stedman had written with the impulse and in the tone and manner of a scholarly gentleman, while the other had exploited himself like a prosecuting attorney.
The obvious thing to do was to get Stedman, if that were possible, to write a signed article on the subject for the Evening Post. With that end in view I went at once to his office in Broad Street.
I knew him well, in literary and social ways, but I had never before trespassed upon his banker existence, and the visit mightily interested me, as one which furnished a view of an unfamiliar side of the "manyest-sided man"—that phrase I had learned from Mr. Whitelaw Reid—whom I ever knew.
It was during Stock Exchange hours that I made my call, and I intended to remain only long enough to secure an appointment for some other and less occupied time. But the moment I indicated the matter I wished to consult with him about, Stedman linked his arm in mine and led me to his "den," a little room off the banking offices, and utterly unlike them in every detail. Here were books—not ledgers; here were all the furnishings of the haunt of a man of letters, without a thing to suggest that the man of letters knew or cared for anything relating to stocks, bonds, securities, loans, discounts, dividends, margins, or any other of the things that are alone considered of any account in Wall Street.
"This is the daytime home of the literary side of me," he explained. "When I'm out there"—pointing, "I think of financial things; when I enter here I forget what a dollar mark looks like."
"I see," I said. "Minerva in Wall Street—Athene, if you prefer the older Greek name."
"Say Apollo instead—for if there is anything I pride myself upon it is my masculinity. 'Male and female created he them, and God saw that it was good,' but the garments of one sex do not become the other, and neither do the qualities and attributes."
He had a copy of "The Victorian Poets" in the den and together we made a minute comparison of his study of Tennyson's indebtedness to Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus with the magazinist's article. For result we found that beyond a doubt the magazinist had "skinned" his article out of Stedman's chapter—in other words, that he had in effect plagiarized his charge of plagiary and the proofs of it.
Stedman refused to write anything on the subject, deeming it not worth while, a judgment which I am bound to say was sound, though I did not like to accept it because my news instinct scented game and I wanted that article from Stedman's pen. His scholarly criticism was literature of lasting importance and interest. The magazine assault upon Tennyson's fame is utterly forgotten of those who read it.