Plagiarism and John Bunyan.
There are not many writers of any popularity or eminence who have not in their day, either in their own behalf or by the sensitive proxy of their intimate friends, had occasion for self-defence against the charge of plagiarism. From young authors especially, some little slur or other on this tender point is pretty sure, at some time, to evoke a thin-skinned answer, replete with a peculiar modest defensive ferocity that critics know by heart, and grin over with a grim relish. This is a thing of course—a well-marked stage of the fever of authorship. Only we notice that most of those who begin with young Byron's philippics end with old Wordsworth's philosophy. The fact is, splendid sensitiveness, here as everywhere, does not pay, and beyond most men the author finds it cost him dear. For of all ill-matched and absurd controversies, there is none like a wrangle about plagiarism. It is a duel of javelins and catapults, of fly and lion. All the advantage is with the attacking party. The accusation is vague and sweeping to the last degree, and the easiest imaginable to make. It need not even be said; it can be sneered. And how cheap it is to be sophistical about it! A little ingenuity to cook up a factitious resemblance, a little malice to point a bit of irony or innuendo, and the thing is done. To rebut such crimination may take days of labor. These very days consumed, too, are so much dead disadvantage; the whole matter grows stale the while. Then the answer must not only conclusively meet the charge, both as to the animus furandi and the fact of theft, but it must be intrinsically interesting, both to revive interest enough in the subject for the reading public to go to the trouble of revising its opinion, and because every word an author writes is matter for fresh criticism, while his opponent may waive all pretensions to style. Practically we incline to think it is much as in battle, where it takes a man's weight in lead to kill him. Now and then, some one is demolished utterly by one of these elaborate broadsides, but the number of them that miss the mark must be enormous. It is only effects and successes that we all remember. The shot that sunk the Alabama at a few hundred yards, made more impression in history than the dozens of idle shell that the great Sawyer gun used to send spinning miles away over the Ripraps. One general net result is a vast waste of the author's time, which is always valuable to him, and sometimes to the public. And after all, with the truest aim and best powder—who is hit? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, some nobody. And this is truer every day. Pope and Byron could at least single out their Dennises and Amos Cottles by name; but nowadays, what with pseudonyms and anonyms, and above all the editorial pronoun, one fights the very air.
Thus we find authors of standing strangely meek under audacious strictures of this sort, and very little given to tilting at the mosquitoes of the press. This is more than dignity; it is sense. But (and now we strike the point we have been coming at all this while) the world draws from this fact a very exaggerated inference. It seems, to reverse the old law rule, that one story's good till another is told. The very fact of an accusation's going unanswered seems to crush it under a vis inertiae of silence. This is all worldly wise, but not very infallible. If a man shouts something against me before my street-door, and I let him shout away at his own sweet will, I am tolerably sure, whether it be truth or calumny he is vociferating, that his wind must give out after a while. The world, though, is apt instead of listening to him, to stare up at my window, and see if I mind it. If I make no sign, he is a vituperator, and some good citizen just mentions him to the policeman round the corner. But all this while may not he be bawling the blessed truth, and I slinking behind the shutters? Public opinion says no. If a man of standing does not deign or see fit to come out against a charge, it is a fabrication or a fancy sketch. Now, the truth is, as history well knows, that there is a vast amount of systematic stealing in the world of letters, and that these same majestic gentlemen, who are above replies, have done their very fair share of the stealing. What is the effect, then, of this false estimate of men and things? This: that when a writer has once attained station, with a decent regard to the conventionalities of literary larceny, he can steal all he chooses with impunity. All he has to do is to alter enough to keep him that runs from reading the resemblance. This done, there remains the one risk that some one who cannot be ignored may expose the theft. But this risk is not, by far, so great as it seems. The man of calibre enough for the task is generally an amiable man, and always a busy one, and has plenty of pleasanter things to do than airing his neighbor's peccadilloes. Besides, it is an even chance but he has some little appropriation of his own to cover up, and this fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Thus a very little judgment in the selection of the author stolen from passes the whole fraud scot free. And there are good reasons why there should be a good deal of this fraud. First-class plagiarism pays, like everything first-class. It has a high market value, with large and ungrudging profits. For the reading power is omnivorous, and it feels that an old author made modern, or a foreign author made native, is not as good as new but better. Pisistratus Caxton is a vast improvement on Tristram Shandy, and the Comedy of Errors on the Menaechmi; and the primmest of the decriers read Bulwer and Shakespeare, and do not read Plautus and Sterne. Boucicault's plays draw in London, and we never hear of English purists staying away till they can go to see the originals at Paris. But it is idle to multiply instances. The fact is too patent to need illustrating, that the nineteenth century prefers essences of books to books, and the juice of literary fruit to the fruit itself. Extracts, and digests, and compilations and abridgments, and horti sicci of all sorts are the order of the day, and the old fogies, who prate of meum and tuum, and dream of international copyright, and read old authors through, "miranturque nihil nisi quod Libitina sacravit," find that these are all side issues. The public does not care a rush where a man gets what it wants. This may be the best law, or it may not; the law it certainly is. Let any one who doubts the popularity of plagiarism, only take up that fine, furious, generous little book, Mr. Reade's Eighth Commandment, and see for himself what is the fashion and what is not.
But the honest crusader against literary despoilers and desecrators, soon finds that without the limits of downright pillage lies a vast debatable land, which has been the Flanders, the Kentucky, the Quadrilateral of critic controversy from time immemorial—the territory of mere resemblance. This is far more difficult ground, because the critic's own fallible perceptions of likeness enter as an element of possible error into his judgment, and the danger of doing injustice is great. Here, it is true, are found the expertest plagiarists of all—the vampires of literature—the thieves that steal the soul and leave the body. But close beside them stand the true scholars, to whose assiduity books yield up an honest wealth, and who melt and mould their well-worn treasure into solid ingots of golden thought or exquisite fretwork of glittering fancies. And more puzzling than both, we have the myriad legions of fugitive resemblances—an army of ghosts, present to the comparing consciousness, but impalpable to the analyzing sense. Obviously it will not do to apply here the martial law of literary vindication. Men are too much alike to be damned for striking even strange coincidences. Among the best writers there are so many parallelisms that a mind with any turn for hunting phantoms of similarity, soon comes to the saying of King Solomon about nothing new under the sun. At any rate, if it ever did exist, the era of entire novelty is of the past now. Take out what a keen, well-read man could trace to Shakespeare, Byron, Macaulay, Carlyle, the Bible, the Greek tragedians, the Standard Speakers, and the Declaration of Independence, and how much is there left of to-day's English and American literature? Yet among the imitations, if there are many wilful and culpable, there are many more innocent and unwitting. True, not every one is born with so developed an organ of unconsciousness as Mr. A. M. W. Ball, who astonished himself by originating some one else's poem in full. But very few read over their familiar authors without finding the germs of a thousand thoughts they had never suspected not to be all their own. Indeed, for some time after beginning, a young author could, if he should choose, (which he doesn't,) pluck up his ideas like young blades of corn, and find the original seed of some pet author at the root.
But critics have called the name of plagiarist far too often and too lightly. The charge is old enough, heaven knows, for people to know what they mean by it. Waiving those ancient Sanscrit sages, who seem with malice prepense to have been born so long ago that we can't more than half believe in them, and before there was any intelligible language for them to be wise in, we find that Job, our oldest modern writer, has been read out of the rubric by a theologue somewhere out West, who has discovered in his style gross and servile plagiarisms from the Bible. Homer stood tolerably well till the German omniscients found out that, like Artemus Ward's friend, Brigham Young's mother-in-law, he was numerous, when it at once becomes plain, from the great uniformity of style, that each one of him must have been a most accomplished plagiarist from the remaining fractional bards. Horace's spiteful and uncalled for commentaries on Lucilius, besides the outrageous ill taste of them, show that there was some shrewdness in the bite of the cimex Pantilius, the blear-eyed Crispinus, and other literary gentlemen—probably good fellows enough, too—as those ancient Bohemians went—who, no doubt, hinted at little likenesses between his sermo merus and Lucilius' sal nigrum. Martial's epigrams have crucified a dozen thieves into immortality. And so the old bandying of hard words has come down the annals of literature, till the self-same wave of bitterness that whelmed the luckless insect Pantilius foams about the shallows of Mr. Swinburne's self-defence, and finally goes combing over the City Hall with Mr. Charles Reade for its Neptune, and threatens to make flotsam of that cosy fixture, the Round Table. Yet, with all these precedents to define it, plagiarism is to-day a purely relative term—a weapon of the partisan wars of letters. If our enemies commit a coincidence, that is plagiarism; when our friends pilfer, it is adaptation, version, studies in style, or some other euphemism.
Modern criticism has not signalized its advance by establishing any principle to decide this difficult question of what is really plagiarism. There is absolutely no standard or criterion yet, and each one who wishes to form a right opinion, is thrown upon his own devices to reach it. Amid the many delicacies and difficulties of judging in this matter, we have found, or fancied we found, one rule of singular service in guiding us to a satisfactory conclusion. It is noteworthy, to say the least, that almost all the great plagiarists and imitators of all time have been writers of the self-conscious or subjective order; men who wrote with Mrs. Grundy uppermost, and their theme next; whose real and primary aim was to exhibit and exalt themselves; to feed their personal vanity, ambition, or greed. The objective or intuitive class, on the contrary—those who wrote because they were full of their subject; thinking of it, feeling it, full of it; those in brief who develop their natures instead of advantaging themselves, are almost never caught depredating intentionally, while their very intentness on what they may have to say makes them the most frequent of unconscious imitators in mere manner and expression.
It may be generalizing too much to say that this fact contains a principle, but we do think it points to a presumption. The more satisfactory the rule, however, the more puzzling the exception, and in applying this test of subjectivity, we strike on quite a little casus conscientiae, in the issues presented by the two books which form our text.
Of all English writers, one of the last to pitch on for a plagiarist is honest John Bunyan. He, if ever man was, is sincere, objective—a convinced missionary and messenger. Grave, rough, outspoken, self-praising, yet rigid, he seems at a first glance to embody and epitomize his age; that strange, fermented, fanatical age, when England seems one vast presbytery—a Massachusetts of political, social, and religious austerities and extremes; when the Englishmen of history seem to lose their characteristics for a while, and turn to foreshadowed, mediaeval Yankees; when we never think of them in connection with blonde love-locks and blue eyes, and slashed doublets, and foaming ale, and big, merry, unmeant oaths, and cheery taverns, and champing steeds; but as stern, sombre, black-a-vised, steel-capped, praying infantry, with jerkins on their backs, and Sternhold and Hopkins in every third knapsack. Yet, when we look closely, Bunyan is not so representative a man as he appears. He was not only a better and bolder man than his fellows, but at bottom a different one. The reason why he typifies so much of those days is really that the man had a large measure of that tact for apparent conformity with the masses which is the essence of popularity, and which in him covered much independence. A hundred years later, he would have been the Francis Asbury of England. Under the Puritan crust lay hidden a red-hot Methodist. His autobiography—by far his most interesting work, in our opinion—is full of an ebullient fervor that was then a favorite novelty, is now to most of us a psychological study, but would waken only electric sympathy without a touch of surprise in many a circuit-riding itinerant of the south-west—unless, perhaps, he should wonder that there were such orthodox Methodists so long ago. He also fails in not representing that pragmatical hypocrisy which culminated in the Rump Parliament and Praisegod Barebones, and finally rotted the Commonwealth into the Restoration. Controversial and conceited he may have been, and he had no little reason to be honestly proud of the volcanic force of manliness that found him an imbruted tinker-boy, and made him a respected leader of his people. But in his great work no man could be more self-forgetful, more impersonal, more transparent to the thought within him. He is rife, permeated, possessed with his subject. His powerful imagination, always morbidly vivid, and at times in his life, disordered, bends its full force to the work. "He saw the things of which he was writing," says one of his biographers, "as distinctly with his mind's eye, as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream." Now, this is not the sort of man to go culling other people's words for his warm and swarming fancies. But moreover Bunyan was attacked in his lifetime with charges of plagiarism, and replied with his usual aggressive emphasis, and in his characteristic doggerel—in the preface to his Holy War.
"Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine
In name and fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother.
"Or that so fond I am of being sire,
I'll father bastards, or, if need require,
I'll tell a lie in print to get applause.
I scorn it; John such dirt-heap never was
Since God converted him. Let this suffice
To show why I my Pilgrim patronize.
"It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dripple it daintily.
"Manner and matter too was all mine own;
Nor was it unto any mortal known,
Till I had done it. Nor did any then,
By books, by wits, by tongues, or hand, or pen,
Add five words to it, or wrote half a line
Thereof; the whole and every whit is mine." …
This leaves the suggestion of plagiarism apparently little room to stand upon, unless it fall back upon some safe generality, such as that in a republic (or commonwealth) all things are possible, or that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, etc.
Against this giant of truth, panoplied in the very robur et as triplex of self-conscious originality, comes out the queerest antagonist imaginable—a French David against a Welsh Goliath. These little books altogether deserve a passing word. Both are published privately and by subscription. One, the later, is a mere translation, arising out of its predecessor. The other is a most singular compilation, from a number of notes which one Mr. Nathaniel Hill, M.R.S.L., as we are not surprised to learn, died making. They make a book very unlike most books. To begin with, Mr. Basil Montagu Pickering, the publisher, has taken for his motto, "Aldi Discipulus Anglus," and the printing is an excellent imitation of that famous old press which so many dead scholars have blessed, and so many dead printers doubtless sworn at. Then the engravings are very curious ones, copied from the oldest editions of the original, and combine a childlike range of scenery with a Chinese mastery of perspective. The text, though, is vilely marred by a variation of plan. Mr. Hill's idea was to show the indebtedness of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to many earlier works, and its principal creditor happened to be this Pélerinage de l'Homme of Guillaume De Guileville. His editors finding it so quaint, were struck by the bright afterthought of making this book itself the main subject. It may have sold better, but for ourselves we differ toto caelo with their taste. Their method defies order, and results in a most extraordinary hotch-potch of queer quotations, Scripture references past number, antique French, archaic English to match, biographies, analogies, and translations, that reads like a fit of levity of old Fuller, or an excursus—or pilgrimage—from the Anatomy of Melancholy. Add now to all this, that to an old-fashioned translation of an antiquated poem by an obsolete monk, there are appended a body of notes full of all sorts of odd learning, and finally, that translation, notes and all, are by a woman, and the outré picture is complete.
The comparison between De Guileville and Bunyan is not originated by this book. Southey, among others, speaks of the Pélerinage, which he entitles the Pélerin de la Vie Humaine, (although this name is not given it in any of the editions on the very full list of this volume,) and dismisses the subject with a wary vagueness that has to our ear a soupçon of Podsnappery, and somehow makes us doubt if the worthy laureate ever read the book at all. But, at any rate, this is by far the most extended comparison yet made, and all the better in that it does not argue a preconceived theory.
One thing, at least, it plainly proves—that Master Bunyan very much overstated his originality in saying that manner and matter too were all his own. It shows that from the time of the Norman troubadors (not to go back to the Apocalypse of St. John) the dream-form which is the framing of The Pilgrim's Progress was a common and favorite device, and instances Piers Plowman's Vision, (A.D. 1369,) Walter de Mapes's Apocalypsis Golice, the older poem, The Debate of the Body and the Soul, Lydgate's Temple of Glass, Hampole's Prycke of Conscience, (1349,) Sir David Lyndesay of the Mount's poem, The Dreme, (1528,) and Dunbar's Daunce, (1470.) Probably Bunyan, not being accused of stealing so obvious and public an artifice, did not have it in mind at all when he made his sweeping self-assertion.
In looking further for resemblances, those who expect to find strong similarity of any sort will be disappointed. In fact, they would in ordinary cases be dismissed as trivial. But we must remember the vast difference between the two works. De Guileville's is a true mediaeval monastic "boke," justly described in this volume as "a cold and lifeless dialogue between abstract and unembodied qualities." It is, in all but its ancient quaintness, the dullest and driest of books; there is not a ray of reality in it anywhere. Bunyan, on the contrary, gives us men and women where the old prior of Chaliz has nothing but ghosts of abstract ideas. One is like the antiquated masques or miracle-plays; the other like the theatre before Garrick's day. Thus between a galvanized French Roman of 1330 and a live English book of 1670, by a man innocent of French, any resemblance in diction would not only be matter of wonder but matter of the merest chance. We will, however, cite a few of the parallelisms given in the comparison which forms the gist and pith of these volumes. And first comes one which we cite because it contains the only lines we have seen worth remembering in De Guileville's dreary waste of dialogue. He is describing the lady (Gracedieu) whom his Pélerin meets at the outset.
De Guileville.
"Moult courtoise et de douce chère
Me fut grandement car première
Me saulua en demandant
Pourquoy nauoie meilleur semblant
Et pour quelle cause ie pleuroye
Et saucune defaulte auoie.
Adonc ie fuz comme surpris
Pource que pas nauoye apris
Que dame de si grant atour
Daignast vers moi faire vng seul tour
Fors et seullement pour autant
Que cil qui a bonte plus grant
Plus a en soy dhumilite
Grant doulceur et benignite
CAR PLUS A LE POMMIER DE POMMES
PLUS BAS SENCLINE VERS LES HOMMES,
Et ne scay signe de bonte
Si grant comme est humilite,
Qui ne porte ceste baniere
Na vertu ne bonte entiere." [Footnote 52]
[Footnote 52: "Full courteously, and in most gentle wise Made she first salutation, questioning Wherefore that I bore not more cheerful mien And why I wept, and if in aught I lacked. And then I was as one o'erta'en with wonder, That lady of so great nobility Should even deign to turn towards such as I, Saving for this sole cause, that whoso most Of gracious ruth doth bless, the same alway Most in his bosom bears of lowliness. For the more rich in store of golden fruit, More deeply bendeth unto man the tree. Nor know I any sign of graciousness Great as humility. Who bears not that Graved on his banner, hath not truly virtue.">[
Lydgate's Translation.
This ladye that I spak of here
Was curteys and of noble chere
And wonderly of gret vertu,
And ffyrst she 'gan me to salue
In goodly wise axynge of me
What maner thyng yt myght be
Or cause why I should hyr lere
That I made so heavy chere,
Or why that I was aye wepyng,
Wher of when I gan take hede
I ffyl into a maner drede
For unkonnyng and leudnesse
That ache of so great noblesse
Dysdenede not in her degre
To speke to on so pore as me;
But yiff it were so, as I guess,
Al only of hyr gentyllenesse,
For gladly wher is most beute
Ther is grettest humylyte,
And that ys verrylye the sygne
Suych ar most goodly and benygne,
An apple tre with frut most lade
To folk that stonden in the shade
More lowly doth his branches loute
Then a nother tre withoute.
Wher haboundeth most goodness
There is ay most of meeknesse,
None so gret token of bewte
As is parfyt humylyte.
Who wanteth hyr in hys banere
Hath not vertu hool and entere.
"The same gracious salutation," says our book, "is made by Evangelist to Christian whilst he is weeping." "I looked then," says Bunyan, "and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, who asked, 'Wherefore dost thou cry?' 'Because I fear,' replies Christian, 'that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into the grave.'"
The simile of the fruit-tree is excellent, and perhaps strikes us the better for its being the one oasis. The resemblance also is strong between the greetings of Gracedieu and Evangelist, and in fact, in the whole situation, and seems hard to account for without supposing Bunyan to have known Lydgate's or some other translation of the earlier author.
The next point is one of apparent discrepancy, but really of likeness. The Pélerin is stopped by a stream, at which he desponds—signifying the water of baptism at the entrance to the church. Bunyan being a Baptist, with strong liberal views of communion, (which, indeed, embroiled him at one time with the radicals of his sect,) naturally balked at this abhorrent papistical metaphor, and substituted his famous Slough of Despond, which, it will be remembered, he makes to be sixteen hundred years old—the age of Christianity at his day.
Another slight touch, perhaps worth noting, is where De Guileville's pilgrims come from Moses, (the Mr. Legality of Bunyan,) as if
"Yssys du bourbier,
Ou dun noir sac a charbonnier:"
while Pliable, in a like case, is represented as seeming "bedaubed with dirt," as if he had been "dipped in a sack of charcoal." This certainly looks like a pebble for Goliath's forehead. Also these same muddy pilgrims of the Pélerinage, returning "Enbordiz et encore tous familleux" come back all of a tremor and beg to join the others: so Christian, after his episode at Mr. Legality's, falls at the feet of Evangelist with prayers to be put again in the way of salvation. Again Christian's second companion Hopeful and the Pélerin's staff Hope are branches of one idea. Farther on, Gracedieu presents her protégé with "the identical pebbles that David had in his scrip when he fought against Goliath." Bunyan makes the damsels of the palace called Beautiful, in exhibiting that establishment to the delighted Christian, display, among other aesthetic accessories of the place, "the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath."
Another curious parallelism is not cited at all in this book. De Guileville's hero is accosted by Avarice, who, in true Amazon style, swears by her golden mammet she carries on her head ("mon ydole est mon Mahommet" says the old lady, instructively) that she will have his life, and makes him the alluring proposal, either to be killed at once, or to give up his staff and scrip, bow down to her mammet, acknowledge it the most worshipful of mammets, and then be killed after all. This reminds us very forcibly of the impressive occasion which so wrought on our childhood's susceptibilities, when "Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den, that you shall go no farther: here will I spill thy soul!'" etc.
Such are the main body of the resemblances between the good old Cistercian abbot and the sturdy Baptist exhorter. There are many who will look them over and decide quite readily with Mr. Southey that the coincidences are fugitive and illusory, and that, as he says, The Pilgrim's Progress might have been exactly what it is, whether Bunyan had ever seen this book or not." But this does not show either much acumen or much thought in Mr. Southey. For all he says might be true from the reason we have before suggested—that Bunyan knew no French, or certainly not enough to master the dialect of De Guileville, and might see the book a thousand times quite harmlessly. We confess, even that if Bunyan had really been familiar with the original poem, these similarities would be trifling. But when he must have drawn if at all from some one of the numerous translations—all indifferently poor—which abounded in his time, slight resemblances mean more. Those who have ever played at the well-known game of passing a story through a number of persons, one by one, will appreciate the force of this. Bunyan could scarcely help seeing some of the translations. For, strange to say, this, to us the baldest of books, was popular for generations, both in France and England. It is hard to understand these cases. We are apt to look upon them as instances of the inveterate slowness of ancient people; but apart from the fact that this slowness is a very difficult thing to analyze, we know that in a few years we shall be slow ourselves. But what every one does not think is, that we are slow to-day. Any one who happens to glance over the shelves of any of our large publishing houses can find there numbers of dull-seeming works, on various specialties, full of facts, figures, demonstrations, discoveries, and what seems to us literally lumber of all sorts. Yet these books sell, and pay an invariable profit to a well-established house. Who buys them and what becomes of them, we shall probably learn when the disappearance of pins, and the necessity of summer clothing, and the origin of evil, are duly cleared up. Certain it is, that the Pélerinage de l'Homme enjoyed a wide reputation and diffusion. Chaucer, especially, was familiar with its author, and his famous "A, B, C," is a palpable and, so far as we know, an undisguised imitation of De Guileville's Prayer to the Virgin, published in the same year 1330. Now, a work which, after filtering through three hundred years, another language and the brains of "painfulle" translators, could still yield the germ of the most nationally popular book in all English literature, has some claim to be called its original.
We shall not attempt to pass upon the question of plagiarism, for the honest reason that, as we have said, we really do not exactly know what the word means in the critical vernacular of to-day. The coincidences we have cited would certainly go to show that The Pilgrim's Progress is not the entire novelty which its author so explicitly proclaims it. On the other hand, it is not proven to complete satisfaction that "John such a dirt-heap ever was" as to mean to steal anything from anybody. Perhaps the most peaceable as well as the most novel conclusion that suggests itself, is to harmonize both sides of this question by a third theory, namely, that one may be a palpable plagiarist, as the word is often used, without in the slightest degree detracting from his originality. The statement sounds extraordinary, but its ingenious advocate, M. Philarète Chasles, is an extraordinary Frenchman, and is talking when he advances it, about the "divine Williams," who is an extraordinary subject for a Frenchman to talk about. We are very much mistaken if those who smile at this seeming contradiction of terms will not find some force in the subjoined excerpt, which we premise, however, suffers greatly in translation for want of the peculiar super-emphatic style of the original French.
"Genius arranges and imitates, studies and deepens; it never invents."
"Genius consists in understanding better, penetrating better, surrounding with more light, what every one does superficially, or understands by half. One of the singular traits of Shakespeare is his supreme indifference as to the subject he is to treat of. He never cares about it; the excellent artisan knows how to find material in everything. He takes up at hap-hazard a pebble, a bit of wood, a block of granite, a block of marble. Little he cares for his predecessor's having made an old king disinherited by his daughters, act and talk upon the stage; it is a fact like any other fact, that counts for no more and no less. Shakespeare goes on to find whatever of tears and of power there is in the soul of this old man."
"People to-day are running after an inventiveness which real originality lacks; it dwells in the artist, not in the materials he employs. With all great men it is tradition, it is the people, it is the common heritage of ideas and customs that has gathered the materials. They have taken them as they came, and then laid their foundations, transmuted them, immortalized them.
"If what is called invention were not a deceptive quality, we should have to rate much higher than Dante, the first idle monk, who wrote, in lumbering style, a vision of Paradise and Hell; the coarse authors of certain Italian delineations would carry the day over Molière; the unknown writers of certain chronicles, divided into acts, would eclipse Shakespeare.
"In the epochs of literary decadence those are taken for inventors who, impelled by a certain ardor of temperament, and a certain fieriness of phrase, dislocate words and images, and think they have launched ideas. These folk proclaim themselves orators. Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière took to themselves no merit but that of studying nature, the world, and man."
"The true function of genius is to second. —Etudes sur IV. Shakespeare, etc., par Philarète Chasles. 1851; p. 88, sqq.
There is no labor like making up one's mind, (unless it be, keeping it made up,) and we own ourselves charmed to find in this acute and able reasoning an outlet of escape from the whole duty of decision. And we think, too, that the many friends of the old Pilgrim—those who love him because (tenderest tie!) he was one of the picture-books of their infancy, those assuredly who have laughed at him in his French dress, converted to a good Catholic Palmer; [Footnote 53] and above all, the large Baptist connection of this magazine, will thank us; and if not, we assure them they ought to thank us, for this third horn of his sore dilemma.
[Footnote 53: Petite Bibliothèque de Catholique, tom. xix. This is a translation of the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress, and is duly modified to doctrinal fitness, and embellished with a frontispiece head of the Blessed Virgin. Southey speaks also of a Portuguese translation of 1782. Nil admirari … !]
The Legend Of The Seven Sleepers.
A.D. 439.
The slaves of Adolius went forth on the hill,
And in toiling and talking got half through their day.
The sun was declining; the landscape was still,
As it stretched far beneath. While they delved in the clay,
And uncovered the rocks by command of their master,
Their stories and comments came faster and faster—
"How hot it became about noon!"
"How the olives were prospering greatly!"
That "the figs and the grapes would be plentiful soon—"
And "what changes had happened in Ephesus lately."
They wandered a century back, ay, and more,
To the time when the edict of Decius went out,
As they heard from their fathers. How fiercely it bore
On the Christians! Their blood in the streets flowed about
How the fame of Diana, whose beauty they knew
By description, those martyrs with horror did view!
How the Goth with his merciless torch
From the Euxine had rushed, an invincible foeman,
And spurning the goddess, had fired her high porch,
Despite of the wide-sweeping blade of the Roman.
Then one ceased his work, who was wrinkled and gray,
And, his hand on his mattock, he said: "It appears
Now since Decius did reign, from what wise people say,
To be clear of one hundred and eighty good years.
When his cruelty flourished, I'm told there were seven
Good youths of our city—so long gone to heaven—
Who fled to these parts and were pent
By the emperor's soldiers, who came on a sally,
And built up the cave." To his mattock he bent,
And a rock that he loosened rolled down to the valley.
They found a large rent where the rock had its bed,
Which with eager assault they made larger by delving;
And a cave was disclosed like a home of the dead—
It was horrid and cold, it was rugged and shelving.
The foulness of ages, unused to the light,
Seemed grimly reclaiming its curtain of night.
But look! as the mist grows more clear,
There's a form moving outward—of hell or of heaven—
The slaves did not question, but fled in their fear;
But in truth this was Iamblichus, one of the seven.
He paused at the mouth; placed his hands on his eyes;
Then he looked toward Ephesus, bathèd in light;
And he journeyed in haste, till with speechless surprise
A cross on the grand city gate met his sight.
He wondered, he doubted, he hearkened the din
Of the city; and kissing the symbol, passed in;
This place he so lately had known
Was transformed—had grown foreign, and altered, and cold;
He was famished for bread, and his wishes were shown;
But they liked not his accents, his dress, or his gold.
"Away to the judge with this madman or worse!"
"He has treasure that must be accounted." They went.
"I'm a Christian," he said, "and am wealthy; my purse
I have offered for bread. Should it be your intent
To enroll me a martyr, my life I'll lay down:
Take my life! Take my wealth in exchange for the crown."
Then the judge when he looked and saw clearly
That Decius' head on the coin did appear,
Declared, while he doubted, "this youth must be nearly
Two hundred years older than any one here!"
The bishop was sent for, and Iamblichus spoke:
"Six others and he had but yesterday fled;
They had slept in a cave, and this morning awoke;
And he had been sent to the city for bread."
"True sons," said the bishop, "of God's predilection!
These men are all saints who have found resurrection.
Resurrection indeed but from sleep,
Which the God of all nature prolonging had shed,
Like a life-saving balsam, to guard and to keep
Those whose memory had passed with the ancient and dead."
The city was emptied the emperor came,
The people, the magnates and all, in a throng,
Beat a broad hardened path to that cavern of fame,
Where the young men of Ephesus slumbered so long.
And when Iamblichus shouted, they came at his call;
And the seven stood together amidst of them all.
But nature asserted her sway,
Which a special design had for once set aside;
And they lived but to gaze on the light of the day,
And imparting their blessing, they painlessly died.
Through the wide Roman empire their fame travelled round;
The East and the West have adopted the story;
In Syriac, in Greek, and in Latin 'tis found;
The Romans and Russians agree in their glory
Where Mahomet conquered, they're known unto all,
And are reverenced as saints from Algiers to Bengal.
The cavilling sceptic may doubt;
But sooner shall earth to destruction be hurled,
Than Iamblichus' name be dethroned or die out,
Or the tale of the sleepers depart from the world.