FLAUBERT AND MR. STURGE MOORE
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Mr. H. W. Crundell thinks that I should explain the absence of a note to my poem Micah; the presence of the one he suggests would have appeared to me an impertinence. Did Gray and Arnold call attention by notes when they adapted a few lines from Pindar? Did Tennyson thus docket what he owed to Homer and Virgil? To me the explanation seems rather due from Mr. Crundell: why he wrote his letter, and from you, why you printed it. However, obviously you think differently, so this occasion may as well serve me to allay an innocent curiosity that I neither intended to provoke nor to baffle. Besides Mr. Crundell's find there is a longer passage from Salammbo in my Mariamne. I put a line from Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer into my Rout of the Amazons, a phrase from Myers' translation of Pindar into At Bethel, and a phrase from Milton into Love's First Communion. Excepting the usual array from the Bible, I believe these to be all my verbal and literal appropriations.—Yours, etc.,
T. Sturge Moore.
P.S.—I have forgotten an unintentional one, a line from Keats in Mariamne.
[By printing Mr. Crundell's letter we didn't mean to suggest that we agreed with his argument; we were merely interested in the derivation of a beautiful passage in a beautiful poem.—Editor.]