ON PLAGIARISM
I have had many literary enthusiasms, some of them transient, some of them lasting, but Pope was never one of them. He seems to me to dwell in a walled-in garden, very perfectly kept, amazingly neat and tidy with the box-hedges trimmed to a nicety and shaped here and there into cocks and other fantasies; but airless and stuffy. I like to take a stroll down his trim couplets now and then, but I am soon content to pass out to the landscapes where the Miltons and Shelleys and Wordsworths and Shakespeares fill the lungs with the great winds and feast the eye with the great spaces. I do not therefore feel any particular horror at Professor Karl Pearson's discovery that Pope is a plagiarist. I should not be disturbed if he proved he was a bad plagiarist. He has not done that, but he has found that Pope's aphorism, "The proper study of mankind is Man," is lifted from Pierre Charron—"La vraye science et le vray estude de l'homme c'est l'Homme." It seems to me a rather poor, pedestrian thing to steal—so commonplace indeed as to defy paternity. Anybody might have said it without feeling that he had said something that anybody else could not have said as well.
If this were the worst charge of plagiarism that could be brought against Pope—and I shall show presently that it is not—few illustrious poets would have so clean a record. If we damned him for so trivial a theft as this, what sort of punishment would be left for the colossal borrowings of a Shakespeare or a Burns? Take, for example, that most exquisite of Burns's songs, "O, my luve is like a red, red rose." There is not a single stanza that is not lifted from old ballads and chapbooks. Compare, as an illustration, the third stanza:
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear.
While the sands o' life shall run.
with this from The Young Man's Farewell to his Love in the Motherwell collection of chapbooks:
The seas they shall run dry,
And rocks melt into sands;
Then I'll love you still, my dear,
When all those things are done.
Even the fine change from "melt into sands" to "melt wi' the sun" is traceable to another source. Wordsworth and Milton, proud and austere though they were, were not above enriching their verse with borrowed thoughts. Milton's borrowings from Dante are abundant, but they are done in the grand manner, as of a prince taking a loan from an equal, not because he needs it, but as a token of their high companionship and their starry discourse. To be plagiarised by Milton would be no grievance, but a crowning distinction. It would be a title-deed for immortality. The two most beautiful lines in the poem on the daffodils by Ullswater are Dorothy Wordsworth's, and in sending The Ettrick Shepherd to the Athenæum for publication Wordsworth acknowledged that in the lines:
Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits
Or waves that own no curbing hand.
he was indebted to a now unknown poet, G. Bell, who in speaking of Skiddaw said, "Yon dark cloud rakes and shrouds its noble brow." One can imagine G. Bell being famous in the Elysian Fields as the man from whom Wordsworth once borrowed a thought.