The indebtedness of Keats to others is indebtedness for words rather than ideas, but it is an immense debt. You can almost trace his reading by the perfumed words that he has ravished from other gardens, and to which he has given a new and immortal setting. When he writes: "Oh Moon! far-spooming Ocean bows to thee," we know that he has been dipping into Beaumont and Fletcher, and so we may track him through Milton and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Sandys' Ovid and Thomson's Seasons, and a score of other luxuriant gardens of long ago. But this plucking of verbal flowers can hardly come within the scope of plagiarism. For that accusation to hold there must be some appropriation of ideas or at least of rhythm and form. Often the appropriation may be so transfigured as to rob it of any element of discredit. Thus, Tennyson's:
Our little systems have their day.
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.
is clearly traceable to the magnificent image in Shelley's Adonais:
The One remains; the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
In both we have the idea of Heaven's light streaming down upon the "broken lights" of our earthly tabernacle, and being splintered into many-coloured fragments, but the later poet's employment of the idea, however inferior, is sufficiently original and fresh to warrant the spoliation. And, indeed, Shelley himself must have had a great phrase of St. Augustine's in mind when he wrote his immortal stanza.
Often the apparent plagiarism is unintended, even unconscious. Some minds are tenacious of good things and quite honestly forgetful of the source. I don't refer to cases like that of the late Canon Fleming, who preached and published a sermon of Dr. Talmage's as his own, and when exposed declared that he had been so impressed by it that he had written it out and then forgotten it was not his own. Nor do I refer to such thefts as that of Disraeli from Thiers. In that case Disraeli, like Fleming, explained that he had copied the passage into his commonplace book and mistaken it for his own. But as Thiers did not speak English, the explanation, as Herbert Paul remarks, was not felt to be explanatory. I refer to honourable men who would not stoop to these depths of brazen effrontery. In the instance I have quoted from Tennyson, it is of course obvious that the poet knew the source. He probably knew Adonais by heart, and he would certainly not have been shocked to find that others had noted the similarity. He quite deliberately invited criticism and comparison. In another case in which he appropriated a picturesque image from Shakespeare, it is difficult to suppose that he was unconscious of what he was doing. "Heigho! an it be not four by the day, I'll be hanged," says the Carrier, calling up the sleepy ostler in Henry IV., "Charles's Wain is over the new chimney and yet our horse not packed. What, ostler!" In the May Queen we read:
And we danced about the maypole and in the hazel copse
Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney tops.
But, to take a recent instance, I do not imagine that Rupert Brooke was conscious of any indebtedness to Thoreau when he wrote:
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
Yet I do not think it would be possible to deny to these lines an indisputable echo of Thoreau's: