One day Mr. Godwin expressed himself as delighted with all I had written on the American Idea. I responded:
"That is very natural. The idea is yours, not mine, and in all that I have written about it, I have merely been reporting what you said to me, as we stood looking at the surf dashing itself to pieces on the rocks at Bar Harbor."
"Not at all," he answered. "No man can expound and elaborate another man's thought without putting so much of himself into it as to make it essentially and altogether his own. I may have dropped a seed into your mind, but I didn't know it or intend it. The fruitage is all your own. My thinking on the subject was casual, vagrant, unorganized. I had never formulated it in my own mind. You see we all gather ideas in converse with others. That is what speech was given to man for. But the value of the ideas depends upon the use made of them."
Mr. Godwin had been at one time in his life rather intimately associated with Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and statesman. As all old newspaper men remember, Kossuth had a habit of dying frequently. News of his death would come and all the newspapers would print extended obituary articles. Within a day or two the news would be authoritatively contradicted, and the obituaries would be laid away for use at some future time. On one of these occasions Mr. Godwin wrote for me a singularly interesting article, giving his personal reminiscences of Kossuth. Before I could print it despatches came contradicting the news of the old Hungarian's death. I put Mr. Godwin's manuscript into a pigeonhole and both he and I forgot all about it. A year or so later Kossuth did in fact die, and in looking through my papers to see what I might have ready for printing on the subject, I discovered Mr. Godwin's paper. It was not signed, but purported to be the personal recollections of one who had known the patriot well.
I hurried it into print, thus gaining twelve or fourteen hours on the morning newspapers.
The next morning Mr. Godwin called upon me, declaring that he had come face to face with the most extraordinary psychological problem he had ever encountered.
"The chapter of Kossuth reminiscences that you printed yesterday," he said, "was as exact a report of my own recollections of the man as I could have given you if you had sent a reporter to interview me on the subject; and the strangest part of it is that the article reports many things which I could have sworn were known only to myself. It is astonishing, inexplicable."
"This isn't a case of talking your thought into another person," I answered, referring to the former incident. "This time you put yourself down on paper, and what I printed was set from the manuscript you gave me a year or so ago."
This solved the psychological puzzle and to that extent relieved his mind. But there remained the further difficulty that, cudgel his brain as he might, he could find in it no trace of recollection regarding the matter.
A Mystery of Forgetting