James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

You mustn’t be disheartened. If you had written a foolish thing, don’t you see?—nobody would be attacking it. People don’t bring artillery to bear on soap-bubbles, but wait till they burst of themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be shaken from that equipoise of good sense and good temper that drew my attention so strongly in your first article. Above all, don’t be drawn into any controversy. Keep straight on, as if nothing had happened, and if you have anything in you be sure the world will find it out. Publicity is one of the painful necessities of authorship. For my own part, I would give all the praise I ever received for the right to be valued simply for my personal good qualities alone. But you must resign yourself. You have given everybody who can command pen, ink, and paper the right to talk flippantly and ignorantly and unfeelingly of things into which you have put your very heart’s blood. But don’t be disheartened. If you honestly try to think (and it was because you seemed to me to do so that I felt an interest in you) you will come out right in the long run. If you have the true quality you will at last get the power of thinking, the only abiding satisfaction and security for happiness which this life or the other for that matter affords, a thing rarer than is generally supposed. Really to think is to see things as they are, and when we have once got firm foot-hold on that rock of ages, our own little trials and triumphs take their true proportions, and are as indifferent to us, morally, I mean, as the changes of the weather. I think you have the root of the matter in you, that is, that you are in earnest to do honest work, and not to flaunt in the newspapers. For that reason I wish to help you all I can. Don’t think I am writing such letters as this every week. On the contrary, I am shy of writing letters at all, especially to women. But whenever a word from me will cheer you, you shall have it.

I have directed two books to be sent you by express and beg you to accept them as a token of sincere esteem from your friend,

J. R. Lowell.

There is another letter drawn out from him by a stranger who was concerned over a case of literary honesty, which is interesting as showing how sensitive Lowell was in all matters pertaining to his art. “You ask,” he writes, “my judgment on a point of literary morals. In the case you set forth I find it hard to judge of the facts without some knowledge of the character of the man, because thoughtlessness, want of moral sensibility, and loose habits of mind generally, may in the particular instance tend to lenify our judgment of the ethical quality of the offence, without in the least changing our opinion of its discreditable nature as respects good scholarship and honest literature. There can be no question that every article (such as you describe) should have had the name of its true author at the head of it, so that no man who read could fail to know whose work he was reading. Nay, I think we should be so scrupulous in such matters as to acknowledge even an apt quotation when we owe it to another man. For example, I suppose I must have read the ‘Divinia Commedia’ of Dante at least thirty times with minute attention and yet it had never occurred to me that cima di giudizie was literally Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘top of judgment,’ till Mr. Dyce pointed it out in a note on ‘Measure for Measure.’ I should never think of using it as an illustration without giving credit to Mr. Dyce. Even had I found the coincidence noted on the margin of my own copy of Dante, I should still have quoted Dyce for it as having first mentioned it in print, in order to avoid even the appearance of evil. I think an honest man can easily resolve any doubt he may have in such matters by asking himself the simple question, Do I gain any credit that does not belong to me by letting it pass for my own? If I do, it is stealing, neither more nor less, for there is no real distinction between picking a man’s pocket of his money and filching the fruits of his industry or thought from a book.

“In literature proper, originality consists of such an energy of nature as enables a man so to infuse thoughts or sentiments common to all with his own individuality as to give them a new character—flavor would be the better word—commending them anew to the general palate. Chaucer is a capital instance in point. He formed himself wholly on foreign models, helped himself to plots, incidents, and reflections from any and everywhere, and yet is on the whole fresher than almost any of our poets. I always liked him the better for remembering in his ‘House of Fame’ the pipes of those

‘little heardgromes
That kepen bestes in the bromes,’

for he was, I doubt not, paying the debt he owed to some nameless minstrel.

“In matters of research and scholarship, the question seems to present itself under a somewhat different aspect. All learning is of necessity to a great extent second-hand—but here also there is a manifest distinction between appropriating another man’s scholarship and assimilating it. In the one case it lies a mere load of indigestible rubbish upon the brain; in the other, it is dissolved and worked over into a new substance, giving sustenance and impulse to one’s native thought. So that after all, whether in literature or scholarship, the point is not so much what a man has taken, as whether he has made something new of what he has taken.[38] If he have not, then he should make punctilious acknowledgment of the sources whence he drew. It is one thing to be indebted to a man for a hint that sets us on a path of original research and discovery, and quite another to rob him of his journals and publish them as one’s own. So as to giving credit where it is due; I would not thank a guide-post, but I must pay a guide. I may read by a man’s lamp, but if I tap his gas pipe, I ought to attach a gasometer that shall record precisely how much I borrow.

“The leading case in this branch of literary ethics is the famous one of Schelling et als. against Coleridge. For the defence we should take into account the defendant’s lifelong habits of mental dissipation, his own really great learning which might make him careless alike in borrowing and lending, and above all the effect of opium in blurring the memory and deadening the nerves of moral sensation. On the other hand, it would be urged that he lifted (to borrow a word, peculiarly apt here, from the loose dialect of the border) from foreigners whose property would be least liable to identification by his countrymen; he did it by translation and transfusion, thus, as it were, obliterating the marks of former ownership; and above all (in the case of A. W. Schlegel) he did it in oral lectures, thus driving his stolen cattle so hurriedly by in a way to baffle detection.

“You will find in Mrs. Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction to the ‘Biographia Literaria’ an eloquent and even passionate vindication of her father from the charge of plagiarism. It does her honor as a daughter, but is hardly convincing. Coleridge’s acknowledgment of general indebtedness to Schelling and others was, to speak mildly, wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very painful impression on the mind. If he was not lying, he was so shamefully inaccurate in dates (to his own advantage) as to have all the appearance of it.