I opened the letter, and showed that I had stated the date and the contents correctly. Mr. Wright’s letter simply contained what my own letter, written on the same date, contained, and mine still lay in its pigeon-hole, where it had been lying during the seven days since it was written.
There was no clairvoyance about this, if I rightly comprehend what clairvoyance is. I think the clairvoyant professes to actually see concealed writing, and read it off word for word. This was not my case. I only seemed to know, and to know absolutely the contents of the letter in detail and due order, but I had to word them myself. I translated them, so to speak, out of Wright’s language into my own.
Wright’s letter and the one which I had written to him but never sent were in substance the same.
Necessarily this could not come by accident; such elaborate accidents cannot happen. Chance might have duplicated one or two of the details, but she would have broken down on the rest. I could not doubt—there was no tenable reason for doubting—that Mr. Wright’s mind and mine had been in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of March 2. I did not consider that both minds originated that succession of ideas, but that one mind originated them, and simply telegraphed them to the other. I was curious to know which brain was the telegrapher and which the receiver, so I wrote and asked for particulars. Mr. Wright’s reply showed that his mind had done the originating and telegraphing and mine the receiving. Mark that significant thing, now; consider for a moment how many a splendid ‘original’ idea has been unconsciously stolen from a man three thousand miles away! If one should question that this is so, let him look into the Cyclopædia, and con once more that curious thing in the history of inventions which has puzzled everyone so much—that is, the frequency with which the same machine or other contrivance has been invented at the same time by several persons in different quarters of the globe. The world was without an electric telegraph for several thousand years; then Professor Henry, the American, Wheatstone in England, Morse on the sea, and a German in Munich, all invented it at the same time. The discovery of certain ways of applying steam was made in two or three countries in the same year. Is it not possible that inventors are constantly and unwittingly stealing each other’s ideas whilst they stand thousands of miles asunder?
Last spring a literary friend of mine,[[1]] who lived a hundred miles away, paid me a visit, and in the course of our talk he said he had made a discovery—conceived an entirely new idea—one which certainly had never been used in literature. He told me what it was. I handed him a manuscript, and said he would find substantially the same idea in that—a manuscript which I had written a week before. The idea had been in my mind since the previous November; it had only entered his while I was putting it on paper, a week gone by. He had not yet written his; so he left it unwritten, and gracefully made over all his right and title in the idea to me.
[1]. W. D. Howells.
The following statement, which I have clipped from a newspaper, is true. I had the facts from Mr. Howells’s lips when the episode was new:
‘A remarkable story of a literary coincidence is told of Mr. Howells’s “Atlantic Monthly” serial, “Dr. Breen’s Practice.” A lady of Rochester, New York, contributed to the magazine, after “Dr. Breen’s Practice” was in type, a short story which so much resembled Mr. Howells’s that he felt it necessary to call upon her and explain the situation of affairs in order that no charge of plagiarism might be preferred against him. He showed her the proof-sheets of his story, and satisfied her that the similarity between her work and his was one of those strange coincidences which have from time to time occurred in the literary world.’
I had read portions of Mr. Howells’s story, both in manuscript and in proof, before the lady offered her contribution to the magazine.
Here is another case. I clip it from a newspaper: