Pascal says that the greatest compliment that can be paid to a book, even to a thought, is the exclamation, 'I could have written that!' and 'I could have said that!' In fact, the author whom we admire most is the one who writes a book that we 'could' have written ourselves. And we say 'bravo' when a philosopher gives us a thought of our own, only better expressed than we could have done it, or when he confirms an opinion that we already held ourselves.
No; there is nothing original, not even the stories that we hear and tell in our clubs. They have been told before. I forget who said that there were only thirty-five anecdotes in the world, seventeen of which were unfit for ladies' ears.
Even the characters of fiction are not original. The novelist is, as a rule, none but a portrait painter, possessed of more or less originality and talent. Charles Dickens said that there was not a single personage of his novels whom he had not drawn from life. Thackeray and Balzac, two observers of mankind of marvellous ability, said the same. Racine borrowed of Sophocles and Euripides, Molière of Plautus and Terence. Alexandre Dumas chose his heroes from history, and regifted them with life with his unequalled imagination. George Eliot's personality remained a mystery for a long time, but everybody knew that the author of 'Scenes of Clerical Life' was a native of Nuneaton, or had lived long enough in that town to introduce local characters who were recognised at once. The Dame aux Camélias, the Camille of the American stage, by Dumas, junr., was inspired, if not suggested, by Manon Lescaut. And is not the Adam Bede of George Eliot a variation of Goethe's Faust? Is not Tess of Thomas Hardy another? And that marvellous hero Tartarin of Alphonse Daudet: do you not recognise in him Don Quixote? More than that, he is a double embodiment, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in one: the Don Quixote who dreams of adventures with lions in the desert, of ascensions on Mont Blanc, of guns, swords, and alpinstocks, and the Sancho Panza who thinks of wool socks, flannel vests, and a medicine-chest for the marvellous journeys that are going to be undertaken—a tremendous creation, this double personage, but not altogether original.
Every character has been described in fiction, every characteristic of mankind has been told; but we like to see those characters described again with new surroundings; we love to hear the philosophy of life told over again in new, pleasant, pithy, witty sentences.
This lack of originality in literature is so obvious, it is so well acknowledged a fact that authors, novelists, or philosophers have used mankind for their work, and availed themselves of all that mankind has written or said before, that the law does not allow the literary man to own the work of his brain for ever and ever, as he owns land or any other valuable possession. After allowing him to derive a benefit for forty or fifty years, his literary productions become common property—that is to say, return to mankind to whom he owed so much of them.
CHAPTER XX
PLAGIARISM
La Bruyère said: 'Women often love liberty only to abuse it.' Two hundred years later Balzac wrote: 'There are women who crave for liberty in order to make bad use of it.' The thoughts are not great, they are not even true, but that is not the question. Could such a genius as Balzac be accused of plagiarism because he expressed a thought practically in the very words of La Bruyère? I would as soon charge Balzac with plagiarism as I would accuse a Vanderbilt or a Carnegie of trying to cheat a street-car conductor out of a penny fare. The heroines of Tess and Adam Bede practically go through the same ordeals as Gretchen. Would you seriously accuse Thomas Hardy and George Eliot of plagiarism, and say that they owed their plots to Goethe's 'Faust'?