Plagiarism and John Bunyan.
There are not many writers of any popularity or eminence who have not in their day, either in their own behalf or by the sensitive proxy of their intimate friends, had occasion for self-defence against the charge of plagiarism. From young authors especially, some little slur or other on this tender point is pretty sure, at some time, to evoke a thin-skinned answer, replete with a peculiar modest defensive ferocity that critics know by heart, and grin over with a grim relish. This is a thing of course—a well-marked stage of the fever of authorship. Only we notice that most of those who begin with young Byron's philippics end with old Wordsworth's philosophy. The fact is, splendid sensitiveness, here as everywhere, does not pay, and beyond most men the author finds it cost him dear. For of all ill-matched and absurd controversies, there is none like a wrangle about plagiarism. It is a duel of javelins and catapults, of fly and lion. All the advantage is with the attacking party. The accusation is vague and sweeping to the last degree, and the easiest imaginable to make. It need not even be said; it can be sneered. And how cheap it is to be sophistical about it! A little ingenuity to cook up a factitious resemblance, a little malice to point a bit of irony or innuendo, and the thing is done. To rebut such crimination may take days of labor. These very days consumed, too, are so much dead disadvantage; the whole matter grows stale the while. Then the answer must not only conclusively meet the charge, both as to the animus furandi and the fact of theft, but it must be intrinsically interesting, both to revive interest enough in the subject for the reading public to go to the trouble of revising its opinion, and because every word an author writes is matter for fresh criticism, while his opponent may waive all pretensions to style. Practically we incline to think it is much as in battle, where it takes a man's weight in lead to kill him. Now and then, some one is demolished utterly by one of these elaborate broadsides, but the number of them that miss the mark must be enormous. It is only effects and successes that we all remember. The shot that sunk the Alabama at a few hundred yards, made more impression in history than the dozens of idle shell that the great Sawyer gun used to send spinning miles away over the Ripraps. One general net result is a vast waste of the author's time, which is always valuable to him, and sometimes to the public. And after all, with the truest aim and best powder—who is hit? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, some nobody. And this is truer every day. Pope and Byron could at least single out their Dennises and Amos Cottles by name; but nowadays, what with pseudonyms and anonyms, and above all the editorial pronoun, one fights the very air.
Thus we find authors of standing strangely meek under audacious strictures of this sort, and very little given to tilting at the mosquitoes of the press. This is more than dignity; it is sense. But (and now we strike the point we have been coming at all this while) the world draws from this fact a very exaggerated inference. It seems, to reverse the old law rule, that one story's good till another is told. The very fact of an accusation's going unanswered seems to crush it under a vis inertiae of silence. This is all worldly wise, but not very infallible. If a man shouts something against me before my street-door, and I let him shout away at his own sweet will, I am tolerably sure, whether it be truth or calumny he is vociferating, that his wind must give out after a while. The world, though, is apt instead of listening to him, to stare up at my window, and see if I mind it. If I make no sign, he is a vituperator, and some good citizen just mentions him to the policeman round the corner. But all this while may not he be bawling the blessed truth, and I slinking behind the shutters? Public opinion says no. If a man of standing does not deign or see fit to come out against a charge, it is a fabrication or a fancy sketch. Now, the truth is, as history well knows, that there is a vast amount of systematic stealing in the world of letters, and that these same majestic gentlemen, who are above replies, have done their very fair share of the stealing. What is the effect, then, of this false estimate of men and things? This: that when a writer has once attained station, with a decent regard to the conventionalities of literary larceny, he can steal all he chooses with impunity. All he has to do is to alter enough to keep him that runs from reading the resemblance. This done, there remains the one risk that some one who cannot be ignored may expose the theft. But this risk is not, by far, so great as it seems. The man of calibre enough for the task is generally an amiable man, and always a busy one, and has plenty of pleasanter things to do than airing his neighbor's peccadilloes. Besides, it is an even chance but he has some little appropriation of his own to cover up, and this fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Thus a very little judgment in the selection of the author stolen from passes the whole fraud scot free. And there are good reasons why there should be a good deal of this fraud. First-class plagiarism pays, like everything first-class. It has a high market value, with large and ungrudging profits. For the reading power is omnivorous, and it feels that an old author made modern, or a foreign author made native, is not as good as new but better. Pisistratus Caxton is a vast improvement on Tristram Shandy, and the Comedy of Errors on the Menaechmi; and the primmest of the decriers read Bulwer and Shakespeare, and do not read Plautus and Sterne. Boucicault's plays draw in London, and we never hear of English purists staying away till they can go to see the originals at Paris. But it is idle to multiply instances. The fact is too patent to need illustrating, that the nineteenth century prefers essences of books to books, and the juice of literary fruit to the fruit itself. Extracts, and digests, and compilations and abridgments, and horti sicci of all sorts are the order of the day, and the old fogies, who prate of meum and tuum, and dream of international copyright, and read old authors through, "miranturque nihil nisi quod Libitina sacravit," find that these are all side issues. The public does not care a rush where a man gets what it wants. This may be the best law, or it may not; the law it certainly is. Let any one who doubts the popularity of plagiarism, only take up that fine, furious, generous little book, Mr. Reade's Eighth Commandment, and see for himself what is the fashion and what is not.
But the honest crusader against literary despoilers and desecrators, soon finds that without the limits of downright pillage lies a vast debatable land, which has been the Flanders, the Kentucky, the Quadrilateral of critic controversy from time immemorial—the territory of mere resemblance. This is far more difficult ground, because the critic's own fallible perceptions of likeness enter as an element of possible error into his judgment, and the danger of doing injustice is great. Here, it is true, are found the expertest plagiarists of all—the vampires of literature—the thieves that steal the soul and leave the body. But close beside them stand the true scholars, to whose assiduity books yield up an honest wealth, and who melt and mould their well-worn treasure into solid ingots of golden thought or exquisite fretwork of glittering fancies. And more puzzling than both, we have the myriad legions of fugitive resemblances—an army of ghosts, present to the comparing consciousness, but impalpable to the analyzing sense. Obviously it will not do to apply here the martial law of literary vindication. Men are too much alike to be damned for striking even strange coincidences. Among the best writers there are so many parallelisms that a mind with any turn for hunting phantoms of similarity, soon comes to the saying of King Solomon about nothing new under the sun. At any rate, if it ever did exist, the era of entire novelty is of the past now. Take out what a keen, well-read man could trace to Shakespeare, Byron, Macaulay, Carlyle, the Bible, the Greek tragedians, the Standard Speakers, and the Declaration of Independence, and how much is there left of to-day's English and American literature? Yet among the imitations, if there are many wilful and culpable, there are many more innocent and unwitting. True, not every one is born with so developed an organ of unconsciousness as Mr. A. M. W. Ball, who astonished himself by originating some one else's poem in full. But very few read over their familiar authors without finding the germs of a thousand thoughts they had never suspected not to be all their own. Indeed, for some time after beginning, a young author could, if he should choose, (which he doesn't,) pluck up his ideas like young blades of corn, and find the original seed of some pet author at the root.
But critics have called the name of plagiarist far too often and too lightly. The charge is old enough, heaven knows, for people to know what they mean by it. Waiving those ancient Sanscrit sages, who seem with malice prepense to have been born so long ago that we can't more than half believe in them, and before there was any intelligible language for them to be wise in, we find that Job, our oldest modern writer, has been read out of the rubric by a theologue somewhere out West, who has discovered in his style gross and servile plagiarisms from the Bible. Homer stood tolerably well till the German omniscients found out that, like Artemus Ward's friend, Brigham Young's mother-in-law, he was numerous, when it at once becomes plain, from the great uniformity of style, that each one of him must have been a most accomplished plagiarist from the remaining fractional bards. Horace's spiteful and uncalled for commentaries on Lucilius, besides the outrageous ill taste of them, show that there was some shrewdness in the bite of the cimex Pantilius, the blear-eyed Crispinus, and other literary gentlemen—probably good fellows enough, too—as those ancient Bohemians went—who, no doubt, hinted at little likenesses between his sermo merus and Lucilius' sal nigrum. Martial's epigrams have crucified a dozen thieves into immortality. And so the old bandying of hard words has come down the annals of literature, till the self-same wave of bitterness that whelmed the luckless insect Pantilius foams about the shallows of Mr. Swinburne's self-defence, and finally goes combing over the City Hall with Mr. Charles Reade for its Neptune, and threatens to make flotsam of that cosy fixture, the Round Table. Yet, with all these precedents to define it, plagiarism is to-day a purely relative term—a weapon of the partisan wars of letters. If our enemies commit a coincidence, that is plagiarism; when our friends pilfer, it is adaptation, version, studies in style, or some other euphemism.
Modern criticism has not signalized its advance by establishing any principle to decide this difficult question of what is really plagiarism. There is absolutely no standard or criterion yet, and each one who wishes to form a right opinion, is thrown upon his own devices to reach it. Amid the many delicacies and difficulties of judging in this matter, we have found, or fancied we found, one rule of singular service in guiding us to a satisfactory conclusion. It is noteworthy, to say the least, that almost all the great plagiarists and imitators of all time have been writers of the self-conscious or subjective order; men who wrote with Mrs. Grundy uppermost, and their theme next; whose real and primary aim was to exhibit and exalt themselves; to feed their personal vanity, ambition, or greed. The objective or intuitive class, on the contrary—those who wrote because they were full of their subject; thinking of it, feeling it, full of it; those in brief who develop their natures instead of advantaging themselves, are almost never caught depredating intentionally, while their very intentness on what they may have to say makes them the most frequent of unconscious imitators in mere manner and expression.
It may be generalizing too much to say that this fact contains a principle, but we do think it points to a presumption. The more satisfactory the rule, however, the more puzzling the exception, and in applying this test of subjectivity, we strike on quite a little casus conscientiae, in the issues presented by the two books which form our text.
Of all English writers, one of the last to pitch on for a plagiarist is honest John Bunyan. He, if ever man was, is sincere, objective—a convinced missionary and messenger. Grave, rough, outspoken, self-praising, yet rigid, he seems at a first glance to embody and epitomize his age; that strange, fermented, fanatical age, when England seems one vast presbytery—a Massachusetts of political, social, and religious austerities and extremes; when the Englishmen of history seem to lose their characteristics for a while, and turn to foreshadowed, mediaeval Yankees; when we never think of them in connection with blonde love-locks and blue eyes, and slashed doublets, and foaming ale, and big, merry, unmeant oaths, and cheery taverns, and champing steeds; but as stern, sombre, black-a-vised, steel-capped, praying infantry, with jerkins on their backs, and Sternhold and Hopkins in every third knapsack. Yet, when we look closely, Bunyan is not so representative a man as he appears. He was not only a better and bolder man than his fellows, but at bottom a different one. The reason why he typifies so much of those days is really that the man had a large measure of that tact for apparent conformity with the masses which is the essence of popularity, and which in him covered much independence. A hundred years later, he would have been the Francis Asbury of England. Under the Puritan crust lay hidden a red-hot Methodist. His autobiography—by far his most interesting work, in our opinion—is full of an ebullient fervor that was then a favorite novelty, is now to most of us a psychological study, but would waken only electric sympathy without a touch of surprise in many a circuit-riding itinerant of the south-west—unless, perhaps, he should wonder that there were such orthodox Methodists so long ago. He also fails in not representing that pragmatical hypocrisy which culminated in the Rump Parliament and Praisegod Barebones, and finally rotted the Commonwealth into the Restoration. Controversial and conceited he may have been, and he had no little reason to be honestly proud of the volcanic force of manliness that found him an imbruted tinker-boy, and made him a respected leader of his people. But in his great work no man could be more self-forgetful, more impersonal, more transparent to the thought within him. He is rife, permeated, possessed with his subject. His powerful imagination, always morbidly vivid, and at times in his life, disordered, bends its full force to the work. "He saw the things of which he was writing," says one of his biographers, "as distinctly with his mind's eye, as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream." Now, this is not the sort of man to go culling other people's words for his warm and swarming fancies. But moreover Bunyan was attacked in his lifetime with charges of plagiarism, and replied with his usual aggressive emphasis, and in his characteristic doggerel—in the preface to his Holy War.