The fair investigator of the charge of plagiarism against Belasco will find that it is twofold: it accuses him of appropriation from the works of other writers precedent to him, and of appropriation from other writers contemporary with him to whose writings he has had, or, as alleged, may have had, access.
CHARLES READE ON PLAGIARISM.
In considering the first part of the accusation I would recommend all inquirers to read the masterly exposition of the subject of Plagiarism made by Charles Reade (himself one of the successful writers frequently, in his day, accused of the offence), which is printed, in his collected Works, as an appendix to his capital story of “The Wandering Heir,”—a story first made public in dramatic form. That exposition is too long to be quoted here in full, but the appended extract from it, which deals with what Reade calls “the mere intellectual detraction” involved in the charge that he had stolen “The Wandering Heir” from Dean Swift’s “The Journal of a Modern Lady,” is illuminative:
“It [‘the mere intellectual detraction’] is founded on two things—1. The sham-sample swindle, which I have defined. 2. On a pardonable blunder.
“The blunder is one into which many criticasters of my day have fallen; but a critic knows there is a vital distinction between taking ideas from a homogeneous source and from a heterogeneous source, and that only the first mentioned of these two acts is plagiarism; the latter is more like jewel-setting. Call it what you will, it is not plagiarism.
“I will take the fraud and the blunder in order and illustrate them by a few examples, out of thousands.
“By the identical process Pseudonymuncle has used to entrap your readers into believing ‘The Wandering Heir’ a mere plagiarism from Swift, one could juggle those who read quotations, not books, into believing:—
“1. That the Old Testament is full of indelicacy.
“2. That the miracles of Jesus Christ are none of them the miracles of a God, or even of a benevolent man—giving water intoxicating qualities, when the guests had drunk enough, goodness knows; cursing a fig-tree; driving pigs to a watery grave. This is how Voltaire works the sham-sample swindle, and gulls Frenchmen that let him read the Bible for them.
“3. That Virgil never wrote a line he did not take from Lucretius or somebody else.