Plagiarism. A nasty little word. In the world of classical antiquity the word plagiarius, wich to Cicero meant manstealer or kidnapper, was used by Martial to denote a literary thief. Ever since, the crime has haunted writers of all calibres.
Many people belive that they could easily hold down that job on the plagiarism desk. But if you think you know what plagiarism is, you are making a very large claim, the claim that you know originality when you see it. Apart from being the small change, and occasionally the major currency, of arguments whitin the worlds of letters and journalism, what we call plagiarism is a subject with deep roots in our literature and huge implications for the crafts of writing and speaking. Let me start with a relatively shattering example:
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again
And man and dog were one,
Like the wips of a graying dawn…
This comes from a poem called “Waste Land”, published in 1913. With the addition of a definite article to the title, T. S. Eliot published a rather more famous verse effort in 1922. Eliot’s poem, which it would be trite to describe as the birth pang of poetic modernism, contained the imperishable line “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”. It also speaks of the “brown fog of a winter dawn”. See above. That’s what Robert Ian Scott, a Canadian scholar, has done. He has found a number of other “resemblances”. Aside form the title and the imagery, there is the matter of Eliot’s acces to the earlier poem. Madison Cawein was a Cincinnati pool-hall cashier who died one year after his “Waste Land” was published. It was printed in a Chicago magazine of wich Ezra Pound, Eliot’s friend and mentor, was european editor. Eliot had submitted a poem of his own to this very magazine. Moreover, in the self-same issue in wich Cawein’s “Waste Land” appeared, there was also and essay by Pound on poetry in London, wich is highly unlikely that Eliot would not have wanted to read. […] These all look like pretty damning, not to say open-and-shout, cases. But a second look discloses a lot of ambiguity. Take Eliot first. Did he derive “a handful of dust” from Madison Cawein? Or did he steal it instead from Charlotte Mew, who in a poem written in 1916 spoke of “a handful of forgotten dust”? Or did que perhaps purloin the said handful from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, John Donne, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Tennyson, or Joseph Conrad, each of whom had employed the same phrase or something very close to it? And where had they taken it from? One might also want to make the point that Eliot’s verse is much more beautiful and powerful:
And I will show you something different fom either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
A good rule of thumb for young plagiarists starting out in life might well be the one set down by George Moore. “Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism”. To “making it worse” one could add “or leaving it exactly the same”. We have a certain respect for the professionalism of the forger and the counterfeiter. For kleptomaniacs we entertain no such feeling, but rather resentment at their sloppiness, and the suspicion that in some pathetic way they hope, or need, to get caught. ”Great literature”, wrote Robert Benchley, “must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted”.
Originality is a quiality so rarely met with in humans that when it does occur it is often disputed. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, took great credit for propounding a law of planetary motion. This was to the outrage of his rival Robert Hooke, who maintained that Newton had drawn on his work as well as that of others. At the date (1678) the modern world of the scholarly journal and the patent was not yet formed. Newton made no direct admission, but did tactfully say that “if I have seen farther is it by standing on the shoulders of giants”. This is commonly known as Newton’s Aphorism, though it had appeared as recently as 1651 in a collection of proverbs by George Herbert. According to the magisterial Robert K. Merton in his labyrinthine book “On the Shoulders of Giants”, other claimants to the coinage of the frase include Bernard of Chartres in about 1126, John of Salisbury, Henri de Mondeville, and Robert Burton (he of the Anathomy of Melancholy). And this is to cite only some medieval and postmedieval candidates, since the remark was probably first made in classical times. Among later imitators were Coleridge, as usual, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, Frank Harris, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom in their different ways had a right to it, and some of whom (though not Mill, who had read everything and had a conscience) may have belived that they were uttering it for the first time. Thus Newton’s most subtle and guarded admission of a possible “debt” is itself one of the phrases most frequently “borrowed”.
So I leave you with the words of that famous dopehead Thomas de Quincey, himself no mean plagiarist and the very man who first published accusations of Coleridge’s thievery: “It is undeniable, that thousands of feeble writers are constantly at work, who subsist by plagiarism, more or less covert. It is equally undeniable… that thousands of feeble critics subsist by detecting plagiarisms as imitations real or supposed.”
Just as writers should beware of joining the first category, so readers should not be too eager to enlist in the second. Now, spot the unattributed quotation in this column. At least, I hope there’s only one.
