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The usual result of almost any great and original achievement is, the production of a shoal of brainless imitators, who are "neither useful nor ornamental." In the same year that Pease's hoarhound candy appeared upon the commercial and newspaper horizon, the "Governor Dorr Rebellion" occurred in Rhode Island. As many will remember, this rebellion caused a great excitement throughout the country.
And even in a sphere accessible to all, we have seen unworthy imitators quickly diverting public attention from the incomparable Walter Scott. For, say what you will, the public has no sense for excellence, and therefore no notion how very rare it is to find men really capable of doing anything great in poetry, philosophy, or art, or that their works are alone worthy of exclusive attention.
They say that in the practice of the Church nothing is to be added to what Christ and the Apostles taught and did. They hold the pure text of the Gospel without any gloss. They allege that the Church is in error, and that they themselves are the brethren of Christ and the true imitators of the Apostles.
In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes the Church to be "imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything."
Nothing is more common, indeed, than to see classical pictures of the Alma-Tadema school not, of course, from the brush of the master himself, who is impeccable in such details, but fair works of decent imitators in which Caia or Marcia leans gracefully in her white stole on one pensive elbow against a marble lintel, beside a courtyard decorated with a Pompeian basin, and overgrown with prickly pear or "American aloes."
"I believe in the past," he said, "because I believe in the future. I want continuity. Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley and in Milton. But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their imitators. I believe in destroying their imitators. I do not believe in destroying them."
Its significance lies, rather, in the host of imitators it spawned and which were to proliferate throughout the world like some malignant series of mutations, in the decades since then.
"Go," said the old religionist, when the youths presented themselves before him; "Go; carry forth the tidings of this visitation, that men come to our succor. I ask not vengeance on the deluded and heathenish imitators of the worshippers of Moloch. They have ignorantly done this evil. Let no man arm in behalf of the wrongs of one sinful and erring.
The students and the imitators of Machiavel must not be frightened with bugbears. Beside, were cowardice as congenial to the feelings of your lordship as I confess it has sometimes been to mine, cowardice itself is not so apt to be terrified with threats hung up in terrorem, and menaces of a vague and general nature. It trembles only at a danger definite and impending.
And we say it with no less regret than surprise, that the chief imitators are females. The novels written by men have generally some manliness, some recollection of the higher impulses which occasionally act on the minds of men; some reluctancy in revealing the more infirm movements of the mind; and some doubts as to the absorption of all human nature in one perpetual whirl of love-making.
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