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Updated: May 1, 2025
If I could but make a parochial settlement even in yours, Audley, run over all your thoughts and sensations. Upon my life, I 'll go and talk to that French mesmerizer about it." Egerton, Alfred de Musset had written his comedies, we should suspect that his lordship had plagiarized from one of them the whimsical idea that he here vents upon Audley. Do talk like a man of sense."
Abashed at his own temerity in venturing to take an independent tail, all the kangaroo's other selections became hopelessly demoralized. He took a grasshopper's hind legs, and plagiarized a rat's fore-paws. Obviously, he got the design of his coat partly from the rabbit and partly from the rat, and the idea of his pouch from the bookmaker.
What is the book which M. Flaubert perused day and night, and which has inspired the passages that the Government Attorney condemns? It is by Bossuet! What I shall read to you is a fragment of Bossuet's discourse upon Illicit Pleasures. I shall bring you to see that all these incriminated passages are not plagiarized; the man who appropriates an idea is not a plagiarist but imitations of Bossuet.
Here's his letter, if you'd like to see what he says of you in black and white; not that there's much white in it, egad!" It was a custom of the Squire of Crompton, unconsciously plagiarized from the Great Napoleon, to let all letters addressed to him in an unfamiliar hand answer themselves.
Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. We are accustomed to bestow so lightly this last hyperbolic honour hyperbolic always, even when we are speaking of a Homer or a Shakspeare, if only we project the vision far enough forward through time that the comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself come to be exaggerated. There are so many "deathless ones" about if I may put the matter familiarly in conversation and in literature, that we get into the way of thinking that they are really a considerable body in actual fact, and that the works which have triumphed over death are far more numerous still. The real truth, however, is, that not only are "those who reach posterity a very select company indeed," but most of them have come much nearer missing their destiny than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or score of writers in one century whom their own contemporaries fondly decree immortal, one-half, perhaps, may be remembered in the next; while of the creations which were honoured with the diploma of immortality a very much smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some fifty per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the goal; and often even upon their brows there flutter but a few stray leaves of the bay. A single poem, a solitary drama nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dramatic avails, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual creation. His imaginative insight into character in general was, no doubt, considerable; his draughtsmanship, whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous; but an artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas for one that will linger in the memory of those who have gazed upon it; and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Captain Tobias Shandy which has graven itself indelibly on the memory of mankind. To have made this single addition to the imperishable types of human character embodied in the world's literature may seem, as has been said, but a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution, or Iago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred; and he contrives to preserve all the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, moreover, considered as an individual character in a specific story, is in complete, accord. If any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has commonly fared with those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to personify a virtue in a man. Take the work of another famous English humourist and sentimentalist, and compare Uncle Toby's manly and dignified gentleness of heart with the unreal "gush" of the Brothers Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter. But Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though we smile at his naïveté, and may even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his purposes as a sentimentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon affectation. It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in illustration of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized (as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly, caught and put out of the window with the words "Get thee gone, poor devil! Why should I harm thee? The world is surely large enough for thee and me." There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in the apostrophe. This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of Sterne's objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium of his own hypertrophied sensibilities. These lapses, however, are, fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only as he appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue the man of simple mind and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely naïf, and delightfully mal-
He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at least a homely one for only such are grateful." In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three days' difference.
What is the meaning of that irritation which we feel when we believe that we are robbed of a phrase, or a thought, or an image, which we believed to be our own, when we are plagiarized? Robbed? Can it indeed be ours once we have given it to the public?
But truly we had just been reading a volume of college stories, and one was about a girl who plagiarized some poems and passed them off as her own. And this Maria Mitchell Kiewit had behaved almost exactly like her. "Or possibly what?" demanded Jo. Adele stammered. "Or p-p-possibly oh, nothing! Maybe she is ashamed of the story or something like that. She lacks self-esteem probably.
"Ah, now," said Miss Knowles, returning her cup to its fellows and turning her face, and her mind, more entirely to him, "now we grow interesting. Describe her to me." "Again?" Jimmie plagiarized. "Yes, again. Tell me, what is she like?" "She is like," he began so deliberately that his hostess, leaning forward, hung upon his words, "she is exactly like nothing." The hostess sat back.
Bertoni not only imitated it in one of his scores, but he had the hardihood to write an Orfeo on the text already followed by Gluck in which he plagiarized the work of his illustrious predecessor in a scandalous fashion.
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