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Nothing could have been more commonplace or unoriginal, but to Tyler Kamps the brilliance of a Madame de Stael would have sounded trivial and uninteresting in comparison. "Where are you from?" "Why, I'm from Texas, ma'am. Marvin, Texas." "Is that so? So many of the boys are from Texas. Are you out at the station or on one of the boats?" "I'm on the Station. Yes ma'am." "Do you like the navy?"
The question was unoriginal and obvious; but the newsboy showed imagination at his second effort, which was the opening line of an old music-hall chorus: "Sidney's 'olidays er in Septembah!" Marmaduke called at another shop and chose the stiffest hat he could find.
'And so you went on thinking it all alone, said Rogers in a low voice. 'I tried to write it first as a story, she answered softly, 'but found that was beyond me; so I went on thinking it all alone, as you say 'Until the Pattern of your thought floated across the world to me, said Daddy proudly. 'I imagined I was inspired; instead I was a common, unoriginal plagiarist!
I translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshipers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell.
His class a fourth, which, at least as regards the greater names of literature, is perhaps the smallest of all comprises those who may almost be said to drift into literary work and literary fame, whose first production is not merely tentative and unoriginal, but, so to speak, accidental, who do not discover their real faculty for literary work till after a pretty long course of casual literary play.
I know, indeed, several high-minded people, diligent, unoriginal, faithful, who have begun by recognising in a philosophical way the worth and force of beauty, but who, having no direct instinct for it, have bemused themselves by conventional and conscientious study, into the belief that they are on the track of beauty in art, when they have no real appreciation of it at all, no appetite for it, but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share.
It was not Browning, but Whitman and Whitman in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that was in him that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their activity flow quietly."
Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase in his operas and songs moves in a conventional or unoriginal curve.
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