St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1892-08-11
THE QUESTION OF PLAGIARISM.
Gems of Thought, 1t Appears, May Be
Stolen if Put in New Settings.

Gems of Thought, 1t Appears, May Be
Stolen if Put in New Settings.
No one has ever been able to de
fine what plagiarism is, and there
fore it is unlikely that there should
be any general agreement as to what
makes a man liable to such charge.
The question. is perpetually recurring
in other fields of literature as well as
in homiletics, and no one has laid
down any scientific principle of suffi-
Gent clearness to decide all disputes.
It cannot be that man who is in
debted to another for an idea is
guilty of theft if he adapts it for his
own purposes; for, if such an appro-
priation be fraud, nearly all modern
writers have committed unpardon-
able sins against the ancients
They may not have known every
thing down in JUDGE, but the range
of literary and speculative ideas was
remarkably extensive in Greece, and
if we are going to judge those of our
writers confne ourselves only to
our own nationality-whoh have owed
inspiration to Athens, we shall have
to condemn a good many illustrious
names. Chaucer, Spenser, Shake
speare, Milton, Dryden, Pope whose
withers viii be unwrung2 A short
time ago a critic took occasion to
draw up list of instances in which
the poet laureate had adopted
thoughts and expressions from his
predecessors 1t was wholly a work
of supererogation. for Lord Tenny-
son would be the first to admit the
debt which he, in common with
| other poets, owes to Homer and Vir-
gil Classical phrases are taken
wholesale, as every student knows,
witness such lines as This way and
that dividing the swift mind, and
''She could not draw the quiet night
| into her blood last a capital in
stance, for it assimilates and i'm
| proves upon the original.
It is not freshness of thought
alone, but also freshness of treat
ment, which gives an author the
right to call his work original. If
we take the supreme instance of
Shakespeare we see at once that the
real question in many cases of this
kind is not where the writer got the
idea, but what he had done with it.
A poet, a novelist, an essayist, a
preacher can take a hint in a crude
state and so transform it by the as
sociations and characteristics of his
own mind that he is justly entitled
to claim it as his own He cannot
be called a plagiarist, at all events
for many of these so called thefts
are unconscious "reminiscences, un-
recognized as such, which are worked
into the texture of a mans own
thoughts and made instinct with his
own personality.
In novels and rOmanceS. again, we
have numerous instances of the same
free exchange: no one ought to call
it by a harder name, unless he is
able to discount the frequency OF
literary condolences or possesses a
higher originality than that to which
most of us can attain. Such rehec-
tons, no doubt, were present in the
minds of the Congregational union
when they absolved Mr.. Woods from
the charges made against him. He
was no plagiarist, because, while
from DR. Dykes valuable store he
selected a few homiltic gems, he pre-
sented them to his congregation at
ClaptOn sparkling in some original
setting of his own.-London Tele-
graph.