Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1906-04-22

ling condenses the history of the making and
remakng of those songs which in every age and
~ country have reached and held the hearts of
He frankly admits that in his art there is
nothing under the sun; and he has found the
reward of his fran<ness in the fact that those who
knew he stole have not told made fuss Had
others been equally candid about their Obligations to
their forerunners there would have been less of the
scandal and suspicion that have often reused ami
mostly and obscured the true view of artistic values
The day of the charge of plagiarism literary
sensation seems, however, to be passing away. 1t
is many years since pagiarist hunting
regarded of the most celebrating of sports;
and the unlucky dog of author caught in the act
was pelted remorselessly. But this undiscriminat-
ing attitude toward the supposed crime was bound
to change; for it opposed by two steadily growing
forces the knowledge of literary history and truer
perception of the nature of originality. The first OF
these shows that the greatest of authors have plum
dered their predecessors without scruple and with
out blame; the second that originality in art
depends far more upon treatment than upon subject
matter.
Originality as an important title to literary recog
milton is largely a modern fad. The writers of the
Middle Ages seem to be almost innocent of the con-
ception When a French poet of the fourteenth
century wished to pay Chaucer high compliment,
he found nothing better to call him than great
translator" Chaucer himself not only made no
attempt to hide his borrowings, but he frequently
protested obligation where none owing. What
he thought he might require, he went and took
and stated his source if the happened to suit
the meter. If it did not, no harm done, for no
extra credit was sought or gwen and man lost
more tnan he gained by not claiming the olde
boke as authority
Ben Jonson a plunderer
by the time of Elizabeth some progress had been
~ made toward the more modern point of view, but
not much. The dramatists of that time took their
plots where they could find them, and Ben Jonson,
who was exceptional in pridng himself on the in
vention of his plots, in of his works
great a plunderer as any. Dryden writing in the
end of the seventeenth century, says OF Ben that
he invaded kingdoms like monarch y; and OF
his use of the ancients, that you track him
And ola hat
DRYDEN rather admired than blamed him for it.
However little of philosophy of art there was
in this apparent CaTeleSsness to what are likely
to regard question of ethics there is little doubt
that it indicated instinct for the root of the
matter than is implied in the modern viewpoint.
The more one knows of the materials out of which
all fiction is built, the less he believes in the posi-
The question is not where got his material,
but how he it. The statement of the
source of plot IS, artistically speaking, un1m-
portant the address of the shop where painter
buys his colors.
The nature and variety of the problems that
after the source recognized nowhere
better illustrated than in the work of the greatest
robber of them all. No artist of the first rank
so ready to take what he found lying to his hand
Shakespeare; and in the work of no other can we
see more superbly exhibited the workings of that
alchemy of art which transmutes the baser metals
into gold. An examination of typical in
stances will to make this clear, and help us to
rid minds of the deusion that anything definite
has been established by mere proof of plagiarism.
The mass of narrative writing of the time of
Elizabeth was itself largely translation and
pilaton and three of the most important divisions
of that form the three chief quarrieS in which
Shakespeare dug. First in quantity come the vast