The Story World and Photodramatist (Jul-Oct 1923)

84 THE STORY WORLD usual book of its kind ever written, a literary treatment of the New Testament. Papini has bent all his great powers of scholar, poet and critic to the writing of this biography. Aside from the nobility of its subject the book is worth reading as an example of charming narrative and perfect literary workmanship. In the current International Book Review there is an interesting discussion of "Plagiarism as a Profession" by the Spanish novelist, Vicente Blasco Ibanez. Plagiarism, he says, or at least accusation of it, is as old as literature itself. Plato accused Euripides, but Plato himself was regarded as a flagrant offender by his fellow writers. The Romans plagiarized the Greeks, Virgil taking bodily whatever pleased him from Homer. Dante made use of many Irish legends, Rabelais and Milton foraged far and near for their ideas and every one knows that Shakespeare took entire plots from Italian novelists. Le Cid is an adoption of the earlier and little known "The Youthful Exploits of Le Cid." Moliere was known as the prince of plagiarists and Balzac wrote so much and so rapidly that he used everything that came handy. Ibanez wisely stops before he reaches the present generation, but with these multiplied instances shall we come to the conclusion that all writers are plagiarists, to use a gentle term? Ibanez' friend, George Maurevert, has just put out "The Book of Plagiarisms" in which he says that the ant in earning his living carries away the whole grain, thus becoming a definite robber, but the bee merely sips a taste of honey from every flower he visits, not in any way injuring the flower and converting what little of the flower's store of sweet which he carries away into more delectable sweetness. So if the writer but be a bee, merely sipping, he is within the law. Anatole France frankly justifies plagiarism if it is done with taste and judgment. As a matter of fact we are all plagiarists to a degree, unconsciously, if not deliberately so. There is nothing so true as that there is nothing new under the sun. The expression of it is the only possibility of originality. In the great Spaniard's own words: "One is thus compelled not only to say, but also to believe, that all the great writers, absolutely all, are plagiarists, and that the best of each does not belong to him, because he has taken it from others. A writer, during his life, gives out hundreds of images and reproduces in new form hundreds of thoughts. A part of this product recalls more or less vaguely the product of his predecessors, or may at times become identical with it; but this does not prevent the said author from adding to the intellectual treasure of mankind another and original portion that is his own. Eighty per cent of his work may thus be old silver, skillfully handled; but what does it matter, if the author adds a handful of completely new coins minted by himself? "Beyond doubt, the new is not plentiful, and each author carries with him only bits of novelty in order to add them to other novelties encountered ages before. Most plagiarisms are committed unconsciously. They are old things that were read and forgotten, and that come to life like witches and pass themselves off, with their false youth, for daughters of the moment. But at the beginning of this chain of writers, all heirs of each other, the reader will ask, were there not original geniuses, true creators who nourished themselves on their own substance? No. At the dawn of literature there is no individual ownership; the communism of primitive societies prevails, everything belongs to everybody, and all assist in production. Thus the masses of the people write the epics — a multitude of vigorous and nameless authors sincere and enthusiastic, who put forth their works, unsigned, with the disinterestedness of the architects and imaginative creators of cathedrals. It is an author with a thousand heads and a thousand mouths that produces the ballad-romances of chivalry and the heroic poems of the north. And much more distant, in the dawn of recorded history, are the wandering bards of Greece, the nameless rhapsodists who united, as cells join themselves together in a body to form one author, unreal yet venerable, called Homer, the "Father of Poetry."