eminent fops and fashionists, and, in like manner, of the gay Eameau of Diderot, who believes in noth ing but hunger, and that the sole end of art, virtue, and poetry is to put something for mastication be tween the upper and lower mandibles.
THE COMIC. 151 Alike in all these cases and in the instance of cowardice or fear of any sort, from the loss of life to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is violated. He, whom all things should serve, serves some one of his own tools. In fine pictures the head sheds on the limbs the expression of the face. In Ra phael's Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, the crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but for the extraordinary energy of the face, it would draw the eye too much; but the countenance of the celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it not. In poor pictures the limbs and trunk degrade the face. So among the women in the street: you shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, and the lady herself quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek submission to her bonnet and dress; and another whose dress obeys and heightens the expression of her form.
More food for the comic is afforded whenever the personal appearance, the face, form, and manners, are subjects of thought with the man himself. No fashion is the best fashion for those matters which will take care of themselves. This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris drawing-rooms, which Napoleon reckoned so formidable, and which are copiously recounted in the French Memoires. A lady of high rank, but of lean figure, had given the Countess Dulauloy the nickname of " Le Grenadier tricolore," in allusion to her tall figure, as well as to 152 THE COMIC.
her republican opinions; the Countess retaliated by calling Madame " the Venus of the Pere-la-Chaise," a compliment to her skeleton which did not fail to circulate. " Lord C.," said the Countess of Gordon, "0, he is a perfect comb, all teeth and back." The Persians have a pleasant story of Tamerlane which relates to the same particulars: " Tirnur was an ugly man; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. One day when Chodscha was with him, Tinmr scratched his head, since the hour of the barber was come, and commanded that the barber should be called. Whilst he was shaven, the barber gave him a looking-glass in his hand. Tirnur saw him self in the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. Therefore he began to weep; Chodscha also set him self to weep, and so they wept for two hours. On this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and entertained him with strange stories in order to make him forget all about it. Timur ceased weep ing, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first to weep amain, and in good earnest. At last said Timur to Chodscha, ' Hearken! I have looked in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I grieved, because, although I am Caliph, and have also much wealth, and many wives, yet still I am so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why weepest thou without ceasing? ' Chodscha an swered, ' If thou hast only seen thy face once, and at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself, THE COMIC. 153 but hast wept, what should we do, — we who see thy face every day and night? If we weep not, who should weep? Therefore have I wept.' Ti- mur almost split his sides with laughing."
Politics also furnish the same mark for satire. What is nobler than the expansive sentiment of patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole nation? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to end in the very intelligible maxims of trade, so much for so much, the intellect feels again the half-man. Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and carry a principle against all opposition? But when the men appear who ask our votes as representa tives of this ideal, we are sadly out of counte nance.
But there is no end to this analysis. We do nothing that is not laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. All our plans, manage ments, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom and love which man represents, are equally imper fect and ridiculous. But we cannot afford to part with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, as well as by tears and terrors; explore the whole of nature, — the farce and buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and philoso phers upstairs, in the hall, — and get the rest and refreshment of the shaking of the sides. But the comic also has its own speedy limits. Mirth quick ly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon 154 THE COMIC.
die of inanition, as some persons have been tickled to death. The same scourge whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was con vulsing JSTaples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him to go to the theatre and see Carlini. He replied, " I am Carlini."
QUOTATION AND OBIGINALITY.
QUOTATION - AND ORIGINALITY.
WHOEVER looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indi cating the sweetness of the act. In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is pro vided with a resource against calamity. Like Plato's disciple who has perceived a truth, " he is preserved from harm until another period." In every man's memory, with the hours when life cul minated are usually associated certain books which met his views. Of a large and powerful class we might ask with confidence, What is the event they most desire? what gift? What but the book that shall come, which they have sought through all libraries, through all languages, that shall be to 158 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
their mature eyes what many a tinsel-covered toy pamphlet was to their childhood, and shall speak to the imagination? Our high respect for a well- read man is praise enough of literature. If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in proportion to the spon taneous power should be the assimilating power. And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not less eager. "He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding," said Burke, " doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contem plates."
"We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation. The Patent-Office Commissioner knows that all machines in use have been invented and QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 159 re-invented over and over; that the mariner's com pass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., have been many times found and lost, from Egypt, China, and Pompeii down; and if we have arts which Rome wanted, so also Eome had arts which we have lost; that the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible by means of vapor of coal-oil or paraf- fine was suggested by the Egyptian method which has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years.
The highest statement of new philosophy com placently caps itself with some prophetic maxim from the oldest learning. There is something mor tifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme econ omy argues a very small capital of invention. The stream of affection flows broad and strong; the prac tical activity is a river of supply; but the dearth of design accuses the penury of intellect. How few thoughts! In a hundred years, millions of men, and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory of philosophy that offers a solution of the great prob lems, not an art of education that fulfils the condi tions. In this delay and vacancy of thought we must make the best amends we can by seeking the wisdom of others to fill the time.
If we confine ourselves to literature, 't is easy to see that the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very arch- 160 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
angels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how narrow are the limits of human invention. The "Paradise Lost" had never existed but for these precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but real connection with our own Bibles.
Eead in Plato, and you shall find Christian dog mas, and not only so, but stumble on our evangel ical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and, long before, in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Whoso knows Plutarch, Lucian, Eabelais, Montaigne, and Bayle will have a key to many supposed originali ties. Eabelais is the source of many a proverb, story, and jest, derived from him into all modern languages; and if we knew Eabelais's reading, we should see the rill of the Eabelais river. Sweden- borg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to un- instructed and to thoughtless persons: their origi nality will disappear to such as are either well- read or thoughtful; for scholars will recognize their dogmas as reappearing in men of a similar intel lectual elevation throughout history. Albert, the " wonderful doctor," St. Buenaventura, the " seraphic doctor," Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor" of QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 161 the thirteenth century, whose books made the suf ficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed and he survives for us. " Renard the Fox," a German poem of the thirteenth century, was long supposed to be the original work, until Grimm found frag ments of another original a century older. M. Le Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of Moliere, La Fontaine, Boc caccio/ and of Voltaire.
Mythology is no man's work; but, what we daily observe in regard to the bon-mots that circulate in society, — that every talker helps a story in repeat ing it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament of fact a good fable is constructed, — the same growth befalls mythology: the legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer, every body adding a grace or dropping a fault or round ing the form, until it gets an ideal truth.
Eeligious literature, the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of course of this slow growth, — a fagot of selections gathered through ages, leaving the worse, and saving the better, until it is at last the work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like an old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of years, until every word and particle is public and tunable. And whatever undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic in spiration, the stronger tendency we are describing 162 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
is likely to uiido. What divines had assumed as the distinctive revelations of Christianity, theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics and poets of Greece and Home. Later, when Confucius and the Indian scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wis dom could be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Eome and England to the Egyptian hierology. The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopaedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years ago, when Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate filled the eyes and minds of young men, you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster's three rules: first, never to do to-day what he could defer till to-mor row; secondly, never to do himself what he could make another do for him; and, thirdly, never to pay any debt to-day. Well, they are none the worse for being already told, in the last generation, of Sheridan; and we find in Grimm's Memoir es that Sheridan got them from the witty D'Argenson; who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell of whom he first heard them told. In our own QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 163 college days we remember hearing other pieces of Mr. Webster's advice to students, — 3,mong others, this: that, when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents, took a pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics, — what he knew and what he thought, — before he read the book. But we find in Southey's " Commonplace Book " this said of the Earl of Strafford: " I learned one rule of him," says Sir G. Eadcliffe, " which I think worthy to be remembered. "When he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any subject, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read the book; then, reading, compared his own with the author's, and noted his own defects and the author's art and fulness; whereby he drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own wants to supply them." I remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that a lady having expressed in his presence a pas sionate wish to witness a great victory, he replied: " Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory, — excepting a great defeat." But this speech is also D'Argenson's, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, " What a wonderful versatile mind has Brougham!
1C4 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
he knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything." You may find the original of this gihe in Grimm, who says that Louis XVI., going out of chapel after hearing a sermon from the Abbe Maury, said, " Si I' Abbe nous avait parle un pen de religion, il nous aurait parl£ de tout." A pleas antry which ran through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted family connection in Xew England, was only a theft of Lady Mary "Wortley Montagu's mot of a hundred years ago, that " the world was made up of men and women and Herveys."
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus's egg is claimed for Brunel- leschi. liabelais's dying words, " I am going to see the great Perhaps" (Jc grand Pcut-etrc], only repeats the " IF " inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe's favorite phrase, " the open secret," translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander, " These books are published and not published." Madame de Stael's " Architecture is frozen music " is bor rowed from Goethe's " dumb music," which is Yi- truvius's rule, that " the architect must not only understand drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting " on the plan which pleased his child ish thought," is Schiller's " Tell him to reverence the dreams of his youth," and earlier, Bacon's " Con- silia juvcntutis jiliis dirinitatis haltcnt."
QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 165 In romantic literature examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse in the old Scotch ballad of " The Drowned Lovers," " Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water, Thy streams are ower strang; Make me thy wrack when I come back, But spare me when I gang," is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the same: — " Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo."
Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of " John Bar leycorn," and furnished Moore with the original of the piece, " When in death I shall calm recline, Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear," etc.
There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human mind. Such are "The Seven Sleepers," "Gyges's Ring," "The Travelling Cloak," "The Wandering- Jew," " The Pied Piper," " Jack and his Beanstalk," the " Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave," — whose omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all frontiers. The popu lar incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in Greece in Plato's time.
166 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
Antiphanes, one of Plato's friends, laughingly com pared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon as they were pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter. It is only within this cen tury that England and America discovered that their nursery-tales were old German and Scandina vian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are the property of all the nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years.
If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of decoration,— if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our walls, the alternate lotus- bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences, — we shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest.
Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY: 167 that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new book we often discover, from the unguarded devo tion with which the writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect from him. If Lord Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the " Instauration " instead of the new book.
The mischief is quickly punished in general and in particular. Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat, — an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among plants, — the self-sup plying organs wither and dwindle, as being super fluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning on an original. In literature quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.
But it is necessary to remember there are certain QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.
considerations which go far to qualify a reproach too grave. This vast mental indebtedness has every variety that pecuniary debt has, — every variety of merit. The capitalist of either kind is as hungry to lend as the consumer to borrow; and the trans action no more indicates intellectual turpitude in the borrower -than the simple fact of debt in volves bankruptcy. On the contrary, in far the greater number of cases the transaction is honor able to both. Can we not help ourselves as dis creetly by the force of two in literature? Certainly it only needs two well placed and well tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private enterprise! Shall we converse as spies? Our very abstaining to repeat and credit the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he and they combine? Cannot they sink their jealousies in God's love, and call their poem Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Theban Phalanx's? The city will for nine days or nine years make differences and sinister comparisons: there is a new and more ex cellent public that will bless the friends. Nay, it is an inevitable fruit of our social nature. The child quotes his father, and the man quotes his friend. Each man is a hero and an oracle to some body, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced vahie. "Whatever we think and say is QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 169 wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in an other mouth. There is none so eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or qualifies his own: and men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost absolute ascendant over their nearest companions. The Comte de Crillon said one day to M. d'Allonville, with French vivacity, " If the universe and I professed one opinion, and M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should be at once convinced that the universe and I were mis taken."
Original power is usually accompanied with as similating power, and we value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not so important to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided by these, we know him as a benefactor, and shall return to him as long as he serves us so well. We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before 8 170 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.