And here I wish to take breath for a short, separate paragraph. I have often felt, after writing a line which pleased me more than common, that it was not new, and perhaps was not my own. I have very rarely, however, found such a coincidence in ideas or expression as would be enough to justify an accusation of unconscious plagiarism,--conscious plagiarism is not my particular failing. I therefore say my say, set down my thought, print my line, and do not heed the suspicion that I may not be as original as I supposed, in the passage I have been writing. My experience may be worth something to a modest young writer, and so I have interrupted what I was about to say by intercalating this paragraph.
In this instance my telltale suspicion had not been at fault. I had printed those same lines, years ago, in "The Contributors' Club," to which I have rarely sent any of my prose or verse. Nobody but the editor has noticed the fact, so far as I know. This is consoling, or mortifying, I hardly know which. I suppose one has a right to plagiarize from himself, but he does not want to present his work as fresh from the workshop when it has been long standing in his neighbor's shop-window.
But I have just received a letter from a brother of the late Henry Howard Brownell, the poet of the Bay Fight and the River Fight, in which he quotes a passage from an old book, "A Heroine, Adventures of Cherubina," which might well have suggested my own lines, if I had ever seen it. I have not the slightest recollection of the book or the passage. I think its liveliness and "local color" will make it please the reader, as it pleases me, more than my own more prosaic extravagances:
LINES TO A PRETTY LITTLE MAID OF MAMMA'S.
"If Black Sea, Red Sea, White Sea, ran One tide of ink to Ispahan, If all the geese in Lincoln fens Produced spontaneous well-made pens, If Holland old and Holland new One wondrous sheet of paper grew, And could I sing but half the grace Of half a freckle in thy face, Each syllable I wrote would reach >From Inverness to Bognor's beach, Each hair-stroke be a river Rhine, Each verse an equinoctial line!"
"The immediate dismissal of the 'little maid' was the consequence."
I may as well say that our Delilah was not in the room when the last sentence was read.
Readers must be either very good-natured or very careless. I have laid myself open to criticism by more than one piece of negligence, which has been passed over without invidious comment by the readers of my papers. How could I, for instance, have written in my original "copy" for the printer about the fisherman baiting his hook with a giant's tail instead of a dragon's? It is the automatic fellow,--Me-Number-Two of our dual personality,--who does these things, who forgets the message Me--Number--One sends down to him from the cerebral convolutions, and substitutes a wrong word for the right one. I suppose Me--Number--Two will "sass back," and swear that "giant's" was the message which came down from headquarters. He is always doing the wrong thing and excusing himself. Who blows out the gas instead of shutting it off? Who puts the key in the desk and fastens it tight with the spring lock? Do you mean to say that the upper Me, the Me of the true thinking-marrow, the convolutions of the brain, does not know better? Of course he does, and Me-Number-Two is a careless servant, who remembers some old direction, and follows that instead of the one just given.
Number Seven demurred to this, and I am not sure that he is wrong in so doing. He maintains that the automatic fellow always does just what he is told to do. Number Five is disposed to agree with him.
We will talk over the question.
But come, now, why should not a giant have a tail as well as a dragon? Linnaeus admitted the homo caudatus into his anthropological catalogue. The human embryo has a very well marked caudal appendage; that is, the vertebral column appears prolonged, just as it is in a young quadruped. During the late session of the Medical Congress at Washington, my friend Dr. Priestley, a distinguished London physician, of the highest character and standing, showed me the photograph of a small boy, some three or four years old, who had a very respectable little tail, which would have passed muster on a pig, and would have made a frog or a toad ashamed of himself. I have never heard what became of the little boy, nor have I looked in the books or journals to find out if there are similar cases on record, but I have no doubt that there are others. And if boys may have this additional ornament to their vertebral columns, why not men? And if men, why not giants? So I may not have made a very bad blunder, after all, and my reader has learned something about the homo caudatus as spoken of by Linnxus, and as shown me in photograph by Dr. Priestley. This child is a candidate for the vacant place of Missing Link.
In accounting for the blunders, and even gross blunders, which, sooner or later, one who writes much is pretty sure to commit, I must not forget the part played by the blind spot or idiotic area in the brain, which I have already described.
The most knowing persons we meet with are sometimes at fault. Nova onania possumus omnes is not a new nor profound axiom, but it is well to remember it as a counterpoise to that other truly American saying of the late Mr. Samuel Patch, "Some things can be done as well as others." Yes, some things, but not all things. We all know men and women who hate to admit their ignorance of anything. Like Talkative in "Pilgrim's Progress," they are ready to converse of "things heavenly or things earthly; things moral or things evangelical; things sacred or things profane; things past or things to come; things foreign or things at home; things more essential or things circumstantial."
Talkative is apt to be a shallow fellow, and to say foolish things about matters he only half understands, and yet he has his place in society. The specialists would grow to be intolerable, were they not counterpoised to some degree by the people of general intelligence.