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发帖数: 2599 | 1 Transcription of Letter
Riverdale - on - the Hudson
St. Patrick's Day, 1903
Dear Helen:
I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad I am to have your
book and how highly I value it, both for its own sake and as a remembrance
of an affectionate friendship which has subsisted between us for nine years
without a break and without a single act of violence that I can call to mind
. I suppose there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until
we get there and show off. I often think of it with longing, and how they'll
say, "there they come--sit down in front." I am practicing with a tin halo.
You do the same. I was at Henry Roger's last night, and of course we talked
of you. He is not at all well--you will not like to hear that; but like you
and me, he is just as lovely as ever.
I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the
most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss Sullivan
, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole.
How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality,
wisdom, character, and the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are
all there.
Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was
that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human
utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul--let us
go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material
of all human utterances in plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are
second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside
sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of
the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of
originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get
from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in
characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you
are listening to ten thousand men--but we call it his speech, and really
some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It
is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call
it his but there were others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to
invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or
any other important thing--and the last man gets the credit and we forget
the others. He added his little mite--that ninety-nine parts of all things
that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the
lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as
the story itself? It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty words--except
in the case of a child; its memory tablet is not lumbered with impressions,
and the natural language can have graving room there and preserve the
language a year or two, but a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest,
with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase. It must be a very
rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a
single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other
to be mistaken by him for his own. No doubt we are constantly littering our
literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some
unremembered time and how imagined to be our own, but that is about the most
we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A
year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used
it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten years afterward I was talking
with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he; he was
not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court," and
so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but who did you steal it from
,"he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because
I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had!"
To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their
ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep for blaspheming about it
last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their
learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of
plagiarism, and they didn't know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull
and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and
purifying a kitten that they think they've caught filching a chop! Oh, dam--
But you finish it, dear, I am running short of vocabulary today.
Every lovingly your friend (sic)
Mark |
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