“Original Poetry:” by the Late Sir Fretful Plagiary, Knight
Member of the Dramatic Authors’ Association, Fellow of the Parnassian Society, &c.
Now first printed from the original copies in the handwriting of that popular Author.
EDITED BY LAMAN BLANCHARD.
We have considerable pleasure in discharging the duty imposed upon us, of transcribing the MSS. which one of Sir Fretful Plagiary’s numerous living descendants has placed in our hands, and of submitting to the public the following specimens of “something new.” Whatever may be thought in other respects of these, the latest emanations—or, as some with equal correctness perhaps would say, effusions—of an immortal genius, we unhesitatingly pronounce them to be original. These poems bear no resemblance to anything ever before offered to the public. Now this is a declaration which cannot fail to awaken in the reader’s mind a strong suspicion that the ideas are mere imitations, and the language a mere echo, of the thoughts and expressions of other poets. In this solitary instance the acute reader will be mistaken in his supposition. There is no one line that can be called an imitation—no phrase that can be pronounced an echo. Line after line is equally emphatic, interesting, melodious, and—original. This fact we might establish by citing at full length a remarkably novel and curious production of Sir Fretful’s, which, with the fineness of Shakspeare and Dryden united, opens thus:—
“Farewell! thou canst not teach me to forget;
The power of beauty I remember yet.”
But we prefer proceeding at once to a strikingly harmonious, and singularly analytical composition, bearing the designation of an
ODE TO THE HUMAN HEART.
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale!
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees,
To point a moral or adorn a tale2.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,
Like angels’ visits, few and far between,
Deck the long vista of departed years.
Man never is, but always to be bless’d;
The tenth transmitter of a foolish face,
Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows up the rest,
And makes a sunshine in the shady place.
For man the hermit sigh’d, till woman smiled,
To waft a feather or to drown a fly,
(In wit a man, simplicity a child,)
With silent finger pointing to the sky.
But fools rush in where angels fear to tread,
Far out amid the melancholy main;
As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Dies of a rose in aromatic pain.
Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,
Look on her face, and you’ll forget them all;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall.
My way of life is fall’n into the sere;
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,
Who sees through all things with his half-shut eyes.
Oh! for a lodge in some vast wilderness!
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
Fine by degrees and beautifully less,
And die ere man can say ‘Long live the Queen.’
If in the above any reader should be reminded of the “long resounding march and energy divine” of poets past or present, it can only be because our illustrious and profusely-gifted bard has clustered together more remarkable, and we trust they will long prove memorable, lines, than any one of his predecessors has in the same space given an example of. That poem can be of no inferior order of merit, in which Milton would have been proud to have written one line, Pope would have been equally vain of the authorship of a second, Byron have rejoiced in a third, Campbell gloried in a fourth, Gray in a fifth, Cowper in a sixth, and so on to the end of the Ode; which thus realises the poetical wealth of that well-known line of Sir Fretful’s,
“Infinite riches in a little room.”
But we must not, by prosaic comment, detain the impatient reader from other specimens of the striking originality of this writer’s powers. Among some fragments thrown loose in his desk, we find the following:—
When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
There’s such a charm in melancholy,
I would not if I could be gay.
Again:
There’s a beauty for ever unchangingly bright,
For coming events cast their shadows before;
Oh! think not my spirits are always as light,
Like ocean-weeds cast on the surf-beaten shore.
We have pronounced these two stanzas to be original; and they are: but with reference to the first of them we admit that a distinguished living critic, to whom it was shown, remarked that it did remind him a little of something in some other author—and he rather thought it was Goldsmith; a second critic, equally eminent, was forcibly reminded by it of something which he was convinced had been written by Rogers. So much for criticism! To such treatment is original genius ever subjected. Its traducers cannot even agree as to the derivation of the stolen property; they cannot name the author robbed. One cries, Spenser; another, Butler; a third, Collins. We repeat, it is the fate of Originality.
“Garth did not write his own Dispensary,”
says Pope jeeringly; Campbell has had his Exile of Erin vehemently claimed by a desperate wrestler for renown; and at this very time a schoolmaster in Scotland is ready to swear that the author of the “Burial of Sir John Moore” never wrote a line of it. But we now pass to another piece by Sir Fretful; and this, whether its sentiments be of a high or a low order, its imagery appropriate or incongruous, is entirely his own:—
Lives there a man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself has said,
“Shoot folly as it flies?”
Oh! more than tears of blood can tell,
Are in that word farewell, farewell!
’Tis folly to be wise.
And what is friendship but a name,
That boils on Etna’s breast of flame?
Thus runs the world away:
Sweet is the ship that’s under sail
To where yon taper cheers the vale,
With hospitable ray!
Drink to me only with thine eyes
Through cloudless climes and starry skies!
My native land, good night!
Adieu, adieu, my native shore;
’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more—
Whatever is is right!
We have thought it expedient to point out briefly the peculiar beauty of some of our author’s lines; but it cannot be necessary to point out the one peculiar and exclusive quality of his writings—his perspicacity—his connectedness. His verse “flows due on to the Propontic, nor knows retiring ebb.” You are never at a loss to know what he means. In his sublimest passages he is intelligible. This is his great beauty. No poet perhaps is so essentially logical. We close our specimens with another short poem; it is entitled,
Know then this truth, enough for man to know:
Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.
Retreating lightly with a lovely fear
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
To err is human, to forgive divine,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.
We ne’er shall look upon his like again,
For panting time toils after him in vain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain;
Allures to brighter worlds, and leads the way
With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay!
Leaving this great poet’s samples of the mighty line, or, as it is sometimes called, the lofty rhyme, to “speak for themselves,” we conclude with a word or two on a subject to which one of his effusions here printed has (thanks to what are called the critics) unexpectedly led—we mean the subject of Literary Loans, or, as they are more familiarly and perhaps felicitously designated, Literary Thefts. A critic of high repute has said, “A man had better steal anything on earth, than the thoughts of another;” agreed, unless when he steals the thought, he steal the words with it. The economising trader in Joe Miller who stole his brooms ready made, carried on a prosperous business. Some authors steal only the raw material; or rather, they run away with another man’s muse, but for fear of detection, and to avoid the charge of felony, leave the drapery behind—a practice which cannot be too severely reprehended. It is the same principle on which, according to Sheridan (Sir Fretful’s friend!) gipsies disguise stolen children to make them pass for their own. Now Sir Fretful, alluding to Shakspeare in a poem which has never yet been published, says very nobly—
“Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
He wants that greatest art, the art to blot!”
If we might dare to parody (Scott said it was a sin to parody—“We are seven”) any one line sanctified by the genius of a Plagiary, we should say that too many of his descendants want that greatest art, the art to steal. They steal—but not with integrity. There may be, nay there is, such a thing as honest theft—equitable robbery—prigging with justice and honour. We hold that in all cases of literary borrowing, or robbery (for it comes to the same thing), it is ten million times better to rob or borrow without the least disguise, equivocation, or mutilation whatsoever. Take the line as you find it. Don’t crack it as you would a nut, picking out the idea, appropriating it to your own purpose, and leaving only the husk behind. You will never get an artificial shell to grow round it; it will never be the nut it was before. Take it whole. Prudery in these cases is often worse than folly—it is shabbiness. It is folly, when, after stealing a fine symmetrical thought, a whole morning is spent in disguising, distorting, and deforming it, until at last all that remains of it merge into the unprofitable moral—“of no use to anybody but the owner.” It is shabbiness, when, as is the practice of prose-writers, a splendid passage is purloined, and a bargain is struck with conscience; when, just for decency’s sake, six words of the sentence are publicly attributed by inverted commas to the right owner, while all the rest assumes the character of originality. We may give an example in the following passage from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which we will suppose to be thus printed:—
But the “age of chivalry” is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the “glory of Europe” is extinguished for ever. The unbought grace of life, the “cheap defence of nations3,” the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, “is gone!”
This cunning practice of acknowledging a few words borrowed, with a view to divert suspicion from the many you have stolen, is like confessing a lawful debt of sixpence, due to the man which you have just plundered of fifty pounds; and this practice, Sir Fretful Plagiary, to his immortal honour, scorned to adopt. Could his original and abundant genius have stooped to steal, he would have stolen conscientiously; he would have taken the whole passage outright; instead of spoiling everything he laid his hands upon, and making (as Dryden says) “the fine woman end in a fish’s tail.” War is honourable, manslaying is not; pillage is legalised by custom, which cannot be said of picking pockets. Thus, as it is more honourable to pillage than to pilfer, so is it to seize upon a whole line, or even a couplet, than to extract the essence of it surreptitiously, or sneak off with a valuable epithet; and it is the more honest, because every author has a better chance, after the robbery has served its purpose, of getting back his own.
Had this principle been in operation from the beginning, what confusion it would have prevented! what discords between authors! what perplexities in settling their claims to disputed metaphors, and their rights in contested ideas! From the mere want of this common honesty in purloining, it is impossible, in many instances, to come to an equitable adjustment. It is a wise poet that knows his own conceit—or to prevent mistakes, let us say, his own idea. He sees his private property transferred to the pages of another, and cannot swear to it. There is no saying which is yours and which is his. Tuum rhymes to suum, and always will.