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
