PLAGIARISM OF POETS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 112, 8 November 1930, Page 21

PLAGIARISM OF POETS

VIRGIL AND OTHERS

(By "Ajax.")

Churton Collins opens his'"lllustrations of Tennyson" in characteristic style as follows: — Those who may happen to be acquainted with, the "Saturnalia" of Ma'crobius will remember that among the most pleasant episodes in that interesting work are the two in which Eustathius and Furius Albinus estimate the extent of Virgil's obligations to his predecessors. Macrobius, Eustathius, and Furius Albinus are, I regret to say, entirely unknown to me, and so is an appalling poet named Nonnus, who is introduced a few pages later. But it is a great pleasure to hear Mr. Collins talking about them, and I should have been glad to have a good deal more of it. Eustathius, it seems, first produces a long and elaborate review of the passages in the Greek poets which Virgil had borrowed, and then Furius proceeds to trace his unscrupulous raids on Latin literature. Between the two of them the unfortunate poet is stripped so bare that he has neither a rag to cover his nakedness nor a feather to flv with. • « » Though Furius himself had supplied the antidote with the poison when he observed that what Virgil condescended 1o borrow was much more becoming to him than it had been to the original owner—"to say nothing,'' Collins adds, "of that owner being in some cases im mortalised by the theft'-' —the investigations appear to have been a trouble | to the faith of the poet's admirers for centuries. Between them, says Collins, these Longb.iines of the sth century made Conington very uncomfortable towards the end of the 19th. But if their disclosures have materially impaired Virgil's claims to originality, they have illustrated his faultless taste, his nice artistic sense, his delicate touch, his consummate literary skill. They initiated a new branch oi" study, they divulged a fruitful secret. » * » "These Longbaiues" floored we again, but on inquiry I find that Gerard Longbaine the younger (1656-92), the , son of a Provost of Queen's College, : Oxford, of the same name, was a dramatic biographer and critic who attacked the borrowings of the dramatists of the day, especially Dryden, in "Momus Triunrphans, or the Plagiaries of the' ' English Stcge Exposed" (1687), and : similar works. Isaae Disraeli accused < Longbaine of having "read poetry only i to detect plagiarisms," but according < to Sir Sidney Lee his work was scholar- 1 ly and without malice. : •* * * ' Churton Collins beats me again when , he opens his next paragraph by quot- j ing from Harpax in "Albumazar" the s lines: — ! This poet is that poet's' plagiary, i And he a third's till they all end in ] Homer. i It was a happy idea to represent the - poets as a perpetual succession of plag- < iarists, each preying on his predecessor ' until the end is reached in Homer, the j anchor-man and the only honest man of ] the whole tribe. The resemblance to Swift's infinite series'Of fleas, as improved by De Morgan, is obvious:— Great fleas have little' fleas Upon their backs to bite 'em, : And little fleas have lesser fleas, . ( And so "ad infinitum." And ;the great fleas themselves, in turn, 1 Have greater fleas, to go'on: i While these again have greater still, \ And greater still, and so on, ( * * * ■ i The suggestion, however, that Homer * was the.only honest man in an other- T wise disreputable crowd may have been c good enough for the 18th century, but I it is now hopelessly out of date. Was ' it not proved by the Germans two or < three generations ago at least that, hav- 6 ing been written long before the in- ' vention of writing, the Homeric poems ' were not written by Homer but by 1 somebody else of the same name? In ' other words, the man who for some '<■ three thousand years has pretended to £ have written those poems is an unniiti- * gated fraud. The still more widely '<■ supported German theory that the poet i was not a man but a syndicate seems > to be equally incompatible with his or, £ their high character. If the members t of the syndicate were the first in the i field, it is no doubt clear that they, i could not have cribbed from anybody, t else. On the other hand, if they did not copy one another, how could they i have got on with their job? Which i seems to show that the poets must have c been .a very bad lot from the very t beginning.- # # j In Ms essay on "Virgil and Tenny- E son: A Literary Parallel," Sir Herbert £ Warren notes,that, like Tennyson, Vir- * gil was taken to task during his life- < time and for much the same faults as < Tennyson. In each case unoriginal^ 1 and plagiarism were placed first on the f list. l "Virgil," says his biographer, as quoted , by Sir Herbert, "never wanted dispara- . gers (obtrectatores), and no wonder, for ' Homer has been disparaged too." Heren- J nius collected only Virgil's faults, Perel- 1 lius Faustus his thefts as well; Quintus i Octavius Aviius had eight books of paral-, < lels or translations, enumerating what < verses he borrowed, and from what Eources. Other critics defended him froni these charges' of plagiarism, but Virgil's own answer is the best: "Why don't those gentry attempt the same thefts themselves? They will then find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his club than i Homer of a single line." l * * -» . ■ 1 If Sir Herbert Warren was unable ; t« improve upon this answer it is cer- ' taiilly beyond my power. Virgil has, ! indeed, supplied the conclusive test. If ; any poet thinks, that he can improve a line of Homer, let him make the peril- i ous attempt. The world will be his debtor if he succeeds, and if he fails he will have thousands of other failures to keep him in countenance, including some of Virgil himself. There is a sim- : plicity, a directness, and a freshness about Homer which make the problem of translating him very much like that of translating the Bible. Knowing nothing of Hebrew, I cannot hazard an opinion of my own upon the subject, but I believe that there are great passages in the Old Testament of which King James's translators are considered by, competent authorities 'to have given us a version which is better than the original. If that is correct, this wonderful success which has served to emphasise the failure of every subsequent attempt, was obtained by a version which, without losing any of the qualities that made for the greatness of the original, carried them all to a higher power. It is hardly necessary to say that .neither Virgil nor anybody else ever effected such an improvement on the Greek of Homer. * * » The essence of the successes no less than of the failures in Virgil's translations and paraphrases of Homer consists in the production of something of an altogether different kind from the original. What Bentley said of Pope's translation, "a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer, would have applied equally well to Virgil's Homeric passages, except that

they were rarely pretty ana oiccu exquisitely beautiful. A single illustration must suffice. The stock example which in the days of compulsory Latin was familiar to every .schoolboy is the contrast between Homer's — Leto (Latona) rejoiced in her heart and Virgil's enlargement: Latonae taciturn pertentant gaudia pectus. Which is excellently rendered by James Ehoades: —. A secret rapture thrills LatonaY breast, and very badly by Conington:— Latona's mild maternal eyes Beam with unspoken ecstasies. Virgil sometimes merely sophisticated Homer, but he often added a beauty and a tenderness that were all his own.