LITERARY COINCIDENCE EXTRAORDINARY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 9039, 14 February 1891, Page 6 (Supplement)

LITERARY COINCIDENCE EXTRAORDINARY.

Those who perused the interview which a member of tha staff of the Melbourne Argus had some time ago with Mr R. L. Stevenson, will read with interest the following remarks by Mr Hall Caiue :—

Mr Stevenson has been giving an Australian interviewer some interesting illustrations of coincidence of invention from one of his own books and a book o£ Washington Irving, aud I am at this moment in the somewhat unenviable position of being' able to add from my own experience an illustration thafc is probably as curious as anything o£ the kind to be found in literary history. When I was a boy at school some accident happened at cricket to one of the eye 3of a schoolfellow, and I was told off to lead him to an eye iofimary not far away, 'i'hcincident was a trifling one; it was soon attended to, and the incident must have passed out of my recollection but for a strange thing that happened. In going out of tbe infirmary we passed, as nearly as I can remember through an outer chamber of a wing of the building occupied by indoor female patients, and there, among other women, waiting for their visitors from home, sat a young, pale, beautiful woman, witb a whito bandage across both eyes. I was prompted to ask questions concerning her, and was told that she had been blind several months, thafc she had lately been operated upon for cataract, that for an instant she had seen the light and the face of tbe doctor, that her eyes had then been closely bandaged, that they were to remain so for a fortnight, aud that she was never for a moment to uncover them on pain of irrecoverable blindness. Though this was interesting, ifc was not calculated to impress the imagination of a boy, but there was a further fact of the most startling kind. The visitor for whom the young woman of the pale face and bandaged eyes was then waiting was none other than her own babe, five months old, born during the period of her blindness, and therefore never yet seen by her, its mother I How well I remember the first thrill of that fact! Even the lai with a head full of sores at cricket could not forget ifc. What; a temptation 1 What would the young mother do when they brought her the babe to kiss ? Sbe was no longer blind ; under that bandage wero eyes j that could see I Now, I thought, if she should \ tear the bandage off! j

Well, nearly 20 years after that day at tho infirmary (it was in Liverpool) I wrote a novel, not otherwise veryremarkable, wherein I used the situation of the blind mother and her babe, with all the surroundings of the cataract, tho bandage, and the injunction against removing it, only heightening the dramatic passion by making the mother remove the bandage and by putting this incident at the climax of a tragedy. Some good friends bave said warm words of that situation, as well they might, and I have had to confess thafc what my imagination gave to it was nofc much. Bufc judge of my astonishment this very day tc find by Mr Newnes' wonderful G-l-wortb,thenewStrand Magazine, that a French writer whoso work has been hitherto unknown to my ignorance, Leo Lespes, born in 1815, died IS7S, wrote, probably before I was bora, a story (also not otherwise very remarkable) of which I bave never heard "until now, embodying every circumstance of the. extraordinary complication as it came lo my knowledge when a boy—plus tho very climax which my own mind, acting for itself, had provided 1 Tho young woman, the cataract, tho bandage, the injunction, tbe babe born in hor blindness, the bandage torn away, and the child seen for the first time 1 More extraordinary still, the translation given in the Knglish magazino contains two or three sentences which are almost word for word the same as sentences which I wrote to fit the like tragical juncture. There is only one reflection which entitles fche coincidence to attention —namely, that human invention, depending so largely on fact, consists chiefly of the arts of combination ; thafc fact repeats itself; that where the conditions are similar the actions of different minds is likely to be the same; and that it needs no charges of servile copying to account for some of the most amazing parallels in imaginative literature. I