Nowadays, plagiarism
is regarded as a sort of ghastly, secret high wire act; like intellectual
bungee jumping. The mess that can be made if it goes wrong provides
morbid instruction for other plagiarists yet to fall, not to mention
entertainment for readers in search of a rumpus. One recent case
was particularly amusing not least because the offender’s
name was Coleridge. Times journalist Jack Malvern revealed
that Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Canberra lifted word for word,
or paraphrased closely, up to six paragraphs from Terry Eagleton’s
review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (The
Times, March 10, 2007). Professor Eagleton was laconic, offering
his help to the Archbishop for any future reviews; Archbishop
Coleridge was unavailable for comment… It bears repeating:
an Australian churchman called Coleridge filched some of a Marxist’s
review of a militant atheist’s latest treatise. You couldn’t
make it up.
From the gamut of famous writers’ proclivities – say,
from Lord Byron’s pederasty to James Joyce’s penchant
for women’s underwear – perhaps the most uncomfortable
disclosures have been in relation to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
plagiarisms. Coleridge’s famous saying, that “all
men are either Aristotelians or Platonists,” is not actually
his saying. It is Goethe’s. That little barbed truth was
just one of the many with which Norman Fruman punctured, puckered
and half-deflated an academic pleasure dome in the early 1970s.
Before the appearance of Fruman’s book, John Livingston
Lowes had played a significant role in the widespread celebration
of Coleridge’s peerless erudition, in The Road to Xanadu:
A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927). However, with
his Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (1971), Fruman became
the Grinch that stole Coleridgean Christmas, so comprehensively
did he demolish the reputation of “the Da Vinci of literature.”
Coleridgeans have since had to completely rethink the anatomy
of Coleridge’s genius.
Tilar J. Mazzeo’s Plagiarism and Literary Property in
the Romantic Period is a wide-ranging reassessment of the
allegations that a number of the writers of the Romantic era were
plagiarists. Handling the numerous and various materials with
wonderful assurance, Mazzeo unpicks many modern assumptions: plagiarism
– as gnarled university examiners tend to understand the
term now – did not exist. Writers in the Romantic era were
normally accused by reviewers on aesthetic grounds; that
is, for not having improved on passages lifted. The legal fears
we are now familiar with did not then exist. Hence, in accordance
with Mazzeo’s authentic 19th century thinking, Thomas De
Quincey was right to blame Coleridge for lifting (without improving
on) passages from Schelling for the Biographia Literaria
(1817), but wrong to blame him for lifting (and improving on)
lines from Friederike Brun for the poem, “Hymn Before Sunrise”
(1802).
Mazzeo’s book has stylishly realigned the whole debate about
literary property. Fruman was technically right about the reality
that Coleridge-lovers had not yet been made to face. But as Thomas
McFarland argued in his review of The Damaged Archangel
(in the Yale Review 1974): “when ‘the Bard,’
to use Professor Fruman’s often repeated nickname for Shakespeare,
writes most memorably of Cleopatra, he is simply ‘plagiarising’
North’s Plutarch. Are we then to speak of ‘Shakespeare,
the damaged archangel’?” Fruman’s book had been
popular with the general public, but unpopular with Coleridge
scholars, and McFarland’s review was, effectively, an exercise
in damage limitation. As it has turned out, the Fruman-McFarland
spat paved the way for increasingly sophisticated views among
Romanticists. In his book, The Day-Star of Liberty: William
Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998), Tom Paulin argued that,
as a young man, Hazlitt read – or rather, feverishly consumed
– Edmund Burke’s writings, inhabiting them in order
to find his way through to his own voice.
Mazzeo draws liberally on the critics who have contextualized
plagiarism properly. McFarland’s book, Coleridge and
the Pantheist Tradition (1969), has been a guiding light:
“[T]he concept of ‘plagiarism’ cannot stand
the stress of historical examination. We encounter the term so
rarely that we are perhaps not so critical of it as we should
be. It applies mainly to the stricken efforts of undergraduates
to meet demands far beyond either their abilities or their interests.
But it has no proper applicability to the activities, however
unconventional, of a powerful, learned, and deeply committed mind.”
Mazzeo says that the “distinctively Romantic attitude towards
plagiarism begins to emerge in the 1760s and operated coherently
in British culture by the 1790s” (12). She cites Richard
Terry (12) who says “that neoclassical writers were particularly
and often exclusively concerned with verbatim parallels”
and includes Richard Hurd’s 1751 testimony that plagiarism
is really only “the same arrangement of the same words”
(13). The “central tension concerned the negotiation between
originality and imitation” (14), so satire was denigrated
in the 1780s and 90s. The problem was an aesthetic one.
Mazzeo calls Fruman’s work “monumental” (17),
and the word is well chosen to do justice to the scale of Fruman’s
achievement: through the 19th century, and much of the 20th, articles
by De Quincey, James Ferrier, J.M. Robertson, John Sterling, James
Stirling, René Wellek, and Joseph Warren Beach had appeared,
disclosing this or that unacknowledged borrowing in Coleridge,
but they had little cumulative effect. Fruman made such an impression
because he laid out the evidence (which had hitherto been scattered
up and down the periodicals) en masse, and put it all in the fascinating
psychological context of Coleridge’s insecurities. Without
pondering with suspicion, as McFarland did, Fruman’s motivation
to write as he did, Mazzeo says that Coleridge’s borrowings
are culpable only when “unacknowledged, unfamiliar,
and unimproved… [and] conscious…” (23).
The following excerpt is a pristine example of the vital importance
of Mazzeo’s book: “His [Coleridge’s] alleged
plagiarisms continue to occasion controversy, and this is often
productive. However, unless the controversy is framed by a historical
context, the debate is senseless; judged by modern standards,
Coleridge is obviously guilty” (45).
The book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in book
history in the Romantic period. For example, women writers had
very little going for them in legal terms: “In concrete
terms, the laws of the British Romantic period meant that Mary
Shelley, who had married in 1816, had no legal identity apart
from Percy Bysshe Shelley and did not own the intellectual property
of a work such as Frankenstein (1818) except through
his goodwill” (52). Also, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal
was (with Dorothy’s full consent) regularly used by William
Wordsworth. The asymmetrical tit for tat was a sign of the times.
William Wordsworth could not have produced poems such as “A
Night-piece” (1798), “A whirlblast from behind the
hill” (1798) and “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
(1804) without using Dorothy’s work. But while it seems
clear that Dorothy Wordsworth was a writer in her own right, she
claimed to “detest the idea of setting myself up as an Author”
(66). She “represented herself as writing simply for the
private pleasure of her family” (66).
Still of interest to the book historian, chapter 3, “Property
and the Margins of Literary Print Culture,” deals with the
issue of the ownership of oral culture in the Romantic era: “texts
located at the margins of literary print culture, oral materials
[like those Matthew Lewis claimed to have used for the ‘Bleeding
Nun’ episode in his novel, The Monk] were understood
as implicitly authorless and, therefore, available for appropriation
in a relatively straightforward manner” (80).
Chapter 4 contains a fascinating discussion of Byron as plagiarist.
Byron’s reputation was under constant attack by his enemies
in the periodical press. Many of them demonstrated that Byron
was an unconscious plagiarist: “to be unconscious
of an obligation was to be absolved of the charge of plagiarism,
at least at any culpable or legal level” (89-90). But the
lesser charge (in legal terms) on aesthetic grounds was
calculated by the reviewers (hirelings of a homophobic and hypocritical
English society) to discredit Byron as a serious talent. Mazzeo
explores Byron’s plagiarisms with a satisfying awareness
of the subtleties well-known to Byron and his contemporaries,
rather than any mere 20th century assumptions such as the automatic
wrongness of appropriation: “style and tone functioned as
elements of literary property in the Romantic period, and borrowings
sometimes too subtle to trouble twenty-first century critics preoccupied
nineteenth century ones” (93). Mazzeo presents William Wordsworth’s
indignation at Byron “poaching” the trademark Wordsworthian
tone in an entertaining and informative way: whereas Wordsworth
had applied his words and phrases with a sense of sacred care,
Byron was disrespectfully splashing, sloshing, and swilling a
melange of echoes from other writers (including Wordsworth and
a number of travel writers); hence, the “Slip-Shod Muse.”
In Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period,
there is no cold embrace of the literary historian to dampen the
reader’s enthusiasm; in evoking the battle between Byron
and Wordsworth, Mazzeo has created the taste by which readers
will relish her thesis. The shift of focus from Coleridge to Byron
is a characteristically refreshing modulation in Mazzeo’s
remarkable study. Byron’s thievery (of tones rather than
words) is more meltingly sophisticated than Coleridge’s,
and therefore beyond capture by a Fruman. In his day, Byron was
attacked more virulently in connection with plagiarism than Coleridge.
Byron used the traditional Spencerian stanza, which he said he
picked up from the Scottish poet, James Beattie. Here is a sample
from Beattie’s The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius,
Book I (1771):
In truth he was a strange and wayward wight,
Fond of each gentle and each dreadful scene.
In darkness and in storm he found delight:
Nor less, than when on ocean-wave serene
The southern sun diffused his dazzling sheen.
Even sad vicissitude amused his soul:
And if a sight would sometimes intervene,
And down his cheek a tear of pity roll,
A sigh, a tear so sweet, he wished not to control.
Here is a sample from
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto
III:
Self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,
With naught of Hope left – but with less of gloom;
The very knowledge that he lived in vain,
That all was over on this side the tomb,
Had made Despair a smilingness assume,
Which, though ’twere wild, – as on the plundered
wreck
When mariners would madly meet their doom
With draughts intemperate on the sinking deck, –
Did yet inspire a cheer, which he forbore to check.
Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage (1812), though influenced by Beattie and Wordsworth,
was originally intended by Byron to be full of humour. But it
is not very humorous. The style seems not to have allowed the
poet to do what he was naturally good at (attacking hypocrisy),
and it would not be until Beppo (1818) and Don Juan
(1819-1823) that Byron would give full vent to his force as a
poet. Meanwhile, the Byron of Childe Harold was adept
at bringing ego into the narrative, but for all his opposition
to Wordswoth’s “simple” poetry, he obviously
spent much time immersed in it:
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture… (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
III lxxii)
One thinks of Wordsworth’s
“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting
the banks of the Wye” (1798), in which the colours and the
forms of the Lake District’s mountainous scenery “were
then to [Wordsworth]/ An appetite,” whereas he found the
city “joyless” and “unprofitable.”
Mazzeo’s book is satisfyingly replete with different views
of the Romantic epoch’s most important literary tension.
It is refreshing to be reminded of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
modus operandi, as he explained it in his essay, “The Defence
of Poetry.” As Mazzeo puts it, “Despite Romanticism’s
familiar critical identification with the values of ex nihilo
originality, Shelley proposes that the ability to appropriate
and to illuminate the works of other writers is one of the period’s
central aesthetic judgments” (135). Yet, “while Shelley
often articulated anxiety over issues of borrowing and over potential
charges of plagiarism, he remained invested in strategies of assimilation
and in the central importance of this activity to the poetic effort”
(142). That image of Shelley labouring between two conflicting
aims (just as Byron, Coleridge and others did) is emblematic:
Mazzeo’s elegant book shows the architecture of Romantic
discourses and tensions from the inside out. It can deliver some
home-truths about the Romantics’ creativity without ever
degenerating into the reading of an anti-Romantic riot act. It
will not embitter as it enlightens. Anyone interested in creativity
should read it.
