much of anything in any
human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the
soul--let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual
and valuable material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For
substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously
drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used 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
anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental
and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in
characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech
you are listening to ten centuries and 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 are others that
contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam
engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, 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 is all he did. These object
lessons should teach us 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 actual 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 upon a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long
enough to turn up some time or other and 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 now 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 dictation, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents
Abroad" with.