Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb

No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to

communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard

to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is

disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original

authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed,

insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a

medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or

statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this

championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He

is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than

is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain

proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real

inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination,

it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the

universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual

products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the

infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the

massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on

that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or

modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically

speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused

for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper

subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or

combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race,

must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or

populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or

Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their

right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author.

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were

brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of

explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as

necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well

known--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for

mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might

injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark

casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has

furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate.

No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the

non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as

well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics

whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of

the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound

learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and

disguised his references to it under contractions in which _Us. Knowl._.

took the place of the low word _Penny_. Works of this convenient stamp,

easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich

but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and

whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance

on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this

frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to

our self-love--when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to

be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is

always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or

Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has

been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which

seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may

pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object

except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his

figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must

weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask

themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the

particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of

service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to

him.

After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation is

more difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of a

plagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberate

reproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittal

are obvious and strong:--the inevitable coincidences of contemporary

thinking; and our continual experience of finding notions turning up in

our minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came; so that

if we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we accept

them at once as a new inspiration. Then, in relation to the elder

authors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then of

remembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of

the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long ago

reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry

which is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we were

ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and

proving our honesty in a ruinously expensive manner. On the other hand,

the evidence on which plagiarism is concluded is often of a kind which,

though much trusted in questions of erudition and historical criticism,

is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our daily judgments, especially

of the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas,

whether St Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus

must have known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points on

which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to justice and

charity than an erroneous confidence, supported by reasoning

fundamentally similar, of my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a case

where I am personally concerned. No premisses require closer scrutiny

than those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must have

known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on

the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the

easiest of all things to the human mind is _not_ to know and _not_ to

read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout,

grin, or hiss--these are native tendencies; but to know and to read are

artificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safe

supposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits.

An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagining

his condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we are

all apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must be

general, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes,

and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent

persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent author

happen to be alive to practical teaching he will soon learn to divide

the larger part of the enlightened public into those who have not read

him and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in polite

society, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wish

to conceal this negation and speak of his "incomparable works" with that

trust in testimony which always has its cheering side.

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of

plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on a

construction of probabilities which a little more attention to everyday

occurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be really

worthless, considered as proof. The length to which one man's memory can

go in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly

find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an

agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you,

with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the first

to elaborate in public; yet any one who listens may overhear such

instances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your peculiar

connection with your acquaintance's judicious views; but why should

_he_? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an

additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember; and a sense of

obligation to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us

in our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is felt

to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want of

polite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day of

celebration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we must recognise as the

first weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember best

is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory of

our neighbours. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour who

borrows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up again

forgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself so

much the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons

cannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, and

have no mental check to tell them that they have carried home a

fellow-visitor's more recent purchase: they may be excellent

householders, far removed from the suspicion of low devices, but one

wishes them a more correct perception, and a more wary sense that a

neighbours umbrella may be newer than their own.

True, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of an

idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely,

yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general

wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that

if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is

clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their

immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and

appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have

alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to

that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor

pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and

often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to

be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo.

Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly met

with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for

any one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his

conversational rapine--his habit of darting down on every morsel of

booty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, as

if it were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by him as a

tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in

gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry you

would probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern

times, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence and

other official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend his

leisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few

predatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons,

gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on

the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily falls

into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress into

fuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needing

to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of

correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some

ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a

hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed

to spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not be

taken as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in the

most graceful manner from a repetition of his previous remark to the

continuation--"All this is on the supposition that a hundred and two

were all that could be got out of nine thirteens; but as all the world

knows that nine thirteens will yield," &c.--proceeding straightway into

a new train of ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded

by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony for

ignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. How should a

small-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be quicker in arithmetic than

the keen-faced forcible Aquila, in whom universal knowledge is easily

credible? Looked into closely, the conclusion from a man's profile,

voice, and fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond the

twelves, seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very common

things are connected; but it is on such false correlations that men

found half their inferences about each other, and high places of trust

may sometimes be held on no better foundation.

It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in

general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the

performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to

be, considering who is the performer. We all notice in our neighbours

this reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish

illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves as we

will, the first impression from any sort of work must depend on a

previous attitude of mind, and this will constantly be determined by the

influences of a name. But that our prior confidence or want of

confidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the

consequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant, is less commonly

perceived, though there is a conspicuous indication of it in the

surprise or disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of an

authorship about which everybody has been making wrong guesses. No doubt

if it had been discovered who wrote the 'Vestiges,' many an ingenious

structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgust

might have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby

an appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in prepossessions,

founded on spurious evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement for

those who, happening to have the ear of the public, give other people's

ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name,

while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an each person who

has paid complimentary tributes in the wrong place.

Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on the

probabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise the

guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess "likely:"

why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrike

attributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been

known as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to the

reverend Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previous

judgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whom

they had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a

species excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrong

in their notion of the specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly in

the small Skunk, and in him alone--in spite of his education nobody

knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, and

in spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him.

Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animals

assembled to consider what sort of creature had constructed a honeycomb

found and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers all

started from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this was

the quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; for the

animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would have

rejected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by a

fish; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received in society

and their ways were little known. Several complimentary presumptions

were expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admired

and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of the

Nightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a positive denial, their

confusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owl

hissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the

animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of

whose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful logical

procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Some

disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself

obtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of his powers, and feeling

that he could have produced the honey if he had thought of it; until an

experimental Butcher-bird proposed to anatomise him as a help to

decision. The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiring

who his ancestors were; until a diversion was created by an able

discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he classified so

as to include the honeycomb, entering into so much admirable exposition

that there was a prevalent sense of the honeycomb having probably been

produced by one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably

eaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled in his low kind of

language, that "Fine words butter no parsnips," by which he meant to say

that there was no new honey forthcoming.

Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, when the Fox

entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and reported that the

beneficent originator in question was the Wasp, which he had found much

smeared with undoubted honey, having applied his nose to it--whence

indeed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seem

a sign of scepticism, had stung him with some severity, an infliction

Reynard could hardly regret, since the swelling of a snout normally so

delicate would corroborate his statement and satisfy the assembly that

he had really found the honey-creating genius.

The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible swelling, were

taken as undeniable evidence, and the revelation undoubtedly met a

general desire for information on a point of interest. Nevertheless,

there was a murmur the reverse of delighted, and the feelings of some

eminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped

so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying

Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw

became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh;

while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated

the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair,

instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was

now plain, had been much overestimated. But this narrow-spirited motion

was negatived by the sweet-toothed majority. A complimentary deputation

to the Wasp was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that this

diplomatic measure would tell on the production of honey.