would have bribed one of Penelope's women to intercept them. Homer did not use that incident, because he did not need it; but all his incidents were of primeval antiquity, even in his own time; he plagiarized them from popular stories; he stole the Cyclops almost ready-made.

There are, doubtless, exceptions to this rule of the universality and public character of the stock of fiction. These exceptions are rather of an empirical sort, and should be avoided chiefly for the sake of weak brethren, who go about writing long letters in the newspapers.

A few instances may be given from personal experience. A novelist once visited the writer in high spirits. Certain events of a most extraordinary nature had just occurred to him, events which would appear incredible if I ventured to narrate them. My visitor meant to make them the subject of a story, which he sketched. But you can't," I said: "that's the plot of Ferdinand's Folly," and I named a book which had just arrived sub luminis oras. He had not heard of Ferdinand's Folly, but he went away sad, for he was a young man that had been robbed of a great opportunity. But he was presently consoled by receiving a letter from another author, a gentleman of repute in more than one branch of literature. "I have just read your Daisy's Dream," said this author, "and I find that there is a scene in it which is also in my unpublished work, Psamathöe." He then described the scene, which certainly did appear of glaring originality-if anything could be original. "Nobody will believe two people could

to do?" said the second unfortunate author; and indeed I do not know what he did, or whether Psamathöe was punished by an early doom for her unconscious plagiarism. The study of the diffusion of popular tales seems to show that there is no incident which may not be invented over and over again-in Siberia, or Samoa. These coincidences will also occur in civilized literature; but some examples are so astonishing that the small fry of moralists are certain to shout "Stop thief." On the whole, an author thus anticipated had better stop before they shout, but it was the merest accident that gave pause to the two novelists of these anecdotes. Alas! unconscious of their doom, the little victims might have published.

Another very hard case lately came under my notice. A novelist invented and described to me a situation which was emphatically new, because it rested on the existence of a certain scientific instrument, which was new also. The author was maturing the plot, when he chanced to read a review of some work (I never saw it, and have forgotten its name), in which the incident and the instrument appeared. Now, may this author write his own tale, or may he not? If he does (and if it succeeds), he will be hailed as an abandoned rogue; and yet it is his own invention. Probably it is wiser to "endure and abstain;" otherwise, the "lynx-eyed detectives" will bring out their old learning, and we shall be told once more how Ben Jonson stole "Drink to me only with thine eyes" fromPisistratus! This I lately learned from a newspaper.

Thus it appears that, though plagiarism is hardly a possible offence, it is more discreet not to use situations which have either made one very definite impression on the world of readers, or which have been very recently brought out. For example: it is distinctly daring to make a priest confess his unsuspected sin in a sermon: The notion is public property; but every one is reminded of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Thus the situation is a thing to avoid; as certain measures-that of In Memoriam for example-are to be avoided in poetry. The metre is everybody's property, but it at once recalls the poem wherein the noblest use was made of it. Again, double personality is a theme open to all the world: Gautier and Poe and Eugène Sue all used it; but it is wiser to leave it alone while people have a vivid memory of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is not inconceivable that an author might use the old notion as brilliantly and with as much freshness as Mr. Stevenson has done; it is certain that, if he tries, he will be howled at by the moral mob. A novelist may keep these precautions in his mind; but if, though he writes good books, he is not a bookish man, he will be constantly and unwittingly offending people who do not write good books, although they are bookish. Thus it lately happened to me to see an illustration of an unpublished work, in which a wounded and dying warrior was using his last force to break, with singular consequences, the weapon that had been his lifelong companion. I knew (being bookish) the incident was perfectly familiar to me, but I could not remember where I had met it before. It haunted me

like the names which you try to recover from faithless memory, and one day it flashed on me that this incident was at least eight hundred years old. But I leave (not its source, for the novelist who is no bookman had probably never tasted of that literary fountain), but the place of its early appearance, to be remembered or discovered by any one who is curious enough to con sult his memory or his library. But here another question arises: let it be granted that the novelist first found the situation where I found it, and is there any reason in the world why he should not make what is a thoroughly original use of it? The imagination or invention needed for this particular adaptation was at least as vivid and romantic as the original conception, which, again, might occur, and may have occurred, separately to minds in Japan and in Peru.

I have chiefly spoken of plagiarism in fiction, for there is little need to speak of plagiarism in poetry. Probably no man or woman (apart from claiming a ready-made article not their own) ever consciously plagiarized in verse. The smallest poetaster has too much vanity to borrow on purpose. Unconsciously even great men (Scott confesses in one case) have remembered and repeated the ideas or the rhythm of others. In a recent Jubilee Ode one reads (indeed it is quoted in a newspaper article on plagiarism):

"Deep-based on ancient right as on thy Thy rule endures unshattered still." people's will

The debt to the Laureate's verse is not to be mistaken; but no less unmistakable is the absence of con

"Made of a red rose that has turned to white."

The mind of the unconscious plagiarist had not been wholly inactive, as the word "swooning" shows, but it was a direct though unintentional robbery. No robberies, in verse, are made, I think, with more malice prepense than this early larceny.

On the whole, then, the plagiarist appears to be a decidedly rare criminal, whereas charges of plagiarism have always been as common as blackberries. An instructive example is that of Molière and Les Precieuses. Everything in it, cried Somaise and De Villiers, is from the Abbé de Pure, the Italians, and Chapuzeau. But somehow none of these gallant gentlemen did, in fact, write Les Précieuses Ridicules, nor anything that anybody except the Molièriste ever heard of.

The laudable anxiety of the Somaises of all time for literary honesty would be more laudable still if they did not possess a little vice of their own. It is not a vice of which any man is the fanfaron: the delicate veiled passion of Envy. Indeed, these lynx-eyed ones have a bad example in their predecessor, Mr. Alexander Pope.

Mr. Pope had a friend who became

an enemy-Mr. Moore, who took the name of Smythe. This Mr. MooreSmythe wrote a comedy, The Rival Modes, played in 1727, wherein the persons occasionally dropped into poetry, printed in italics. On March 18, 1728, an anonymous correspondent in the Daily Journal accused Mr. Pope of having plagiarized certain verses from this comedy, and published them in the third volume of his Miscellanies:

""Tis thus that vanity coquettes rewards, A youth of frolics, an old age of cards”— and so forth. There was no doubt that these verses, after appearing in The Rival Modes, came out in Pope's Miscellanies. But in 1729, in the enlarged edition of the Dunciad, Pope quoted the anonymous letters (there were two), and maintained that the verses were his own, and that Moore-Smythe was the plagiarist. He had given Smythe leave to use them (the men had once been on good terms), and had suggested their withdrawal later. Pope then, on a quarrel with Smythe, published them, and antedated them (1723), "in order to found or support the charge of plagiarism against Smythe.' And Mr. Alexander Pope himself (like Conkey in Oliver Twist) was his own anonymous accuser, bringing the charge against himself, that he might retort it on the luckless Moore-Smythe. But Mr. Moore-Smythe was in one respect well advised: he made no reply.

Though it appears from this anecdote, as told in Mr. Carruthers' Life of Pope, that people who bring charges of plagiarism are not invariably of a delicate morality, yet a review of the whole topic cannot but

console the moralist. Mr. Matthew Arnold assigns to morality but a poor seven-eighths in the composition of human life. But we see that morality has far more interest and importance than this estimate allows. A masterpiece of mere art in poetry or fiction might be published (I wish it were probable) without exciting one hundredth part of the interest provoked by the charge of stealing half a page. Thus we learn that Art is of no importance at all in comparison with Conduct. A good new book is murmured about at a few dinner parties. A wicked new action-say the purloining, real or alleged, of twenty lines-is thundered about from the house-top, and flashed along all the network of electric wires from London to San Francisco. While men have this overpowering interest in morals, who can despair of humanity?-ANDREW LANG, in The Contemporary Review.

ARE ANIMALS MENTALLY

HAPPY?

IN TWO PARTS.-PART I.

Here we must necessarily argue from our own feelings to those of the lower intelligences. We must presume a similarity between our own affections and the affections of animals, which similarity will be still closer if we limit our comparison to the affections of childhood or those of primitive man. If in examining and analyzing our own emotions we find we can trace any element common to all our mental pleasures, we are bound to assume the presence of the like element in

the mental pleasures of the brute. True, there can be no direct comparison between such a pleasure as we derive from the C minor Symphony of Beethoven, or from the Blenheim Raphael, and any pleasure of which we can suppose the mind of a rabbit to be capable. But we must remember that all our more civilized pleasures are exceedingly complex: they are combinations of a number of separate, simple, pleasurable elements, each of which is quite distinct and unaffected by the presence of the others. Thus in listening to the symphony we have a separate pleasure in the rhythm (a ganglionic pleasure associated with muscular movements), a separate pleasure in the harmonies and melodic phrases (also ganglionic; the latter depending on the former, inasmuch as melody gives no pleasure by itself, but only as it suggests beautiful harmony), a separate pleasure in the contrasts of light and shade, pianos and fortes (likewise ganglionic); and amongst a host of intellectual elements we have a separate pleasure in tracing the development of the theme-a pleasure of the kind called "plot interest;" a separate pleasure in the whole work considered as a human creation; a separate pleasure in the imitation by the orchestra of human emotional phases, and so forth. Of these and of a dozen other distinct elements is our delight in an art-product builded up, and therefore, though it is quite impossible that any being of more limited capacities should find the slightest enjoyment in such a complex resultant, still, the separate elements, or some of them, may be within the grasp of the inferior capacity, and if so, the reason why

they give pleasure to man will also be the reason why they give pleasure to the animal.

Now in the above example, as in almost all our mental pleasures, there are certain of what we have called bodily conveniences mingled with purely mental satisfactions. The fact that these are almost invariably blended in life has to some extent effaced the essential distinction between them, and we are apt to forget that only by way of metaphor can they be brought under one name. Toward the opposite end of the æsthetic scale we do in some measure preserve in our speech a record of the inherent difference. between torture of limb and grief of spirit. When we use such a word as "torture" to symbolize a certain degree of mental distress, we so employ it with a distinct recognition of its symbolical character. No less symbolical, however, is our use of such a word as "pleasure" to characterize mental elevation. Language has been fixed in ages when as yet mental satisfactions had not arrived at their present importance and complexity; confusion in language has led to confusion in thought, and psychologists have been accustomed to content themselves with considering the case of a sprained muscle or a crushed limb, imagining in so doing they had at the same time furnished a complete explanation of the distress arising from a frustrated desire. It will, however, suffice to fix in our minds the essential difference between the two if we remember that their very physical signs are different. Thus in mental distress the brow is contracted, while in bodily suffering the corners of the mouth are affected; and it is only

when bodily sufferings are protracted so as to affect the mind or when they are accompanied by danger causing mental distress that the corrugator muscles begin to make furrows in the brow. If you see in a statue or painting of a human figure the upper part of the face indicating suffering, you instantly conclude the suffering to be mental; if you see the lower part of the face drawn or distorted, you recognize it as the sign of physical pain. That is to say, you recog nize the fact that the nervous centers concerned with mental distresses are distinct from those occupied with local or bodily pains.

Now, before we can attempt any estimate of the mental satisfactions of animal life, we must start with some hypothesis as to the nature of that common element which at different moments we express by such words as glad, happy, pleased, joyful, and the like. The theory of Mr. Herbert Spencer which we have accepted as a sufficient explanation of physical pleasure affords no guide whatever for the interpretation of the widely different phenomena of mental satisfaction. No theory of nerve waste and nutrition can be of any use to us in determining what there is in a particular painting and a particular social situation which leads us to characterize our feelings in the presence of both by the same name.

What we want is to discover some common element, the presence of which characterizes all our pleasurable emotions, and the intensity of which varies in proportion to their exaltation, while the presence in varying intensity of its exact opposite characterizes in like manner and measure all our sadness and distress.

There is a passage of Lucretius in