Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

ON PLAGIARISM.

The Dictionary informs us that to plagiarize is, “ in literary or artistic
work, to appropriate from another and give out as one’s own.”
The definition is clear and seems easily comprehensible; there should
be no room for discussion; what is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours;
and if I take yours and say that it is mine I am a thief, or, in polite language, a
plagiarist; and that settles the question. But in spite of the logical sequence
of the definition, it drops to pieces the moment we analyze it. To begin
with, what does "appropriate,, mean ? To take for one'sown use, does it not?
But take what ? Presumably, anything at all; the definition allows no leeway ;
nothing which belongs to another have we a right to take. Then, when
Shakespeare appropriated plots in part or in whole from the Decameron of
Boccaccio, he was a plagiarist, was he not? When Homer gathered together
the myths of the people and retold them in a better style, he was plagiarizing,
was he not? And Wagner, whose literary accompaniments to his music are
but the legends of the Rhine rewritten to suit himself; and Hans Andersen,
whose Fairy Tales are those of his land; and Grimm, and Boccaccio himself;
they must all have been plagiarists ? Or, is it allowable to take the plot from
another author and give it out as one's own? Is it there that our definition
is wrong?
I think there must be a flaw in the generally accepted idea of what
constitutes plagiarism; and possibly, if we will seek light from the past ages
to learn what their attitude toward literary and artistic thefts was, we may
discover this flaw. Let us, for this purpose, study the history of Italian
painting, from the day of Giotto to the period of the Renaissance, and let us
note how and from whom the artists obtained their motifs and methods of
execution.
Now, Giotto, the father of European painting, in his early youth was a
shepherd, and used to amuse himself by scratching outline-drawings of the
sheep into the rocks or soil of the fields, just exactly as a thousand other
little boys had done before him, just as the cave-dwellers used to carve the
outlines of men and beasts into the ivory of the mastodon; and probably
Giotto executed his drawings no better than did the primitive man; but
there was one thing about them which it would have been impossible for him
to say of any work he did in later years, namely, they were entirely original
work, and no part of the thought or execution had been "plagiarized" from
any one else. His original period did not last long; somebody " discovered"
him, and he was apprenticed to Cimabue to learn the profession of painting
— trade, they called it in those days. For about twenty years, along with a
number of others, he studied under Cimabue; his labors, apart from learning
the manufacture and grinding of pigments, consisting for a long period in
copying his master's paintings; and when he could copy them well, he helped
make them, painting such parts as he had learned to do. Finally, having
absorbed all the knowledge he could, he started out for himself and made
pictures so exactly like those of his master that it was almost impossible to

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