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

we imagine. When a young artist, in his enthusiasm for some particular
‘ master, begins to imitate him, and in so doing to understand him; and when
in time the critic sees the work, and instead of criticizing it for what it is
intrinsically worth, tells the artist that he is a plagiarist, the artist, being made
to feel that he has been guilty of a moral and intellectual weakness, "alters
his style," or, in a vain effort to appear original, does something " effective,”
and the result is that much valuable time is lost.
In thus advocating plagiarism I do not wish to be understood—and I
am now coming to the crucial point to which all I have said has been but a
preface—to endorse copying of anybody and everybody’s thoughts and
methods; on the contrary, the limits to which we may go and to which the
old masters did go, are clearly defined by their practice as well as a socio-
psychological law, and this law says that general types of truth and beauty
are the common property of all, but a specialized type belongs solely to the
artist who specialized it. That this dictum of license and limitation has
always been in the minds of great writers and painters when they borrowed
becomes very apparent the instant we analyze the nature of their borrowing.
Take, for example, the work of those poets whose subject-matter was the
legends and myths of their own or other lands, as some of the plays of
Shakespeare, or the Iliad, or the writings of Wagner; we will invariably find
that the original source of their inspiration was a tale or tradition of some
kind that had been in the land for ages, and was so often repeated from
father to son that whatever it may have been like in the beginning, when it
reached the poet who took it for his own, it had become shorn of all local
color; it presented itself merely as an expression of thought typifying a
certain class of idea. That this must be the inevitable result or end of all
stories or truths which are frequently told from mouth to mouth can easily
be understood when we remember that in any continual repetition through a
long chain of minds only those facts which are easily comprehensible and
whose beauty is appreciated by each and every member in the chain will be
preserved; and further, that not only will the beauty and all that is of general
interest be kept, but occasionally will there be added a new touch of beauty,
which, if understandable to all successive links in the chain, will be passed
on, the result being that in the end there is presented to us a highly evolved
concentration of thought, each flavor of which, as well as the whole com-
bination, is palatable to all minds, and which therefore contains within itself
nothing that can only be felt and appreciated by a special group. Now, such
a myth or tale I call a general type of truth and beauty, and it is something
which no one human mind could ever construct; but is the result of the
united efforts of countless brains laboring for ages, their heirloom to us, and
the common property of all. So, when Shakespeare is said to have taken plots
from Boccaccio, it merely means that Shakespeare sheared Boccaccio’s tales
of what was special to Boccaccio, and that in taking what remained — namely,
the plot — he merely helped himself from the same natural source that Boc-
caccio had, the source to which all of us have an equal right. But if to-day
some one were to borrow one of Shakespeare’s plays and use it without

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