Perhaps it is idle thus to wonder how any one of a dozen novelists of distinctive talent would have treated this alluring theme had he taken it for his own.  But of this we may be certain, that any novelist of individuality who had chosen it would have made it his own, and would have sent it forth stamped with his own image and superscription.  Indeed, the same tale told by Richardson and by Sterne, altho they were contemporary sentimentalists, would have had so little in common that the careless reader might fail to see any similarity whatsoever; and probably even the pettiest of criticasters would feel no call to bring an accusation of plagiarism against either of them.

     (1905.)

INVENTION AND IMAGINATION

Probably not a few readers of Prof.  Barrett Wendell’s suggestive lectures on the ’Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature’ were surprized to be told that a chief peculiarity of the greatest of dramatic poets “was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of needless invention.  When anyone else had done a popular thing, Shakspere was pretty sure to imitate him and to do it better.  But he hardly ever did anything first.”  In other words, Shakspere was seeking, above all else, to please the contemporary playgoers; and he was prompt to undertake any special type of piece they had shown a liking for; so we can see him borrowing, one after another, the outer form of the chronicle-play from Marlowe, of the tragedy-of-blood from Kyd, of romantic-comedy from Greene, and of dramatic-romance from Beaumont and Fletcher.  And in like manner Moliere was content to return again and again to the type of play which he had taken over from the Italian comedy-of-masks.

This “sluggish avoidance of needless invention,” which is characteristic of Shakspere—­and of Moliere also, altho in a less degree—­is evidenced not only by their eager adoption of an accepted type of play, an outer form of approved popularity, it is obvious also in their plots, wherein we find situations, episodes, incidents drawn from all sorts of sources.  In all the twoscore of Shakspere’s plays, comic and tragic and historic, there are very few, indeed, the stories of which are wholly of his own making.  The invention of Moliere is not quite so sluggish; and there are probably three or four of his plays the plots of which seem to be more or less his own; but even in building up these scant exceptions he never hesitated to levy on the material available in the two hundred volumes of uncatalogued French and Spanish and Italian plays, set down in the inventory of his goods drawn up at his death.  Apparently Shakspere and Moliere accepted in advance Goethe’s theory that much time may be lost in mere invention, whereas, “with a given material all goes easier and better.  Facts and characters being provided, the poet has only the task of animating the whole.  He preserves his own fulness ... since he has only the trouble of execution.”