LITERARY COINCIDENCES

ACORRESPONDENT of a Contemporary, desiring to be informed of the authorship of some lines on " the hollow . sea-shell " which, when held to the ear, " proclaims its stormy parent," remarked that they sounded to him like a satire upon Wordsworth, who had used the figure in " The Excursion." They turned out, however, to be the opening of a sonnet by Eugene Lee- Hamilton. Whether we judge him to have been on this occasion a borrower or not, it is clear from the context that he was not perpetrating a parody. What are we to make of this and similar coincidences ?

Sheridan, it will be remembered, has offered a solution. When, at the rehearsal of Mr. Puff's tragedy, the Beefeater exclaimed " Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee," and the author's friends reminded him that the line occurs in Othello, Mr. Puff made answer, " All that can be said is, that two people happened to hit on the same thought, and Shakespeare made use of it first, that's all." Now there is an equal need of explanation in another and a genuine tragedy, Byron's Marino Faliero,; for theatre-goers of 1821 who knew their Shakespeare must have been startled by the occurrence in it of the familiar phrases " free and merry " and " like a sick girl." But a disarming footnote to that great poet's " Siege of Corinth " should make us pause before condemning him offhand :- " I must here acknowledge," wrote Byron, " a close though

unintentional resemblance to a passage in an unpublished poem of Mr: Coleridge Called Christabel.' It was not till after my lines were written that I heard that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem recited ; and the manuscript of that pro- duction I never saw till very recently, by the kindness of Mr. Coleridge himself, who, I hope, is convinced that I have not been a wilful plagiarist. The original idea undouhtedly pertains to Mr. Coleridge, whose poem has been 'composed above fourteen years."

This apology discloses a highly sensitive literary con- science, particularly as the resemblance is of the slightest. The passage in the " Siege of Corinth '-' describes how Alp, the renegade, became aware of the presence of Francesca's spirit :— !‘ Was it the wind, through some hollow stone, Sent that soft and tender moan " lines not strikingly reminiscent of :- . " It moaned as near .as near can be, But what it is she cannot tell."

What a picture. by the way, that footnote brings before the mind : Coleridge in the green-room at Drury Lane, reciting `-` Christabel " to Byron !

But now for a Byronic coincidence for which no apology, despite its striking character, is in existence, an echo even more patent than those in Marino Faliero of Othello and Julius Cavar. Everyone, presumably, admires Byron's famous comparison of Kirke White with an eagle that received its death-wound from an arrow feathered by its own plumage ; but not all, it is probable, are aware that the simile had already been used by Waller, an author whose work can hardly have escaped Byron's reading, in the stanzas, " To a Lady singing a Song of . his Composing " :- " The eagle's fate and mine are one,

Which, on the shaft that made him die, Espy'd a feather of his own Wherewith he wont to soar so high."

Whether Byron improved upon his predecessor may be left to individual taste ; but was his appropriation of the -idea a conscious one ? Or again, when in 1818 he wrote " lone as a solitary cloud," was he deliberately adapting Wordsworth's " lonely as a cloud " of 1806 ? The alternative, and it is a reasonable one, is to suppose that these borrowings are cases of subconscious memory. One may read something, forget that one has read it, and then innocently reproduce its substance as one's own.

This accident seems to have occurred to that impeccable -writer, Mr. Joseph Addison, when warning the fair readers of his Spectator against keeping their lovers in suspense too long. " Were the age of man the same that it was before the flood," he wrote, " a lady might sacrifice half a century to- a scruple, and he two or three ages in demurring. Had she nine hundred years to the good she might hold out to the conversion of the Jews before she thought fit to be prevailed upon." Now this is but an adaptation of Marvell's Lines to his Coy Mistress " :— " Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime

I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews."

What a pity we cannot know whether anyone at Button's had the temerity to murmur those lines to himself in Addison's hearing !

There is, however, one very curious parallelism which cannot be put down to subconscious memory, that between A. H. Clough's

" Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all."

and Tennyson's

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."

The first passage occurs in Clough's "Peschiera," which was written and published in 1849, the second (of course) in " In Memoriam " which, though written during 1884, w'ds only published in 1850. Here we have, it is clear, a sheer coincidence, for that Tennyson could or would have bor- rowed, and at the eleventh hour, from so recent a source is unthinkable. The coincidence, moreover, is the more remarkable in that the poets were using the same metre, one, as it happens, of which Tennyson, until disabused, believed 'himself to have been the creator, whereas it had been - employed two centuries earlier by Lord Herbert of -Cherbury.

For the similarity of idea which underlies these two quotations ingenuity has failed to find a common origin : but Tennyson had read widely, and -certain passages in cider authors have been suggested as the remote begetters of his thought—a thought so nobly expressed- and so deeply felt that no discovery of descent can mar its Perfection. Yet such inquiries are not in themselves without interest •

" 'Tis an unhappy circumstance of life " (says Mrs. Marwood in .Congrove's. " Way of the World " ) ," that love should ever die before us ; and that the man should so often outlive the lover. But say what you will, ' tis better to be left than never have been . loved."

Here a certain inverted resemblance may be granted ; yet it is difficult to imagine Tennyson inspired by such a context. A line from Crabbe .

"Better to have loved amiss than nothing to have loved " .

might, mutatis mutandis, have a better (Maim. But there is a couplet in Byron's " GiaOur "—Byron paid out' perhaps, for his own borrowings :- " I die—but first I have possess'd, • And come what may, I have' been bless'd," which seems more probable as a contributory source. For Tennyson was in his youth much addicted to reading Byron ; he could not read him, he regretfully admitted, in his maturity ; and this couplet may have lurked in the hidden chambers of memory, to-issue in a transfigured form under the influence of a great sorrow.

H. C. M1NCHI*.