“I have just been reading Lamb’s Specimens,” said he, “and am surprised to find in the extracts from the old dramatists so many ideas that I thought exclusively my own. Here is a passage, for instance, from ‘The Duchess of Malfy,’ astonishingly like one in ‘Don Juan.’
“‘The leprosy of lust’ I discover, too, is not mine. ‘Thou tremblest,’—‘’Tis with age then,’ which I am accused of borrowing from Otway, was taken from the Old Bailey proceedings. Some judge observed to the witness, ‘Thou tremblest;’—‘’Tis with cold then,’ was the reply.
“These Specimens of Lamb’s I never saw till today. I am taxed with being a plagiarist, when I am least conscious of being one; but I am not very scrupulous, I own, when I have a good idea, how I came into possession of it. How can we tell to what extent Shakspeare is indebted to his contemporaries, whose works are now lost? Besides which, Cibber adapted his plays to the stage.
“The invocation of the witches was, we know, a servile plagiarism from Middleton. Authors were not so squeamish about borrowing from one another in those days. If it be a fault, I do not pretend to be immaculate. I will lend you some volumes of Shipwrecks, from which my storm in ‘Don Juan’ came.
“Lend me also ‘Casti’s Novelle,’” said I. “Did you never see in Italian,— “Round her she makes an atmosphere of light;
“The very air seemed lighter from her eyes?”
“The Germans,” said he, “and I believe Goëthe himself, consider that I have taken great liberties with ‘Faust.’ All I know of that drama is from a sorry French translation, from an occasional reading or two into English of parts of it by Monk Lewis when at Diodati, and from the Hartz mountain-scene, that Shelley versified from the other day. Nothing I envy him so much as to be able to read that astonishing production in the original. As to originality, Goëthe has too much sense to pretend that he is not under obligations to authors, ancient and modern;—who is not? You tell me the plot is almost entirely Calderon’s. The fête, the scholar, the argument about the Logos, the selling himself to the fiend, and afterwards denying his power; his disguise of the plumed cavalier; the enchanted mirror,—are all from Cyprian. That magico prodigioso must be worth reading, and nobody seems to know any thing about it but you and Shelley. Then the vision is not unlike that of Marlow’s, in his ‘Faustus.’ The bed-scene is from ‘Cymbeline;’ the song or serenade, a translation of Ophelia’s, in ‘Hamlet;’ and, more than all, the prologue is from Job, which is the first drama in the world, and perhaps the oldest poem. I had an idea of writing a ‘Job,’ but I found it too sublime. There is no poetry to be compared with it.”
I told him that Japhet’s soliloquy in ‘Heaven and Earth,’ and address to the mountains of Caucasus, strongly resembled Faust’s.
“I shall have commentators enough by and by,” said he, “to dissect my thoughts, and find owners for them.”