Ellen G. White and Her Critics

The Historical Background of Literary Borrowing

In order rightly to evaluate the charge before us, we need to examine the subject of literary borrowings in its historical setting. The old saying that there is nothing new under the sun finds ample illustration in the history of literature. Literary ideas, themes, plots, et cetera, seem to be strangely alike century after century. Different writers fall into similar forms of expression in describing similar incidents. One writer, though patently borrowing phrases or sentences from another writer, may use these simply as part of his foundational material on which he rears a literary edifice that is sufficiently different from that of the other writer to warrant the judgment that it is a piece of truly original literary architecture. It is in this very area that much of the dispute and uncertainty have arisen. EGWC 404.10

Works on plagiarism cite numerous instances where a poet, for example, has taken couplets from an earlier poet’s work, turning the phrases, embellishing the thought, changing the literary figure. Then another poet, and still another, down through the years has continued the changing. There is newness, yet there is no doubt that the original couplets are the substratum of their work. Many, we might safely say most, of the great poets have thus drawn, at times, on the past. One poet reasonably justifies such a procedure in these words: EGWC 405.1

“Though old the thought and oft exprest, EGWC 405.2

‘Tis his at last who says it best.‘” EGWC 405.3

So general has been the practice, by prose writers as well as by poets, of drawing more or less from earlier works that the noted author, Vicente Blasco-Ibañez, declared, in a vein of hyperbole: EGWC 405.4

“One is compelled not only to say, but also to believe, that all the great writers, absolutely all, are plagiarists, and that the best of each does not belong to him, because he has taken it from others.”—Quoted by MAURICE SALZMAN in Plagiarism, The “Art” of Stealing Literary Material, p. 22. EGWC 405.5

Another writer on this general subject observes: “The great [literary] artist is only one of a long chain of borrowers and adapters.”—W. A. EDWARDS, Plagiarism, An Essay on Good and Bad Borrowing, p. 114. EGWC 405.6