Book 2 — A REPLY TO DWIGHT’S ARTICLE ON MOZART’S DON GIOVANNI.

This is the title of a long and prominent article in Graham’s February number: the writer is but a wordy plagiarist. He has received many rebukes already for his cool appropriation of the ideas of others, but Aristabulus Bragg fashion, he still goes on, in the calmest, most approved style, perfectly unblushing. A year or eighteen months ago an article of his in Sartain’s Magazine was pointed out to us as containing some clever thoughts on a very original idea, “the Musical Trinity.” Oh, we exclaimed, this is not original, the whole idea is stolen from the German; then we turned to Goethe’s correspondence with a child, Bettina von Arnheim, and found several passages on the same subject in conversations with Beethoven and Schlosser. Some time after we read in Saroni’s Musical Times that the editor had also detected the plagiarism in this article, and pointed out another author, book and page; saying with great good-nature that he would not have noticed it, had Mr. Dwight only written his article as clearly and concisely as the original; “but to rob an author first and then murder him,” says the editor, “is more than we can bear.” The author alluded to by Mr. Saroni, is the German Marx, and he tells us that the fourth paragraph in Sartain’s article is an almost literal translation of a paragraph in Marx’s “Komposition-shlere,” second edition, p. 24.

We have waded through this last article of Mr. Dwight’s on Don Giovanni, partly from curiosity, partly for amusement. We wanted to see the extent to which he would go: and then it amused us to detect the little pilfered thoughts, trigged out in the Boston transcendental clothing until their parents would have scarcely recognized them.

It opens with quite a flourish, trying to decorate the story and hero as the German Hoffman did long ago, but though the whole of the first part is a spun-out translation of the German critic’s description, it is so mingled with his own crude, half-educated thoughts, as to require some little skill in separating Hoffman from Dwight. He has made an attempt to improve upon the German, and we can not say we admire the Boston imitation. Judge for yourself by the following comparison: