Wanted: A New "Mark"

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IT is an allusion mark that I want. I am sure every one—at least every member of the Guild of the Pen — will know directly what I mean. A conventional sign wherewith to make one’s acknowledgments when one is adapting, not quoting, another man’s phrase : what a boon that would be !

In many instances, to be sure, such a sign would be banal enough ; no one desires to point the allusion when he elects to write, for example, “ The bitter byeand-bye,” or “ Oft in the chilly night,” or “ Lest we remember,” or “ He awoke one morning and found himself infamous,” or “ Persistency thou art a jewel,’ any more than he wants quotation marks for the corresponding Familiar Quotations. Nevertheless, the need I speak of is frequently so conspicuous that I really cannot conceive why nothing has ever been done about it. Suppose I want to make use of a borrowed bit, not literatim, but trimmed, twisted, or touched up to suit a special case. Perhaps it is only a matter of altering a tense or a person, or turning “ direct discourse ” into “indirect;” perhaps it is a more radical modification keeping at the same time the shape and cadence or other distinguishing feature of the original. Suppose I cannot count on my prospective readers to recognize the adaptation as such, or at any rate to understand that I meant it to be recognized. Suppose, as so often befalls, an explanatory reference, however lightly thrown in, would disfigure my text. Behold a three-horned dilemma : I must become a “ thunder-thief,” or at least risk being taken for a thunder-thief, or I must wink at clumsy technique, or I must give up my allusion altogether, and so, it may be, knock out a telling point that cannot otherwise be made. (I don’t take into account the illiterate and immoral expedient of putting quotation marks to a phrasing that is not accurate quotation.) What am I to do ?

The pertinence of an allusion mark, of course, would largely depend, as the pertinence of the quotation mark largely depends, on the quality of the contingent one might be trying to please. If one were writing with an eye to, say, the readers of the Atlantic, one would naturally dispense with such a device in many cases that would call for it were one considering a company presumably less bookish. An unliterary — not illiterate — scientist friend once showed me an article in a leading scientific magazine, whose thesis, as nearly as I who am an ignoramus about biology know how to put it, was that certain processes thitherto supposed to take place only within the several cells of a particular organism really went on from cell to cell throughout the structure. The essay concluded with the words, “ In this respect, cell walls do not a prison make.” “ Look at that! ” exclaimed my friend in disgust. “ Did you ever see such a sentence ? She ” — the author in question chanced to be a woman — “ has read German till she ’s forgotten English.” Now the allusion to Lovelace’s classic line was absurdly out of tone with the article and the magazine, anyway, but if the writer had had and employed a “ mark ” to indicate that it was an allusion, she would have been spared aspersion, at least for anything worse than bad taste, even from readers who did n’t happen to be acquainted with the stanzas to Althea.

But, be your market what it may, the allusion mark is still a desideratum. Short of a cumbersome or otherwise inappropriate parenthesis, the little problem confronting you is often quite insoluble. There are the times when your reference is to some out-of-the-way scrap with which no one could be expected to be familiar, — so that the use of it sans acknowledgment would indeed be thundertheft. There are the times when, though precise quotation is n’t important to your purpose, you would like to quote precisely, but your memory of the given passage is imperfect, and you can’t get at the original. There are the times — but I need n’t go on.

Now why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should things be as they are in this particular ? Does not the absence of such a device as I have been pleading for constitute a real, a lamentable, little lacuna in Language as she is wrote ? An allusion mark : why not ?