Literary borrowing

Pure chance recently put a copy of the “Sketch book” by Washington Irving into my hands, and I have been enjoying rereading classic stories and discovering ones that were previously unfamiliar.  In the latter category is “The Art of Book Making,” in which Irving describes a desultory trip to the British Museum and his fascination with watching putative authors as they devour earlier works in order to create their own.  I have commented before on the need for authors and other creators to have useful access to previous works in order to create new knowledge and literature.  Isaac Newton’s famous phrase about “standing on the shoulders of giants” often springs to my lips.  But I could never match the eloquence and humor of Irving’s description of, and justification for, literary borrowing — especially the image of mushrooms springing from a rotting tree trunk — so I will, for the remainder of this post, simply allow him to speak:

After all, thought I, may not this pilfering disposition be implanted in authors for wise purposes; may it not be the way in which Providence has taken care that the seeds of knowledge and wisdom shall be preserved from age to age, in spite of the inevitable decay of the works in which they were first produced? We see that nature has wisely, though whimsically, provided for the conveyance of seeds from clime to clime, in the maws of certain birds; so that animals, which, in themselves, are little better than carrion, and apparently the lawless plunderers of the orchard and the cornfield, are, in fact, nature’s carriers to disperse and perpetuate her blessings. In like manner, the beauties and fine thoughts of ancient and obsolete authors are caught up by these flights of predatory writers, and cast forth again to flourish and bear fruit in a remote and distant tract of time. Many of their works, also, undergo a kind of metempsychosis, and spring up under new forms. What was formerly a ponderous history revives in the shape of a romance—an old legend changes into a modern play—and a sober philosophical treatise furnishes the body for a whole series of bouncing and sparkling essays. Thus it is in the clearing of our American woodlands; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place; and we never see the prostrate trunk of a tree mouldering into soil, but it gives birth to a whole tribe of fungi.

Let us not, then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their elements shall never perish. Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them—and from whom they had stolen.