Dear John,
An irrefragable answer. (And very choice and illustrative citation, indeed.)
Yours very truly,
Yan
J> Dear Yan
J>
J> I warmly agree.
J>
J> In common parlance "Plagiarism" implies passing off someone else's work as
J> one's own, which Kipling certainly did not do. He borrowed stories and ideas
J> and rhythms and cadences from his wide reading, and from tales told to him,
J> but he transmuted them into something altogether personal and different, as
J> Shakespeare did. See Jonson's comments to Shakespeare in "Proofs of Holy
J> Writ". Also "the poem "The Coiner".
J>
J> I think Kipling was using the expression ironically in this letter. I suspect that in
J> order to increase the value of the letter someone has made a news story out of
J> it, rather as Cambridge University Press have done with the 'fifty lost poems'
J> now documented by Tom Pinney in his great work.
J>
J> Kipling was careful in his use of tales that were told to him. As he tells in Something of Myself (p. 213) he was nearly caught out by a young Englishman who told him a story as a personal experience which he had in fact read in a magazine. When Kipling had written it up he found it a little too slick. Feeling uneasy he did not publish, and then discovered its origins in a dentist's waiting room, by chance: he writes:
J> "I found a file of bound —say six hundred pages to the volume—dating from the ’fifties. I picked up one, and read as undistractedly as the tooth permitted. There I found my tale, identical in every mark—frozen ground, frozen corpse stiff in its fur robes in the buggy—the inn-keeper offering it a drink—and so on to the ghastly end. Had I published that tale, what could have saved me from the charge of deliberate plagiarism? Note here. Always, in our trade, look a gift horse at both ends and in the middle. He may throw you. "He was no plagiarist, though a master-coiner. expert at transmuting base metals into gold.
J> All best wishes, John R
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