This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
By Gilbert Parker
With each volume of this subscription edition (1912) there is a specialintroduction, setting forth, in so far as seemed possible, the relationof each work to myself, to its companion works, and to the scheme of myliterary life. Only one or two things, therefore, need be said here, as Iwish God-speed to this edition, which, I trust, may help to make oldfriends warmer friends and new friends more understanding. Most of thenovels and most of the short stories were suggested by incidents orcharacters which I had known, had heard of intimately, or, as in the caseof the historical novels, had discovered in the works of historians. Inno case are the main characters drawn absolutely from life; they are notportraits; and the proof of that is that no one has ever been able toidentify, absolutely, any single character in these books. Indeed, itwould be impossible for me to restrict myself to actual portraiture. Itis trite to say that photography is not art, and photography has no charmfor the artist, or the humanitarian indeed, in the portrayal of life.At its best it is only an exhibition of outer formal characteristics,idiosyncrasies, and contours. Freedom is the first essential of theartistic mind. As will be noticed in the introductions and originalnotes to several of these volumes, it is stated that they possessanachronisms; that they are not portraits of people living or dead, andthat they only assume to be in harmony with the spirit of men and timesand things. Perhaps in the first few pages of 'The Right of Way'portraiture is more nearly reached than in any other of these books, butit was only the nucleus, if I may say so, of a larger development whichthe original Charley Steele never attained. In the novel he grew torepresent infinitely more than the original ever represented in his shortlife.
That would not be strange when it is remembered that the germ of The'Right of Way' was growing in my mind over a long period of years, andit must necessarily have developed into a larger conception than theoriginal character could have suggested. The same may be said of thechief characters in 'The Weavers'. The story of the two brothers—DavidClaridge and Lord Eglington—in that book was brewing in my mind forquite fifteen years, and the main incidents and characters of othernovels in this edition had the same slow growth. My forthcoming novel,called 'The Judgment House', had been in my mind for nearly twenty yearsand only emerged when it was full grown, as it were; when I was sofamiliar with the characters that they seemed as real in all ways asthough they were absolute people and incidents of one's own experience.
Little more need be said. In outward