Posts tagged Turning

The story with which this book opens, ‘The Lane That Had No Turning’,
gives the title to a collection which has a large share in whatever
importance my work may possess. Cotemporaneous with the Pierre
series, which deal with the Far West and the Far North, I began in
the ‘Illustrated London News’, at the request of the then editor, Mr.
Clement K. Shorter, a series of French Canadian sketches of which
the first was ‘The Tragic Comedy of Annette’. It was followed by ‘The
Marriage of the Miller, The House with the Tall Porch, The Absurd
Romance of P’tite Louison, and The Woodsman’s Story of the Great White
Chief’. They were begun and finished in the autumn of 1892 in lodgings
which I had taken on Hampstead Heath. Each–for they were all very
short–was written at a sitting, and all had their origin in true
stories which had been told me in the heart of Quebec itself. They were
all beautifully illustrated in the Illustrated London News, and in their
almost monosyllabic narrative, and their almost domestic simplicity,
they were in marked contrast to the more strenuous episodes of the
Pierre series. They were indeed in keeping with the happily simple and
uncomplicated life of French Canada as I knew it then; and I had perhaps
greater joy in writing them and the purely French Canadian stories that
followed them, such as ‘Parpon the Dwarf, A Worker in Stone, The Little
Bell of Honour, and The Prisoner’, than in almost anything else I have
written, except perhaps ‘The Right of Way and Valmond’, so far as Canada
is concerned.

I think the book has harmony, although the first story in it covers
eighty-two pages, while some of the others, like ‘The Marriage of the
Miller’, are less than four pages in length. At the end also there are
nine fantasies or stories which I called ‘Parables of Provinces’. All
of these, I think, possessed the spirit of French Canada, though all are
more or less mystical in nature. They have nothing of the simple realism
of ‘The Tragic Comedy of Annette’, and the earlier series. These nine
stories could not be called popular, and they were the only stories
I have ever written which did not have an immediate welcome from the
editors to whom they were sent. In the United States I offered them to
‘Harper’s Magazine’, but the editor, Henry M. Alden, while, as I know,
caring for them personally, still hesitated to publish them. He thought
them too symbolic for the every-day reader. He had been offered four of
them at once because I declined to dispose of them separately, though
the editor of another magazine was willing to publish two of them.
Messrs. Stone & Kimball, however, who had plenty of fearlessness where
literature was concerned, immediately bought the series for The Chap
Book, long since dead, and they were published in that wonderful little
short-lived magazine, which contained some things of permanent value
to literature. They published four of the series, namely: ‘The Golden
Pipes, The Guardian of the Fire, By that Place Called Peradventure,
The Singing of the Bees, and The Tent of the Purple Mat’. In England,
because I would not separate the first five, and publish them
individually, two or three of the editors who were taking the Pierre
series and other stories appearing in this volume would not publish
them. They, also, were frightened by the mystery and allusiveness of the
tales, and had an apprehension that they would not be popular.

Perhaps they were right. They were all fantasies, but I do not wish
them other than they are. One has to write according to the impulse that
seizes one and after the fashion of one’s own mind. This at least can be
said of all my books, that not a page of them has ever been written to
order, and there is not a story published in all the pages bearing
my name which does not represent one or two other stories rejected by
myself. The art of rejection is the hardest art which an author has
to learn; but I have never had a doubt as to my being justified in
publishing these lit

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