The Lane That Had No Turning, Complete. Gilbert Parker

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      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 little symbolic things.

      Eventually the whole series was published in England. W. E. Henley gave 'There Was a Little City’ a home in ‘The New Review’, and expressed himself as happy in having it. ‘The Forge in the Valley’ was published by Sir Wemyss Reid in the weekly paper called ‘The Speaker’, now known as ‘The Nation’, in which ‘Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’ made his name and helped the fame of others. ‘There Was a Little City’ was published in 'The Chap Book’ in the United States, but ‘The Forge in the Valley’ had (I think) no American public until it appeared within the pages of ‘The Lane That Had No Turning’. The rest of the series were published in the 'English Illustrated Magazine’, which was such a good friend to my work at the start. As was perhaps natural, there was some criticism, but very little, in French Canada itself, upon the stories in this volume. It soon died away, however, and almost as I write these words there has come to me an appreciation which I value as much as anything that has befallen me in my career, and that is, the degree of Doctor of Letters from the French Catholic University of Laval at Quebec. It is the seal of French Canada upon the work which I have tried to do for her and for the whole Dominion.