It can hardly be said that there were two series of Pierre stories.
There never was but one series, in fact. Pierre moved through all the
thirty-nine stories of Pierre and His People and A Romany of the Snows
without any thought on my part of putting him out of existence in one
series and bringing him to life again in another. The publication of
the stories was continuous, and at the time that Pierre and His People
appeared several of those which came between the covers of A Romany of
the Snows were passing through the pages of magazines in England and
America. All of the thirty-nine stories might have appeared in one
volume under the title of Pierre and His People, but they were published
in two volumes with different titles in England, and in three volumes
in America, simply because there was enough material for the two and the
three volumes. In America The Adventurer of the North was broken up into
two volumes at the urgent request of my then publishers, Messrs. Stone &
Kimball, who had the gift of producing beautiful books, but perhaps had
not the same gift of business. These two American volumes succeeding
Pierre were published under the title of An Adventurer of the North and
A Romany of the Snows respectively. Now, the latter title, A Romany of
the Snows, was that which I originally chose for the volume published
in England as An Adventurer of the North. I was persuaded to reject the
title, A Romany of the Snows, by my English publisher, and I have
never forgiven myself since for being so weak. If a publisher had the
infallible instinct for these things he would not be a publisher--he
would be an author; and though an author may make mistakes like
everybody else, the average of his hits will be far higher than the
average of his misses in such things. The title, An Adventurer of the
North, is to my mind cumbrous and rough, and difficult in the mouth.
Compare it with some of the stories within the volume itself: for
instance, The Going of the White Swan, A Lovely Bully, At Bamber’s Boom,
At Point o’ Bugles, The Pilot of Belle Amour, The Spoil of the Puma, A
Romany of the Snows, and The Finding of Fingall. There it was, however;
I made the mistake and it sticks; but the book now will be published in
this subscription edition under the title first chosen by me, A Romany
of the Snows. It really does express what Pierre was.
Perhaps some of the stories in A Romany of the Snows have not the
sentimental simplicity of some of the earlier stories in Pierre and His
People, which take hold where a deeper and better work might not seize
the general public; but, reading these later stories after twenty years,
I feel that I was moving on steadily to a larger, firmer command of my
material, and was getting at closer grips with intimate human things.
There is some proof of what I say in the fact that one of the stories in
A Romany of the Snows, called The Going of the White Swan, appropriately
enough published originally in Scribner’s Magazine, has had an
extraordinary popularity. It has been included in the programmes of
reciters from the Murrumbidgee to the Vaal, from John O’Groat’s to
Land’s End, and is now being published as a separate volume in England
and America. It has been dramatised several times, and is more alive
to-day than it was when it was published nearly twenty years ago. Almost
the same may be said of The Three Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue.
It has been said that, apart from the colour, form, and setting, the
incidents of these Pierre stories might have occurred anywhere. That
is true beyond a doubt, and it exactly represents my attitude of mind.
Every human passion, every incident springing out of a human passion
to-day, had its counterpart in the time of Amenhotep. The only
difference is in the setting, is in the language or dialect which is the
vehicle of expression, and in race and character, which are the media of
human idiosyncrasy. There is nothing new in anything that one may write,
except the outer and visible variation of race, character, and country,
which reincarnates the everlasting human ego and its scena.
The atmosphere of a story or novel is what temperament is to a man.
Atmosphere cannot be created; it is not a matter of skill; it is a
matter of personality, of the power of visualisation, of feeling for
the thing which the mind sees. It has been said that my books possess
atmosphere. This has often been said when criticism has been more or
less acute upon other things; but I think that in all my experience
there has never been a critic who has not credited my books with that
quality; and I should say that Pierre and His People and A Romany of the
Snows have an atmosphere in which the beings who make the stories
live seem natural to their environment. It is this quality which gives
vitality to the characters themselves. Had I not been able to create
atmosphere which would have given naturalness to Pierre and his friends,
some of the characters, and many of the incidents, would have seemed
monstrosities--melodramatic episodes merely. The truth is, that while
the episode, which is the first essential of a short story, was always
in the very forefront of my imagination, the character or characters
in the episode meant infinitely more to me. To my mind the episode was
always the consequence of character. That almost seems a paradox; but
apart from the phenomena of nature, as possible incidents in a book,
the episodes which make what are called “human situations” are, in most
instances, the sequence of character and are incidental to the law of
the character set in motion. As I realise it now, subconsciously, my
mind and imagination were controlled by this point of view in the days
of the writing of Pierre and His People.
In the life and adventures of Pierre and his people I came, as I think,
to a certain command of my material, without losing real sympathy with
the simple nature of things. Dexterity has its dangers, and one of its
dangers is artificiality. It is very difficult to be skilful and to ring
true. If I have not wholly succeeded in A Romany of the Snows, I think I
have not wholly failed, as the continued appeal of a few of the stories
would seem to show.