This eBook was produced by David Widger
By Gilbert Parker
When I turn over the hundreds of pages of this book, I have a feelingthat I am looking upon something for which I have no particularresponsibility, though it has a strange contour of familiarity. It is asthough one looks upon a scene in which one had lived and moved, with thefriendly yet half-distant feeling that it once was one's own possessionbut is so no longer. I should think the feeling to be much like that ofthe old man whose sons, gone to distant places, have created their ownplantations of life and have themselves become the masters ofpossessions. Also I suppose that when I read the story through againfrom the first page to the last, I shall recreate the feeling in whichI lived when I wrote it, and it will become a part of my own identityagain. That distance between himself and his work, however, whichimmediately begins to grow as soon as a book leaves the author's handsfor those of the public, is a thing which, I suppose, must come to onewho produces a work of the imagination. It is no doubt due to the factthat every piece of art which has individuality and real likeness to thescenes and character it is intended to depict is done in a kind oftrance. The author, in effect, self-hypnotises himself, has createdan atmosphere which is separate and apart from that of his dailysurroundings, and by virtue of his imagination becomes absorbed in thatatmosphere. When the book is finished and it goes forth, when theimagination is relaxed and the concentration of mind is withdrawn, theatmosphere disappears, and then. One experiences what I feel when I takeup 'The Weavers' and, in a sense, wonder how it was done, such as it is.
The frontispiece of the English edition represents a scene in the Houseof Commons, and this brings to my mind a warning which was given mesimilar to that on my entering new fields outside the one in which Ifirst made a reputation in fiction. When, in a certain year, Idetermined that I would enter the House of Commons I h