y 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 t