ole year in the office of Literature, a weekly paper
published by The Times, and getting free again, I felt like a prisoner
released from chains; ready to dance in letters to any extent. Forthwith
I thought of "A Great Romance," a highly elaborate and elaborated piece
of work, full of the strangest and rarest things. I have forgotten how
it was that this design broke down; but I found by experiment that the
great romance was to go on that brave shelf of the unwritten books, the
shelf where all the splendid books are to be found in their golden
bindings. "The White People" is a small piece of salvage from the wreck.
Oddly enough, as is insinuated in the Prologue, the mainspring of the
story is to be sought in a medical textbook. In the Prologue reference
is made to a review article by Dr. Coryn. But I have since found out
that Dr. Coryn was merely quoting from a scientific treatise that case
of the lady whose fingers became violently inflamed because she saw a
heavy window sash descend on the fingers of her child. With this
instance, of course, are to be considered all cases of stigmata, both
ancient and modern: and then the question is obvious enough: what limits
can we place to the powers of the imagination? Has not the imagination
the potentiality at least of performing any miracle, however marvelous,
however incredible, according to our ordinary standards? As to the
decoration of the story, that is a mingling which I venture to think
somewhat ingenious of odds and ends of folk lore and witch lore with
pure inventions of my own. Some years later I was amused to receive a
letter from a gentleman who was, if I remember, a schoolmaster somewhere
in Malaya. This gentleman, an earnest student of folklore, was writing
an article on some singular things he had observed amongst the Malayans,
and chiefly a kind of were-wolf state into which some of them were able
to conjure themselves. He had found, as he said, startling resemblances
between the magic ritual of Malaya and some of the ceremonies and
practices hinted at in "The White People." He presumed that all this was
not fancy but fact; that is that I was describing practices actually in
use among superstitious people on the Welsh border; he was going to
quote from me in the article for the Journal of the Folk Lore Society,
or whatever it was called, and he just wanted to let me know. I wrote in
a hurry to the folklore journal to bid them beware: for the instances
selected by