The Way Of Ebcen

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  NOBODY will think, I hope, that I pretend to have invented this story. Those who are familiar with the earlier works of Felix Kennaston will of course recognize that one encounters hereinafter the Norrovian legend upon which is based The King’s Quest. There has never been, though, so far as I am aware, any prose version made in English; and in taking over this story from Garnier’s anthology, Kennaston necessarily introduced many and frequent changes prompted by the demands of Spenserian verse. Moreover, Kennaston—with, as I think, unwisdom—has toiled to prettify the tale throughout, and to point, a bit laboriously, an apologue which in the story’s original form simply does not exist. I may at least assert that in The Way of Ecben (which “teaches “nothing whatever) I have clung rigorously to the queer legend’s restrained, and quite unfigurative, first shaping.

  —This, too, under some duress. The tale is so brief that in recording it the temptation was ever present to pad here and there, and to enlarge upon one or another detail, with the wholly pardonable design of rewarding each possible purchaser with the average amount of reading-matter to be found in the average novel of commerce. ... But in the outcome I have resisted that ever-present temptation. For Gamier knew his business; the thing as it stands is properly proportioned: and symmetry is, after all, one of the seven great auctorial virtues.

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