ough not of so original a
kind, perhaps, as the best of the "Fiona Macleod" work, "Silence Farm"
has to it a "wholeness of good tissue" that belongs to little work of
this most uneven writer. "Silence Farm," I would emphasize again as I
emphasized at the opening of this paper, is better written, both as
regards style and architectonic quality, and it is a truer reading of
life, than any of the Highland stories. Though it is a story of to-day,
and about a life much like that made familiar by the writers of the
Kailyard school, it is not to them, but to such kindred
unsentimentalized work as Mr. Shan Bullock's, that you instinctively
compare it. The people, indeed, are the same dour Presbyterians, though
the one writes of Scotland and the other of the North of Ireland. And as
you compare the material of "Silence Farm" with that of "The Squireen,"
for instance, you note, too, that the art of both is the art of Mr.
Hardy.

There is little modern writing with which to compare the Highland
stories of Sharp. It is not that the Highlands have not been much
written about, but that they have been written about intimately by but
few. No part of the world so out of the world as their outlying islands,
the Hebrides, has been so bewritten by travelers from Martin's time to
our own; but comparatively few have known either islands or mainland
well enough to dare novels of their life, and of those who have so dared
no one up to the time of Sharp had written a great realistic story of
the Highlands, and but one or two great romances. Now we have Mr. Neil
Munro, like Sharp a very uneven writer, whose "Children of Tempest"--to
take one of his best stories--now delights and now tortures you; and
yesterday we had William Black, famous for sunsets. Black knew the
Hebrides well, very well for a Lowlandman turned Londoner, and he
labored hard to make his books true and beautiful. Unfortunately it was
not in him to do fine work, not even the best sort of the second order
of novelists,--such work as Trollope's, for instance, which by dint of
faithfulness and humanity almost persuades you now and then that it is
of higher than second order. Black was faithful to what he saw and
broadly sympathetic, but his writing not only lacks distinction, but,
even at its best, as in "The Princess of Thule," home thrust to one's
interest. Yet, such as it is, it is all but all that we have which
attempts to put before us any broad view of Highland life. The one