Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/307

 Rh 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