Talk:The Watcher by the Threshold

Reviews
The Bookman June 1902: The title story takes its name from some words quoted by Mr. Buchan from Donisarius of Padua: "Among idle men there be some who tarry in the outer courts, speeding the days joyfully with dance and song. But the other sort dwell near the portals of the House, and are ever anxious and ill at ease that they may see something of the Shadows which come and go. Wherefore night and day they are found watching by the threshold, in fearfulness and joy, not without tears." Now there may be two opinions about the excellence of these stories as stories; but it may be confidently asserted that what Mr. Buchan set out to do he has done with a large measure of success. His is not a cheerful intention. Indeed, persons who demand cheerful literature should keep the book far from them; for it is the "back-world of Scotland" he tries to describe, "the land behind the mist and over the seven bens," the land where linger old terrors, which is haunted by ancient cruelties and a paganism so outworn as to be quite reasonably called inhuman. In "No Man's Land" he tells of a folk beside whom the Celts are parvenus. "The Watcher by the Threshold" is a terrible tale of possession of a modern man in the grip of an ancient, overpowering personality. In "The Far Away Islands," the haunter is an idea, a dream, that generation after generation draws a son of an old house to his doom. However, unlike in plot, vague terror of an unrecognised reality, the survival of an unkindly time, is in them all, to shake our smug content with the triumphs of civilisation, and to stir forgotten depths, from which rise what wars against our comfort. The book is one to shudder over; but through it run veins of genuine beauty.

The Nation, Nov. 23, 1918: John Buchan's sense of the supernatural is a long way from this sort of mystical meliorism, as well as from the death cult of Bierce. It is the Celtic sense of a world not yet clear from physical presences out of another world. But it is not the simple, vague, half-fearful faith of the peasant in leprechauns and "little people" who dwell in a misty region that may not safely be explored by humankind. Behind the haunted country gentleman of "The Watcher by the Threshold" is the shadowy tradition of the Roman Justinian who, with all his wisdom, was the Devil's own. Ladlaw's possession by the Devil is in part an effect of place. For his moorland dwelling is in a land of ill omen, not far remote, it seems, from "the dank tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." Here takes place a strange drama, at the end of which the Devil (a very real person to us by that time) passes out of Ladlaw, by way of the body of a dull young parson, and disappears for the time being. The most striking and haunting tale of the series is "No-man'sLand," which has nothing to do with the war, but pictures a strange and terrible survival in a hidden district of the Scottish Highlands. The discovery is methodically led up to, by way of historical record and legends set down in print from time to time, during the past two centuries, so that it appears quite plausible when it comes. In this one Highland region strange things have been happening for centuries, the maiming of cattle by some skilled hand, the abduction of girl children, the unexplained murder or disappearance of lonely cottars. Hither comes in our own time a university scholar learned in the history of the Northern peoples. He lodges with a shepherd whose sheep are being carried off or mutilated nightly by he knows not whom. But not far from his shieling looms an uncanny fastness of the mountains, called "the Scarts o' the Muneraw," shunned by all hillsmen for generations. The scholar goes where the shepherd dares not, is captured by a naked beastly-human race, the remnant of the ancient Picts; he lives to see their destruction by decree of nature, to tell his tale, to be scouted by all the world, and to die distraught. These stories are told with a skill quite beyond anything that mere "workmanship," the clever manipulation of materials, can attain. They are strongly felt, creations of atmosphere and mood rather than idea or plot. —Extracted from "In Various worlds" in The Nation, Nov. 23, 1918.