These and half a dozen other novels by Mr. Black entitle him to his place as a popular novelist; they are alternately gay and sad, they are spirited and entertaining; certain characters, like the heroine of ‘Sunrise,’ cast a bright effulgence over the dark plots of intrigue.  But Mr. Black is at his best as the creator of the special school of fiction that has Highland scenery and Highland character for its field.  He has many followers and many imitators, but he remains master on his own ground.  The scenes of his most successful stories, ’The Princess of Thule,’ ‘A Daughter of Heth,’ ‘In Far Lochaber,’ ‘Macleod of Dare,’ and ‘Madcap Violet,’ are laid for the most part in remote rural districts, amid lake and moorland and mountain wilds of northern Scotland, whose unsophisticated atmosphere is invaded by airs from the outer world only during the brief season of hunting and fishing.

But the visit of the worldling is long enough to furnish incident both poetic and tragic; and when he enters the innocent and primitive life of the native, as Lavender entered that of the proud and beautiful Princess of Thule sailing her boat in the far-off waters of Skye, or the cruel Gertrude in the grim castle of Dare, he finds all the potencies of passion and emotion.

The temperament of the Highlander is a melancholy one.  The narrow life, with its isolation and its hardships, makes him pessimistic and brooding, though endowed with the keen instinct and peculiar humor of those who are far removed from the artificialities of life.  But Mr. Black ascribes this temperament, not to race or hardship or isolation, but to the strange sights and sounds of the sea and land on which he dwells, to the wild nights and fierce sunsets, to the dark ocean plains that brood over the secrets that lie in their depths.

Under his treatment nature is subjective, and plays the part of fate.  Natural scenery is as the orchestra to a Wagnerian opera.  The shifting of the clouds, the voice of the sea, the scent of the woods, are made the most important factors in the formation of character.  He whose home is in mountain fastnesses knows the solemn glory of sunrise and sunset, and has for his heritage the high brave temper of the warrior, with the melancholy of the poet.  The dweller on tawny sands, where the waves beat lazily on summer afternoons and where wild winds howl in storm, is of like necessity capricious and melancholy.  The minor key, in which Poe thought all true poetry is written, is struck in these his earlier novels.  Let the day be ever so beautiful, the air ever so clear, the shadows give back a sensitive, luminous darkness that reveals tragedies within itself.

Not that the sentient background, as he has painted it, is to be confounded with the “sympathy of nature with character” of the older school, in which hysterical emotion is accentuated by wild wind storms, and the happiness of lovers by a sunshiny day.  But character, as depicted by him in these early novels, is so far subordinate to nature that nature assumes moral responsibility.  When Macleod of Dare commits murder and then suicide, we accept it as the result of climatic influences; and the tranquil-conscienced Hamish, the would-be homicide, but obeys the call of the winds.  Especially in the delightful romances of Skye, Mr. Black reproduces the actual speech and manners of the people.