Born, at Glasgow, 15 Nov. 1841. Educated at private schools. Studied at Glasgow School of Art. Contrib. to “Glasgow Weekly Citizen.” First married, 1862. To London, 1864. Joined staff of “Morning Star,” 1865. War correspondent during Austro-Prussian War, 1866. For a time Assistant Editor of “Daily News.” Works: “James Merle,” 1862; “Love or Marriage?” 1868; “In Silk Attire,” 1869; “Kilmeny,” 1870; “Mr. Pisistratus Brown, M.P., in the Highlands” (from “Daily News,” anon.), 1871; “The Monarch of Mincing Lane,” 1871; “A Daughter of Heth” (anon.), 1871; “Strange Adventures of a Phaeton,” 1872; “Princess of Thule,” 1873; “Maid of Killeena,” 1874; “Three Feathers,” 1875; “Madcap Violet,” 1876; “Lady Silverdale’s Sweetheart,” 1876; “Green Pastures and Piccadilly,” 1877; “Macleod of Dare,” 1878; “Goldsmith,” 1879; “White Wings,” 1880; “Sunrise,” 1880; “The Beautiful Wretch: The Four Macnicols: The Pupil of Aurelius,” 1881 (“The Four Macnicols” separately, 1882); “Adventures in Thule,” 1883; “Yolande,” 1883; “Shandon Bells,” 1883; “Judith Shakespeare,” 1884; “White Heather,” 1885; “Wise Women of Inverness,” 1885; “Sabrina Zembra,” 1887; “Strange Adventures of a House-Boat,” 1888; “In Far Lochaber,” 1888; “Nanciebel,” 1889; “The Penance of John Logan,” 1889; “The New Prince Fortunatus,” 1890; “Donald Ross of Heimra,” 1891; “Stand Fast, Craig-Royston,” 1891; “Wolfenberg,” 1892; “The Magic Ink,” 1892; “The Handsome Humes,” 1893; “Highland Cousins,” 1894; “Briseis,” 1896.

Personal

  Have always found him the same pleasant, sympathetic companion, the same thoughtful, unostentatious, quick-witted gentleman. Tightly built, lithe of limb, strong in the arm, capable of great physical endurance, the novelist is nevertheless below the medium height. Short black hair, thick brown moustache, a dark hazel eye, a firm mouth, a square forehead, Black gives you the idea of compact strength—a small parcel, so to speak, well packed. You might sooner take him for an artillery officer who had seen service, a yachtsman, or a man who spent most of his life in outdoor sports and pastimes, than set him down as an author, and particularly as a novelist. Black might pass for a member of any profession except the clerical, or for an ordinary gentleman of the time, until you came to know him well enough to talk to him familiarly, and then you would find as you always do in men who have made a mark on the current history of the times, in whatever direction, something extraordinary in his talk and in his appearance. You would first be impressed with the bead-like brightness of his eye, and its steadfastness; and then you would probably be struck with the fact, if you were travelling with him, that every bit of natural phenomena going on around him is an object of constant interest to him; that he knows the names of the birds you see and their habits; if you are at a sea-port, that he knows every class of craft, and the name of every rope in its rigging; if you are talking of art, or literature, or politics, that he has strong, well-formed opinions, and that he is perfectly frank and open in expressing them and, moreover, that if you do not want to talk, he can be silent as an oyster.

  He had no ambition whatever to shine in Society. His books, everyone knows, were greatly admired by Queen Victoria; and there were many inducements to him to seek for a welcome in the very highest circle of English life. But Black had no social ambition of that kind to trouble his mind, and would not have crossed the street for the sake of having his name chronicled in the pages of a Society newspaper…. Black was not a great talker, although he could always say good things, and he loved to keep the talk going. Indeed, he impressed strangers by his habitual quietness and reserve; he did not care in the least to be lionised, and people who came obviously with the intention of transacting a literary conversation with him were apt to set him down as naturally shy and silent…. One thing I believe William Black could not do: he could not make a speech…. He was a thoroughly modest worker; he did his very best, and he did it in his own way; but he was a keen observer of everything, even of his own work, and he was too conscientious an artist to indulge in self-conceit. Some of his literary friends used to say that he had a very easy time of it, for during a great part of his successful years it was his custom to write but two hours a day, and that not by any means on every day in the week. But then Black was working hard at his books before he put a pen to paper. He thought out his scenes and his characters, and their meetings and their talk (he had seldom much of a story to trouble himself with); he thought them out in the streets, in hansom cabs, on the deck of his yacht, in long walks by the sea; and when he sat down to his desk he had only, as he told me himself more than once, to copy out what was already written down in his mind.

General

  A novel [“Madcap Violet”] which ought to be buoyant enough to float down the stream of time…. Mr. Black has had the courage—it needed a great deal to recognise that our forefathers always took for granted in all their dealings—that there are “unlucky” men and women, marked by fate with almost visible sign “Madcap Violet” is the story of two of these, on whom presses a wilful destiny, not born from any ancient curse or sin, but merely from the caprice of fate. It is impossible that the tale should be so pleasing as some of its predecessors, and it will always be a question whether the slight details of commonplace life, and the everyday topics introduced, heighten tragic effect by force of contrast; or, on the other hand, give an air of triviality to a story in which the awful stress of an inexplicable will in the world works so powerfully.

  Mr. William Black is the head of a school of fiction which he himself called into existence. Scottish scenery and Scottish character, alternating with certain phases of London life, are the field in which he works, and in which he has no rival. He has not as yet shown himself great in passion or pathos. The deeper emotions of the human heart, the sterner phases of human life, he has apparently not often cared to touch. But in his own province, somewhat narrow though that be, his art approaches to perfection. He can paint not merely scenery, but even atmosphere, with a delicacy and strength of touch which in themselves constitute an art.

  In Mr. William Black’s beautiful story of “A Daughter of Heth” there is nothing that might not have happened precisely as he relates it.

  Mr. William Black, who has filled the islands and rocks of the Western Highlands with many new friends and acquaintances since the time when the “Princess of Thule” came among us with all the glory of the sunsets about her, and who has made all that beautiful but stormy region his own—not to speak of the milder landscape which he embodies in a “Daughter of Heth,” and the abundant sketches of English scenery, as well as the men and women of all nations whom he has added to our acquaintance, and the shoals of salmon glittering in silver and gold in whom he has compelled us to take a sometimes excited interest.

  The novelist gives us some very charming pictures [“Judith Shakespeare”] of the Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch and engaging; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon; and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that have hampered him; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that belonged to his treatment of things among the Hebrides.

  No one has furnished healthier and purer entertainment, especially to the young of the present generation. It may be, as has been said, that interest in these novels is now on the wane; if so, it is probably because their subjects lie so much in the domestic sphere, and pander so little to an unhealthy craving for excitement. Manlier men and sweeter women we could not wish to meet, nor could we reasonably desire to have them set before us with a more charming and exquisite art. Of tragic passion, and even of pathos in its intenser forms, there is but little in these pages. Even such humour as they show most frequently takes the form of genial pleasantry. The thought, moreover, is a trifle commonplace, while of the dark problems with which it seems so much the business of the modern novel to perplex and make miserable the much-enduring average reader, there is absolutely nothing. Instead of this we have a well-constructed, well-told tale, over which plays a pleasant ripple of thought, suffused with a sentiment that is always generous and healthy, like the breezes that blow over the Scottish moors and lochs this author loves so well. No doubt these tales are open to the charge of sameness. The landscapes, and even the characters and situations, we have seen before, and we may have even caught the trick of them. But if we miss the robustness, the various energy and depth of a more virile genius, it is but right to consider the simple unalloyed pleasure obtained at so little cost of pain which these works have afforded, and conceive that probably to give such pleasure was the soul aim and ambition of the author.

  His third book [“Daughter of Heth”] and his best. It is true a note of plaintiveness was sounded so often in this otherwise delightful story that we wearied a little from time to time, and wished Coquette would pluck up her spirits, or that Lord Earlshope would emigrate to Borneo; but then we could always turn for distraction to the “third volume of Josephus,” hollowed out to hold white mice: or we could watch the Whaup and his fellow-conspirators dipping their good little brother, Wattie, into the burn until he consented to “say a sweer,” and this “vision of sin” confronted us through a great many melancholy chapters…. “A Princess of Thule,” and Mr. Black’s literary reputation reached its zenith, both in England and in the United States. The novelty, not of the theme, but of the setting, the wild, sweet vision of that far northern land cradled in waves, swathed in mists, rocked by the voice of the tempest, touched all hearts with a sentiment that was half pleasure and half pain. There are books which bring to the tired dweller in towns some gleam of nature’s face, some fresh keen wind from the Hebrides, some gentle breath from the Adriatic, some fleeting dream of sea and sky, valley or moor or mountain peak; and, reading of them, one sickens of brick walls and the city’s hateful din. Such a book was “A Princess of Thule.”

  The author’s first real triumph was won by “A Daughter of Heth” (1871). Here he was most fortunate in his subject, depicting the domestication of a lively French woman in a Scotch puritan family. “The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton” (1872) was even more successful, and introduced what became Black’s special characteristic—so through a combination of scenes of actual experience in travel and sport with fictitious adventures that the reader sometimes hardly knew whether he was reading a book of travel or a novel. In 1874 “A Princess of Thule” thoroughly confirmed his reputation. Both in this book and in “Madcap Violet” (1876), as previously in “A Daughter of Heth,” the delineation of female character was an especial charm. The certainty of meeting with an agreeable woman, and of details of travel and sport which, if not perfectly legitimate in their place, were sure to be entertaining, continued to maintain his popularity to the end of an active career, although he never regained the level of the best work of his middle period.

  There was a moment when William Black might have been recognized as the leading writer of English fiction, unless we are to count some novelists of finer skill and greater force in the American condition of English fiction. But unhappily for his supremacy the vaster and deeper and fresher naturalism of Mr. Thomas Hardy began to make itself known, and William Black’s chance was gone…. No writers could be more opposite in their realism than the novelist whom I have just named, and Black. Both are poets, and both are apt to seek in nature the charm they make us feel, but the final sense of the mystery and loveliness imparted by Mr. Hardy is of something which his heroine confers upon her circumstances, and in Black’s fiction it seems something which she derives from it. I am now thinking chiefly of such a girl as Gertrude White in “Macleod of Dare,” who is as dependent upon society for means of self-expression as any heroine I know, and yet is as genuine a personality as may be met in fiction.

  It is related that Carlyle once said to Black, in the course of a conversation: “Ay, ay, ye ken our Scotland weel, but tell me, mon, when are ye gaun to do some wark?” Souls of the strenuous sort, who expect novelists to deal with the serious problems of society, and who insist upon the ethical motive, if not upon the didactical method, will not find their account in the novels of William Black, unless they think of him solely as the author of “Sunrise.” Such souls have their Mr. Meredith and their Mr. Hardy and their Mrs. Humphry Ward, and we do not deny them the right to their point of view. But when they go out of the way to institute invidious comparisons between the novelists they happen to like and such accomplished craftsmen of a different sort as Mr. Black and Mr. Blackmore, we feel bound to protest. The novelist now under consideration did not have the genius of Mr. George Meredith, for example, but he cultivated a saner method, and the talent that expresses itself by the methods of sanity is not unworthy of being ranked, in the total estimate, upon a level with the genius that expresses itself by, let us say,—that we may avoid the harsher term so obviously suggested,—the methods of perversity. Those intellectuels, in the name of whatever uncouth or morbid form of art they may make their plea, are not to be allowed the final word when it comes to an appraisal of so graceful and abundantly endowed a writer as was William Black. He is likely always to be reckoned as one of the five or six best English novelists of his time.