The Moon Endureth

The Moon Endureth: a contemporary review

The Moon Endureth (Blackwood) is a collection of tales and fancies, in prose and verse, which Mr John Buchan has contributed to Blackwood's Magazine. It reminds me of an old, well-thumbed saffron book, called, I think, Tales from Blackwood, which was one of the soberer delights of my schoolboy days a many moons ago. It isn't only that in several of the stories Mr Buchan makes me feel the thrill and ecstacy that comes of the cool, clean breath of mountain and moor and loch, and the boundless space of sunlit skies and the sound of running waters. That he can always do when he sets his mind to it. But he has somehow caught the indefinable spirit of the old 'Maga' magic which makes a typical Blackwood story as different from ordinary magazine fiction as the spacious repose of Tudor houses from the irritating pretence of modern jerry-built villas. His title, which is not very happily chosen, refers really not to the promise of the Psalmist, but to the belief of St Francis that the moon stands for the dominion of all strange things in water or air. In that region of mystery and horror Mr Buchan is always at home. But I like, too, his other fancies, more particularly those of the Americans who came to Europe to invite Prince Charlie to be their king, and found him drunk, and of the Lemnian who fought side by side with the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae. They might both so easily have been true.

Punch, March 15th, 1912