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13 Glebe Road Bedford
8/3/07
To John Buchan Esq.r, author of "A Lodge in the Wilderness"
Dear Sir,
May I venture, respectfully, to express my gratitude to you for the very great pleasure I had in reading your latest book, and to offer my congratulations at the advent of the second edition? I would have ventured to do so when I read your book some time ago, but for the fact that you withheld your name. To me, however, the book was not anonymous, because I had read your volume on South Africa - where the "Lodge" is clearly prefigured - just as I have read all your
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books from the "Scholar Gipsies" and "John Burnet" until now. I may as well confess, indeed, that I have long looked to you to give us a series of Scottish novels in the Scott and Stevenson tradition, and to redeem our country from the Kailyairders.
Meantime, I am delighted to have the "Lodge". Both in subject and treatment the book is, in a manner of speaking, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. In my own halting way I have been dealing with the problems of the Empire during the last ten years, from week to week, in a Glasgow newspaper. It is a disheartening business sometimes - people take so little interest
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in their Empire unless the guns are blazing - but your book has come to me as a rebuke and an assistance. The element in your presentment that appeals most strongly to me is the sense of spaciousness which you so happily secure; the exterior spaciousness in sure tally with the interior spaciousness. It is just here that you score over such books as "Friends in Council" and "The New Republic"; their chit-chat belongs to a poky little parlour, while you touch the great themes that lighten and reverberate across far horizons.
Expressing my gratitude once more
I beg to remain
Yours respectfully
Hamish Hendry.
