IN 1914, SIXTEEN OF Graham’s Scottish works, mostly portraits, were collected in his Scottish Stories some of which had been included in previous anthologies (which perhaps explains why the book was hardly reviewed). The Academy briefly reviewed it thus:

This latter point may be true, but it may also be true that very few people, even in Scotland, had experienced or understood the specific, unique, and deeply historical ambience and moods of the district about which Graham wrote. Also, their impact was lost because they were so separated and distanced in his anthologies. Earlier that year, another reviewer expressed his surprise that someone who held such zealous opinions, could preserve such impartiality in his literary works, concluding, ‘The truth is, Mr. Cunninghame Graham on the platform is an impatient idealist; Mr. Cunninghame Graham in the study, is to a great extent, a patient realist.’

It was not until Graham’s next anthology, Brought Forward (1916), which contained sketches originally published in 1914 and 1915, that we can begin to see the effect of recent events and a more melancholy strain, a critic commenting that the war ‘has cast a gloom upon this last volume’. The theme of death was illustrated in a sketch entitled ‘Fidelity’, which concerned a dying bird and its mate’s devotion, which may have reflected on the death of Gabrielle in 1906. As he put it, in another sketch in this anthology, ‘When a man’s lost his wife it leaves him, somehow, as if he were like a ‘orse hitched on one side of the wagon-pole, a-pullin’ by hisself’. Perhaps of even more relevance was the tale in which an idealistic lay preacher addressed a small and diminishing audience: