Ice House of the Mind

Ice House of the Mind is the third of this series of Stories and Sketches. It contains the collections, His People, Faith and Hope, published between 1906 and 1910, which present a typical mix of Cunninghame Graham's stories set in widely separated locations and drawing on his vast experience of life in different classes of human society. The stories are suffused with Cunninghame Graham's striking blend of the elegiac mood and unsentimental realism. All that we write is but a bringing forth again of something we have seen or heard about. What makes it art is but the handling of it, and the imagination that is brought to bear upon the theme out of the writer's brain. It follows therefore that all writing, as I said before, brings sorrow in its train.....To record, even to record emotions, is to store up a fund of sadness, and that is why all writing is a sort of icehouse of the mind.... (Faith, Preface). Alan MacGillivray is a specialist in Scottish Literature, who has lectured at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is a former President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. John C. McIntyre taught Spanish Language and Latin American Literature at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He holds a postgraduate Diploma in Scottish Literature.