his own eyes, and he has a self-satisfied, genial way of depicting much which pleases the reader and leaves him in a good humour at the end, but not without encountering many things in the course of the story to provoke him. There are times when his humorous reflections, far from being amusing, are so time-worn and commonplace as to be detestable. And anything more appalling than Mr. Johnston's pathos could not be imagined. He is evidently a superficial man, without the capacity of very deep feeling; and when he describes a child's death we weep not with him, but for him. Where he succeeds is in the ordinary half-humorous delineation of obvious characters. His farmer's wife is good, but even that is a reproduction (as will occur to those who have read Johnny Gibb), and lacks the truth, the insight, the restrained force, the perfect art of the original. But Mr. Johnston's book may be read with a good deal of pleasure.

On the title-page of James Inwick, Ploughman and Elder, appear the forbid ding words, "with a glossary"-and the book needs it. James Inwick himself is the narrator of these sketches, for story there can scarcely be said to be. The Scotch spoken is the unlovely Lowland dialect, and the glimpses which an outsider gets of Scottish life through the medium of James Inwick's complacent and coarse garrulity is unpleasant, and not very flattering to his brethren in whatever part of the country he lives. There is a pawky humour in the hesitating, philandering ploughman, sitting uncomfortably between two stools that of loyalty to the Church of Scotland and devotion to his political principles which has some semblance to truth in it; but most of it will be unintelligible to those without the pale of Scottish ecclesiastical history. Besides, its bleak realism and provincial tone debar it from having interest or attraction for any one outside of the "Pairish o' Snawdon."

Scottish life has not been exhausted, in spite of many recent inferior novels, in which it would seem to be running at the lees. Mr. Barrie, who led the way, is triumphantly proving, in Sentimental Tommy, that he has much more to show us in Thrums. Indeed, he feels that he has only begun to tell the story of his birthplace. The Scottish idyllist who is to win the public ear must be a man of deep insight, and able to pierce beneath

the surface. The surface is rough and repulsive, and we take no pleasure in sheer ugliness. Those who can tell us about nothing else are wasting their labour. What Mr. Barrie says of

Thrums in The Little Minister is true of all Scottish life: "This Thrums is bleak and perhaps forbidding, but there is a moment of the day when the setting sun dyes it pink, and the people are like their town. Let a man catch that light, and enable his readers to catch it, and his work is accomplished."

CLEG KELLY.*

Cleg Kelly is a fresh and amazing proof of Mr. Crockett's talent and resource. I have been reminded in reading it of the literary souvenirs of M. Maxime Du Camp. When Du Camp, in 1848, at

the age of twenty-one, made acquaintance with Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert was a few months older than himself, and heroically handsome. Both the youths were romanticists of the purest water, formed on Chateaubriand and Hugo. When the ice was fairly broken between them they drew up a plan of life. They were twenty-one, and agreed that they had nineteen years before them. Of the time that might remain They after forty they made little. agreed that at forty man is used up. He may remember, but he cannot create. He must give over all thoughts of adding to the pleasure of mankind, although some useful occupation may be found that will add to its knowledge, and that will lead the labourer peacefully to a quiet grave. For example, they thought that some investigation of the philological connections of the romance languages would probably meet the necessities of the case.

As for the nineteen

golden years, they agreed to spend nine in the acquiring of knowledge. At thirty, production was to begin, and to be carried on uninterruptedly till forty. In the pursuit of their plan for the first nine years they took a tour together in Brittany, preparing for it as if they were

explorers.

Gustave reserved for him

self the historical part, and found at the Rouen Library such books as he wanted. I took charge of all that concerned the geography and ethnology and archa

* Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City. His Progress and Adventures. By S. R. Crockett. New York: D. Appleton & Co. $1.50.

ology. In our letters we talked of nothing but Brittany. I would say to him, 'Take up your war of succession between Jean de Montfort and Charles de Blois,' and he answered, 'Look well to your Menhirs and your Cromlechs.' Mr. Crockett's preparation has been something like that. He has been an insatiable reader and an indefatigable observer. Nothing that he has read or heard or seen has been allowed to escape him. The result is that he writes out of a fulness to which perhaps no living writer, not even Sir Walter Besant, can lay claim. He may carry this accumulation too far; he may turn to account occasionally materials which had better have been left alone. But, on the other hand, it must be acknowledged that he is marvellously successful in giving the sense of reality, the sense of actual contact with life and nature in every one of his books. His friends and admirers, when they see a fresh volume announced every few months, may begin to tremble for him, but their fears are allayed when they open his pages, and find that he has still been true to himself and to his exacting literary conscience—for it is an exacting literary conscience, whatever his detractors may say.

The first impression and the last given by Cleg Kelly is one of extraordinary cleverness. Mr. Crockett has written greater books; he has touched heights unscaled in his new volume. Perhaps, indeed, it is one of the least permanent of all his writings, but when you consider the problem to be solved, your wonder at his talent must grow. How many living men could have taken a subject like the life of a slum boy, and treated it with such zest, such knowledge, such insight, such optimism, and such unfailing veracity? I do not believe there is one. Cleg Kelly, from the first page to the last, is full of interest and brightness. Any one who makes a fair start with it is sure to read it through, and Mr. Crockett's popularity is not surprising to those who read much of current fiction; for he has as yet beyond any of his contemporaries escaped the shadow. Life to him is good and glad and full of joyful surprise. The most depressed will be in a measure enlivened when they read these pages. They will feel a new hope stirring within them. Mr. Crockett has been accused of coarseness, and like most large-en

joying natures, he has a vein of Rabelaisianism. But those who find Cleg Kelly coarse must have brought the coarseness with them, and must read between the lines what the author never intended. Emphatically Cleg Kelly is a healthy, sunny, brave book, and I have no doubt of its cordial welcome.

What the literary future of Mr. Crockett and others of our young authors may be, I cannot tell. Sir Walter Scott's twenty-five novels have been exceeded by many of our diligent practitioners. Mr. James Payn must have written fifty. The question, however, is whether any man can write more than twenty-five books which will be genuinely popular. Our new writers have some things in their favour. They begin early, and they are set free from other work. Mr. Crockett's materials are so abundant that he thinks he has hardly touched them as yet. But will the old vivacity survive? Will the manner continue to be agreeable? It is the manner that cannot be altered. A novelist may write on many subjects; he may change from gay to grave, but from first to last his method of address is the same, and it may cease to charm. These speculations, however, need not trouble us much. Mr. Crockett will have written a good many books before he touches the line of danger, and he will lay us under a deep debt if all of them are as bright and brave as Cleg Kelly.

Claudius Clear.

CONCERNING GOOD ENGLISH.* The writer of this review is old fashioned enough to believe that English literature must be written in good English.

He has also the conviction that, having once done excellent work, an author has given hostages to criticism. So that from this point of view it seems right and proper to say a word touching at least the style of the new novel by Miss Wilkins.

That this story, melodramatic in character, rough in construction, and reckless of reserve, should have come from the author of Pembroke, Jane Field, and A New England Nun, is as strange as inexcusable. Viewed solely with reference to style the work is most surprising.

*Madelon. By Mary E. Wilkins. New York: Harper & Brothers. $1.25.

Of the tone and motive of the work, nothing more need be said, since only the reading of the whole book could give any adequate idea of the distance of the departure from the author's former manner. Some of its lapses in grammar are probably the fault of the printer. It is unlikely, for instance, that the writer would have set down Abner come panting alongside." But the coining of the word "preventatives," the use of the phrases "she looked palely up at him," "with no man accountable, and "don't you dare to touch her,' which are repeated more than once, can scarcely be laid at the door of the same scapegoat who has served most of us a good turn at one time or another.

66

And if these examples of carelessness set the literary teeth on edge, what shall be said of the following examples of absurdity? What does the author mean by saying that the jailer looked at the heroine "irresolutely with his stupid light eyes; then all his great system of bone and muscle seemed to back out of the room"? Are we to understand that a portion of this great system of bone and muscle could have backed out of the room had it chosen to do so? And why say "seemed"? since in this case the question is merely to back or not to back. When the little worked apron that the girl wore thrown over her face" is thus referred to, are we to conclude, in the absence of further information, that it was worn so habitually? When she describes the heroine's "baking the corn cakes that her father and brothers loved before the fire," are we to believe that they did not love them elsewhere? When she describes the vigil of the impossible Lot, "who did not go to bed, but sat huddled over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound book on his knees, all night," we naturally wonder whether she means what she says-namely, that he held the book on his knees all night. When, in portraying the heroine's night ride, she says, the mare shot out of the stable with a fierce lash-out of her heels and an upheaval of her roan flanks that threatened to dash the girl's head against the lintel of the door," there is still greater uncertainty. For, while there is no reason to think that the author had in mind another part of the animal's body when making mention of its flanks, it is obviously impossible that any

swelling of a horse's flanks could endanger the rider's head. Nor does it seem necessary, under normal conditions, to speak of a woman's arms and eyes as two in number. And still the wonder grows; how a man could "lounge into his boots" or stand in the midst of a room, or how a road could be "glare with ice," or how a girl could "point her blue satin toes around the ball-room,' or how her lips could "grow fond under her lover's gaze, or be "stiffly quivering." Of "an image whom" the heroine chooses, and "a horse who' does so and so, it is enough to say that the peculiar use of the relative pronouns recalls Mark Twain's lecture on the intricacies of the German language.

The possibilities of indirection and obscurity in our own language are rarely illustrated so strikingly as in this work. Take, for example, the following paragraphs, and try to understand them at a glance, as all English that is good may be understood:

"She felt incensed with this mother of Burr's, who came to the door and greeted her as if she were an ordinary caller, and her son were not in prison. . . 'I will stand here,' said Madelon, almost as if her heart were broken; into Burr's cell, she caught him by the arm and but when the jailer prepared to follow Dorothy tried to draw him back, and cried out sharply that he should let her see him alone. . . . That last Sunday Madelon went to him without being summoned, in the early evening after supper.'

All this is bewildering enough; but when to the confused meaning inelegance and bad taste are added, and the clumsy construction is still more distorted by a persistent inversion of the prose order, the work becomes a curious study in literary awkwardness and affectation. Inelegance and bad taste are, of course, somewhat a matter of opinion. But there can scarcely be an appeal from two or three cases which may be cited. The least fastidious could hardly read without a qualm-even while smiling at the extraordinary construction-that "Madelon Hautville, who had washed but a few hours ago the stain of murder from her hand, in whose heart was an unsounded depth of despair, mixed up the corn cakes daintily with cream;' or that "the great bass viol fell to the ground like a woman ;"or that Lot, when he coughed, "bent over double, and shook with rattling volleys;" or-worst of all-the many unrefined references to the promiscuous kissing that sounds

throughout the book like the popping of firecrackers.

In order to get the full effect of the numberless laboured inversions of the

prose order-such as "he deigned not a word to him, . . . no costly finery had Madelon, . . . I care not to dance,... one of those deeds she had committed, ... she spoke never a word, . . . upstairs she hastened to her chamber". they must be taken in the connection in which they are used. For example:

"A certain girlish daring was there in this gentle maiden for youthful love and pleasure, else she had not stolen away that night to the ball, but

very little for tragic enterprise... Truly afraid were they all, with that subtile cowardice which lurks sometimes in the bravest souls, of one an

other's knowledge and suspicions as they filed up the creaking stairs. . . . He had a fair, nervous face, and he was screwing his forehead anxiously over the situation. Enough of New Eng

land blood Madelon had to feel toward Lot a

new impulse of scorn that he should write her thus, instead of bidding her come, simply like a man, displaying his power over her that they both knew. . . . A strange double-conscious

ness she had, as she listened, of her senses and her soul. All her nerves lapsed involuntarily into delight at the sounds they loved [are all nerves auditory ?], and all her soul wept above all melodies and harmonies in her ears. The spirit of an artist had Madelon, and could, had she wished, have made the songs she sung, and for that very reason music could never carry her away from her own self. . . . A great player was her father, although the power of creation was not in him, for he fingered his viol with the ardor of a soul set in its favorite way, of all others. . . . She was seized with the belief which filled her at once with agony and an impulse of fierce protection, like that of a mother defending her young, that Burr had had a falling out with Dorothy... He knew he was coming through the pale darkness of the night before he was actually in sight by his cough. . . Madelon Hautville, when she entered Dorothy Fair's room, had her mind not been fixed upon its one end, which was above all

such petty details of existence, might have looked

about her.'

"

Of the awkward construction of the work on the whole, the following is, perhaps, as fairly representative as a single paragraph could be:

He was a relative of the Hautville family on the mother's side, old and broken, scarcely able to find his feeble way on his shrunken legs through the snow; but with the instinct of gossip, the sharp nose for his neighbor's affairs still alert in him, he had arisen at dawn to canvass the village,

and had come thither at first, since he anticipated

that he might possibly have the delight of bring ing the intelligence before any of the family had heard it elsewhere."

But, as Hamlet said, “There is somewhat too much of this"-though there is a good deal more.

George Preston.

THE REDS OF THE MIDI.* This new work, translated directly from the manuscript, sounds an unfamiliar note in Provençal literature. The old Provençal was distinctively the literature of courts, and told the tales of the Round Table. From its rise to pre-eminence with the writings of William of Poitiers, the poet-prince, on down through the succession of troubadours, to its decadence two hundred and fifty years later, the Provençal was filled with the spirit, the aims, and the deeds of chivalry. It dealt almost as exclusively with the mighty as if there had been no lowly in the world.

The new Provençal has changed all that, judging from this recent work of M. Gras, which celebrates the passing of chivalry; which ignores the rich and the powerful; which chooses its heroic figures from the humblest of the earth's heavy laden. The only point of resemblance remaining between the new and the old is the historical aspect of the story. And in this there is no local significance, since the historic tendency of French fiction has long been recognized as a national trait. French writers, whether of langue d'oc or langue d'œil, have always found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the history of their own country. French readers have always found the history of France more interesting than any other subject. No other nation, no matter how patriotic, seems to be quite like the French in this respect. Certainly there is nothing to correspond with it in this country, where the path of the historical novelist has ever been uphill, and beset with disappointment for himself and others. Whether this has been because our ablest writers have not turned to historic fiction is an open question. The fact, however, remains that no one has arisen to do for America what so many have done for France.

Among these masterpieces of French fiction, The Reds of the Midi seems likely to find a permanent place. No one among them has dealt with a more stirring theme than M. Gras has handled in this, in describing the march of the Battalion from Marseilles to Paris, and the part that it played in precipitating the Revolution. Many have described that march-Carlyle most memorably, per*The Reds of the Midi. By Félix Gras. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

$1.25.