BOOKS.

CLEG KELLY.*

IMMEDIATELY after reading Oleg Kelly an enthusiastic reviewer might be tempted to hail Mr. Crockett as a latter-day Dickens—a Dickens with a drier humour, a more academic style, and a less voluminous flow of sentiment, as becomes a Scotchman—but still very like the genial cockney novelist in that which was of the essential soul of the real Dickens,—his hearty human sympathy with the tragedy and the comedy, the pathos and the humour, of the odd people of the gutter, who seem to belong to no class and yet to every class, who are familiar from childhood with all that is horrible, criminal, and miserable, who want a great deal of pity, but whom it is the greatest mistake in the world to think of as wanting pity chiefly. But on second thoughts it would be necessary to add that, while following Dickens in much in which it is good to follow him, Mr. Crockett, perhaps just because he is a latter-day writer, has not succeeded in arriving at the heart-whole sincerity of conviction which Dickens certainly had, and without which no one will ever become a Master in fiction. Mr. Crockett can be simple, and he can be sincere; he can be very earnest and very delicate ; and at times his humour is exquisite. But he wants some- thing either of complete faith in himself, or of complete trust in his public; and the result is that he stoops very often to affectations that are in extremely bad taste. Among them is a trick, which we really must call vulgar, of chuckling over little matters of self-consciousness between men and women and boys and girls, which good breeding has long ago decided that it is better to take no notice of. One feels sometimes that Mr. Crockett has a fancy for imitating Sterne as far as he dares. But this is a fancy which he would do well to renounce. And the man who can write a novel so fall of really wholesome character and interest as Cleg Kelly can well afford to renounce this and all other bad tricks and affectations.

Cleg Kelly is in form a much more complete novel than Mr. Crockett's books generally are. Its principal characters are not only cleverly and touchingly drawn, but they are

e MO KellyCe. Arab of the City. By B. Crockett. lvoL London: Smith,

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carefully and consistently developed, and its circumstances are woven into the intricacy and consistency of a plot. It is rich in picturesque acenes,:and in situations full of sentiment and humour ; but humour, sentiment, and scenery are almost always subordinated—as they should be—to the progress of the story. Cleg, the street-arab of Edinburgh slums, is a thoroughly real person whom we find it as easy to believe in as to admire, though we are bound to say that some of his feats are more easily admired than believed in. That, how- ever, is no charge against the author. A certain amount of imaginative license in recording the exploits of a hero must be allowed to every novelist, and especially to the novelist who is primarily a humourist. Whether Cleg really had breath enough left in his body for that marvellous swimming and diving adventure immediately after his long fight with Kennedy in the barn, is a point not at all important to the substantial truth of the boy's generous, dare-devil, unselfish character. And certainly the fight and the swimming both make very good scenes. But what is really important is the way in which the principle of heredity (of which we hear so much nowadays that no novelist dares to ignore it) is worked out in this son of a villainous thief. Oleg inherits a great deal of skill from his father—especially a very perilous ingenuity in manipulating locks—and also a great deal of shiftiness and impudence. But he has a good heart—that mysterious organ which does not seem to be hereditary—and Mr. Crockett courageously makes his hero's good heart steer him straight.

He has a good mother, too,—a patient, ill-used woman, who dies early in the story. Her passing away from the world that has dealt so cruelly with her, full of trust for the little son who has been her only comfort, is described with the delicacy and pathos of Mr. Crockett's best manner. Oleg is playing in the street, when the mother becomes aware that her end is near. She means to call him in before she goes, but she cannot bear to interrupt his happiness, and she delays

" It seemed to her to be almost time now. She leaned forward wearily to call her son to help her. But he was sitting on a brick throne in the midst of his castle, dressed as Robin Hood, with all his merry men about him. He looked so happy, and he laughed so loud, that Isbel said again to herself, 'I cm manage yet for half-an-hour, and then I shall cry to him.' But her son caught sight of her at the window. He was so elated that he did not mind noticing his mother, as a common boy would have done. He waved his hand to her, calling out loud, ' Hither, wither, I'm biggin' a bonny hoose for you to leave in ! ' Isbel smiled, and it was as if the sun which shone on the hills of her dream had touched her thin face and made it almost beautiful for the last time before sundown. ' My guid boy—my nice boy,' she said, the Lord will look till him ! Be said he was biggin' a hoose for his mither. Let him big his hoose. In a while I shall cry to him—my ain laddie ! ' Yet in a while she did not cry, and it was the only time she had ever broken her word to her son. But that was because label Kelly had journeyed where no crying is. Neither shall there be any more pain."

The heroine, Vara Kavannab, is made of the same brave, unselfish stuff as the hero. Cleg becomes her protector against a really devilish mother, while he and she are both

little more than children, though Vara is already the self- constituted mother of two little brothers. Some of the troubles through which the children pass make harrowing scenes—but the touch either of kindness or of hope is never quite forgotten—and much of their story reads like a perfect idyll. We cannot forego the pleasure of giving two extracts

from the episode called "Maid Greatheart's Pilgrimage." Vara's father has fled from his fiendish wife; and at last Vara resolves to follow him, and starts on foot for Liverpool, whither she believes him to be gone—the bigger boy trudging beside her—the baby in her arms :—

" Thus hour by hour they left behind them quiet, kindly, red- tiled villages, set in heartsome howee and upon windy ridges. And, as they wont ever onward, morning broadened into day; day crept dustily forward to hot noon ; noon drowsed into afternoon, with a scent of beanfields in the air, dreamily sweet. Vara's arm that held the baby grew numb and dead. Her back ached acutely from the waist downwards as though it would break in two. Sometimes the babe wailed for food. Little Hugh dragged leadenly upon her other hand, and ' whinged' on with the wearisome iteration of the corncrake, that he wished to go back to Callendar's yard, till Vara had to remind him, because nothing else would stay his plaining, of the • awfu" woman waiting for him there Yet there must have been pleasure in their journey too, for they sat down in the pleasantest places all that fine, warm, bough-tossing day. The shadows were sprinkled on the grassy hillsides, like a patchwork quilt which Vara had once seen in their house when Hugh was very little, but which had long ago become only a memory and a lost pawn-ticket."

At nightfall, after many adventures, some joyful and some sorrowful, they came to a farm :—

" They were now on a high wild moor, and there was no house within sight. They still went onward, however, blindly and pain- fully. The roadsides trailed past them black and indistinct till they came to a farmhouse. They could see tall buildings against the skies and hear the lash of an unseen mill-stream over a wheel into a pool. A blackcap sang sweetly down in some reeds by the mill-dam. Vara did not dare to knock at the door of the house. She was just about to go into the farmyard in search of a shed to lie down in, when she remembered that she had heard from Cleg how there were always fierce dogs about every farmhouse. For Hugh's sake ste could not risk it. Instead of going forward, therefore, she groped her way with one hand into a field where there were many stacks of hay and corn. Vara could tell by the rustling as her hand passed over them. Soon she came to a great haystack in a kind of covered shed, which stood between wooden posts like trees. One end of it was broken down and cut into platforms. Vara mounted upon one with the baby, and reached down a hand for Boy Hugh. For the last few miles, indeed ever since it grew dark, Hugh had been more than half- asleep, and his weariful sobbing had worn down to a little clicking catch in his throat, which still recurred at intervals. It was by the sound that Vara found him. She leaned over as far as she dared, and drew him up beside her. He was asleep in her arms before she could lay him down. Vara thought the people of the farm would not be very angry in the morning if she pulled out a little of the hay. `It is for the baby's sake ! ' she said, to excuse herself. So she scooped out of the higher step of the stack where it was broadest a little cave among the hay, and into this she thrust Boy Hugh gently, putting his legs in first and leaving only his bead without. Then she rolled the babe and herself in the shawl and crawled in beside him. She drew the hay close like a coverlet about them. She listened awhile to Hugh Boy's breathing, which still had the catch of bygone tears in it. She kissed Gavin, closed her eyes, and instantly fell asleep herself. Vara said no prayers. But the incense of good deeds and sweetest essential service went up to God from that haystack."

When Mr. Crockett writes simply, like this, he is quite perfect,—which makes us regret the more that he frequently indulges himself in a trick of girding at the respeotabilities

and orthodoxies of the world, as if he had not sufficient mastery of style and largeness of sympathy to enable him to paint the goodness of ragamuffins without the aid of a sort of cheap insinuation that only ragamuffins are good. It is parti- cularly a mistake in Mr. Crockett's case, because he not only knows the falsehood of it, but is honest enough every now and then to state the other aide of the matter with an effect of rather inconsequent self-contradiction. Of the nature of a sensational trick not quite worthy of the book, we are afraid we also find the words with which it opens,—Cleg's declara- tion that " God's dead ! " But we will not end our notice with carping. Rather we wish to let our last word be one of praise of the admirable modesty and reticence attributed to

both these children of the gutter in the matter of their love- making. Vara wins the heart of a very poetical, loyal- hearted farm-boy called Kit Kennedy, who makes love to her so prettily that she sighs as she parts from him, and wishes that Oleg, who has been her guardian-angel for so many

years, " would speak to her like that." But Oleg is shy, and even when he goes to see Vara, with all loverlike intentions in his mind, is too modest even to shake hands. "A chap looks that soft aye shakin' hands," he remarks to himself. And he stands looking at her on the doorstep a long while before he can find anything to say. "Vara seemed all sun- shine and pleasantness. But still he could think of nothing to say, till he was about ten yards down the walk. Then at.

last he spoke. ' Ye are takkin' your meat weel to a' appear- ance,' he said." And this very nnpoetical compliment was enough to make Vara altogether happy. "He maun think an awfu' deal o' me to say that !" she told herself. And hence- forth the brave little maid knows she has only to wait till the right time has come for Cleg to make a home for her and her bairns.

The story teems with incidents of all sorts, and has many more characters than we have space even to name. And it carries the reader along, keenly interested and full of sympathy, from the first page to the last. It is a thoroughly good and interesting novel, and particularly wholesome in its handling of character. We have nowadays so many novels of slum-life pitched in a pessimist key, that one that strikes a cheerful note is entitled to a specially hearty reception.