ROBERT FALCONER.* MIS novel belongs essentially to to-day. Two schools

of thought have risen among us, growing silently side by side. The one has occupied itself with purely physical science, has taken the earth (and for that matter, the stars also) into its dissecting-room, and regardless of all the cruelty of vivisection, has calmed the living pulse (giving frantic throbs under the operation) by many a pro- mise that the victim will survive the scalpel. But it is with that living pulse alone the second school cares to intermeddle. Its disciples are in no attitude of antagonism to pure science and its results, understand well enough there can be no such thing as knowledge

"Heaven has no'er foreseen And not provided for,"

are glad of fresh proofs of the world's aucientry, and content to bide the outcome of fresh discovery. But they are conscious of a double atmosphere in this world of ours ; of strata of spiritual life lying deeper and more hidden than those that mark its natural growth. And they have sought diligently with an old long dis- used tool (once wielded by a master hand some eighteen centuries ago) the pickaxe of sympathy, to penetrate some of its depths, to come in contact with

"These ruins of humanity, This flesh worn out to rags and tatters This soul at struggle with insanity."

"Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father," quotes Mr. Macdonald, and adds, "And we know only the fall, and not the sparrow."

At last Mr. Macdonald has suffered his genius to have full swing, or, perhaps, like all true genius, it would come out of him, and even at the risk of passing through a baptism of fire he has had his say ; and what he says will live, not possibly or probably as embodied in his story. Good as it is, it is a mere husk, which must in the nature of things perish, but fresh fruit will spring from the seed it contains.

The history of Robert Falconer is traced from the period of early boyhood, when "be was yet mostly in the larva condition of character, when everything is transacted from inside." The -dialogues in the book, which are many, are almost entirely in Scotch, with humour and pathos so finely blended as to make them in themselves an intellectual treat, to which the reader returns again and again before pursuing the thread of the story. It is difficult to disintegrate passages; wit always needs its setting, and pathos needs it infinitely more. Robert's grandmother is sketched to the life. Mr. Macdonald thinks "English readers will not like her." We pity the man who can recall no likeness to that picture, the lines all softened in the tender light of holy memories. The just woman, with "a conscience more tender than her feelings, bearing under- neath a cold outside a warm heart, to which conscience acted as a capricious stoker, now quenching its heat with the cold water of duty, now stirring it up with the poker of reproach, and ever

treating it as an inferior and a slave." An upright and just woman, albeit the slave of a narrow theology ; her constant " noo

*Robert Fa'co-er. By Gorge Macdonald, LL.D. Londoa: Hurst and Blackett. be deuce" uttered to the soberest boy she had ever known lets us into the secret of the thickness of the conventional crust which had grown over her in the name of religion, but beneath the dark- ness of which a flame of true spiritual life was burning. We understand at once the reaction and revolt from much she held sacred which she was the unconscious means of producing in the boy's mind, while yet "Isis deepest nature came into contact with that of his noble old grandmother ; there was nothing small about either of them. Hence 11 >heft was not afraid of her."

Robert, however, is by no means SUIC hero of the story. " Shargar," one of the parish scholars so well La r.vn in Scotland, illegitimate son of the Baron of Rothie and a gypsy woman, is indebted for protection and even home itself to Robert, and thenceforward sticks to him as Highlanders can, with the worship and devotion which counts no service a disgrace, but has no touch of kin with servility. They win through their boyhood together, Shargar's head untroubled with the problem of humanity, and with the doubts beneath the weight of which Robert's inherited faith seems crumbling into ashes. Shargar has faith in hint; God, therefore, must be somewhere ; it suffices him, while the hungry soul of his comrade goes long unsatisfied.

"In reading the Paradise Lost he could not help sympathizing with Satan, and feeling, I do not say thinking, that the Almighty was pomp- ous, scarcely reasonable, and somewhat revengeful."

Robert's first love, the grand passion of his early boyhood, is a violin, it, or as he would put it, " she," understands him ; be his mood merry or sad, she responds to it. His grandmother looks on all music that is not psalm-singing as of the Devil, discovers the treasure Robert has hitherto concealed from her, and hides it away from him ; but he recovers it for a little space, to cling to it as only a solitary boy with the undeveloped tenderness of a large-hearted man could have clung to anything ; and then a day comes when he returns from school, and finds his violin lying with its back on the fire, half consumed, its strings all shrivelled up save one, which burst even while he looked. We will not do the pages which follow the injustice to abridge them. Robert did not hate his grandmother ; he knew too well how quietly she would have given herself instead of the violin to be burnt, if she had found it necessary for lam,—yes, for him. He never doubted the love (utterly false in its direction as it was) which prompted the act ; he only doubted then, and ever after, the creed of which that act was the outcome. The kite which till then had been his delight, and the string of which he kept through his open window fastened to his bad-post, became suddenly a thing of the past to him ; he cut the string, "away went the dragon," and "with it afar into the past flew the childhood of Robert Falconer." There comes that inevitable day, very early to some, far later to others, but inevitably and inexorably, when the spirit knows with mingled pain and gladness that it has entered on a new life, and finds out, not perhaps till long afterwards, that

it is

"On stepping-stones of our dead selves We rise to higher things."

The life of the two boys passes from Rothieden to the wider life of study in Aberdeen, where Robert again meets Eric Ericson, one of the students Scotland counts by so many hundreds ; poor almost to the lacking of bread, but of noble nature and unstained name ; scholar, gentleman, yet it may be Cottar's son ; not this last in Erie's case, however. Robert makes his first acquaintance at the Boar's Head, first inn in Rothieden, kept by three worthy sisters, much respected. At this house all students on their way to or from Aberdeen, however poor, found a hearty welcome, and here, accordingly, Eric entered with a party of fellow pedestrians, weary and downcast and accepting none of the proffered hospitality. We cannot resist giving a morsel of the following scene. It is Miss Letty, one of the sisters, who, having disposed of the other students, now turns to Eric :—

" Noe, sir, will ye gang to yer room, an' mak yerser comfortable?— jist as gin ye war at hams, for sae ye are.' She addressed the stranger thus. He replied in a low, indifferent tone:—' No, thank you ; I must be off again directly.' He was from Caithness, and talked no Scotch. 'Deed, sir, yell do naothing o' the kin'. Here ye s' bide, tho' I sold lock the door.' 'Come, come, Ericson, none o' your nonsense !' said one of his fellows. Ye ken yer feet are sae blistered ye can hardly put ono by the ither. It was a' we cud du, mem, to get him slang the last mile.'—' That s' be my business, than,' concluded Miss Letty. She left the room, and returning in a few minutes, said, as a matter of course, but with authority, Mr. Ericson, yo maim come wi' me.' Then she hesitated a little. Was it maidenliness in the waning woman of five and forty ? It was, I believe; for how can a woman always remember how old she is ? If ever there was a young soul in God's world, it was Lofty Napier. And the young man was tall and stately as a Scandinavian chief, with a look of command, tempered with patient endurance, in his eagle face, for he was more like an eagle than any other creature, and in his countenance signs of suffering. Miss Letty seeing this, was moved and her heart swelled, and she grew conscious and shy, and turning to Robert, said, 'Come up the stair wi"s, Robert ; I may want ye.' Robert jumped to his feet. His heart too had been yearning towards the stranger. As if yielding to the inevitable, Ericson rose and followed Miss Letty. But when they had reached the room, and the door was shut behind them, and Miss Letty pointed to a chair beside which stood a little wooden tub full ef hot water, saying, Sit ye doon there, Mr. Ericson,' he drew himself up, all but his graciously bowed head, and said, 'Ma'am, I must tell you that I followed the rest in here from the very stupidity of weariness. I have not a shilling in my pocket.'—' God bless me !' said Miss Letty—and God did bless her, I am sure= we mann see to the feet first. What wad ye du wi' a shillin' gin ye had it? Wad ye clap one upo' ilka blister?' Ericson burst out laughing, and sat down. But still he hesitated. Aff wi yer shuns, sir. Day ye think I can wash yer feet throu ben' leather?' said Miss Letty, not disdaining to advance her fingers to a shoe-tie. 'But I'm ashamed. My stockings are all in boles.'—' Weel, yo s' get a clean pair to put on the morn, an' I'll darn them 'at ye bee on, gin they be worth darnin', afore ye gang—an' what are ye sae camstairie [unmanageable] for ? A body wad think ye had a clo'en fit in ilk ane o' thae bits o' shune o' yours. I winna promise to please yer mither wi' my darnin' though.'—' I have no mother to find fault with it,' said Ericson.—' Weel, a sister's wane= I have no sister, either.' This was too much for Miss Letty. She could keep up the bravado of humour no longer. She fairly burst out crying. In a moment more the shoes and stockings were off, and the blisters in the hot water. Miss Letty'a tears dropped into the tub, and the salt in them did not hurt the feet with which she busied herself, more than was necessary, to hide them."

Small wonder was there that when in after days they knew each better, Robert and Eric drew together ; and if the deepest pain of his life came through his friend, will any one say it is not commonly so ?

The short poems scattered through the book are all ascribed to Erie, and if we cannot assign them as high a place as Mr. Mac- donald evidently feels they ought to fill (they are not his own), we yet find in them many lines full of strength and beauty. This, for instance,—

"I have seen

• Unholy shapes lop off my shining thoughts Which I had thought nursed in thine emerald light; And they, have lent me leathern wings of fear."

Or this, as the soul's cry when only half-way out of the depths,— " So slowly, Lord,

To lift myself to Thee, with hands of toil, Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer."

Or, again, the thought in this line,— " And I shall be a vein upon Thy world."

We do not undertake to follow the course of the story; it would be impossible in our space to do even scant justice to a tale where all the byplay is equal to the main drama, and there is material here which to analyze would be to decompose. But we must protest against the sensational element here and there introduced into a work really of too high a class to need such adventitious help to recommend it. The meeting of Shargar with his gypsy mother in a crowded London thoroughfare, the hairbreadth escape of Mysie Lindsey, and her subsequent history are all elements which may, probably will, help to circulate the story, but act as weights to detain the author on a lower platform than he is justified with his rare gifts in occupying. On the other hand, we are aware not a few will protest against the occasionally long sentences, in which Falconer becomes the exponent of the school Mr. Macdonald represents. Most 'men descend to meet,' and the highest natures are often the most impatient of mental pre-Raphael- itism, preferring also a hint to a dogma ; but a great teacher cannot write for quick imaginations and kindred spirits alone, if he would teach, he must condescend to be very plain, very accurate, possibly even a little tedious, though this Mr. Macdonald certainly is not ; but it is plainly to be perceived that in his mind his story is but a peg on which to hang truths which, self-infolded, would consume him with their intensity. His work throughout is one protest against the cardinal doctrine of the Scottish Creed,—the eternity of future punishment. From the boy's first eager cry, "0 Father in heaven, hear me!" with the hour of struggle with the first flash of the thought, "1 dinna care for him to love me ; if He doesna love ilka body," to the last hour of his helpful patience with sin, disease, and misery, the thought is in unison with this first chord, only a clearer light dawns on Robert's own mind meanwhile ; and perhaps our author's curious insight into the subtle shades of human character never, perhaps, comes out more plainly than when he makes the debased, sin- degraded, yet still Scotch father of Robert express indignation and horror at the unorthodoxy of his son.

The pages are full of lights and shadows, of gleams of truth which linger lighting up the darkness out of which comes many a human cry. Amongst other things, Mr. Macdonald has found out that it takes more love in a human heart to receive service (that is, graciously and gladly) than to do it. Falconer ends by being neither more nor less than a medical missionary. Mr. Macdonald will object to the name. The reaction or revolt against all formulm is at present too strong within him to hear it without prejudice.

From one point of view, we confess, not without shame, a purely m.sthetic one, this life-long work of Falconer's seems for a moment the weak point in the book. The subject is becoming hackneyed. We have enough and to spare of courts and alleys, disease, misery, and sin, both in and out of books, God knows ! Common enough—yes, but the insect that eats out the heart of the rose has a beauty of its own and a use, seen through a microscope ; stars are common enough, but turn a telescope upon them, and they assume new proportions. They are no other than they were, but in some small degree we see them as God sees. This is what Mr. Macdonald has done. With the eye of a true poet, "microscope and telescope in one," he has turned his glance full on some of the lowest depths of humanity, and found none too common or unclean to claim the Fatherhood of God. None? Will Mr. Macdonald use the edge of that fine genius to test the temper of the metal whereof a far different class is made, tell us something of the joyless, sunless life of rich mediocrity crusted over with conventionalism, and tell us through what chinks the divine life enters there?