A PEDLAR'S PACK. By Rowland Kenney. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
About a generation ago, a number of writers, led by Mr. Arthur Morrison, began to specialize in stories and sketches of low life, and reacting from the sentimentalism of previous authors they went to the other extreme, and made their people as brutal and their scenes as foul as possible. This fashion seemed almost to disappear after ten years or so, but sometim7s a writer discovers it again. Mr. Kenney is in this tradition. Navvies, railway shunters, tramps, and prostitutes are his people, and the stories he tells are marked by an insistence upon the most brutal incidents and the most revolting details. The first story describes a fight between two members of a gang of navvies working in a big railway tunnel. One of the combatants kicked the other on the skull, and this enrages the crowd. "The cavern rang with their growls, and in two seconds a score of fists fell on the crouching form of Taffy, five score fingers closed over his naked flesh, he was flung aloft us a boy flings a ball, and crashed to earth a shapeless, grisly mass." This is the beginning ; in other stories, faces are smashed in, bodies torn in pieces, and what not. Mr. Kenney both writes and con- structs his sketches with extreme care, and he shows at times genuine power and an unusual visual imagination. But he is in danger of allowing himself to be victimized by a formula, and an ugly formula at that.
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