MR. CLARK RUSSELL'S NEW NOVEL.* THERE are two novelists of

the day who, while they do not re- semble each other in any other respect, equally possess the power of blending romance with reality, and whose works " consequently stand apart from the mere mundaneness and materialism that are growing characteristics of modern fiction. These exceptional writers are Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Clark Russell. The student of " all sorts and conditions of men " is the most realistic of our writers, and also the most purely and brightly romantic. The author who made his mark by The Wreck of the Grosvenor,' and has deepened it by his sub- sequent works, puts the lives and the ways of seamen before us with unadorned plainness, while he interprets the awful voice of the ocean, and presents its wonderful pictures with force, poetry, and fancy. It is not surprising that a writer who puts his heart, soul, and conscience into his work, as Mr. Clark Russell does, resents the handling of his theme, under its sublime or its humble aspects, by writers who have no real knowledge of either, and insists upon the claims of the true sailor to be studied and understood by us—an island people, with an ocean empire—and " no longer to be confounded with the cockneys, and tailors, and fresh-water shell-backs, who clap on his overalls and sicken their stomachs with his quids, and scrape to us, from the stage or in novels, under the patronage of largely-advertised reputations." It is not surprising that he dislikes and despises the summer-sea and white-wings line of would-be nautical narrative, with its flavour of flirtation and French wines, and its feebly-imitative sea talk, as much like the real thing as the men who utter it are like Tom Bowling. He offers to healthier appetites stronger food ; to the few who are still susceptible to the charms of romance, a story which will take hold of them, as the lied Rover took hold of its readers in its tune; to those who like to get at the outcome of true knowledge and long experience, a narrative that will make them realise the lives, the responsibilities, and the risks of our merchant seamen, in a way that ought to be acceptable to all. The story of A Sea Queen is told in the first person, with success that rarely attends that form of narrative, and is due to the simplicity of the style and also to the fine avoidance of self- • 41 Sea Queen. By W. Clark. Hassell. London : Sampson Low and Co.

consciousness on the part of the supposed narrator, whose share in the quick succession of events is contrived with skill and boldness. We acknowledge that we do not know whether Mr. Clark Russell does or does not intend us to believe that his Sea Queen had any real existence. He says, "The lady who has

told you her story resided, up to a recent period, in South Shields. As for her narrative, I had it from her lately and in

small bits at a time, and my memory may have failed to give it

all the colour and exactness I found in her relation of it

We have been praising sailors so long, that some may think it is about time that we gave their wives a turn." All this may be only the artfulness of the author, and he may smile at our credulity if we profess faith in a real Jessie Fowler ; we may, at least, say that we hope, for the sake of some such men as the father and the husband of the author's Sea Queen, there once was a woman who did these deeds, or the like of them. She is a heroine of romance, to stir the fancy, a heroine of reality, to elevate the mind and cheer the heart ; from first to last we follow her story, —with its homely tone, its frank simplicity, its true, honest, matter-of-course affections and straightforward views of duty

counterbalancing its wild and wonderful incidents of peril, terror, and daring,—with unflagging interest. The tale begins admirably;

the writer giving us a taste of his finest quality in the grand de- scription of the mouth of the Tyne in a gale, and the simply pa- thetic episode of the death of Jessie's mother,—killed by the 'long- shore agony of suspense so bravely borne, and when the husband is safe by her side, and the daughter whose youthful terror she had soothed with such loving self-repression, is rejoicing.' The talk of the old sailors and fishermen—time " sea-porkypines," to quote Peggotty—is quite convincing ; we have never heard it, but we recognise it just as we recognise George Eliot's peasants' talk at the " Red Cow." The gathering of the gale, the ways of the place and the people, are all drawn with a masterly hand.

Of course, we know that Captain Richard Fowler, Jessie, his brave and loving young wife, and the barque Aurora,' which is described with admiring minuteness, are to come to and out of terrible grief, and from the first the grim shadow of mutiny at sea is forecast upon the voyage that is to realise the dream of Jessie's childhood. Before that voyage is undertaken, however, Jessie undergoes a more ordinary trial. It is only a baby's death ; but the incident is so simply told, the relief of the

bereaved mother, when her husband returns and she can tell her grief to him, is made so touching, that the reader feels the author's power as keenly in the following passages as in the grander scenes of trouble and danger that come apace and amain :— " If ever I had dreaded tolling Richard of our loss, I had now no other sense of that fear than to reproach myself for having felt it. It soothed me unspeakably to pour out my heart to him, as I sat nestling at his side, earnestly and tenderly watched by his loving eyes. For in spite of my father's touching, simple, consoling sympathy, I had felt myself alone with my grief. There was only one person in the whole wide world who could truly share it, and he had been away

when my, anguish was greatest I could not expect that Richard should feel as I did Yet there was deep disamiointment in his face, and such a sorrow as must arise in the heart of a man who could see with his soul's eye the love that had come and vanished in his absence, that had been as real as life and beauty could make it, and

yet no more than a dream to him either The baby's resting- place was marked by a cross, with that sweet sentence, 'Jesus called a little child unto 'Him,' carved on the steps When my husband came to the spot where our baby lay, he stood looking without speaking, touched to the heart by the littleness of the grave and the sight of his and my name upon the cross, and the age of the lost one, ' Five months and one week.' He then took his hat off, and knelt down, and said a prayer, by the resting-place of his child whom he had never seen, whom he loved, yet could only think-of as a spirit. Never did death appear to me so great a mystery and miracle as at that time."

Mr. Clark Russell enlists his readers' sympathies for the Sea Queen long before she earns that title by revealing her true

womanliness, her sweet, loving, pious nature. There is no harsh- ness in her heroism ; there is no repellent boldness in her resolute good-sense and fearlessness ; the feminine aspect of her character

is only elevated by danger and hardship, it is never obscured. In the delineation of Jessie the author has achieved a greater literary success than he has hitherto had to score; while the story of the voyage and loss of the Aurora,' with the subse- quent adventures of the captain and his wife on board the fever- stricken ship, is equal in interest and superior in construction, to The Wreck of the Grosvenor.'

Shipwreck, fire at sea, and mutiny, are materials with which a skilled artisan of fiction may work over and over again, without fear of exhausting the interest of his readers ; those who feel the thrill and the excitement of such themes will not tire of them ; those who do not, will not read sea stories—real sea stories, we mean—at all. Of these three terrors of the sea, we have examples in Mr. Clark Russell's present work ; and the third is invested with peculiar dread by the presence of a solitary woman in the doomed ship. It seems to us that the one weak point in this powerful story is the motive of the mutiny. It may be our own 'long-shore dullness makes us fail to see the author's full meaning--in that case, the fault is ours—but we certainly do not perceive what the villainous mate and his rascally associates had to gain by their mutiny, that would have compensated for the risk at which only they could have forced the captain to return into port, had not the fire that led to the abandonment of the ' Aurora ' broken out. The villainy of Heron is too much of a parti pris, the hints of his character are premature ; his light-red beard and moustache, his pale-blue shifty eyes, his face " without an atom of weather in it," are all danger-signals, indications as plain and as stagey as the scarlet cloak and the cock's feather of Mephistopheles.

From first to last the interest of the story steadily rises, and the noble nature and gallant conduct of the Sea Queen take an increasing hold upon the reader's admiration. And then how delightful is the seamanship to us who know nothing at all about it. Ilow doubly delightful it must be to readers who do know, and therefore get out of it much more than the general sense of breeziness and bustle, dash and danger, com- bined with practical promptitude and all-thereishness, which it conveys to our ignorance. There are chapters in this book of extraordinary beauty, full of the music and the majesty of the sea; descriptions that are pictures and poems, to which the reader will turn back when he has read the story, and felt the truth and quaintness of the sketches of sailor-life and character. Putting all the rest aside, he will study these chapters with deep delight, like that which is brought to him by the wind and the waves, when on a lonely shore he looks and listens.