MR. BARRIE'S NEW SCOTCH IDYLL.*

THE author of Auld Licht Idylls showed such a genuine—and above all such a genuinely Scotch—literary faculty, that its admirers have been naturally on the outlook for something equally good from the same pen. It is only now that they have obtained what they wished. Between Auld Licht Idylls and the volume now before us, Mr. Barrie has written, or at least has published, a series of sketches, styled An Edinburgh Eleven, and a novel, a "story of literary life," entitled When a Man's Single. But although both were clever almost to a fault, neither had that air of life, reality, and intellectual • A Window in Thrums. By J. M. Barrie. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1889.

sincerity which was the leading characteristic of Auld Licht Idylls. Mr. Barrie, more especially in When a Man's Single, appeared to be conscious of the fact that he was a humorist, and that he was expected to give amusement by making some of his characters stand on their heads. In A Wind= of Thrums he returns to his better style ; indeed, the strain here is of a higher mood than even that of Auld Licht Idylls. The idyllism is at once more delicate and more natural ; pathos and humour are combined in juster proportions ; one is less suspicious that Mr. Barrie is "trotting out" or laughing at his own characters. A Window in Thrums is, in fact, as decidedly better than Auld Licht Idylls, as Auld Licht Idylls was, within the special department of literature dealing with Scotland to which it belongs, decidedly better than anything that had been published since the time of Galt and Wilson. There are three living authors, who, in virtue of such of their writings as realise—or idealise—Scotland, can fairly be claimed as belonging to English literature,—Mrs. Oliphant, Mr. Stevenson, and Mr. Barrie. Of the three, Mrs. Oliphant is most familiar with the Scotch character generally, and appeals most directly to the Scotch heart. The Scotch gentleman in the Jacobite sense, slightly Villonised, and the Scotch scoundrel pourtrayed in such a picturesque costume that one cannot help entertaining a sneaking liking for him, are, along with a unique style, all Mr. Stevenson's own. Mr. Barrie's field is—or, at all events, seems in the meantime to be—a more limited one than either Mrs. Oliphant's or Mr. Stevenson's. It is confined, in respect of character-sketching, to that class in Scotland which is always trembling on the verge of poverty, and which is only saved by its piety from falling into sanseulotterie. But what Mr. Barrie lacks in comprehensive- ness of survey, he makes up in realism of portraiture. Happily, there is more of Tethers than of Zola in his realism ; more happily still, there is more of Wilkie than of Tethers.

The success of A Window in Thrums is due to the fact that Mr. Barrie concentrates all the interest of his readers on one house and its inmates. It is a one-story house in Thrums, which "stood bare, without a shrub, in a garden whose paling did not go all the way round, the potato-pit being only kept out of the road, that here sets off southwards, by a broken dyke of stones and earth." This is the cot of Hendry McQumpha, and here he and his wife Jess live with their daughter Leeby, and here, seemingly, lodges the schoolmaster, the ostensible

author of these sketches. Sometimes Hendry and his friend left the house. "After the eight o'clock bell had rung, Hendry occasionally crossed over to the farm of 'Tnowhead, and sat on. the pigsty. If no one joined him he scratched the pig, and returned home gradually. Here what was almost a club held informal meetings, at which two or four, or even half-a-

dozen assembled to debate, when there was any one to start them." It was at a meeting of this Pigsty Club, that Tammas Haggart, the humorist of Thrums, propounded his views of his own calling, declaring, among other things, that "the humorist 's like a man firm' at a target—be doesna, ken whether he hits or no, till them at the target tells 'im." But it is the life and the love, the anxieties the and sorrows of Hendry and Jess and Leeby that form the staple of the book. One son of Hendry and Jess, a promising boy named Joey, who would probably have entered the Church had he lived, has been dead these twenty years, having been run over by a cart. Another son, Jamie, is in London, working at the trade of a barber.

He is a "good son," duly visits his parents at intervals, and makes them presents. Yet one entertains almost from the first chapter, in which Jamie is mentioned, a suspicion which in time develops into a moral certainty, that, to use the ethic°. religious phrase that once was so popular in Scotland, "all is not well" with him. In course of time, Jamie to all intents and purposes forsakes his parents, having apparently been entangled in a degrading marriage. In the last chapter, he reappears in his native village, full of remorse to find his father and mother and sister all dead. This chapter is almost too painfully powerful, and yet it is so simply on account of its unvarnished truthfulness. Here is one incident in the story of Jamie's apparently unavailing repentance :—

"He walked up the glen to the school-house nest forenoon, and I went out to meet him when I saw him coming down the path. Ay,' he said, it's me come back:—I wanted to take him into the house and speak with him of his mother, but he would not cross the threshold.—' I cam cot,' he said, to see if ye would gie me her staff—no 'at I deservel!—I brought out the staff and handed it to him, thinking that he and I would soon meet again. As he took

it, I saw that his eyes were sunk back into his head. Two great tears hung on his eyelids, and his mouth closed in agony. He stared at me till the tears fell upon his cheeks, and then he went away."

But it is some time before this tragedy is reached, and, ere Jamie proves a moral failure, the affection entertained for each other by the members of the McQumpha household is fully revealed. Jess, an invalid, speaks thus of her husband, —" There's them at 's cleverer in the ways o' the world, but my man, Hendry McQumpha, never did naething in a' his life 'at wasna' weel-intended, an' though his words is common, it's to the Lord he looks. I canna think but what Hendry's pleasire to God." Jess is seized with what is feared to be diphtheria. The doctor is sent for, and proves that this is a false alarm. "When the doctor left, Hendry was still on Jess's armchair, trembling like a man with the palsy. Ten minutes afterwards, I was preparing for bed, when he cried up the stair, Come awa' doon.' I joined the family party in the room. Hendry was sitting close to Jess. Let us read,' he said firmly, in the fourteenth of John.' " It is the McQumphas and such like that are still the salt of Scotch humble life.

The best chapters in A Window of Thrums are those of

which one or other of the McQumphas is the centre. But the book also contains many others which are fall of that quiet unsmiling humour by which Mr. Barrie first made his reputa- tion. The informal meetings of the Pigsty Club evoke a great deal of it from Tammas Haggart, its chief wit and wag. Exceptionally enjoyable are "The Power of Beauty," and "A Home for Geniuses." The Home is to be built at the public expense, within an hour's distance from London.

"Geniuses' health is always breakin' doon because of late hours, as in the case of the lad who used often to begin his immortal writin's at twal o'clock at nicht, a thing 'at would

rain ony constitootion. But the superintendent would see as they had a tasty supper at nine o'clock, something as agreed wi' them. Then for half an hour they would quiet their brains readin' oot aloud, time-about, frae sic a book as The Pilgrim's Progress, an' the gas would be turned off at ten

preceesely." Still better in its way, as throwing a side-light on Scotch character, with its mixture of shyness and outspoken-

ness, is such a chapter as "How Gavin put it to Mag Lownrie." But good as is the humour of A Window in Thrums, the

pathos is still better ; and the simple, all-consoling piety is the best of all.