NOVELS.
TALES OF RYE TOWN.* THE Cinque Ports appeal to different people in different ways. To some moderns they justify their existence solely by the excellence of their golf links, so that a saturnine critic has been heard to complain that they were always polluted by stockbrokers and sloe-gin. Others, however, are still left to whom the ancient glories of these forgotten sea-ports still appeal with irresistible force, and amongst those must now be reckoned Mrs. Stepney Rawson, who in this pleasant volume has brought a retrospective imagination to bear on one of them with very charming results. In a very interesting introductory chapter Mrs. Rawson goes a long way towards interpreting the secret of this " bourg delaisse an milieu des marais," as Elisee Reclus calls the sister-town of Romney :—
" Delaisse ! How else picture the town from the cliffs of Winchelsea two miles away, or from the straight white road that goes between the two ? That road runs through the flat marsh, sheep-dotted, with tossing reed plumes which show the sunken ditches here and there. So still, so lovable is Rye as you look at her from the white road ; so rich the clustering roofs of red, and dove colour, and deep cobalt, rising from that green sea of marsh. Everywhere marsh; to the right, till it meets the sea ; to the left, till it touches the hills of Udimore where the woods are deep, the lanes high-hedged, and the smoke of the red and white oast- houses goes up in white columns against an evening sky. Rye is indeed like a weary soldier, for she was ever the centre of war. The sea attacked her in fierce tenderness on this side, and then, when she put on fresh buckram with a sea wall, he besieged her anew on that. And she did not know her good fortune while it lasted, for, so long as her lover's arms encircled her on three compass points, he was her defender from the side of Gaul, but, when he sulkily loosened his hold, a man, born a king, and third of the Edwards, was forced to give her, as duenna, a fort in the green place that the sea had bared. The wars have gone over her head, but she is still the same Rye, with the same alleys, the old sites, the old names. Her two hundred and seventy-one rods contain her still, as when Jeake planned his horoscopes in his black and white house with the two gables in Mermaid Street, and saw, in a vision, the shining letters 'C.R.' and'I.E.' by which he knew of a surety that after Carolus Rex IL should come the Nazarene Himself. Upon the salts and in the alleys you will find russet-skinned and rosy children. Some of them have strange names. They are surely Huguenots, in blood, from crown to heel. But they know nothing of the toil of their refugee sires, of the tireless fingers of forgotten men and girls in the cellars and crypts. Catch a brown-eyed boy and ask him what he does here. He looks at you in shy scorn. 'Pl-ay,' he whispers, and then blushes because you ask whether it is the salt damp wind that makes his lashes curl. Not even the permanent way can bring back to Rye her old business of the days when the sea was about her. She is occupied certainly, like an anxious housewife, with a tender joy in methods that are old and circuitous. There is corn to buy and thresh, and barges to unload in the Rother, and ale to brew. And people get married, or fall out, and make bargains, as before ; so that the town lawyers behind their flat fronts of Georgian brick, in which their doors stand level with the cobbled street, have sufficient to keep their waistcoats filled and their seals active. Yet, though the golfer hurries boisterously through the alleys to the toy train that rune to the links on the marsh, there is no other haste in Rye. She is the seat of contemplation and of gentle gossip and of neighbourliness."
Mrs. Rawson owes much to Jeake, but still more to her own faithful observation and graceful fancy. And it is no small proof of her skill that though the scene is always laid in Rye or its environs, no sense of monotony is engendered by the uniformity of local colour. The spirit of the town and the breath of the marshes pervade the book, but so diverse are the aspects portrayed, and so wide is the range of time covered, that Mrs. Rawson's readers have no cause to complain of her particularism. Now it is an imaginary episode in the reign of Queen Elizabeth that she sets before us, when the virgin Queen surprises a group of lads and lasses on May Day and herself awards the crown to the May Queen. Anon she trans- ports us to the age of Orange William, when Rye, like other towns on the seaboard, was a favourite place of call for spies from St. Germains. Or, again, she revives for us the home life of the refugees,—Huguenot and Flemish artificers, who have left their traces on the buildings that stand to this day. These efforts at reconstruction are always beset with pitfalls, not the least being the temptation to employ those conventional archaisms which find their reductio ad absurdum in the programme of "Ye Olde Englishe Fancye Fayre." Mrs.
• Tani of Rye Town. By Maud Stepney 'Lawson. London : A. Constable and Stepney Rawson is too good an artist, and has studied her subject too carefully, to resort to such cheap devices, though we regret to notice the use of the expletive " Tush " on one occasion. For the rest, though the dialogue is at times a little mannered, the idealisa- tion is legitimate enough, and there is a laudable absence of Wardour Street English. As for Mrs. Stepney Raw- son's outlook generally, it is romantic, delicately senti- mental, and marked by a keen sense of the ornamental and decorative side of life. A Flemish painter, whose conscientious realism affronts his patrons and patronesses, is the central figure of one episode; a Flemish silversmith figures prominently in another. Lady Clemency Honeyfoot, who successfully emulates Portia in one story, and is baulked, not very convincingly, in her attempt to avenge the honour of a dead brother in its sequel, is as conspicuous for her bravery of attire as for her passionate love of justice. This constant appreciation of the superficial grace and comeliness and stately amenities of bygone times no doubt deprives her pictures of breadth and realistic completeness, but with this reserve we can cordially commend these eloquent and ingenious essays in romantic reconstitution.
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