Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/281

It is a long time since the present writer has sat in this familiar chair and handled the books on this well-known table. What will the public say if a critic ventures to tell it, that for a long time there have been very few books? All the same, of the making of books there has been no end. Printers and publishers have, we suppose, been as busy as usual. The young lions in the newspapers have not lacked their food. We read with our own eyes, in an advertisement only the other day, of a dashing work of travels that has gone through two or three editions, that it was “a gallant book”! “and that if a man wanted new hope and courage he might find it there,”—the man being sixteen or so, let us suppose. But even with this proof of genius before our eyes, we are obliged to renew our plaint. For novels, which at the present day are far the largest branch of literature, though we pretend to despise them as if they were scarcely in it, there is always something to be said. They are the worst and they are the best things going. In the ocean of folly there is always a rock or two standing up here and there—some of the old friends still, let us be thankful, and these two young demoniacs to put the old ones on their mettle, Mr Rudyard Kipling and Mr James Barrie. We feel the glow as of an old workman, refreshing the very cockles of our heart, at the sight of these young fellows baring their arms to their work. What sinews they have, what a swift strong touch, what intense and overmastering capability! Mr Barrie’s demon is of the angel kind. It brings to light a whole district, an entire village rapt in a soft illumination in which the secrets of every heart are revealed: and makes it apparent that the bad secrets are few, that a confused inclination towards the good is in most minds, for which all humankind may thank him; but “I think Rudyard Kipling must be the devil, to have all that power up his sleeve,” says some one. He is a bon diable too, that reckless young Berserker, flinging out his armies and battalions to fight the world. What soldiers! not trimmed for ladies’ society. And, by the by, one does not see that the young person, that critic feared of all the writers who would like to be improper, does our demoniac any harm—certainly not at least with his warriors, his war correspondents, his men. We would wish for ourselves that his ladies, those Delilahs of Indian stations, were dropped into the sea. If they are true, the more’s the pity; but nothing so bad is ever fundamentally true. But then the men!—to be able to make a man or two, a living red-hot soldier, even a poor little tipsy hero of a drummer-boy, what a gift it is!

But this is an unpardonable digression. We should like nothing better than to set you forth these two young men, O gentle reader, the heirs and hope of the craft; and perhaps it may be so permitted one day. But, in the meantime, what we have to deal with is very different from these young heroes. The books before us are not those that light up the eyes and make the reader’s heart thump in his bosom. Fiction is what fiction does, and that is a great deal in life. But those