T MAY indeed have been a rare day for the young D'Artagnan when, like so many other sword-wise cadets of Gascony, he fared forth from Meung upon that yellow horse (of an astonishing color like a dandelion) upon his way to Paris. A rare day, but no more for him than for those who for more than half a century have been enthusiastically traveling that road with him. "The Three Musketeers," chief of romantic historical narratives, continues to perpetuate the golden hours of fascinating reading, for more readers than ever thumb the novels of Meredith or Hardy, and certainly for more than wander in the somewhat dreary mazes created by the sex and problem novels of to-day. Yet it is none the less true that the authentic magic that lies in good narrative well told has dwindled, so that it now finds a repository in not more than a bare dozen of able and not seldom inspired pens at work upon the creation of literature. Fortunately for those of us who still follow as we have followed so many times before, the blades of M. de Treville's incomparable four, there exists this dozen of pens, and comprised in it the admirable one of John Buchan.

Mr. Buchan has written not a few interesting novels, some furnished with historical settings (and they are the best) and some not so equipped, but in "Midwinter" he achieves what is to us his best romantic narrative. Perhaps it is because the Scots heritage in his blood takes more than kindly to his subject,

*"Midwinter." By John Buchan. Doran. $2.

irrespective of whether his ancestors were out in '15 and '45 or numbered with their clansmen at the final sorry end at Culloden under the banners of Cumberland and Wade and the dour Whig Lords. Certain it is that the hero of "Midwinter" is a Scots gentleman of heritage and courage, a living character who depresses us not at all with that priggish pomposity that is so often a failing with heroes, and whose politics are as his heart and mind are, sound. Alastair Maclean, late of the forces of Louis the Well-Beloved, which so many men of his beliefs and breeding had joined after the collapse of the Old Pretender's effort at tender's effort at Preston, traveling fiercely incognito through England to enlist resources for Prince Charlie, gathers in his wake, well hidden as it is, a train of incidents and personages as infinitely colorful as the day that saw their existence. Dearest of all to us is Samuel Johnson, who bursts upon Alastair in a fashion most alien to the Olympian of Boswell, and discloses himself the selfconstituted protector of a maiden partly beneath his tutelage and wholly beneath a devotion which sometimes could seem ponderous and who has run off with a scoundrel. Mr. Buchan deals faithfully with Johnson.

Under the bright candelabra, among crystal and silver and shining fruit and the gay clothes of the others, he cut an outrageous figure. He might have been in years about the age of Lord Cornbury, but disease and rough usage had wiped every sign of youth from his face. That face was large, heavilyfeatured and pitted deep with the scars of scrofula. The skin was puffy and gray, the

A contemporary portrait, this, with no attempt made to disguise beneath phrases the great man's physical uncomeliness. But the character of Dr. Johnson is no less honestly portrayed. His is, as it should be, the greatest figure in the book, although he pursues his peregrinations with Alastair of Clan Gillian apparently clad precisely as he was at his first entrance into the story. Sword knots and brocade seem actually to shrivel and the little persons that they adorn to suffer grievous diminution, as the vast, rolling, shabby lexicographer forges his way through intrigue and petty misfortune to the conclusion that

his conscience and his standard demand. Then there is Kitty of Queensbury, the perennial beauty of Prior and Pope and Gay and as far removed from her position in the life of that England as may be, the Naked Men. This shadowy society of woodmen and charcoal burners, dominated by the fascinating and somewhat prophetic character of the man "Midwinter" himself, constitutes what seems to be a sort of beneficent Jacquerie dedicated to the thwarting of oppressors and the protection of the worthy. Alastair Maclean is fortunate in his alliance with them, a happy circumstance brought about by his delivering one of their brotherhood from the inclement clutches of a keeper, and which in the end, saves him from a terrible and most inglorious death.

Mr. Buchan, in "Midwinter," shows himself to be possibly the ablest disciple of the greatest of all contemporary romantic narrative authors of Scotch history and life, Neil Munro. It has been more than a quarter of a century since the publication of "John Splendid," the beloved lan Aluinn of Clan Diarmaid, but the glory of that book for those who

have read it is as eternally thrilling as are the wheeling seasons in the wild highlands of which it tells. Perhaps it demands a strain of Scots blood in the reader to

enjoy thoroughly and appreciate Neil Munro and this happy continuation of his themes in the talent of the author of "Midwinter." There may exist readers who miss the poignant tragedy that lay for the Clans in Culloden, and those who never heard of "The brief wild glory of the great Montrose," but none the less, even as we who know not Gascony and

who well might have detested Aramis, continue loyally to be of his company, so may all readers of romantic narrative wholeheartedly enlist themselves in that of Munro and thus latterly of John Buchan. No less skillful a story-teller and one who possesses to a far greater degree an elusive and delightful quality of humor is Alfred Ollivant. Years ago he wrote a little epic about two dogs and named it after the lesser of his canine characters, "Bob, Son of Battle." The homeric striving of Red Wull of the MacCullough strain, and Bob, the last of the gray dogs of Kenmuir, formed the material for one of the genuine classics about animals that compose a division of literature actually contributed to by but few authors, although many have striven to attain to it. Of a different, though equally interesting theme, is his latest novel, "Devil Dare,' a romantic narrative of the embattled England of the Napoleonic wars and of which the hero is a nobleman of infinite charm who bears the entrancing name of Pierre Ferrers Clanricarde Brudenell, Earl Dare of Dene. My Lord Dare is surely the most lovable and certainly the most diverting and unconventional peer that ever wagered at Brooks' or gambled with his heritage at Crockford's or Waitier's. He is, we understand, of that company of beaux of which George Bryan Brummel was the leader and Lord Alvanley the wit; one of those astonish

*

*"Devil Dare." By Alfred Ollivant. Doubleday, Page. $2.

ingly garbed young men who were wont to arise with old sherry and get them to bed with brandy and grilled bones, perhaps an hour or two after dawn. But "Devil Dare" becomes bored with beaux before he enters our ken. Perhaps he would brook no insolence from the Barrymores nor arrogance from the preposterous Prince-Regent. At any rate, he becomes weary of the pleasures of the town and to amuse himself enters into a treasonous intrigue with Boney, who is at that time greatly concerned with getting rid of Nelson's fleet so that he may land the vanguard of the finest army in the world upon the Sussex Downs. In other words, My Lord becomes a traitor to England, but a traitor innocent of any villainy, of any treachery, or of any loss of self-respect. With the utter carelessness, but

with the candid innocence of a small child, he prepares to throw open his country to invasion merely for the sake of amusement, but he finds in the end that even for that paramount reason he cannot do it. Napoleon himself he finds a little vulgar, a little ridiculous, and although Nelson has stolen Emma Hamilton, his first and only love, and he, too, is after all a parson's son, nevertheless he is an Englishman. And so with Boney, Monseigneur s'en fiche.

But even so a price is upon his head. Not that it worries him. He lives in an ever narrowing circle of his enemies, playing with infinite enjoyment the part of a rural dean and although convinced that his end is close upon him imbuing the rôle with an ineffable charm and delicacy.

Ollivant is a past master at the creation of impression and atmosphere and what he writes about he loves. There is England, and in England, Sussex, most treasured of all her counties.

A goat-sucker began to ja-r-r in the heart of the great wood he had just left. A covey of partridges floated on wide wings across the

lane in front and settled in the field. He could hear the pleasant mother-murmur of them as they cuddled together in a circle for the night. It was England; it was evening; it was summer. And how he loved it all.

A paragraph of pure autobiography. For his sympathy and understanding of animals he once and for all gave testimony in "Bob, Son of Battle." In "Devil Dare" one of the chief subsidiary characters is Kate, His Lordship's mare. No beautiful woman could elicit descriptive passages of more tenderness or delicacy

of touch than does she. Olivant has made her a creature vivid as flame, and quite as interesting as Madge, the publican's daughter, whose extraordinary sweetness and sincerity match My Lord's subtle humors. Mole, My Lord's man, is a jewel of a character. He is, in fact, possibly the best

man in that sense, that we have ever read about and his habit of speech is beyond all words marvellous. Not one of your soft tailored fellows, either, but a bruiser to be wary of.

"Yus, sir. I beat Copper Kettle, the mulatter, inside o' seventeen round, at the Pied Bull,

Islington, where Tobaccer begun. Knocked

him into a bleedink pulp-me Maker, in whom I yope is my yope, 'elpink me."

But "Devil Dare," a small section, the last, of his life and the beauty of his passing, is after all the bone and sinew of the book. He wins the sympathy and the affection and the respect of the reader by those same debonair qualities of heart and mind that drive him to outrageous measures to escape the liveried tedium of his days. Dare of Dene, a most gallant gentleman, by whom His Grace, the Duke of Brontë himself, patched eye and glory altogether, makes not half so appealing nor yet so dashing a figure.

It is a long cruise from the Sussex Downs to the sterner anchorages of New England and an even greater leap from a tip-top buck and Corinthian of the

Regency to a grim, forbidding sinner of a Massachusetts ship-owner of the eighteen thirties, but since both characters compel admiration, the one for a winsome if mischievous gallantry, and the other for a craggy violence of determination and vigorous, if sinister, design, the narratives of their activities are not actually unrelated. John P. Marquand has achieved in Eliphalet Greer, the dominant figure of "The Black Cargo"* a character that nothing save the varied complexities of certain aspects of the New England life of a century or more ago could produce. Eliphalet Greer houses within an exterior as rugged and withal as darkly polished as the teak of his own ships a spirit tortured by the conflict of a sincere spiritual faith and the genuine hell-roaring essence of the true buccaneers. The poignancy of his tragedy lies not in the fact that in his tempestuous youth he was a slaver and, what that company of desperadoes so palliatively termed themselves, a gentleman adventurer, but in the fact that having been these things and marooned his friend and co-pirate into the bargain, he is condemned eternally to remember a past that Morgan and Avery and Teach could have thrust cheerfully behind them, but which flourishes in the type of mind that is his, an ulcerous growth from which he may find no surcease. In the end, when the transport of his evil traffic drifts masterless upon the tide toward the wharves of the town of which he is the respected leading citizen, when all that he has accomplished sinks beneath the sluggish forefoot of his own slave-ship, then only does he regain his ancient independence, for he is expiating the sin that has returned to him. He is balancing the account and he is, we feel, in far greater measure than ever before, happy. In Eliphalet Greer, Mr. Marquand has created a very genuine and intensely moving character that dominates a narrative exceptionally successful in its recre

*"The Black Cargo." By J. P. Marquand. Scribner's. $2.

ation for the reader of the salt and the seaweed atmosphere of a seaport town in New England in the days when Yankee shipping was a by-word of strength and intrepidity upon the seas. There is the sea in "The Black Cargo," but chiefly there is the atmosphere of the inns, the streets and the docks in the town that the sea has begotten, an atmosphere utterly unique in the quality of its attraction.

Mr. Marquand, like Mr. Hergesheimer, possesses the gift of placing the time and action of a story accurately and vividly within an historical period, with the result that it reads like a diary of that period more than ordinarily filled with incident. There is no jarring modern note, no shattering anachronism to disturb the perfection of the impression created. And the impression is perfectly incisive. The final departure of Greer with the man who long ago had been his friend, once more into the wrack and spume of the storm-driven sea, is as clearly before our eyes as would be the somber tumult of a seascape by Turner. But our last impression is only superficially somber. Actually, "The Black Cargo" ends upon a note of exaltation as the passions of these two are fused and transmuted by an irresistible alchemy into the loyalty of their pristine comradeship.

Such a buccaneer, as Eliphalet Greer might have been had Bristol or Vigo or some obscure Breton harbor been his birthplace instead of a New England port, is the blood-swinking "Thomas the Lambkin"* of Claude Farrère. Thomas is, we are told, a Malouin by birth, but in everything else Cyrano himself could not be more typically of Gascony. But his are not empty gasconnades. His boasts, some of which involve the horrid slaughter of whole companies of beings, are faithfully fulfilled and even improved upon. Thomas is a Corsair, the chief of all the "Brothers of the Coast," and from the poop of his great frigate La Belle

*"Thomas the Lambkin." By Claude Farrère. Dutton's. $2.

Hermine he directs piracies that are no mere incidents in the history of sea robberies, but notable campaigns whose scope and direction render them almost legitimate in the eyes of his king, Louis XIV. And finally, after a particularly successful sack, Thomas is ennobled; he becomes the Lord of the Lambkin, Le Sieur de L'Agnelet, his title being derived from an obviously comic reference to his gentleness when engaged in battle. Like the black-a-vised Morgan whose wholesale lootings coincided with the desires of his sovereign, and so netted him the somewhat questionable honor of a knighthood that caused many honest gentlemen of that title to blench, the Lord of the Lambkin thrives on a diet of hewn and bloody flesh with a complete impunity so long as the flesh be not that of loyal subjects of the Kingdom of France. But it is not Thomas's success as a pirate, though this is admirably described, that interests us as much as the sinister passion to which one of his own victims binds him and which eventually brings him to the gallows which he has so long and so arrogantly made sport of. In one of his more notable ventures he captures a Spanish maiden of Hidalgo heritage and great beauty who for a long time repels in a fashion peculiarly arrogant and acid the advances that Thomas hitherto irresistible to the women of his choice confidently makes. Juana, delicately nurtured and fiercely religious, becomes by a process of splendidly analyzed degeneration, more savage in her lusts and cruelties than Thomas himself and, as she tires of him, taunts him with the curse of his love for her that neither her words nor her deeds can affect. The Lord of the

Lambkin, thrice a hundred times a cuckold, preserves in himself this singular but all powerful corrosive up to the very moment when he is to swing from his own yardarm, nor does one feel that he is emptied of it even when the child that Juana is to bear him is named by her own lips as being none of his. When this message is brought him, trussed as he is for the drop, one does not wonder that Thomas the Lambkin leaps unaided into space. Poor Thomas, in the end, nothing much more formidable than a lamb at the

mercy of the not too privy paw of the she-wolf that he himself has created. Ah, yes, poor Thomas. Compared to Flint or Long John he is nothing much more than a big baby. Imagine the blue-jawed, rumguzzling master of the Walrus jeopardizing his life and his ill-gotten fortune by a soulrotting attachment to a treacher

ous jade devoted to the accomplishment of his downfall. Not much. But then Flint-well, Flint was not a Frenchman.

In the work of the four men here discussed, Buchan, Ollivant, Marquand, and Farrère, the chief significance is the maintenance of the narrative tradition, largely and mercifully ungarnished by the bothersome complexities of sex psychology and the solution of social or moral problems. The vigor of the novels of these men is infinitely refreshing and owes its existence to the denial of just those subjects. Like the epic four of Dumas, the books swagger a bit and have little traffic with stupid niceties of speech and deportment. They are bravos, granted, but bravos

whose blades are honestly enlisted and whose sword-play swift and very capable it is a fascination to contemplate.