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M A U R I C E.

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M A U R I C E. A Romance of the Welsh Coal Mines. Mr. Joseph Keating is a Welshman by birth and association, and an Irishman by descent andfeeling. His early years were passed in the coal districts of Glamorganshire, and he knows and understands the charm and the sorrow, the romance and the sordidness of the collier's life. Modern conditions of life rarely evolve a romance," he says in his somewhat stilted prefatory note. If by romance is meant the tinsel happenings of life that is no doubt true; but Mr. Keating supplies in Maurice (Chatto and Windus) his own refutation. Here we find no baronial halls, no ivied castles, no virant knights or forlorn damsels. None the less "Maurice is a true romance tho' it deals only with the homely annals of the poor. Its characters are hillside peasants, driven from home and content by the ruthless onrush of modern industrialism; Irish vagrants with nothing to commend them to the reader but loyal hearts and soft speech rough miners who never trod on carpet; village gossips and exiled Italians and two of the most delightful children that we have met with in recent fiction. The most important personage in the book is Dandy Ellis," and he is but a farmer that has had the luck to become rich thro' no efforts of his own, and whose highest ambition is to be appointed a magistrate. The lovers, Jethro Boscawen and Olwen Ellis, are no high-born Romeo or exquisite Juliet-only the fine flower of the Welsh peasantry. Yet, Maurice is as enthral- ling and as true a romance as if it dealt with the lives and the loves of Sir Charles Grandison and Lady Clara Vere de Vere. Mr. Keating has made a great advance in his mastery of the novelist's craft since he wrote his first book, "A Son of Judith." There are crudities of style and diction and treatment in Maurice" which show that Mr. Keating has still much to learn before he perfects his art, but its strength, its sincerity, its glow, its restraint, point unmistakably to future eminence as a writer. Whenever Mr. Keating touches upon things he knows-the love of old Irish Grig for little Maurice Brennan, the two happy children playing truants on the mountain, the gossip of the village, and the life in a coalmine-he writes with a power and a sureness of touch which are rarely equalled in our own days. His description of the" squeezing" of the mine and of the explosion are horrifying in their naked realism. Not even Rider Haggard could have given a more thrilling description of brave men fighting against heroic odds than Mr. Keating has given of Jethro and. Maurice fighting their way in the dark from their tomb in the pit to the upper air. That, without doubt, is the best thing Mr, Keating has yet done. There is no straining after effect, no rhetorical extravagances, but a bald, unadorned narrative that by its very simplicity grasps, convinces, startles the reader. It is a disappointment when we come to the meeting of Jethro and Olwen after these breath- less pages to find Jethro soliloquising over his swooning sweetheart such unreal stuff as this :— Olwen, I would rather have been crushed to dust in the darkness of the pit than see you in this perilous state I have freed myself from death's grip to find its cold clutch fastened on you in revenge for my escape-upon a life that I value more than my own and all the lives of this teeming world put together Mr. Keating would be well advised to leave love-making alone, and stick to his own domain. Let him give us more of pit life, more descriptions of the Irish who have come to sojourn in our midst, more stories of the children among the hills, and he will surely come to his own. Welshmen "0 waed coch cyfan are somewhat apt to forget that Cymru Fydd will not be all Cymric, but will be a composite of all the various elements that are now to be found in Wales. The Welshman of a hundred generations will have to mix with, and should therefore, try to know and understand, the stranger within his gates. Mr. Keating is well suited to become the interpreter of this New Wales that is being evolved, for he possesses the eye to see, and the heart to feel, and the pen to describe, the peculiar charm and character of each component part. W. LL. W.

UNDEB YR EGLWYSI *RHYDDION.

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