THIS GOODLY FRAME.
The Right Place. By C. E. Montague. (Chatto and Windus. 7s.) Mu. MONTAGUE'S last book of essays, it will be remembered, -was called Disenchantment, and was a troubled, stinging kind of book that might have been written in the shadow of Elsinore.
Taking his Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns by the arm, Mr.
Montague now talks to them of this goodly frame, the Earth, and this most excellent canopy, the air ; in short, he has produced a book of essays on the joys of travel that is so happy and zestful that it might very well have been called Enchantment. The dominant note is sounded in the very first paragraph :-
" You may wonder how it will feel, to find you are old, and able to travel no more. Perhaps to sit out, with your legs up, in an invalid chair on a lawn when the warm weather comes, and to finger a book of time-tables for trains, and to think how at this hour the day express from Paris is probably nearing Mulhouse, and the evening freshness of air that has blown across snow is coming in at the windows ; soon the train will be slowing to clank into the station at Pale just when the first lamps are lit in the town and look gay in the twilight. How the Rhine must be swishing along, a plashing, .glimmering coolness heard more than seen, below the balconied windows of rooms at the Three Kings Hotel, where the blest, who have just come from England, are giving a sigh of content as they throw their dusty gloves down on a bed. . .
In such artfully contrived prose (whose felicities have lured so many admiring young Manchester journalists to destruc- :Lion), Mr. Montague talks of the Alps and the roads of England, the pleasures of map-reading, the character of the Pennines, the faces and fortunes of cities, the joys of the street (in which even the warehouses of Liverpool and Manchester are pressed into service) ; and everywhere he gives us something more than a tourist's rhapsody and fine writing, for all these essays have a philosophical background, and this background is frankly recognized and partly explored in the very last paper of all. " Between our senses and any object that might stir us to some genial or aweful delight," he remarks, very justly, " there is always interposed a kind of ether distilled from our own personality." The feast is always spread, but only those who have the " radiant receptiveness " of children, lovers and artists can bring to it the right appetite. And here Mr. Montague deals sturdily with those mistaken persons who imagine that " experience " can be widened and deepened by mere loss of self-control, as if the personality were a kind of rag-bag into which all manner of experiences can be flung, instead of a living growth that cannot go in two different directions at once, and cannot taste continually of evil and yet retain the unspoilt palate of innocence. Further, he puts forward for our admiration " the fortunate few who have not lost the finer use of their eyes—their bodily and mental eyes together—as most of us do in the later stages of youth," and it is only by following such happy mortals, who are for ever discovering a world that has been newly made for them, that we can enjoy the feast.- This' only means we must adopt a similar attitude of mind towards things in general ; it does not mean that we must try to see the world as other, perhaps more gifted, persons see it, imitating their gestures and echoing their opinions. It is such tampering with the free personal response that provokes Mr. Montague's sarcasm. There is no one right way of feeling in the presence of supposed beauty, and no wrong way, " so long as it is a vehement personal way " that belongs to somebody. " Any such human experience is the ultimate unit of critical truth ; you cannot get higher authority than that sincere assurance for any valuation of any visible thing." And it is worth remarking (for this kind of writing is not for everyone) that the greater part of this volume is concerned, and exquisitely concerned, with the writer's own personal experience of the delights of travel, and that only the last paper or so takes us into philosophy and morals. But that is as it should be, for after the bustling roads and the mountain peaks of aesthetic experience, we are ready for the tranquil inn of the philosophic mind. Mr. Montague, whose mannered but very agreeable style is now losing its Meredithian contempt for a plain statement, moves easily from achievement to achievement, success to success.
J. B. PRIESTLEY.
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