A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE.t Mas. Wnaixon's originality of thought and
distinction of style are here concerned with an inexhaustible subject: the beauty and romance of France. To this day one meets people who believe that the interior of France is ugly, flat, and nnvaried, and who have never so much as heard of many of the towns, churches, castles, abbeys, mentioned in this attractive book.
" The motor-car," says Mrs. Wharton, "has restored the
• The Complete Forhunter. By Charles Richardson. With 46 Illustrations, of which 4 are in Colour. London: Methuen and Co. [12s. 8d. net.] t 4 Motor-Plight through France. By Edith Wharton. Illustrated. London Macmillan and Co. [86. 6d. net.]
romance of travel." The truth of this will be keenly enough felt by any one who can realise what the old posting days were, "the wonder, the adventure, and the novelty" which waited on every hour of those old-time journeys, the freedom from bondage to ugly railway stations, the intimate acquaint- ance with the physical geography of a country, and with those little towns and villages "missed and yearned for from the windows of the train." Certainly no one can turn over these pages, with their delightful descriptions of places which for many of us might be in the interior of Africa, and their large number of interesting illustrations, without bowing down respectfully before the new and almost magic power of the automobile.
A glance at the contents of the book—Boulogne to Amiens, Rouen to Fontainebleau, Royat to Bourges, Paris to Poitiers, the Rhone to the Seine, &c., &c.—does not suggest anything like the treasures of novelty to be found within. Of course nothing is more true than that "we receive but what we give," and that the eye sees what it brings with it the faculty of seeing; and so it might be very possible to follow in Mrs. Wharton's footsteps without reaping her rich harvest of art, archaeology, history, and the understanding of those natural features which explain the age-long changes in a country's life. But no one can read the book without having his eyes necessarily opened to much that is beautiful and new—newly discovered, for it is all old—old enough, after all, to baffle modern interpreters.
As to the merely technical study of these architectural wonders—which some hold to be the one right and necessary method—we are heartily with Mrs. Wharton when she defends her own way of looking at things,—
" the kind of confused atavistic enjoyment that is made up of historical association, of a sense of mass and harmony, of the relation of the building to the ski above it, to the lights and shadows it creates about it—deeper than all, of a blind sense in the blood of its old racial power, the things it meant to far-off minds of which ours are tho oft-dissolved and reconstituted fragments."
"Familiarity with the past" of these ancient creations,— that is indeed the one way to understand the present.
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