Recent Reprints
. JOHN MACGREGOR, the author of The Voyage Alone in the Yawl 'Rob Roy' (Rupert Hart-Davis, The Mariners' Library, 9s. '6d.) was a Victorian who combined mild eccentricity with a genuine and practtcal philanthropy. The social stirrings of the mid-nineteenth century gave, ample scope to his genius for publicity; when not rowing or Bible-reading at Cambridge, he was writing for Punch and handing the proceeds to the Ragged School Union. But he was marked out to be a mariner; Hannah More had celebrated him in a poem for surviving two shipwrecks in 1825, when he was a baby, and fame came with his invention of the Rob Roy canoe, the foundation of what is still the Royal Canoe Club, the numerous-inland voyages he made in canoes through Europe and the Near East, and the books that followed them. The Yawl 'Rob Roy,' published in 1867, resulted from Napoleon III's interest in MacGregor's canoes and a desire "to encourage a taste for the, exploration of solitary streams and lonely currents among the youth of France." A boat exhibition was to be held in Paris, with a regatta on the Seine, and MacGregor immediately set sail from London with, daringly enough, a cargo of Protestant tracts to distribute among the benighted Roman Catholics. He would find material for lectures (in one year they earned him over £4,000) and another book. -This, in a reprint now edited and intrOdueed by Arthur .Ransome, makes pleasant reading in its freshness and enthusiasm. The Kill by Emile Zola (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 12s. 6d.), with an introduction by Angus Wilson, is a translation of La Cur& made by A. Texeira de Mattos, first published in 1895. It is the second novel of the great Rougon-Macquart series telling of the decline and fall of a family under the Second Empire. Aristide Saccard has come from Provence to exploit the Haussmann real- estate boom, and the first theme of the novel is the mania of money- ' making, the wrecks and lightning triumphs of municipal speculation. Saccard's precocious, effeminate son Maxime follows him to Paris to introduce the fleshly theme; he is seduced by his young and bored stepmother,. Renee. The scenes of adultery on a black bearskin rug, among the begonias and gloxinias, under the poisonous Mada- gascar tanghin-tree, might easily have been over-written by a lesser author, but while one can dimly see the shade of Zola taking patient notes in the Jardin des Plantes, his handling of the image of the vast, sweating, suffocating conservatory and the decadent loves of Renee and Maxime is masterly and sustained. The publishers have had the happy idea of reissuing The Gentle Art of Making Enemies by J. B. M. Whistler (Heinemann, 21s.) as a facsimile of the original 1890-92 editions, for the minute type-face and the self-conscious lay-out only stress the waspishness of the argument between Whistler and the official art-critics. By and large, Whistler and his artistic arrangements come out of it well, although the fastidious self-importance of the prose seems to make the book more of a faded antiquity than it really is; in fact the venom still preserves a sting. It can only be believed that Sir John Mandeville was one of the first great geographical hoaxers, a fourteenth-century de Rougemont.
A few facts are known, and some fifteen manuscripts and a number of fifteenth-century printed versions of his travels survive ; the rest is conjecture and research. Mandeville's Travels: Text and Translations by Malcolm Letts (Two vols., The Hakluyt Society, £4) contains a modernised edition of the Egerton text, first printed by Sir George Warner for the Roxburgho Club in 1889, a French text, d the short Bodleian text. There is a long introduction,• with correlative texts and scholarly notes, and the volumes are excep- ionally well-produced. The sum of evidence seems to allow that Mandeville actually travelled as far as the Holy Land, and the rest Of the way, to the ultra-geographical Land of Prester John, in agination, with the aid of a well-contrived hash of the works f those who really had travelled. Between India and the Great all of China is the legion that provides him with giant snails and blue elephants, foul men without heads', folk that are white all Over, people who smell like apples and die when they lose their savour, grunting men with horns, and mechanical peacocks of gold. There are many tall stories in his tale that the footnotes drily debunk, but a suspension of disbelief makes it first-class reading.
First published in folio in 1925, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance by J. C. Shepherd and G. A. Jellicoe (Alec Tiranti, 25s.) is now in mailer format and consists almost entirely of over 200 plans and hotographs. The introductory essay, with a parallel text in sketchy rench, traces the history of a series of gardens that have probably ever been surpassed in civilised design. The masterpieces of the sixteenth century, of a richness of mind as yet unrepeated in Europe, the Villa d'Este, Villa Madama, the Belvedere, the Villa Lante, appear in a sombre, ghostly beauty in the book's illustrations which in themselves make it a pleasure to possess.
Mention must be made of a revised and reset edition of Owen arfield's History in English Words (Faber, 18s.), a study of Western outlook, and current English in particular, by means of an explora- tion of the etymological brew into which many important ingredients have gone between Plato's concept of "quality" and Coleridge's definition of "imagination".
PAUL DINNAGB
Previous page
