Fluvius Vag us
Coming Down The Wye. By Robert Gibbings. (Dent. tzs. 6d.) THE Wye is the loveliest of rivers, a stream of the most various beauties and of many characters, changing with level and season, wind and sunlight, rain and cloud, passing from the noble Silurian hills to the broad and open pastures of its lower valleys. Those who know the Wye intimately may well be a little suspicious of the visitor who thinks that he knows it as well as they do, and who takes upon himself the task of description and of delineation. I therefore approached this book (knowing it to be a visitor's book) with a certain degree of prejudice, or, it may be, of jealousy. But Mr. Gibbings writes delightfully and has a true eye for the colour, the form and the mood of this most magical stream—particularly in the enchanted country of the Welsh Wye. He may not perhaps observe the subtle melancholy of the river at such places as the witches' pool under Llowes, or where the dark and lightly murmuring water flows by the trees near Clifford, yet he feels the power and the glory of the Wye and the hills ; he is responsive and sensitive, not only to the river and its life, but also to the nature of the landscape and of the people in the Wye country.
Both in the pictorial and in the literary sense Mr. Gibbings excels rather in the observation and the record of detail than in a more spatial view of landscape as a whole or in a more penetrating investigation of character. But this is as it should be. The essential quality of the book, both in text and illustration, is charm. Mr.
Gibbings is a pleasant, unexacting, peaceful companion ; he provides refreshment of a sort which is badly needed in these jarring times. He is friendly, discursive, anecdotal, and he talks with a natural un- forced originality. Sometimes, perhaps, he is too inconsequent; but he never falls to the commonplace, and he rises occasionally to the level of noble prose. The great value of his book is that it reminds us of the existence of the world of beauty, untouched and enduring in the midst of the present hideous troubles.
C. E. Vuri.imsw.
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