Stories of Travel

THE four travel books before us illustrate very vividly that in the case of this kind of book it is the merit of the author as a writer rather than as a traveller which matters. No matter what astonishing experiences and breathless adventures may have been encountered, all is useless if the author cannot

command the difficult art of making a book. " The book's the thing," and no amount of hairbreadth escapes or beguiling incidents can make up for lack of literary capacity. In these volumes Mr. Henry Baerlein has perhaps the least exciting story to tell. All that Mr. Baerlein has been doing is to take a walking tour in Transylvania ; but then Mr. Baerlein happens to be a writer. The consequence is that he provides us with an entertaining and mildly scandalous book. Indeed,

a previous work of Mr. Baerlein's was compared to Sterne's Sentimental Journey. This seems to us, to say the least of it

an exaggerated verdict. All the same, Mr. Baerlein has pro- duced a pleasant and amusing little book. He gives a genuinely entertaining picture of the peasants of Transylvania and of the hopeless tangle of " minorities " which the Ver- sailles Treaty has left in South-Eastern Europe. He travelled about, it seems, with a hawker of religious paintings, one

Ilarion, who, if he had lived in the Midlands of England, would unquestionably have been known as a " card." We get a vivid sense of the mediaeval superstition of the peasants intermingled with motor 'buses and with peasants who have spent most of their lives in Cleveland, Ohio. In a word, Mr. Baerlein is an intelligent man and knows how to write. Hence he cannot fail to produce a book that is worth reading.

Two of the other books before us are of the opposite kind. For example, Mrs. Victor Bruce undoubtedly accomplished an amazing feat in buying an aeroplane one morning in Bond Street, and then flying most of the way round the world in it. The book in which she tells us of her adventures, however, is only moderately interesting, because, although Mrs. Bruce has now seen almost the whole world, she has not very much that is new to tell us about it.

In the Track of the Crusaders is another book which suffers from the same defect. It undoubtedly recounts a most sporting performance on the part of two undergraduates, in walking to the Holy Land. Moreover, all sorts of adventures duly befell them. They have something to tell us about these

adventures, but not very much.

By far the best of these volumes, however, is The Omnibus Book of Travellers' Tales. This is a book of a different character

entirely. Its title is badly chosen ; one might suppose from it that this was a collection of all the tall stories of the cen- turies. Far from being that, it consists of extracts from the original journals of the greatest explorers who have ever lived. It is a brilliantly selected anthology of exploration. We have, for example, the greatest passages from the writings of Marco Polo, Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, Cabot, Frobisher, Raleigh, Cook, Stanley and Captain Scott. In addition, the editor, Mr. Milton Waldman, contributes a short history of

exploration and the foundation of the science of Geography, from the days of Herodotus to to-day. In fifty pages Mr.

Waldman performs this task with real skill. He explains just why the Ancient World never managed to establish a science of Geography; and he makes us feel the breathless thrill of the almost incredibly sudden bursting of the bounds of the Ancient World in the fifteenth century. He reprints the Ptolemaic

map of the World, with its incomprehensible jumble, which was constructed in the Second Century A.D., and reproduced in 1478, as being still the last word in geographical know-

ledge :

" The version here reproduced appeared in a geographical treatise published in 1478 ; though half of recorded human history had unrolled in the interval, it was still the best map of the earth available. Yet within fourteen years America was to be dis- covered ; within twenty Africa was to be circumnavigated and India reached for the first time by the Cape ; by 1842, one hundred and sixty-four years later, the last unknown land of any con- siderable size had been added to the map of the world."

He is deeply moved by the journals of the great explorers of the Renaissance, and he communicates his emotion to the reader. As he points out, these heroes were not only great men of action, but were for the most part great prose artists. He quotes the first letter of Columbus himself in proof of this :

Truly great and wonderful is this, and not corresponding to our merits, but to the holy Christian religion, and to the piety and religion of our sovereigns, because what the human understanding could not attain, that the divine will has granted to human efforts. Por Cod is wont to listen to His servants who love His precepts, even in impossibilities, as has happened to us on the present occasion, who have attained that which hitherto mortal men have never reached."

Altogether, this is one of the very best compilations which We have ever seen.