Messer Marco Polo
by . New York: The Century Company. 1921. Tall 16mo, vi + 148 pp. $1.25.
MR. BRIAN OSWALD DONN-BYRNE makes a characteristically Irish approach to the story of Marco Polo. It is told in New York one evening to a chance group, ‘sportsmen, artists, men and women of the world,’ clustered before a crackling fire, by an Ulster Scot, old Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen. And whether the tale is of Venice or of China, of ‘the Perilous Valley, where the Devil’s Head is in black stone, and that is one of the nine entrances to Hell,’ or of ‘the Desert of the Singing Sands,’ the accent is ever of Antrim.
Malachi’s story begins with Marco Polo, ‘only a strip of a lad, roaming Venice on a spring night. In a wineshop he hears from a Chinese sea-captain of Golden Bells, daughter of Kubla Khan, and thenceforth the dream of her possesses him until ‘it would be worth walking the world barefoot for to see that little golden face, to hear the low, sweet voice they call Golden Bells,’ By many strange hazards, traveling as a Christian interpreter to far Cathay with the elder Polos, his father and uncle, traders, Marco finally wins his way to the princess, converts her, weds her, and in less than three swift years loses her by death. For fourteen years longer, ‘a lean, hard face on him and savage eyes,’ he rides up and down the world ‘on the great Khan’s business,’ and then, at the bidding of the wee brown wraith of Golden Bells, goes home, bearing a haunted heart.
What does history say to this? Not that Malachi would care. ‘ There’s been a power of books written about Marco Polo. . . . But the scholars are a queer and blind people.’ In the small compass of this volume there are glimpses, as of Venice in her glory, more veracious, because realized by imagination, than the most matter-offact of the old chronicles; and the career of Marco Polo, apart from Golden Bells, conforms in general to the record. But the essential truth of this book is the truth of pure romance. Golden Bells is the music of the world, drawing to her even the Prince of the Land of Darkness, with his treasures of ‘sea ivory and pale Arctic gold.’ Life is poetry and beauty and love; dream and longing and adventure; magic and mystery and terror; splendor and wisdom and pain. A book with the touch of Celtic genius.
KATHARINE LEE BATES.