Four Books of Travel

WE have had a great many books about Paris as it was in bygone centuries. We have not had many about the persons in Paris to-day, some of whom are making history, some gossip, and all contributing to the atmosphere sought by the traveler. Such a book is Sisley Huddleston’s Paris Salons, Cafés,Studios. And who knowmore about Paris than the distinguished British journalist who has written, for an audience as wide as the English-speaking world, on almost every important event in Paris during the last thirty years? Not many individuals have come in contact with so many celebrities and near-celebrities. Not many have had such opportunities as Mr. Huddleston has had for watching the men and women of Paris group and regroup themselves in kaleidoscopic patterns.

Few who go to Paris come in contact with the individuals presented in these brilliant pages. And, given the opportunity to meet them otherwise, few could get for themselves the essence of these personalities as Mr. Huddleston has distilled it for us. So I shall urge many people who ask me what to read in preparation for going to the French capital to make the acquaintance of this distinguished guide, and follow him through a Paris which, otherwise, they could not know. And to be in Paris, where so much of history is in the making, without a ’programme’ of the persons in the play is to miss a great deal of what that city should be to us. I cannot, without making a mere catalogue, enumerate the men and women his acquaintance with whom he shares with ns in this ample volume and its fifty illustrations. They include pretty much ‘all the world’ as Paris has known it in a very full and momentous generation. I should say that this is not merely a book you may add to your collection of books on Paris, but a book not to be left out of that collection.

Far from Paris Salons. Cafés, Studios, we may travel with a great humanitarian. Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell. In Labrador Looks at the Orient we accompany him to Egypt and Palestine, to India and China and Japan. Here is another observer who sees what you and I could never see though we trailed his very footsteps; who sees what few persons could, and they only such as have lived a life completely dedicated to the service of humanity in places remote from what we are, rightly or wrongly, pleased to call the centres of civilization. Not only were many doors open to Sir Wilfred and Lady Grenfell which would probably be closed to you and me; not only wore many personages whom we could not approach only too glad to be approached by him; but he, too, can interpret what he saw as few of us could interpret it for ourselves even if we were as privileged as he in the matter of open doors. We have traveled, vicariously, in the Orient with many guides — propagandist, pictorial, and other sorts. But I am sure that Grenfell. looking at the Orient and enabling us to look with him, offers many points of view which a multitude of readers will be delighted to share.

Spain beckons, each year, to a larger and larger number of travelers abroad; and there is a demand for travel information on Spain that seems to exceed the supply. Mr. Robert M. McBride, author of many travel books and publisher of many more, has issued a second printing of his book (first published in 1925) on Spanish Towns and People. For hasty tourists through Spain this book may be helpful; it is what might be called a ‘ear window’ chronicle, and gives somewhat the impression of seeing the moving-picture reels of a friend. Mr. McBride found the cathedrals of Spain ‘one of the country’s lesser attractions.’ He spent a night at Ávila without apparent consciousness of Saint Theresa. And he says he did n’t go to the Escorial because someone he calls ‘the discriminating Osborne’ says ‘the Escorial is as dreary as Versailles’!

Of a different cast from the usual book of travels is Winged Sandals, by Lucien Price. Here is a volume in which places, monuments, and relics are important only as they are vehicles of genius as it has descended to earth at various times and in various civilizations, Mr. Price makes a bold attempt to seize directly and concretely on the great heritage of culture which the common man is apt to view with diffidence, and to present this heritage to any reader who will hear him with sympathy. Mr. Price is a journalist employed by a daily newspaper, but he reveals himself as a man of wide and rich reading, broad knowledge, and fine enthusiasms. He has an impulsive sympathy with greatness wherever it appears in earthly history, and he writes with an expressiveness and eloquence which in themselves give beauty and dignity to his book. It is the more surprising to find him putting aside his mastery of vigorous and cultivated style to crack jokes which a down-at-heels vaudeville performer would disdain. He writes learnedly of Beethoven and Wagner, rhapsodizes in Greek at Pæsfnm, seems perfectly at home in Athens, yet asks us to believe that he was such a Babe in the Woods that he could n’t count Italian money, but held it out in handfuls inviting the natives to help themselves!

But Mr. Price’s purpose is evident, He has not set out to write the book of an experienced traveler. He has allied himself with the novice and the common tourist, that he may win their confidence as a spiritual guide and counselor, that he may the more readily persuade them to trust and welcome him when he seeks to share the fruits of his knowledge and understanding. He himself postponed his first voyage abroad until almost a generation of study had prepared the way. Then he visited not out-of-the-way corners in a search for novelty, but the centres of historic civilization, ever waiting to be freshly apprehended and interpreted. His own apprehension and understanding are offered in Winged Sandals. He has tried to give the great heritage of culture a local habitation and a name. It must depend on the individual reader whether the heritage remains airy nothing, or becomes concrete and real.
CLARA E. LAUGHLIN

Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios, by Sisley Huddleston, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1928. $5.00.

Labrador Looks at the Orient, by Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1928. $5.00.

Spanish Towns and People, by Robert M. McBride. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co. 1928. $3.00.

Winged Sandals, by Lucien Price. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 1928. $3.50.