In the Steps of Saint Paul
by
[Dodd, Mead, $2.50]
EACH travel book written by H. V. Morton is a vivid personal experience for its readers. No one can turn its pages and remain at home by his fireside: he goes along with the author on a companionable and delightful expedition — particularly in this volume, where so much of the journey, on mule-buck, camel-back, or on foot through regions difficult but now rediscovered, is of a sort to make our gratitude the greater because we need not do it in the flesh.
In the Steps of Saint Paul carries us through all the part of the Eastern Mediterranean world through which the indefatigable Apostle to the Gentiles forged his way in the first century. So much of that world has been parenthesized from almost Paul’s day until almost our own that it is not an impossible feat to imagine the Paul of the earlier years amidst the conditions for which Mr. Morton finds such adequate and suggestive clues.
The vigorous personality, the unostentatious yet burning audacity of the man who dared to match his Christ against the Roman Empire and all its included faiths, the tireless crescendo of hardships up to the final martyrdom — all this is given us so graphically that one suspects this book will become as indispensable a handbook of Pauline study as is In the Steps of the Master for study of the Gospels. Mr. Morton shows himself sanely expert amid the intricate problems of the Book of the Acts and the Epistles. He takes the proper middle path of scholarship, halfway between such left-wing studies as Dr. Lake’s and the right-wing Fundamentalisms which almost include King Jamesian language as literal inspiration. We are shown a very pungent, urgent, indomitable, and warm-hearted Paul who compels our sympathy and admiration. He comes alive again, the invisible but real guide of this journey.
No modern writer of travel books has a greater gift of visualization than Mr. Morton. Snapshot phrases flick our realizations into five-sensed connotations. It is more than clever English; it is insight and perception to the nth degree. It has the same suggestion of overtones and the unsaid which the best poetry has. ‘The crisp insistence of the cicada and the sound of the waves making a perpetual duet in the heat,’‘the Armenian chauffeur trying painfully to excavate English words from his scanty vocabulary,’the storks ‘following the ploughman with priggish step, with an air not of rendering assistance but of inspecting with critical approval each newlyturned patch of soil’ — almost every page has touches which make the adjective ‘vivid’ seem pale. Here are fresh approaches to well-known stories, rediscoveries of forgotten sites, many flavorous derivations of words, many well-appraised folk customs, and a sane indication of the political trends in the complex Turkish world of Kemal Ataturk. It is almost as if the reader observed for himself the effect of centuries of goats on the landscape of Syria, the details of ancient travel, the strategic importance of the Cicilian Gates, the ‘perils of robbers’ under Roman rule, the origin of the tempo of the dervish dance, the effect of the Ephesian imprisonment upon the Epistles. . . .
Saint Paul made four missionary journeys, traversing Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta, Macedonia, Greece, and to Rome. Mr. Morton has covered the same ground in three. The underlined town names on the map indicate the thoroughness of his research. The visualization of Paul’s scenes and to-day’s is therefore comprehensive, not based on fleeting impression or hearsay. Never has Mr. Morton done us a greater service than to conduct us through such a labyrinth of fact. Above all, he has abundantly fulfilled his hope that ‘perhaps it will be our good fortune, in the course of our adventure, to draw a little nearer to the man who carried with him over the ancient world the most civilizing influence ever brought to bear upon mankind.’
PHILLIPS E. OSGOOD