THE JOYS OF A DIVERTED ATTENTION
The Little World. By Stella Benson. (Macmillan. Ss. 6d. net.) AT Hanoi, Miss Benson once came upon a Chinaman, " with an expression, as it were, sheeted in religious fervour, waving a string of merrily exploding crackers about his door as though it were holy incense. His dogs barked, his pigs had palpi- tations, his wives squeaked, his babies held their stomachs and skipped in ecstasy, but it was evident that, in the old man's view, everyone but himself was missing the profound solemnity of his act. . . . He did not apparently remember the days of his youth. He was simply dutifully disinfecting his home of demons."
Miss Benson is always missing the profound solemnity of the act. That is what makes her travel-sketches so delight- fully readable. She has a child's eye for the erratic sparkling of the fire-cracker. If fireworks are tiresome enough to have Inner Meanings that is not her concern. The stuff of her art she draws out of a diverted attention ; and a diverted attention, as she proves again and again, can be a most abundant source of delight. It may miss the symphonic architecture of the Taj Mahal, but it notes the beetles and the lizards that wriggle in and out of the crannies there. " If a monkey and a minaret," confesses Miss Benson, " were competing for my attention, the monkey would almost certainly win."
She does not lose her bright perspective in the presence of tradition. The muezzin may call, as immemorially he has called ; but what is that compared with the gharry horses that amble along in the dusty road beneath, with blue bead neck- laces just behind their cars and such wistfully hopeful looks ? Cle.menceau is a name to conjure with, and Miss Benson saw him fresh from killing two tigers. Yet this is how she writes of him : " He cried out for his manservant as though he were calling his Nannie, and wanted many things done immediately all at once. ' One of the tigers he shot,' said an Indian, was already—' But we did not want to hear, and the old man pulled his shawl up round his cars." Similarly she deplores the truly Victorian attitude of the young women who go out to India. " There are no youngers and silliers in India to worry the olders and wisers. Everyone is modelled on Kipling. . . Perfect Ladies are everywhere. . . . They simply adore reading or drawing or music or poker-work or just Art. . .. Yet these are men and women whose youth has found them at a time when youth is at last allowed to go unchained—and found them too in one of the most fantastic countries in the world." Miss Benson tingles with delight in every one of her sprightly Senses in response to a thousand stimuli from a quaint and Most amusing world ; and she does not suffer too gladly the weary ones who prefer to respond only to its call for Wisdom, Dignity and DeCorum.
Her best pictures are of China and Japan—though she puts a girdle, as it were, round the whole world, in this most cheery. book of travel. Hers is the delicate art that can catch the East in a tiny bubble of words. She is no 'lotus-eater there ; her humour is never stilled into reverential awe before the golden glory of its days ; even the little spring that trickles from behind Buddha's hand, in a temple so high that " in this place even a whisper can reach God," is useful for cooling the bottles before a whisky and soda. Not, of course, that she is nothing but a humourist. Her pity is stirred by all broken things. Yet even then her descriptions never lose their childlike simplicity ; she could never be guilty of fetching our tears and then shaming us with a moral. When springtime puts fine feathers on the female egrets of Yunnan they are caught and torn and thrown away. " No money in them after that, poor things, they are just white debris underfoot, their green legs sprawling and absurd, their round eyes clipped like pince-nez on the bridges of their long beaks." Crueller than that are the descriptions of barbarous native warfare—tho crueller for the comic twist Miss Benson can give them. And here is a grim cameo from Mcngtsz " Once a door was opened and a dead man, in rags, was thrown into the road. He ‘988 picked up by two men who rammed him rudely into a sorry broken packing-case. They carried the case away between them on a poie, the dead man's toes showing through a crack. At an eating-booth the carriers stopped and left tha wretched coffin in the streaming gutter, with 'pigs scratching themselves against it and cabbage-stalks floating in and out of it. 't So we go on, from Tintagel to UK' States, from Hongkong to Peking, from Aden to Yunnan, " a forgotten province, a piece of China mislaid by the world." With sharpened senses we are made to see familiar things as for the first time, till nothing is insignificant or usual ; and a little imp of Fun smiles round every corner. To go with Miss Benson to a Chinese theatre is as entertaining an experience as anyone could wish, or to join her on a picnic in Aden, or to ship with her up the tempera- mental Yang-Tse, or—. But it is graceless to pick and choose in such a colourful, alluring book.
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