A GUIDE-BOOK TO ROUMANIA
Roumanian Journey. By Sacheverell Sitwell. (Batsford. 8s. 6d.)
IT must be a matter for marvel to anyone conversant with modern conditions of publishing that Messrs. Batsford and Company have been able to produce Roumanian Journey at a price very little in excess of an ordinary novel. Here you have a 50,000 word essay by the best possible man for the task, 96 pages of photographs, mostly by Mr. A. Coster and Mr. Richard Wyndham, and three or four coloured plates which will no doubt increase the book's popularity with all but the fastidious. In the circumstances it seems churlish to complain, but I do feel that a list of illustrations Might have been included (at the expense, if necessary, of the painting opposite page 59) and the advertisement omitted from the page between the half-title and title. This seems to me an example of bad manners in publishing. To bind up a list at the end of the book, though undesirable, has prece- dents of antiquity, but to intrude into the book itself is an impertinence to its distinguished author. At times, too, the collaboration between author and illustrators seems to have been incomplete ; the text does not always explain the pictures, nor the pictures illustrate the text. Both, however, are admirable and the book, as it stands, is astonishing value for money.
It is, I believe, the first artistic guide-book to the country to appear in English. Mr. Sitwell courteously affirms that " everyone has heard of Sinaia." I wonder. For most of us Roumania has lain outside our travels ; it is not on the aesthetic Grand Tour ; it is too civilised to tempt the adventurous. We know it as the home of Count Dracula and Dr. Kommer, as a place of Iron Guards and active Royalty. The popular Press has declared it Ruritanian and dismissed it. The reader of Mr. Sitwell's book has the pleasure of coming to it in the mood of curiosity which possessed the author.
As I have said above, he was the best possible man for his task. Good travelling is a question of aesthetic digestion. Some travellers start life with a voracious appetite and soon sicken. In early youth they look about them, gorge glut- tonously and thrive; their first travel books are full of amiable gusto. Then they begin to put on weight and develop a coated palate ; after a time the more delicate flavours become indetectible to them and they can taste only the overspiced and gamey. Other travellers work like professional Tea- tasters. They swallow nothing, and preserve their powers of discernment at the expense of their own growth. Mr. Sitwell is very rare in being able to assimilate huge and regular aesthetic banquets without a qualm.
He has also the rare quality of being able to write the kind of book which is needed. He can be as discursive, poetic, personal, satirical, macabre as anyone else when he wants to be, but he does not feel the fatal itch of exhibiting all his talents all the time. Roumanian Journey is practical and even prosaic. Its object—or so it seems to me—is to suggest to his fellow countrymen that Roumania is worth a visit and to be of service to them when they go there. It is a guide- book written by a traveller who knows just where guide-books usually let one down. He keeps himself and his travelling Companions austerely in the background. His theme is the country itself, its aspect and sound and smell. He eschews
politics, with the result that his book will be of value long after the particular combinations of Danubian Powers which excite notice today: It should have the affect of redirecting some of the Salzburg-Venice tourist traffic into a new and interesting
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