Tidelines. By Keith Shackleton. (Litter- worth Press. 31s. 6d.)
THIS picture-book of birds aims at giving atmosphere rather than scientific detail. Like Mr. Peter Scott, who writes a foreword and was trained in ornithology by the same head- master, Mr. Shackleton sees birds as the centre of every picture ; but his work is on the whole more dramatic and stylised than Mr. Scott's with a good deal of Japanese influence. The book consists of sixteen reproductions of oil paintings on sea sub- jects, surrounded with an explanatory essay and black and white drawings, some full- page, some of single figures. The writing is of necessity discursive, but Mr. Shackleton has a number of interesting and sincere things to say about the birds themselves, himself and his art, and his style is youth- fully vivid and poetic. He is aiming, he explains, at people who " take pleasure in the life of the wild without applying them- selves to the biology of it " ; and it is the wild he accentuates, painting stormy shore- less seas, empty sands and vast skies. In his " will to see new things " he learnt to pilot a plane, and as soon as he was familiar with the new sights he went to an estuary to look down at it through the eyes'. of a migrant bird. Indeed it is, all through, the bird's world that is shown, and the one human figure painted close to, a girl carry- ing a duck, jars a little. Though ,Mr. Shackleton mocks at himself as a senti- mentalist, he admits that every bird senti- mentalist has something of the scientist too ; and he knows a great deal of the lives of birds, not noting dry minutiae but investing day-to-day habits with grandness _ and mystery. The illustrations themselves have a fine decorative quality and a sense of weather and light and shade. The book's format and printing are altogether handsome.
G. F.
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