Have You Anything to Declare? A Note Book with Com-
mentaries. By Maurice Baring.. (Heinemann.: 8s. 61.) Mr. Baring's Scrap-Book * MR. MAURICE BARING-takes down the key and iewis us, like excited children, to the store-room wherein he has gathered4he fruits of a lifetime's reading in seven languages. He dreamed that he had crossed the Styx and had to declare the literary liaggage with which he had travelled during his life ; but "only those things of which I had a permanent record either
in my 'memory or in written notebooks." When he tells, us that he has drawn on these two sources only we believe him at
once : his delightful book is not so much an anthology as scrap-book, and its contents are not of the sort that one Asembles with a definite respository in mind. The only book I know like it is Mr. Aldous Huxley' S _Teals and Pretexts, but
between their commentaries there: is a wide difference : whereas Mr. Huxley most enjoys those intellectual contraits which enable him to point an astringent moral at the end, Mr. Baring is generally content to hold something beautiful up to the light like a connoisseur, remarking upon its colour,
its _ texture, perhaps upon its affinity to some. product, of another culture. Both authors select their material with originality and discernment ; but the plums on Mr. Hu.xley.'s
shelves are " cookers " intended to adorn, and amplify scam
philosophic pudding, while Mr. Baring's are sugar-plums, demanding irresistibly to-be eaten at once for their own sake.
Everyone will pick his own favourites. There is no lack of variety : Horace, Renan and John Ford are among the authors to whom notable justice is done. And there are many pleasant surprises, among them several passages from the almost forgotten novels of John Oliver Hobbes, full of wisdom and gaiety and excellent writing. How modem a ring has this death-bed scene from The Sinner's Comedy : "He did not speak again till just before he died, when he kissed his wife's hand with a singular tenderness, and called her Elizabeth. She had been christened Augusta Frederica, but then, as the doctors explained, dying men often make these mistakes." Translations—mostly metrical and often Mr. Baring's own— are given of all the passages in Greek, Latin, Spanish and Russian ; frequently of the French and German authors too. Few people could skim through this book without an increased awareness of the variety and splendour of the world's literature, and many will be impelled to venture into fresh country themselves. That is the great virtue of such books ; and if it be objected that they sometimes tempt us to stick on to our luggage pretty labels from towns we have never
visited, well what of it ? An amiable piece of snobbery at the worst, the practice is often an earnest of good intentions.
For my own part I am undismayed by the danger to my soul, and wish that other men of wide reading and fine taste—say Mr. Santayana and Mr. MacCarthy to begin with—would trust us with the keys of their store-rooms too.
DESMOND SHAWE-TAYLOR.
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