Victorian Travel
Victoria's Subjects Travelled. Edited by Herbert van Thal. (Arthur Barker. 25s.) THERE are many sagging shelves supporting evidence that a suffi- ciency of Victorian ladies and gentlemen were not stay-at-homes. Sooner or later these plump books (The Rifle And Hound in Ceylon. Supplementary Appendix to Travels Among The Great Andes Of The Equator, &c.) were bound to tempt the anthologist, and Mr. Herbert van Thal has grabbed some 382 pages from travel volumes which appeared during the last 50 years of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was not necessary to do more, for the period was an open season for the straight traveller with few reservations for specialists, no aeroplanes to bring continents too near nor official restrictions to drive them too far apart, and a general lull in the grave dangers. (Mr. James Chalmers is the only contributor who perished en voyage, and he was eaten by civilised cannibals of New Guinea who flavoured his flesh with saffron.) Anyway, the editor has been con- tent with an alphabetical arrangement of extracts, and it is up to the reader to play his own game of points and patterns.
Very well, let us admit it is a pity the editor did not keep his avowed intention of "favouring the more obscure." Snippets from such famous writers as Charles Doughty and William Henry Hudson seem to have been included to catch the public-librarian's eye and tend to throw the book out of a possible balance of exploration in forgotten volumes. The most striking of the other extracts are those which record what may never be again. "It is something," wrote the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, "to have seen Bokhara while it may still be called the Noble." It is also something to read an eye-witness account of the city of which it was said: "In all other parts of the world light descends on the earth, from holy Bokhara it ascends." There is, too, a particular and terrible–fascina- tion in Miss Isobella Bishop's note on Seoul where the king was seen by his subjects, who were forbidden to pronounce his name, only at the ceremony of Kur-dong, when he was preceded through the streets by " drummers " beating bowl-shaped -kettle drums in pantomime, some 5,000 servants connected with the palace, playing- card soldiers and an empty chair canopied with red silk to deceive the assassin.
Scenes of Seoul and Bokhara before Time marched into them are surely better subjects for the anthologist than passages from books which rely on the adventure of movement to make their effect, and which lose direction without the background of the whole process of the journey. So one is tempted to wonder again. whether Mr. van Thal ought to have considered more reasons for selection than re-presentation. However, inclusiveness does give the reader an opportunity to make assessments on the achievement of 50 years, and son', of them are surprising. The Earl of Dunraven, alone of the 41 authors, indulges in meditations about the "great awful Oneness " ; and rarely does a traveller lapse into : "What does the world mean to me when I'm in my little tent ? " attitude. -Indeed, far from the period flavour one expected, there seems to be a dis- tinctly modern nate. Mrs. F. D. Bridges speaks frankly of the " dreary " dances in Tibet, with the dancers "apparently absorbed in counting their toes and fingers " ; Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace makes a spirited case for the comparative morality of head-hunting ; and the Earl of Pembroke's gay response to the chaims of Tahiti might have been written, if not experienced. yesterday.
There is nothing musty, then, about the best of this anthology, even if there might have been more of the best. Certainly there are many pages of pleasure for travel-starved readers who live in a war- weary world which has blotted its map. OSWELL BLAKESTON.
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