The Restless English
The Traveller's Eye. By Dorothy Carrington. (Pilot Press. 18s.) THE writer of this learned but diverting study of English travellers abroad from the Renaissance to our own day declares in her intro- duction that she has kept two " interconnected themes " in view. These themes she defines as " the story of how the English have looked on the world and the story of how they have acted in it." She has elucidated them with scholarship, with wit and with a most enviable skill. Anyone at all acquainted with the dust-laden travel shelves of the second-hand bookshops knows what a multi- tude of travel books the English in their restlessness have put out over the last four and a-half centuries. They range from the early, clumsy, calf-bound quartos and stumpy duodecimos, their pages black with what Miss Carrington happily calls " a rash of capitals," to the tightly-printed scientific or antiquarian records of Victorian travellers. Travel has been an outlet for that romanticism which English life has increasingly denied to English people at home, and in the whole body of our travel literature a very distinct trend of development is discernible as we pass on from one generation to the next. "Discernible," may be, but surely Miss Dorothy Carrington is one of the first people to have discerned it clearly, and to have described and illustrated it in a serious but entirely amusing book. " In the unsifted and largely forgotten mass of English travel literature I gradually became aware of a development, as definite as that of English poetry or the English novel," she tells us. It was a development in point of view. The marvelling mediaeval pilgrims gave place to the Tudor buccaneers, who in turn ceded to the inquisitive Stuart travellers. After these came the merchants and the dilettantes of the eighteenth century, and, finally, the practical, the patriotic imperialists of Queen Victoria's reign. The method followed by Miss Carrington is -a §imple one, but like all truly simple things extremely hard to do. From the beckon- ing swarms of English -travellers she has cold-bloodedly selected sixty or seventy specimen persons, extracted whatever she wishei.i from their journals or memoirs, and stitched these extracts together with firm, informative, humorous prose. But the book is not a compilation of snippets, for Miss Carrington has marshalled her material with a positively muscular control, has co-ordinated it and made it cohesive. It is divided into two parts and eight sub- sections: the first part, Travelling to the East, shows English travellers setting off first for Paris, then for Italy, then for Turkey and finally for China ; the second gives glimpses of westward journeys—to West Africa, to the Caribbees, to America and to ,:ht far Pacific. Her choice of countries and travellers is personal and thus arbitrary ; she says_ she has left out as much interesting material as she has put in—another reason, perhaps, for the calm sense' of solidity and richness which the book gives one. There has been no book-making or scraping of the barrel here. The section on Paris begins with Coryate and Dallington, includes Evelyn bur also the raw-boned Scots lad Lauder of Fountainhall, and ends with George Moore in the Paris of the Impressionists, and an account of the city after the Fall of France. Venice is seen through the eyes of Lord Perth, a Jacobite exile, as well as of Tom Moore ; for the routes to China, we have Sir Aurel Stein ; for the West Indies and the Southern States she has disinterred, among others, Miss Janet Schaw, while for modern West Africa the authoress has wisely relied upon the sharp steel pen of Cecil Beaton. Every traveller in this book seems in it for some excellent reason, and everything they say bears generally towards the twin themes stated at the outset.
The illustrations form an ideal commentary—nos:algic, extravagant —upon the text and precisely echo the mood of the book. Thev are beautifully reproduced—the whole volume, indeed, is admirably got up. Only the proof-readers and the printers have let Miss Carrington and her caravan of travellers down: the book is sprayed with misprints and someone has played hell with the index. But in contrast to such superfluous incompetence the grasp and knowledge. the sense of fun and the sense of humour of the writer stand out brisk and clear. This is a really entertaining as well as an original
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