Trairellers' Tales
One Fine Day I.Was walking Along . . . By Margot Robert Adamson-. • (Den,t. 6s.) -
Roumania. By Walter Starkie. (Murray. 10s. 6d.)
A Sussex Peep-Show. By Walter Wilkinson. (Geoffrey Bles.
78. 6d.)
Trade Winds. The Adventures of a Dealer in Pearls. By Louis Kornitzer. (Geoffrey Bles. 10s. &I.) MISS ADAMSON is not a traveller but a pilgrim, and in this age of diffuse beliefs she has put herself under the protection of St. James of Compostello. She is a poet and mediaevalist, but on a fine day when she goes a-walking she never strays too far from the stable in which she keeps a winged horse- The eloquence of Ruskin which sent so many mild creatures abroad with their little paint-boxes is not perhaps for our century. -We require a more nervous quicksilvered enthusi- asm ; an interpretive fancy, such as we find in Mr. Sitwell's Baroque Art, is to our taste. Miss Adamson re-creates the intensity of Gothic art and conjures up its' triumph in places such as Freiburg, Wurzburg, Speyer and Darmstadt. She writes Nil-Us-choice precision : we follow her obediently " LIP the wide street, fringed with plane-trees, edged with those wide conduits of clear-running, green hill-water that glitter
along the streets of Conrad of Zahringen's city, as if in delightful, in folk-song imitation of those running waters whose music makes glad the city of God.' " She interprets and defines accurately the inarticulate appreciation of the ordinary traveller gazing at cathedral or stained glass.
She is a traveller in an imaginative world of carven saints, mysterious gargoyles and mediaeval aspiration. Those who remember the exhibition of English mediaeval art at South Kensington a few years ago and realize how scattered, hovit vestigial are those glories of the past, will appreciate her chapters on the English cathedrals. A wine-red patch of glass at Beetham in Westmorland, the Lantern of Ely, the " great cream-gold arches and pillars " of Abbot Paul at St. Albans, the faded wall-paintings that she restores imaginatively with their colour—here is a lost world to which she brings the light of historic imagination. To add to the variety of this book there are glimpses of the kingdom of Fife and of lonely Northern capes.
In complete contrast is Mr. John Gibbons' book. He makes no attempt to define the emotions which the Vatican or the Ponte Vecchio at Florence aroused in him. He gives us the small change of travel, the embarrassments of hiring taxis or catching trains. His plain unpretentious fellow.- feeling is not unattractive. He tells us much about the new Italy—about, for instance, the well-run child-welfare clinics established to further the Fascist ideal of a greater popula- tion. At Loretto he was interested in the holy house of Our Lady, said to have been transported by angels from Nazareth in the thirteenth century. As an earnest convert to Roman Catholicism, Mr. Gibbons has been relieved to find that acceptance of this remarkable miracle is not an article of faith. Mr. Gibbons once tramped to Lourdes, but he is less inspired by the tourist world of railway carriages.
Certainly Shanks's mare may often take the place of the winged steed. Professor Starkie borrowed a rough suit of clothes and, with fiddle under oxter, trudged through Hungary and Roumania in search of gipsy music. Professor Starkie had plenty of adventures ; from the first nomad encampment he was chased ignominiously, wondering what George Borrow would have done in similar circumstances. He became equally friendly with the Magyar cafe bands and with the summer wandering tribes. Here are fascinating glimpses of a country where music is an essential of life and a legendary form of magic. We hear of Czermak, a Magyar nobleman who, after an unlucky love-affair, wandered in rags through the forest with his fiddle, of Czinka Parma, the wonderful girl musician of the eighteenth century. The slow Lassa, the pulse-quickening csardas—here is captured for us the idiom of the Hungarian spirit. Professor Starkie seems, however, to have been able to don and doff his rustic disguise with ease and to return from uncomfortable camp to Budapest café when he wished. His summer holiday exploit is slightly alarming. Who knows but that the red- bearded apostolic beggar outside a. Genoese church may not be a distinguished University professor who has hired the pitch, or that the street musician to whom one compassionately gives a copper or two may not be a famous composer spending his vacations al fresco.
Mr. Walter Wilkinson has been sending round the hat for a good number of summers. His one-man Peep-Show with its puppets, Martha, John Barleycorn, the curate and others has given him an excellent angle from which to view the hidden England. Bringing the excitement of the fair to lost villages, he can stir even sluggish rustic minds into semi- articulate enthusiasm. There is a Sussex which has not been entirely captured by the novelists, and one can wander sunnily with Mr. Wilkinson through the valley of the Adur, by Coombes, High Salvington and other dream places. Mr. Wilkinson has now gone through five shires, and there are still plenty more of them left.
Mr. Anderson's description of summer cruises among the Hebrides is enthusiastic, but it is difficult to vary successive descriptions of the panorama of sea and lonely mountain.
Trade Winds reminds us with a shock that the magazine short stories are really true. Pearls, like hidden treasure, seem to bring out strange human traits. Mr. Kornitzer's adventures in Broome, the Australian pearl fishery, and in Sulu among the Moro natives, Japs, Chinks and pirates were
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