French and English
My Old World. By Ernest Dimnet. (Cape. 7s. Oda
THE dream of England which haunted a small boy in a village of Northern France, over fifty years ago,. has resulted in the series of works by which the Abbe Dimnet has won an audience here and in America. Perhaps few Frenchmen have ever used our language with greater ease than he, in his Brontg Sisters, The Art of Thinking, and other books. The new work by him, My Old World, may be found still more attractive, as showing the inner history of this literary achievement. The author's family, and his own birth and education, con- nected him with a section of France whose inhabitants boaSted the enhanced patriotism of frontier people. Both. Belgium and Germany were close at hand. But for many English readers the scenes of his boyhood are interesting on account of their connexion with our later War. Born at Trelon, he was familiar with the Forest of Mormal, the pasture lands of French Flanders, and such towns as Lille and Hazebrouek. Some of us, visiting these scenes in recent years, have found it hard enough to recognize the expected glamour in their reserved and unpromising features. The Abbe Dimnet, confessing he had once been prejudiced against Lille, now writes of them in such a way as to expose their hidden vitality. He was above all attracted to Douai, renowned, for him, as the lost centre of sixteenth-century English learning. Only by chance did the eager schoolboy discover that the old Douai tradition was still upheld in the English Benedictine College.
Cambrai, another town that rouses English echoes, was fated to wear for the Abbe Dimnet an aspect peculiarly and forbiddingly French. At the Cathedral school there he expe-
rienced strict Gallic discipline, and long hours of study without recreation. Yet there he, developed so great a preference for intellectual joys that a new book could become en'important friend, and a mastery of Latin could ease the personal agonies of home-sickness. There, too, was fostered that love of the English language which an uncle had first planted in his willing mind. In consequence, the school -lives more happily in his memories of Cambrai than does the Seminary to which he returned later, rebelling inwardly against its antiquated teaching of theology and its prison-like rules. .
It should not be inferred, however, that. the Abbe' Minna has anglicized himself into a contempt or even a dislike for his native country. In this quiet record he gives charming and appreciative sketches of his- three young aunts, of a miracle-working chapel in the Trelon woods, of the pastures and peasants known to his boyhood. These -pictures retire into the background only to give place to the author's keen delight in mental diScoveries and the fruits of • reading or reflection. Statements revealing a wise and matured outlook are to be met with throughout the book. " Children are not childish " is a 'remark that many adults might Well take to heart. Again, he speaks of happiness as a state more easily known in retrospect than at the moment. It is this knowledge that now enables him to pay such mellow tribute to his life in Douai, and to recall with gratitude " the long: slow years in which his soul ripened in peace in its closed garden." We leave him leaking for the first time on the New York sky- scrapers, not regretting the change, but aware that one's old world has a tint of its own, altered perhaps by time and
distance, but for ever indelible. SYLVA NORMAN.
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