The New Books.
More "Recollections of a Happy Life."[1]
Those who have read Marianne North's "Recollections of a Happy Life" will approve the publishing by the editor, Mrs. J. A. Symonds, of a supplementary volume of "Further Recollections" containing certain earlier chapters of Miss North's journals omitted from the original work. We may say at once that while the new volume lacks the scientific interest of its predecessor, it easily surpasses it in wit and vivacity. The chapters now given were originally omitted, chiefly, as the editor tells us, because the journeys described were over what is nowadays comparatively well-trodden ground—an objection, however, which loses force in the case of narrators whose "travel-pictures," like Miss North's, are largely a reflection of temperament. Miss North had, in a special sense, her own way of seeing things. What she describes comes to us tinged and refracted, as it were, through a quite peculiar medium; so that it really matters little in point of novelty whether her observations are made from the deck of a Nile dahabieh or from the top of a Brompton omnibus, the results being in either case largely out of the average ken.
The most objective and guide-lookish of Miss North's descriptions have, however, a certain value of their own, in that they enable us to contrast the travel of thirty years ago with the more convenient, if less picturesque, methods of our own day. Railways and Cook's steamers had not then, in Spain and on the Nile, quite supplanted the leisurely arrangements of more primitive travel. The jogging, jingling caravan of mules is now, almost everywhere, a thing of the past; so is the old Spanish diligence—a delightful vehicle in which Miss North was whirled "at a furious pace over zig-zag passes and round shoulders of the Pyrenees, racing with a rival diligence in a most breakneck manner, too shaken and exhausted even to notice the wondrous change of vegetation." There is a big hotel now at Luxor! fitted with the "modern improvements," and affected by squads of Cook-forwarded pilgrims; and, in short, the ubiquitous railway, wafting abroad the winged seeds of the "Anglo-Saxon contagion," will in a few more years have made travel, as the editor laments, "everywhere exactly alike."
"Further Recollections" is essentially a transcript of the journals kept by the author from 1859 to 1870, while travelling with her father in Spain, Switzerland, Egypt, and the Levant. The thread of continuity supplied in the opening volume by the scientific purpose of the writer's later journeyings, is here lacking. It is distinctly the work of a younger woman—of a fresh young girl with a fair stock of reading and a vast stock of animal spirits, whose keen enjoyment of the novelties of foreign travel is bracingly manifest in every page of her diary. Miss North was a specially stout-hearted and independent traveller, one of the sort whose elasticity of spirits is more than proof against the annoyances and discomforts that form the melancholy refrain of the narratives of less resolute pilgrims. The direst mishap serves, with her, to point a jest. At the very start, for instance, a precious portmanteau (one portmanteau, containing everything that this admirable woman thought necessary for a journey of several months) fell overboard in the harbor at St. Heliers:
"Everything was thoroughly soaked, and had to be spread out separately to dry; all my paints, paper, and dress (only one); for we took the least possible luggage, and yet had everything we really needed, even luxuries(?) including a bonnet, whose crown I used to stuff with a compact roll of stockings and cram into a hole left for it amongst my underclothing, just big enough to contain it: when taken out it would be damped and set in the sun, with the stockings still in the crown, and it stretched itself into proper shape again, and was the admiration of all beholders."
Very different, we may note in passing, from Miss North's slender effects must have been the baggage train of the American ladies (the "Skinners of Boston") whom she saw later at Philæ tripping about among the relics of the Pharaohs, appropriately dressed "in Worth's very latest fashions," and convoyed by a male apparition clad "in a complete suit of cineraria color, from stockings to cap." Sarcastic Miss North! She even goes to say that, owning to this "Yankee incursion" (that is her disrespectful expression) from the Back Bay, "the place lost half its charm," etc.
A pleasanter American experience was her meeting with Miss Hosmer in Rome 1860.
- ↑ Some Further Recollections of a Happy Life. Selected from the Journals of Marianne North, chiefly between the years 1859-69. Edited by her sister, Mrs. John A. Symonds. With portraits. New York: Macmillan & Co.
