Mystic Isles of the South Seas
by . New York: The Century Co. 1921. 8vo, 534 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
EVERY generation, someone has said, must interpret anew for itself the history, the hopes, and the dreams of human kind; and it has apparently fallen to the lot of Mr. Frederick O’Brien to fashion for our learned, violent, and unlovely age a current version of the dream of the South Sea paradise. Gone are Melville’s epical adventurers, with their shipwrecks, their forays, and their loves; vanished are Stevenson’s urbane brown chieftains, with their too, too Hieland air; yet the rack of the dream is as full of fascination as ever were its cloud-capped towers.
That such a result has been achieved is evidently the triumph, not of Mr. O’Brien’s style, but of his personality. A sometime sailor, he has an eye for the characters and realities of the seas that the casual though highly trained observer never attains; a sometime newspaper-man, he has the journalist’s instinct for the interesting thing and the interesting human being, the latter in particular; a man of the world through and through, he is tolerant, prepared for all things, and as guiltless of the Puritan attitude as a cultivated Frenchman. We thus hear of people and things whom the romancer Melville would have passed by, and Stevenson was too artificial to mention. In fact, a humorous and good-natured interest in human beings, in wandering sailors, petty officials, hotel-keepers, hard-drinking traders, runaway artists, and Tahitian light-o’-loves is the secret of the book.
It is rather a pity that Mr. O’Brien gives so few photographs of those whom he mentions, and restricts himself, for the most part, to a ‘travelbook’ gallery. The majority of readers, for instance, would far rather see a picture of Kelly, the island labor agitator, than the very much posed photograph of an unknown Tahitian belle which faces page 144, above the intriguing caption, ‘made of love and sunshine.’
But, pictures or not, the dream is here in this entertaining and decidedly readable book — the dream in its present-day reality, even as the twentieth century would see it and hear of it. For, intensely gullible over realities, to-day’s world is suspicious of dreams. In its own language, it ‘wants to be shown.’ Taking the spirit of the time at its word, Mr. O’Brien produces, not a vision, but a kind of super-journalist’s photograph of an actual, inhabitable fragment of the Earthly Paradise, which continues something of a paradise in spite of the attempts of our socalled Western civilization to modify it.
Mystic Isles is a book to put on a handy shelf in the bookcase; it is the sort of thing one takes down every once in a while, and reads, not for edification, not for knowledge, not for the pleasure distilled of literary art, but for the refreshment born of contact with a new revelation of the boundless richness and variety of life.
HENRY BESTON.