Europe - Whither Bound?
by New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1922. 8vo, pp. x + 224. $2.00.
IN this volume a writer, who knows Europe intimately and has written abundantly about its countries and peoples before the war, records his travel impressions of thirteen European capitals old and new — with Monte Carlo added to avoid an unlucky number — in the year 1921. Written originally on the spot for periodical publication, the letters — for such the chapters really are — have the freshness of first-hand impressions. The author does not delve deeply into polities or economics, but he has background and is not superficial. He is interested mainly in the dynamics of contemporary Europe, in the forces that are moulding it into new and unfamiliar forms. Yet he does not speculate and philosophize about those forces; he describes their concrete manifestations in social, business, and political life.
Tre&chanil Strokes occur in these national character sketches that sometimes cut rather deep. Athens, ’the cradle of the ideal, is a city where there are no ideals at all.’ At Sofia the author finds ‘none of the elegance and indolence of Athens, or of the ingenuity and cleverness of Constantinople, but a steadiness and drabness of peasant clumsiness.’ At Belgrade, too, the population is mostly ‘ the peasant come to town.’ Passing to Hungary the author enters an atmosphere of sullen determination to retrieve defeat. Over the passport window on the Danube quay at Budapest you read: I believe in one God. I believe in God’s eternal justice. I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.
‘ New Bohemia ’ is * manifestly the best-governed State which has arisen out of the ruins of the old.’ The Czechs are described as ‘a thickset, burly, rather obstinate people, with imperturbable eyes. . . . They seem to be the most capable people in their part of the world.’ The Poland of 1921 —indications of a different, spirit are visible now—does not win the author’s approbation.
The older capitals of central and eastern Europe are harder to describe effectively with a few dashing pen-strokes, nor do they impersonate so satisfactorily to the informed reader the larger and more complex nationalities for which they stand. Yet there are many illuminating flashes in the pages describing them.
What the author entitles ‘extra leaves’ are interpolated between several of the chapters. They did not form part of the original articles from which the present volume is compiled. Whether they treat of the passport abomination or of loftier themes, like international charity, they are suggestive and thought-provoking.
Upon the whole this is not a weighty book, but it repays perusal. It is informing in an impressionist way, adding to one’s stock of intimations and opinions rather than to one’s store of precise facts. It deals with conditions more or less ephemeral, and will be read with greater interest to-day than to-morrow. But it is the kind of a book that helps a layman to interpret what he learns about Europe from other sources, and it entertains while it instructs.
VICTOR S. CLARK.