Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/93

 CURRENT LITERATURE.

Going to Jericho; or Sketches of Travel in Spain and the East. By John Franklin Swift. San Francisco: A Roman & Co.

The days of sentimental journeying are over. The dear, old book of travel, with its conscientious desire to instruct, its guidebook directness, its dreadful distances, and more dreadful dates; its feeble moralizing, its poetical quotations from Moore, Byron and Rogers; its one or two thrilling personal adventures, and its reminiscence of at least one noted foreign public character, is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and impressible ladies, and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes, whose hearts and mucous membranes are equally susceptible. No one dares quote John Murray except ironically; no one draws upon Childe Harold's Pilgrimage except apologetically; no one has any adventure except of a humorous or whimsical quality. They are plundered only by guides; theye "stand and deliver "only bucksheesh; they are devoured only by fleas. Nor is this lack of the heroic quality as remarkable as the want of reverence. A race of good-humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth century, have paid particular attention to the holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvasses with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect. And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish. It has been said they have given nothing in return. But if they have left the indestructible; if they cleared away the extrinsic and useless, and if they opened to us a clearer view of the real edifice of christianity, we need not to sit in judgment on their motives. Beside these exuberant image-breakers—whose perfect unconsciousness of the terror they have excited in the well regulated mind is

not their least charm—even Kinglake Eothen's rhetoric seems occasionaly tawdry, Curtis' sensuous elegance affected and dressy; the spectacle of good Mr. Prime with a revolver in one hand and a bible in the other is somewhat ludicrous, and too susceptible Lamartine's tears mere brine, and pickle. It is true, we have lost something. We have lost that which made Irving's Taleg of a Traveler possible; which lent a nameless charm to some of Lever's earlier novels—the romance of foreign travel. We can offset Lamartine's persistent lachrymoseness by Ross Browne's persistent jocularity; Prime's bibles and revolvers, by Mark Twain's lawless humor and lyric fire; Curtisdilettanteism by Swift's satirical and half playful materialism; and be the gainer. But we cannot afford to lose even such a book as Mackenzie's "Year in Spain "'—though inferior in literary ability to any we have named.:

Mr. John Franklin Swift's "Going to Jericho "is in legitimate literary succession to Howell's Venetian Life, Ross Browne's multifarious voyages, and Mark Twain's Holy Land letters. It is somewhat notable that three of these writers are Californians, and all from the west. With the exception of the first, who has an intrinsic literary merit which lifts him above comparison with any other writer of travel, Mr. Swift in some respects is superior. He is more self-restrained, and often impresses the reader with a reserved power even better than his performance. He uses his satire sparingly, not from lack of material but apparently from conscientiousness of purpose. He is rarely funny for fun's sake alone; but uses his wit only to illuminate some phase of his story, or to pointa moral. He has but one wholly funny chapter in his book— and it is difficult to tell whether the exaggerations which make that humorous are intentional. They certainly are not strained— a quality which cannot be charged upon anything Mr. Swift does, and which is unfortunately a too common fault of your humorous traveler. His best things are said in a