THE CRIMSON BOOKSHELF - REVIEWS - JOTS AND TITLES

"I know such little heavens that I could take you to islands lucked away under the Line. You sight them after weeks of crashing through water as black as black marble because it's so deep, and you sit in the fore-chains day after day, and see the sun rise almost afraid because the sea's so lonely. . . . And there are noises under the sea, and sounds overhead in a clear sky. Then you find your island alive with hot, moist orchids that make months at you and can do everything except talk. There's a waterfall in it three hundred feet high, just like a sliver of green jade laced with silver; and millions of wild bees live up in the rocks; and you can hear the fat cocoanuts falling from the palms. . . ."

What Dick promised Maisie as they sat on the beach and watched the signal rockets flare from the bridge of the "Bharralong," south-bound in the Channel chop, is fulfilled in "White Shadows of the South Seas." The fascination of strange peoples and new scenes lies at some time on every one, and among all the harvesters of exotic flowers who have written of happier climes and simpler manners, till there has been of late years no end of making books about the South Seas, Frederic O'Brien takes high place.

"Typee" and "Omoo" were gateways to wonderland in our youth, opening upon a region "where every prospect pleases" and only in the eyes of the European missionary is man ever vile. Melville, perhaps, discovered to literature a whole new demesne for the imagination to conjure with. Charles. Warren Stoddard bore his testimony to the passing of a Polynesian paradise; Robert Louis Stevenson died "under the wide and starry sky" where he passed his latter days; Jack London, Safroni Middleton, Rupert Brooke, paid tribute each in his own specie; Paul Gauguin painting and drinking absinthe to the end, seeking relief from constant paint in drugs, limned the pagan folk of "Bloody Hiva-oa" for all the world, and lies now in an unknown grave overlooking the Bay of Atuona.

It remained for Frederick O'Brien, journalist, author, seaman, and wanderer on the face of the earth, to turn the fancy of a war-sick world once more to a half-forgotten corner of the globe. James Norman Hall and Hector MacQuarrie may follow on the path he leads to reveal a parting glimps of the fairyland that fades as civilization makes its inroads.

O'Brien's story of his visit among the child-like cannibals in the vale of Atuona, under the peak of Temotiu, has already won rank as a classic among books of travel. Although its author will never be held a great stylist, he is supremely readable. What is more important, he has the power to make his reader see the scenes which he describes so colorfully and know the quaint characters that live between his pages.

In passages the volume consists of pure description; chapters are interlarded which are almost unsurpassed as examples of the short story; now and again the writer indulges in the speculative essay; all so instinct with warmth and life and motion as to carry the reader quite out of himself.

After all, it is probably pleasanter to sit by the warm fire of a cold winter's evening, and imagine one's self lolling on the "paepae" of some picturesque Marquesan hut, listening to the chatter of Exploding Eggs, the native valet, and Chief Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in The Mud, than it would be to explore in the flesh those far-away places, to broll under the tropic sun, flee from the shark and the enraged swordlish, or suffer the stings of the "nones" in deserted Haapa, where the last dregs of the Typee race wait for death to release them. One even half-suspects that the beauty of Vanquished Often and her companions sporting on the sunny beaches of Vait-hua, is allied in charm to the sweetnes of melodies unheard.

Where the author turns to rumination over the spectacle of a dying race, or comparison between the eucharist and primitive cannibal rites, he treads where a mere passing acquaintance with Lang, Frazer, and Franz Cumont will not allow us to follow. His anthropology may be sound; at any rate it is interesting. And his conclusions are pathetic.

Kipling, who has contributed his bit to the literature of the southern seas, compels quotation again. Laying down the "White Shadows" one is reminded inevitably of McAndrew's hymn of the places where:

By day like playhouse-scenes the shores slid past our sleepy eyes;

By night the soft, lesceevious stars dleered from those velvet skies.