TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14982, 1 June 1914, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Travel Impressions. The "Pall Mall Magazine" (now twenty-one years old, and extremely proud of its majority) prints in its birthday number some entertaining remarks by Hilaire Belloc, headed" "Back from Abroad." He complains that the more he knows of countries or towns, the more surprised ho is at tho paucity and exiguity of any descriptive writing about them. It is not for want of travellers or of publishers. _or one book describing a strange country or corner thereof available to one man's reading a hundred years ago, there are now fifty or a thousand such available to the reading of all men; but they seem to have ceased to translate the foreign experience. The writers seem to have lost the power of transferring from their own consciousness to that of others the particular emotions of travel." And. the remedy is that an individual traveller should not be ashamed of setting down the thing that struck him first and most vividly when he saw a new land. For instance, Mr Belloc knew, from many writers, all the correct things £o be felt and known about Italy, but what struck him the first time he saw Italy was the colour of the houses. No book had prepared him for the astonishing effect produced to the ey© by the absence of white. "Most French houses are dead white; most English ones grey or whitish. But here in Italy I saw whole streets and frontages along the sea bright green, bright yellow, bright red, and bright blue—as one used to see the world in childhood when one looked through coloured glasses to make it seem strange." Other petty matters had not been sufficiently dwelt on. "Tho loud- noise of the crickets; the sight of a scorpion upon a marble floor; the permanent heat of the air, and even of the waters of the sea; the openness of everything—an openness which made churches and palaces into thoroughfares." For the want of vividness in

[ such small things, tho modern travelbook 6till leaves a reader so unprepared that ho finds the real country utterly different from any preconceived impression. As a matter of fact, it is the value of the individual impression that is making tho fortune of the more astute novelist. He had the sense to perceive the trivialities which tho writer of travels ignored, and, through his characters, he may convey to the tintravelled just the impressionist sketch desired. Hawthorne struck tho right lino in "Transformation." Who does not remember, through him, the smell of new bread in Rome? Howells gives us Niagara in "Their Wedding Journey," and Venice in one or two other novels . With Domini, in "The Garden of Allah,'' many readers first realised tho desert. "Lady Hetty Across the Water" sees New York sky-scrapers appearing, "bright and vivid now, as giant hollyhocks growing in irregular rows." The ro_e fields of Rumania blossom in a novo] by Dorothy Gerard; Dutch life stands translated in "Una Silbcrrad's "Good Comrade." And the reading, but non-travelling, public, unfed, as Hilaire Belloe complains, by the writers of fact, buy ravenously tho travels of fiction.

The Foreign Governess. A well-known French novelist, M. Marcel Prevost, was the inaugurator, some time ago, of a campaign against the introduction of English governesses into French families. The reason ho gave for his action was that the French governess is the best teacher and companion for French children, because she can understand and sympathise with her charges and appreciate their point of view, whereas the governess brought up in a foreign country cannot do so. Another argument was that'tco frequently little or nothing is known of antecedents of the foreign governess, and that many cf them have had to leave their country owing to moral lapses. As a result of M. Provost's warning a movement was begun to. discourage French mothers from engaging foreign governesses for their children. Now an Englishman has been carrying the war into the. enemy's country, and warning English people against the dangers of employing governesses of other nationalities. According to Mr William le Queux, the novelist, a secret organisation exists in Germany for placing governesses in the homes of British naval, military, and Foreign Office officials. German, Belgian, French, and Norwegian governesses aro sent to England, he says, by this organisation to obtain secret information as to battleships, forts, war supplies, and so forth. On this disclosure the London correspondent of a Sydney paper comments: -—"If one believed what Mr le Queux has written on the subject as facts which have come within the scope of his investigations, it would seem that high officials of the British Navy and Army not only make a practice of employing foreign governesses, but of taking home with them secret documents of great importance, and leaving them Tying carelessly about for everyone in the house to handle," certainly a rather unlikely hypothesis. Mr lo Queux, the writer adds, has so long been writing sensational fiction of an improbable kind, that he is unable to make his sensational facts appear even remotely probable.