INTO THE SUN

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21116, 17 March 1934, Page 15

INTO THE SUN

The Ont-of-Doors Book. Selected and arranged toy Arthur Stanley. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 486 pp. (6/- net). This is an exceedingly likeable book in every way. Plain green linen, with the titling in gold on the back-strip. Nothing on the front cover but a little stamped design of a mile-stone and tall grass. Very well printed on thin paper, so that 500 pages, nearly, make a book only a shade more than half an inch thick and therefore apt for the pocket. (Pass the question whether a reader out of doors wants an out-of-doors book to read in.) Some, but not too many, of Mr Eric Fitch Daglish's neatest and most harmonious decorations, from woodcuts. And, to come to Mr Stanley's sine-qua-nonnical part of the business last, the choice and arrangement of the extracts in the book are hardly to be praised but in superlatives. He designs 12 sections, including (with what happy propriety) "Wheels and Wings." Here we find Mr Pickwick driving with the two Wellers (and Mr Peter! Magnus) on that journey which produced Sam's profound reflections on the nexus between poverty and oysters and his father's on the misanthropical nature of pike-keepers; we find Tom Brown travelling by stage up to school; we find a passage from Ward's "Hints on Driving"; and we find charming pieces from Washington Irving and Leigh Hunt on the look of all the mufflered, red-faced, ribbon-skilled Wards of this noble period. We find Mr Siegfried Sassoon's verses, "Morning Express," and more by W. G. Hole, also dedicated to the railway and also very good. (And who ever heard of W. G. Hole? This is one of the reasons why Mr Stanley is so laudable an anthologist.) We find Mr Boas's lines to a bicyclebell (but miss Frank Sidgwick's parody, ending "And now that thou art lying, my dear old safety wheel, A handful of umbrella ribs and odds and ends of steel. . . .") and three or four excellent bits about motor-cars and motoring. Then we find a piece on "learning to glide." by a member of the London Gliding Club, verses on gliding by Mr Edward Shanks, a fine extract from David Garnett's "A Rabbit in the Air," Jeffery Day's poem, "On the Wings of the Morning"—a proof of poetry's aptitude for new "subjects" and of Wordsworth's saying about poetry's being the impassioned expression on the face of science—and—easily penetrable initials — "J.M.B.'s" note in "The Times" on "Bron," Captain Lord Lucas, killed in air-fighting on November 4, 1916. This is enough to show how imaginatively and comprehensively Mr Stanley has filled these pages.