Book Reviews

Abstract

THE mode in which this volume has been produced is rather curious. In 1873 M. Meignan, who had already travelled in the regions around the Levant for pleasure, took it into his head that, by way of contrast to these lands of the sun, he would like to see a land where snow and ice were predominant, and accordingly he undertook to travel from France to China through Siberia. He appears to have had no object in the journey but the pleasure of motion and of seeing new and strange objects. It was undertaken in the winter, and the traveller naturally saw, and was interested in, Moscow, Nijni-Novgorod, the Urals, and so travelled through Siberia by Omsk to Irkutsk. After a short stay in the latter place he pursued his journey through Kiachta, Urga, and Kalgan to Pekin. Many travellers have done the journey before and since; it is a long and tedious one, and perhaps that is as much as can be said for it. Mr. Conn talks of crossing “the trackless Desert of Gobi” on the way, but this is an abuse of language. The only part of the Gobi passed is that between Urga and Kalgan, two considerable trading cities, between which caravans, couriers, and travellers go daily along a high road which is a very good one as roads go in Asia. But M. Meignan, having done the journey, and being of a lively and amusing turn, wrote an account of it some time after his arrival in France. This account of a journey in 1873 Mr. Conn has “edited” in 1885; he has, he says, produced a modified version rather than a translation, the modifications consisting in correcting the slipshod style of the original, in producing “a more just co-ordination of parts and subordination of minor details,” and also in expanding the original here and there. The volume, notwithstanding this dual authorship, is pleasant reading, much as a tolerably written account of a journey in Wales or Scotland would be pleasant. There are not a few errors, especially as the traveller gets farther east, but these cannot seriously interfere with such enjoyment as may be derived from a perusal of the volume. As Mr. Conn has a taste for this species of literary work—having published another volume, an adaptation or translation of a Japanese tale by a French writer, during the year— we would suggest to him that he should select his originals more carefully. A sterling popular work in French or German might very easily prove a sterling popular work in English; there can be little real use in reproducing trumpery French books in English, except to add to the already enormous mass of similar indigenous literature in England.