Publisher's Synopsis
A review from "The Critic," Volumes 20-21:
THE CHARACTERIZATION of foreign types and foreign lands on piquant and telling lines requires no small talent: it is indeed of those talents that have wrought minute perfections in ivory, painted a drama on a fan, or displayed Japanese delicacy on a screen or a kakemono. A very cunning eye, a very deft pencil, a taste for salient detail, and a command of vivid colors go to make up such a power of sketching in words, a power not to be despised or ignored - rather to be envied and delighted in. How many people have vainly attempted to describe Constantinople or Venice, Cordova or Mexico, floundering around among vague epithets and hopeless adjectives without ever reproducing the phantom of a minaret, the glimmer of a palace-haunted canal, the glow of Spanish light, the vivid beauty of Chapultepec! Volumes have been written on these cities and places whose voluminousness in vain aspires to reproduce Spain or Italy, Orient or Occident, as a single strophe of Victor Hugo's 'Orientales' reproduces the subtle scenery of the East, or as Fernan Caballero reproduces her beloved Andalusia in a single paragraph. The imagination must be "henna" stained, deep-dyed, with the pigments and poesies of a region before the quintessence of an old town or land can be put into the tiny phials of words and exhale their vague yet precious odors to the sympathetic mind.
Mr. Hopkinson Smith has this power - the painter's power of depicting both in pigments and words what he has seen and heard in other lands. This delightful little volume is an artist's portfolio of sketches from East and West, all the more vivid because the sketches are altogether in words rather than in lines. Its author is an impressionist with a romantic tendency, swift to see a beautiful effect-a bit of fine cornice or palace-window on the Grand Canal, a little landscape on the Mexican Vega, a horse-shoe arch or a picturesque ruined door on the Guadalquivir, - and skilful to transfer its soul and spirit to his reader. The initial sketch -'A Day at Laguerre's ' - is a little poem in its way, celebrating scenery near Harlem in charming fashion, and making one envy the possessor of eyes so sharp and so poetic. All Venice looms through the pages of 'Espero Gorgoni, Gondolier, ' and Turks and cypresses and Oriental rascalities crowd the lines of 'Under the Minarets' in very lifelike form. Our guide at Stamboul bore the imposing name of 'Pericles' - a solemn-faced, rather taciturn Neo-Greek, whose mournful visage brightened only at the vision of a golden Napoleon or a sovereign at the close of his day's twaddle. Mr. Smith rejoiced in 'Isaac Isaacs, ' a Turk of Hebraic tendencies who had stolen another man's name. At Athens it seemed appropriate that our cicerone should be dubbed 'Miltiades, ' while Mr. Smith's Cordovan mentor was the scion of an ancient but impecunious line. The artistic form of his book is redolent of the studio, with its quaint title-page, narrow paging, and broad margin. Travelling of the kind Mr. Smith habituates us to spoils the reading of regular books of travels. It is graceful, piquant, humorous, soulful; and one's sole chagrin is that there is so little of it.
