flict, and I have made it a rule in each case to follow those which seem to me to be the earliest, the best corroborated and the least likely to have been affected by reasons of state or a desire to please the public.

This product of more than four years of research forms a large volume of over five hundred pages, containing seventy illustrations, including maps and contemporary drawings.

The thesis of the author is that the Molluccas and not Spanish treasure ships were the objective of that famous voyage of 1577-80, when Englishmen for the first time circumnavigated the Globe.

The first part of the book is devoted to an exposition and narration setting forth that Drake was probably not commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to raid the commerce of Spain, but that the piracy was self-intentioned, and that he had no plans for a colony in the New World, but was bound for the Spice Islands. The story follows of the voyage of the "Golden Hind" and her fleet to the coast of Brazil and Patagonia where an objector to Drake's purpose was executed. It tells of the tortuous trip through the Straits of Magellan into the all but unknown Pacific, where the fleet suffered a terrible storm which destroyed all the ships but one. This lone vessel pushed up the Chilean coast, raiding shipping as she went, and, with a fortune aboard, made the now famous and much discussed landing on the California coast, whence she voyaged to the Molluccas, on around the Cape of Good Hope, and so home. Part two of the book is devoted to translations and sources, and to a reproduction of such as occur in English, together with an analysis of the maps illustrating the voyage, various appendices, etc.

Of interest to Californians particularly will be the answer to the oft-propounded question, "Did Sir Francis Drake sail through the Golden Gate?" From all available sources Wagner comes to the conclusion that Drake did not enter San Francisco Bay, but made his two landings at Trinidad Head and Bodega Bay respectively.

The author in his introduction explains and regrets the lack of opportunity and space for complete translation of all sources, but for the average reader the volume should prove more than adequate.

Henry R. Wagner, a Yale alumnus (1884), has lived many years in Chile, Mexico, and other foreign countries, where his mining interests called him, and where he fast became known as a book collector and historian. Other volumes which he has

produced are Irish Economics: 1700-1783, The Plains and the Rockies, California Imprints, The Spanish South West, and a translation of original documents California Voyages 1539-1541.

SIDNEY M. WALES.

Random Letters. By JOHN GARDINER COOLIDGE. Boston, Marshall Jones Company. $5.00.

The personal document is having its day. Letters are being hauled out of the attic and rushed to the printer in ever increasing numbers. For the most part they are interesting reading, and often valuable unconscious histories, or sidelights into history; cross-sections of life giving to detail the emphasis that is needed to better interpret the whole. But we still have the right to be a bit particular in our choice of letters. Private correspondence should have at least one of three marks of merit before being thrust upon the unsuspecting and voracious public. Letters should have some intrinsic worth, that is, they should tell a tale; or they should have some historical value; or, lacking these two, should be gems of rhetoric, diction, and style. Random Letters, from many countries, by John Gardiner Coolidge have none of these virtues. And they are the more disappointing because they should be so good.

Coolidge was in the American consular service in Africa, China, Japan, and Mexico, and visited most of the other foreign countries. He was always present when exciting events took place, but the very nature of his position, necessitated his deleting all real news from his letters home. And of what interest is a letter, which says in brief, "Hell is popping, but I can't tell you about it"? The letters of John Coolidge, most valuable to his family, have but a soupçon of worth for the public.

SIDNEY M. WALES.

The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in French Literature 1800-1925. By WILLIAM LEONARD SCHWARTZ. Paris, Champion, 1927.

From the time when the Jesuit priests accompanied the Portuguese on their voyages of conquest along the Indian Ocean the Far East has been a constant stimulus to Western thought and literature. The history of this interchange of ideas is divided into two parts. The first, ending with the French Revolution, was the period of the Jesuit sinologues who, for two hundred years, were the only missionaries of culture between the two civilizations.

In the Jesuit works the literature of form was completely subordinated to the literature of ideas. Poetry, which furnishes the strongest literary bond between the East and the West in the nineteenth century, was scarcely mentioned. The whole fertile field of T'ang poetry remained undiscovered until Hervey SaintDenys published his Poésies de l'époque des Thang in the middle of the past century. The drama was represented by only one play, though this was important because it furnished Voltaire with material for his Orphelin de la Chine. The great mass of novelistic literature was ignored entirely. On the other hand, the Jesuits presented to Europe a picture of the social, moral, and political backgrounds of Chinese culture which, though it has been considerably added to since, has scarcely been surpassed in accuracy. The enthusiasm of the missionary scholars for the Confucian system was communicated to European savants and it resulted in the sinomania of Voltaire and the philosophes.

The years which saw the death of Voltaire and of the members of his group saw a temporary break with the Far East and, in Europe at the same time, a re-distribution of values in literature. Romanticism gave a new interpretation to the term exoticism. Under the influence of Ossian, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, and others, the new exoticism was dominated by the desire for contrast, the longing for something different from reality. In spite of the renaissance of sinological studies in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literature of ideas, which contact with the Orient had stimulated in the previous century, gave way to a literature of emotion, a littérature évocatrice, as a recent French critic has called it. The greater part of the literature using the Far East as a motif during the last hundred years falls into this category, in spite of an occasional appearance of realism.

Professor Schwartz has traced this littérature évocatrice through the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries. It first centered around the person of Théophile Gautier, who inspired his daughter Judith's Oriental works and influenced other writers such as Bouilhet, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts. The latter, in their turn, became the center of a japonisme which arose from their appreciation of Japanese color prints and other Oriental objets d'art. This japonisme had its effect on the Parnassian poets in giving them subjects for their poems, as the author shows by quotations from Hérédia, Mallarmé, and others.

This cult of the Far East seems to have had no influence on the Symbolists or on the development of vers libre but, while these two movements in modern French poetry were developing, an equally important movement of a wider scope, namely, the cult of Impressionism in Art and Literature, was receiving the imprint of Oriental influence. "It is generally conceded," says the author, "that Japanese art, during the last half of the nineteenth century, taught Europe: (1) a new idea based on the charm of irregularity and (2) a new sensitiveness or ability to perceive the fugitive aspects of nature." This last statement applies not only to Japanese art but also to Chinese and Japanese poetry. The influence of the Japanese hai-kai, with its short line and its intense conciseness, is perhaps the most vital point of contact between the literatures of East and West during this period. The cult died down only to revive again, and the beginning of the present century saw not only a new mass of hai-kai poetry in France but also, in Europe and America, an attempt on the part of Arthur Waley, Witter Bynner, Amy Lowell and others to put into English the same intense concentration found in Chinese poetry. Translations of Li Tai-Po, Tu Fu, and other T'ang poets are multiplying rapidly, as well as those of more modern writers, and there is no indication that the interest in this poetry is on the decline.

In the exotic novel the name of Pierre Loti stands pre-eminent. Loti is the most perfect example, in the nineteenth century, of exoticism, in the most generally accepted meaning of the term. It is too much to expect of him that he should be an "interpreter" of other lands and culture. His descriptions and observations lack the objectiveness of the truly observing mind. For this reason his pictures of the Far East differ in essentials very little from those of his other tropical landscapes. Loti was born after his time. He had the enormous advantage over writers on the Far East in the early part of the century in that he was able to describe things he had actually witnessed but he failed as an interpreter of these countries because, in the midst of them all, he saw only himself. He was a Romantic dominated by the truly romantic qualities of pity and melancholy.

Loti misunderstood Japan, says Professor Schwartz, but he is important because he showed other writers what can be done with exotic scenes by the literary artist who actually visits them.

Recent writers like Victor Segalen, Claude Farrère, and Soulié de Morant, with greater gifts as observers, have given us pictures of the Far East in which the exotic elements are mixed with a healthy amount of reality. The author points out that the best of these later writers derive their material from all three of the sources from which Oriental material has been taken, namely, from the study of learned literature on the subject, from the knowledge and appreciation of Oriental objets d'art, and from the experience of travel. In the judicious use of all these materials he sees a hopeful sign that we shall some day have a literature on the Far East which will provide sound materials with which to bridge the chasm between East and West.

In recent years there have been several attempts to determine what progress we have made in bringing Oriental and Occidental thought into harmony. In 1925, for example, there appeared, under the title Appels de l'Orient, a symposium in which a large number of prominent writers attempted to answer the question. A long residence in the Orient has fitted Professor Schwartz to speak on this subject with some authority. He finds very little in French literature since 1800 to warrant the statement that the East has exerted a remarkable influence on Western thought. Anyone who has studied these periods of contact must concur in his opinion. It is probable that with the shrinking of the earth, the advance in sinological science, and the economic urge to break down national boundaries and cultures, we may be approaching that day when true realism will be the keynote in this branch of literature. Until that time we shall be forced to read many books on the Far East which are superficial and even misleading.

The volume we have reviewed is admirable both in the thoroughness with which the author has handled his material and in the restraint which he shows in his conclusions. His first-hand experience of Oriental life has freed him from the false enthusiasms which attack so many travelers in that part of the globe, as well as from the misinterpretations of which they are often guilty. In its thoroughness and usefulness the work is a fitting continuation of Pierre Martino's volume dealing with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

With the exception of one bad typographical mistake the book is well printed. It is to be regretted, however, that a work of this kind does not contain an index.

ARNOLD H. ROWBOTHAM.