From Paris to Pekin over Siberian Snows

Embarrassed readers, who delight in books of travel, whether for the recreation or the useful information they afford, are not relieved of their difficulty when the title of the work, instead of indicating the nature of the subject, only presents an enigma for them to solve. How, for instance, is the reader to gauge the nature of the contents of “Voyage en Zigzag?” It might mean the itinerary of some crooked course among the Alps, or, perhaps, the log-book of a yacht chopping about the Channel, or the record of anything but a straightforward journey. Again, “By Land and Sea” might simply be the diary of a holiday trip from London to Paris, or a réchauffé of impressions of a “globe-trotter,” who went to see what everybody talked about that he also might talk about what he had seen. Then there are a host of others, such as “Travels West,” “The Land of the North Wind”—which one has to discover vaguely by ascertaining first where it does not blow,—“Loin de Paris,” “Dans les Nuages,” “On Blue Water;” all of which might be strictly applicable to the metropolitan area if the water were only just a little bluer. But “Voyage Autour de ma Femme” is still less intelligible. Is it a book of travel at all, or only a romance, or a comédie-vaudeville? It may not be a fantaisie like “Voyage Autour de ma Chambre,” nor even the record of a journey necessarily performed within four walls, for—though I have not looked at the book—it may be the narrative of an unsentimental journey, in which the tourist had taken a holiday trip all around picturesque Europe and his wife, leaving her at home; or it may be a sentimental journey as touching as Sterne’s—a kind of circular tour en petit, circumscribed by the ordinary length of the apron-string; in which event, a very subjective turn of the impressions de voyage would be evident; and consequently would not suit readers who decidedly prefer to regard what is presented from the objective side.

The reader will naturally discover from the title of this book the traveller’s course, but he will at the same time, no doubt, desire to know something of the character of the book.