Algernon Blackwood

“ His deep conviction is felt in every description, in every adventure, in every comment and suggestion, and his message is one the world may well listen to as at least a little bit of stimulating leaven against the sordid commercialism that oppresses life everywhere today. ”

“ To give broken quotations thus from the notebook of an idealist, I feel, is to risk injustice to their author, but I have taken the risk in order to show the deeper meaning which breathes everywhere through the pages of what is three-quarters a book of travel, and an uncommonly interesting one at that. Indeed, so deftly and unobtrusively is the idealism interwoven with the exciting adventures that the reader whom it bores may pass it by without detriment to his enjoyment of the narrative. ”

“ When we have accomplished that, a miracle is promised⁠... The new heart means the salvation of all.⁠ ⁠... We are many: I speak for thousands who are voiceless. But we are feeble, for we know not one another: We shall know. ”

“ The writer’s passionate worship of Beauty, his love of simplicity, his charity, his courage, all these make a strong appeal. He has in him poetry and vision; he strikes fearlessly; he is an honest rebel in vehement revolt ”

“ It is with life itself that this volume is concerned,” and his observations upon life may be listened to for what wisdom is in them, because he is in such tremendous earnest, because he loves Beauty for its own sake and because he is constructive as well as critical. ”

“ By the combined effort of the flower of the race, those who at present are rebels, even tramps, but who, in view of their larger vision, might be spiritual leaders; and by ignoring “the smaller, meaner sort of man” which “the tremendous commercial machine is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration, the average man, ‘the damned, compact, liberal majority,’ to use the words of Ibsen.⁠ ⁠... ”

“ Details of the journey are to be published later, and will form a continuation of the work begun in his Undiscovered Russia⁠—the full story of the places visited along the Black Sea shores, of the life of the pilgrims on the way to the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre and at the Shrine itself. The interesting, and I would say the important, things in this book are the inner experiences of the tramp who is in rebellion, for to be a tramp, in the writer’s meaning, is to be one who has escaped⁠—from the conventional moulds of life. ”

“ Lord Dunsany, oddly enough, makes a somewhat similar plea in the English Review for October. The note sounds, indeed, from many quarters. It is in the air⁠—a warning and a prophecy. Ostensibly these “sketches” describe the writer’s pilgrimage with Russian peasants to Jerusalem; but actually they are the notes of a spiritual pilgrim going towards the New Jerusalem. For he is no common “tramp”; there is genius in tramping as there is in painting pictures or in playing tennis. ”

“ And he answers his own question thus: “It is not to wreck thc great machine”⁠—of modern commercialism⁠—“it is not even, as I think, to build a new machine⁠ ⁠... The one way and the first way is to use and subordinate the present machine, to limit it to its true domain, and let it be our true and vital servant”⁠—a plea, in other words, for proportion, for higher ideals, less fever for gold, less ugly, hurried rush in the worship of that Moloch, Progress, a little more room for Beauty and inner spiritual endeavour ”

“ For all the rest of ordinary humanity is waiting to live its life in relation to these (greater ones) . By finding the few who can live the life of communion, the few who can show forth the true significance of the race. ”