Le Terrain de Jeu de l’Europe, by Leslie Stephen, translated by Claire-Eliane Engel. 8 vo., wrappers, 268 pages, with two illustrations. Paris: Victor Attinger, 1935. Price, Fr. 6.50; bound, Fr. 9.50.

Under the inclusive title of “Montagne” this is the third of a series of Alpine classics now appearing for the first time in French translation. The earlier volumes were Charles Gos’ Alpinisme Anecdotique and Mazotti’s Dernières victoires au Cervin. Now one receives Leslie Stephen’s “Playground,” admirably translated by Mlle Engel, whose researches in Alpine history are well known.

Frederic Harrison once said that “The Alps were to Leslie Stephen the elixir of life, a revelation, a religion.” It is the summing up of the intellectual qualities which make his book of such perennial charm, a subtle blending of realism and mysticism that struck a new and inimitable note in Alpine writing. The list of his notable ascents begins in 1858 and continues to 1877. He was first to conquer the Bietschhorn, the Schreckhorn, the Jungfrau from Roththal, the Zinal Rothhorn, and Mont Mallet—to mention only a few of the outstanding peaks in his pioneering. He was born in 1832, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who climbed with him in 1866, died in 1935.

It is a good lesson for English-speaking mountaineers ! Why cannot we have such translations ? Splendid things such as “The Matterhorn” and “Peaks and Precipices” are, to be sure, at hand. But who will give us “Paccard wider Mont Blanc” and “Simler,” or Carl Egger’s “Aiguilles,” or Rickmers’ “Querschnitt,” or Rambert’s “Murmelthier,” or Schuster’s “Weisse Berge”? The Germans do these things well through the flourishing Gesellschaft Alpiner Bücherfreunde.

“Le Terrain de Jeu”—for once the French language fails for a compact equivalent. But may their mountaineers thrill in reading in their own language of this playground, even as we have with the original.

J. M. T.