In a literal sense it is exalted society of which Henry S. Salt tells in his bulky, yet all too brief book “Company I Have Kept” (London: George Allen & Unwin, 10s). For mountains figure much in the retrospect; and the heights of the lake region and the incomparable architecture of the hills of Skye, prompt soulful moods that counteract others that are coldly intellectual and sometimes acidulated.
His friendliest reader will feel that somehow or other Mr Salt’s views became warped, but that the result has not reached his inwardness. Mr Salt may call himself a Rationalist, but this delightful and inspirational record of his experience of mountain solitudes, of great-hearted men and beneficent books, and of humanitarian movements, certifies his identity with what Christianity implies.
Among the many things in Mr Salt’s very rich book is a paraphrase philosophy, so original, whimsical, and practical that, mentally, one leaps at its impact. A lover of quiet, he laments the rattle and crash of the modern world, and with due respect for the boon of wireless, he suggests that a much greater boon would be an invention of exactly the opposite sort—one that would give us the means not of listening-in but of silencing out.
He thinks that if noise develops, a valued pocket instrument will be one which will enable, not the deaf of hear, but the hearer to the deaf.
The Courier and Advertiser, June 25, 1930, p. 12
Book Reviewed: Company I Have Kept