In Praise of Journeys
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
HE who confides these words to a long-suffering typewriter has not been truly happy since he declared — in print — that ‘ there is only one thing stupider than the average person’s travels: and that is the book written to describe them.’ There is some truth in the statement, and that, precisely, is why it is an ungrateful thing for one to have inscribed who has derived much comfort from his own wanderings and from those of other people. Do you, O Superior Person, consider travel literature an insipid kind? That is but natural if you have just been reading one of the contemporary atrocities got out to serve as letterpress for pictures in three colors. I can even imagine a robust reader turning from Mr. Lucas’s latest travel-book on the ground that it is too saccharine in its song of ' the joy of entering and reëntering Paris.’ Let such an one turn, after hearing Mr. Lucas out, to the Totall Discourse of William Lithgow. ‘Paris, I confesse, is populous,’ he writes; ‘a masse of poore People, for lacques and pages, a nest of rogues, a tumultuous place, a noctuall denne of Theeves, and a confused multitude.’ Between Lithgow, with his seventeenth-century testimony, and Lucas, with his of the twentieth, we somehow manage to get the real Paris: the Paris that had Villon and has Apaches; the Paris that has Sorbonne and Comédie Française and Louvre thrown in for good measure. Travel literature is ever rich in just such mutual correctives.
Frivolous though it is, in the main, an essay on this bastard genre, with due attention paid, not only to the experiences of travelers throughout the lands and ages, but also to their sentiments and philosophies, and the attitudes of worldly men and wise toward this pastime of travel, would make a magnum opus worthy of the dustiest labors. Far be it from me to attempt anything so scholarly. I am content in setting myself down, for my part, a confirmed and habitual nomad. And that is the fact which best proves to me that I am really an American.
Formerly, men traveled from motives of materialism. But we have changed all that, we Americans. No one says to-day what Dr. Fuller wrote in the long, long ago: ‘Labor to unite and distil into thyself the scattered perfections of several nations.’ We know too well that those ‘scattered perfections’ are out-perfected here in the States. We travel — some of us — rather to enjoy the opportunity of telling foreigners how much better we do this or that at home. ‘ You must come to Chicago and see for yourself,’ we urge; whereas Richard Lassels, Dr. Fuller’s worthy contemporary, counseled that ‘the traveler have a care not to carry himself along with himself, but to leave behind all his faults and vices, so that when he comes back and meets some evil companion he may avoid him; and when the other protests, “ I am so and so,” he may answer, “It may be so, but I am no more I.”’ The nearest approach to so old-fashioned a counsel is James Russell Lowell’s; and I really think that the American’s is the better statement of the case. ‘The wise man,’ he writes, ‘travels to discover himself; it is to find himself out that he goes out of himself and his habitual associations.’ And the principle is the same, whether we use ocean-liner, tunnel-train, or arm-chair.
Lowell speaks true in his Fireside Travels when he writes that one may find his antipodes without a voyage to China. Certainly, of all the evercharming travel books the very most delightful is Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma Chambre. Richard Lassels, Gent., the excellent authority whose name one need not apologize for repeating, expressed it as his conviction that ‘ traveling maketh a man sit still in his old age with satisfaction.’ But the genuine philosopher does his best traveling of all in the very act of sitting still. Never was there framed a fallacy more vulgar or more mischievous than that which takes motion for the sine qua non of happy voyaging.
And if 4 self’ is, after all, the Blue Flower of the traveler’s unending search, that, perhaps, explains why so many of our fellow travelers seem utterly wanting in personality. If they had it, they would be tending it carefully, no doubt, in the home garden. Even as it is, they will as likely as not find themselves when they return home, like the Grailseeker in the legend. So, at least, I like to think: apologizing for my conduct and for yours, good reader, since you are equally a traveler, whose eyes have already strayed from this poor page to study the far more interesting shipnews. Nor do I blame you: one smells salt on reaching that corner of the newspaper. One may even hear the whistle blowing its final five minutes in praise of the ocean, and all the wonders overseas.
Half of the pleasure of travel consists in the advance study of time-tables and ‘Shipping Intelligence.’ These documents call up new pictures and refresh old ones. Anticipation and retrospect blend into one perfect composition. The happiest day-dreamer of all is the intending traveler, in springtime.
Wise men, to be sure, decry every sort of travel literature, even time-tables. As for the thing itself, they call traveling a fool’s paradise. But wise men have never heard of the Blue Flower. The learning they prate of is book-learning — a sorry substitute for the knowledge of men and things, the varied cheer, the shifting scenes, the scarcely ever serious fatigues, of reasonable travel. Nor need a man stop acquiring even the thing called learning because his legs or some other engine carry him hither and thither. When Lecky tramped the Pyrenees he carried Spinoza in his pocket, ‘getting exceedingly enthusiastic about the scenery and exceedingly perplexed about the difference between Hegel and Schelling.’ Lecky’s idea of mountain climbing is not mine, yet there is the precedent for any one to follow who thereto inclines. Certainly there was never a want of peripatetic philosophers. Travel of some sort mankind must have — or takes it, like Xavier, in his bed-room. Some write books about lands they hope to visit on the proceeds; as Gautier in the case of his Spain. Some, more conventional, actually use steamships and railways and motor-cars. For, to the normal man, ‘All the world’s his soil.’ And the less cause we can allege for our travels,