The Immorality of Travel

TRAVELING is the vice of the many and the virtue of the few. ‘Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ said Bacon; but Bacon lived fortunately early and so escaped the modern cult. He never saw what we have seen: the devastation of fair countries, the desolation of old cities, the desecration of sacred shrines, by the intrusive presence of people who do not belong. My bitter complaint is not directed solely against my own countrymen, albeit Americans are multitudinous in offense. I protest against all folk who get out of their frames and insist on making a part of pictures for which they were not designed by nature, whether they be German or Turk, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, or Hindustanee. The day is past when I could welcome, as I could in childhood, the sight of a Chinese coolie pattering home to his laundry, because he gave me the sensation of somehow touching the Orient; the later day has gone, when a supple Lascar along the docks would set me dreaming of the world beyond Suez. Against Turkish travelers in particular I have nourished a grudge since a swarthy and probably distinguished Red-fez poked his head over my shoulder while I was reading a manuscript in the Bodleian. I felt his breath on my cheek, and looked up into beady and curious eyes. Shade of Sir Thomas! He did not belong there; nor, by the same token, did I.

Experience leads me to think, indeed, that most of us would do much better to stay at home. Let travelers travel, and write exciting books about places not made common by intruding thousands of foreigners. By our own fireside we could then read of Paris as if it were Thibet ; whereas we now all go to Paris and fail to get much sense of foreign parts in seeing the pavements of the boulevards throng with our compatriots as do the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. There are not many civilized regions of the earth that one can visit any longer with the hope of finding the exotic unpolluted by commonplace visitors. There are certain parts of Asia, like Thibet and Turkestan; there are one or two spots in Europe; but I do not know of others.

Travel is the great epidemic of the modern world, common to most races, wasteful of time and money, disastrous to the places visited, most unbeautiful in all its effects. No one has yet described the malady. In the hope that some doctor of society — so numerous a company nowadays — may be induced to study its causes and advise as to its remedy and prevention, I make these jottings. I have suffered from the disease in my own person, as well as vicariously, and I recognize the possibility that I may again be smitten. In a time of health, I present my evidence for the benefit of other sufferers — sufferers in a double sense.

The malady is, indeed, a modern one. For a great while men have traveled, but they have done so decently and sanely for the most part. Merchants have always sought and sold their wares abroad, as they do to-day, with perfect propriety. The much-traveled Odysseus did not garner his experience altogether of his own will; and he represents sufficiently well the classical tradition. In the Middle Ages people went on pilgrimages, multitudes of them; yet they made their journeys with an end in view beyond the mere satisfaction of curiosity and the quest of new sensations. Clerks and minstrels traveled; but they wished to learn, or to make a living. Their purpose saved them. Only in the Crusades do we find a parallel to the madness of our times, while even they were sanctified by an idea. During the Renaissance, and down to the nineteenth century, there is no trace of the disease as we know it.

‘Travel in the younger sort is a part of education.' Clearly Bacon had in mind for youth what afterwards came to be known as the grand tour. No harm came from this. The young squire, plentifully supplied with money, and mayhap with a learned tutor (scholars, I may say in parenthesis, should always be encouraged to travel for the benefit of the nations), set off for a round of the Continent. He learned much, good and bad, but he was never legion. Moreover, if the milord became too obnoxious to the inhabitants of any region, they could take a short way with him and prevent the repetition of the nuisance for a considerable time. If the young man’s father traveled, he went on some sufficient errand; and his gain was, as Bacon declared, ‘a part of experience.' Most people, however, stayed at home, and listened to travelers’ tales with understanding suspicion. This state of mind, I submit, was healthy and very sensible.

In lust for travel, as for gold, we moderns do not heed the wise example of our forbears. We have followed too much the enthusiasms of the Romanticists, of Goethe, of Byron, and of Heine, who taught the world that journeys were good for their own sake. We travel because we have the money ; because it is the fashion; because we wish to compare other lands with ours, probably to the disadvantage of both. We travel for all reasons except good ones; we are, in short, the victims of a disease. We fail to realize what unlovely spectacles, as average human beings, we present when uprooted from our native soil. In our own place we do very well; abroad we display our defects, and hide our virtues.

On tour, the Englishman’s blustering bashfulness makes him unpleasant; the Frenchman’s suave impracticality lends itself to ridicule; the German’s splendid egotism becomes unbearable. In what light Americans appear abroad, it becomes no patriotic citizen to tell. Furthermore, most of us do not travel wisely but too fast. It is a symptom of disease. We may plan a leisurely sojourn in a few carefully-selected towns, or in some hallowed country district; we usually end with a mad scamper. Such an outbreak of the latent malady ends in exhaustion of the purse and the man. And death-bed confessions on the homebound steamer serve no useful purpose. ‘ Globe-trotting’ is no more scandalous as a word than as a fact. That persons in whom the disease of travel has assumed this virulent form should be permitted to spread the infection as they do, is a crime against society.

I receive, from time to time, invitations to join, at a considerable premium, ‘travel-study tours.’ Could there be a more ironic comment on Bacon’s phrase as interpreted in our day? Or a madder perversion of educational method? To cram pictures in Italy under the guidance of a tutor, to absorb cathedrals in France under the tutelage of a guide! Not for one hour, I suppose, do the enthusiasts who follow these febrile quests of culture permit themselves an undirected taste of lands not their own. They must be too busy about the improvement of their minds to care for the enlargement of horizons that real travel gives. I can console myself only by the shrewd suspicion that they do not really study either, and so return to their homes quite unaffected by their jaunt, except for being mortally tired. They are more to be pitied than globetrotters, but less to be blamed.

One of the saddest features of the whole matter is the havoc wrought upon innocent regions by the pestilencebreathing hordes of travelers. I have already deplored the decay of the exotic, the disappearance of the sense of wonder from the world. I have alluded to the wretched condition of Paris. I must go further if I am to stir right-minded people to a consciousness of the terrible devastation that the disease has accomplished during the last century. Have you ever chanced to see at Verona the late Roman sarcophagus, purporting to be the tomb of Juliet, half-filled with German visiting-cards? Have you ever visited the Island of Marken and noted how a village of fisher-folk can be transformed into a race of harpies? You must have been saddened to find a charming English country town like Stratford-onAvon turned into a tawdry shrine for the worship of a poet who learned only too well in his lifetime the foibles of humanity. The very church where he is buried has become a temple filled with money-changers. At least, I have seen placards with figures in two systems of money affixed to its walls. And Chester, with blatant rapture, welcomes to her smug and raw antiquity the incoming or departing hosts of Americans. I wonder, when I read that one of the leading performers in the Bavarian Passion Play is advertised to accompany an American party up the Nile, whether even Oberammergau has escaped the taint. Has not Boston, proud of being our own sacred Mecca, adorned herself with patches of black and white, tablets of wood, more to satisfy the appetites of travel-smitten strangers than to honor the dead ?

As to the method by which the disease is transmitted, I am no wiser than you; but I feel sure that there is a germ.