Without any doubt whatsoever, the one characteristic of the towns is
the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in
towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn’t only that we get
our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by
printer’s ink—that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion
of the modern mind, printer’s ink ends by actually preventing one from
seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another
who has not travelled, “Travel!” one wonders whether, after all, if he
does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he
will find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
fashion to-day than ever there was.
I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores
has sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New
York or Melbourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really
felt. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have
read before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century
village believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote
conveyed a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the
State; or just as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low,
travel in that country and say they can see no children—though they
would hardly say it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is
lower still.
What travel does in the way of pleasure (the providing of new and fresh
sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in
the way of knowledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, provide a
complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham
culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary—the
lions do not live in deserts; they live in woods. The peasants of
Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character; Barbary is full
to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings—they are not
striking—but of great Roman monuments: they are altogether the most
important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole: most of
Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants
of Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what
civilization can give them, such as _crème de menthe_, rifles, good
waterworks, maps, and railways: only they would like to have these
things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so
forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new
truth.
Now it took the French forty years and more before each of these plain
facts (and I have only cited half a dozen out of as many hundred) got
into their letters and their print: they have not yet got into the
letters and the print of other nations. But an honest man travelling in
Barbary on his own account would pick up every one of these truths in
two or three days, except the one about the lions; to pick up that
truth you must go to the very edge of the country, for the lion is a
shy beast and withdraws from men.
The wise man who really wants to see things as they are and to
understand them, does not say: “Here I am on the burning soil of
Africa.” He says: “Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve
hours late”—as it was (with me in it) near Sétif in January, 1905. He
does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna:
“Observe yon Semite!” He says: “That man’s face is exactly like the
face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner.” He does not say:
“See those wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new
artificial world around them!” Contrariwise, he says: “See those four
Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking
liqueurs in the café! See, they have ordered more liqueurs!” He does
not say: “How strange and terrible a thing the railway must be to
them!” He says: “I wish I was rich enough to travel first, for the
natives pouring in and out of this third-class carriage, jabbering like
monkeys, and treading on my feet, disturb my tranquillity. Some
hundreds must have got in and out during the last fifty miles!”
In other words, the wise man has permitted eye-openers to rain upon him
their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in
travelling will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees
and hears, he will become a whole nest of Columbuses discovering a
perfectly interminable series of new worlds.
A man can only talk of what he himself knows. Let me give further
examples. I had always heard until I visited the Pyrenees how French
civilization (especially in the matter of roads, motors, and things
like that) went up to the “Spanish” frontier and then stopped dead. It
doesn’t. The change is at the Aragonese frontier. On the Basque third
of the frontier the people are just as active and fond of wealth, and
of scraping of stone and of cleanliness, and of drawing straight lines,
to the north as to the south of it. They are all one people, as
industrious, as thrifty, and as prosperous as the Scots. So are the
Catalans one people, and you get much the same sort of advantages and
disadvantages (apart from the effect of government) with the Catalans
to the north as with the Catalans to the south of the border.
So with religion. I had thought to find the Spanish churches crowded. I
found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded,
not the Spanish; and the difference between the truth—what one really
sees and hears—and the printed legend happens to be very subtly
illustrated in this case of religion. The French have inherited (and
are by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of) a big
religious debate. Those who side with the national religion and
tradition emphasize their opinion in every possible way—so do their
opponents. You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for instance, and
it is quite on the cards that the leading article of each will be a
disquisition upon the philosophy of religion, the one, the “Depêche” of
Toulouse, militantly, and often solently atheist; the other as
militantly Catholic.
You don’t get that in Pamplona, and you don’t get it in Saragossa. What
you get there is a profound dislike of being interfered with, ancient
and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monasteries, and
the colleges, and with all this a curious, all-pervading indifference.
One might end this little train of thought by considering a converse
test of what the eye-opener is in travel; and that test is to talk to
foreigners when they first come to England and see how they tend to
discover in England what they have read of at home instead of what they
really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your
foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along
its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is
like a garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just
published by a French traveller, his bird’s-eye view of the country as
he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place
a desert; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural
decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the
Commons and an aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall
have heard but four speeches in each, and though every one of the eight
speeches shall have been delivered by members of one family group
closely intermarried, wealthy, titled, and perhaps (who knows?) of some
lineage as well.
The moral is that one should tell the truth to oneself, and look out
for it outside one. It is quite as novel and as entertaining as the
discovery of the North Pole—or, in case that has come off (as some
believe), the discovery of the South Pole.