What right have we to travel, when better men have to stay at home? But
it would be unwise to attempt an answer to that question, for certainly
it would lead, as did the uncorking of the bottle that imprisoned the
Genie, to much smoke and confusion. We should not poke about with a
naked light amid the props which uphold the august and many-storied
edifice of society, even to make sure of our rightful place there. It
was a reading of Lord Bryce’s _Memories of Travel_ that started so odd
a doubt in my mind. When I had finished it I did not begin to think
of packing a bag. I felt instead that I had no title to do that. Lord
Bryce, that learned man, had been remembering casually Iceland and
the tropics, Poland, the Mountains of Moab, and the scenery of North
America. But he did not make me feel that those places should be mine.
He, that great scholar, made them desirable, yet infinitely remote,
and reservations for wiser men, among whom, if I were bold enough to
intrude, my inconsequence would be detected instantly. After reading
his book of travel I felt that it would be as wrong in me to possess
and privily to treasure priceless Oriental manuscripts as to claim the
right to see coral atolls in the Pacific or prospects of the Altai.
We may lack the warrant to travel, even if we have the means. Lord
Bryce made it coldly clear that few of us are competent to venture
abroad. He made me feel that much that would come my way would be
wasted on me, for I have little in common with the encyclopædias. The
wonders would loom ahead, would draw abeam, would pass astern, and I
should not see them; they would not be there. The pleasures of travel,
when we are candid about them, are separated by very wide deserts and
tedious, where there is nothing but sand and the dreary howling of
wild dogs. An Eastern city may grow stale in a night. “‘Dear City of
Cecrops’ saith the poet; but shall we not say, ‘Dear City of Zeus?’”
There are days when the ocean is a pond. Its relative importance then
appears to be that of a newspaper of last week. Sometimes, too, you
do not want to hear that there are three miles of water under you; no
less. What of it? In nasty weather the end so far below you of the last
two miles is of less importance than the beginning of the first.
It may also happen that when at last your ship reaches that far place
whose name is as troubling as the name of the star to which you look
in solitude, that--what is it you do there? You gaze overside at it
from your trite anchorage, unbelievingly. The first mate comes aft,
leisurely, rubbing his hands. You do not go ashore. What has become of
the magic of a name? You go below with the mate, who has finished his
job, for a pipe. To-morrow will do for Paradise, or the day after. One
morning I reached Naples by sea, and I well remember my first sight
of it. The stories I had heard of that wonderful bay! The ecstatic
letters in my pocket from those who were instructing me how nothing of
my luck should be missed! But it was raining. It was cold. I had been
travelling for an age. There was hardly any bay, and what I could see
of it was as glum as a bad mistake. There was a wet quay, some house
fronts that were house-fronts, and a few cabs. I took a cab. That was
better than walking to the railway station, and quicker. It is quite
easy for me to describe my first sight of Naples and its bay.
But Lord Bryce was not an incompetent traveller. He could see through
any amount of rain and dirt. He was competent indeed; fully, lightly,
and with grace. To other tourists he may have appeared to be one of the
crowd, trying hard to get some enjoyment out of a lucky deal in rubber
or real estate, and not knowing how to do it. But he was not bored. He
was quiet merely because he knew what he was looking at. What to us
would have been opaque he could see through; yet I doubt whether he
would have said anything about it, unless he had been asked. And why
should we ask a fellow-traveller whether he can see through what is
opaque? We never do it, because our own intelligence tells us that what
is dark cannot be light. What we do not see is not there.
Yet how much we miss, when on a journey, Lord Bryce reveals. There
was not often a language difficulty for him. When he looked at the
wilderness of central Iceland he knew the cause of it, and could
explain why tuffs and basalts make different landscapes. When he was in
Hungary and Poland the problems we should have brushed aside as matters
no Englishman ought to be expected to understand, became, in the light
of his political and historical lore, simple and relevant. Among the
islands of the South Seas, with their unsolved puzzles of an old
continental land mass and of race migrations, so learned a traveller
was just as much at ease. Once I remarked to an old voyager, who in
some ways resembled Lord Bryce, that it was in my dreams to visit
Celebes. “But,” he remarked coldly, “you are not an ethnologist.” No;
and I can see now, after these _Memories of Travel_, that I have other
defects as a traveller.
Yet I cannot deny that a craving for knowledge, when abroad, may
sometimes come over me, with a dim resemblance to the craving for food
or sleep. But if I go to my note-books in later years and discover that
though I had forgotten them I had many interesting facts stored away,
nevertheless it is evident the valuable information does very well
where it is. It will never be missed. Its importance has faded. There
are other things, however, one never entered in a notebook, and never
tried to remember, for they were of no seeming importance then or now,
things seen for an instant only, or smelt, or heard in the distance,
which are never forgotten. They will recur from the past, often
irrelevantly, even when the memory is not turned that way, as though
something in us knew better what to look for in life than our trained
eyes.