A witty French abbé was once asked why he kept up a country-seat which
he never visited. "Do you not know," he answered, "that I must have
some place, where, though I never go to it, I can always imagine that
I might be happier than where I am?" The world is like the abbé. Most
of us are not living, we are anticipating life. We are always "going to
our country seats." It is the land we have not visited that is to give
to us our greatest happiness. If we have not yet found it in America,
it is awaiting us in Europe; if not in Europe, surely in Japan. As the
Germans say, "Da wo ich nicht bin, da ist das Glück." Hence travel
is attractive, if only as a means of acquiring that happiness which
here seems so elusive. All of us hope to some day visit Europe and the
Orient, and for that reason everything pertaining to their beauty,
art, and history seems alluring. But when these have been seen, the
wished-for goal of the untraveled world again recedes, and the desire
is just as strong to visit other and more distant lands.
This love of travel is not caused by ordinary restlessness. It springs
originally from the universal craving of the soul for something
different from its usual environment.
It also comes from a legitimate longing for that broader education
which only personal study of other races, civilizations and religions
can bestow. And, finally, it arises from a yearning for the joy and
benefit of _realizing history_ by visiting the ancient shrines of art,
the homes or sepulchres of heroes, and the arenas of heroic deeds.
When such desires are once awakened, to travel is to live, to remain
continually in one place is to stagnate.
Thousands of books of travel have been written, but notwithstanding
that the scenes described in them are practically the same, and
though the streets and buildings which adorn their text are perfectly
familiar to their readers, such works are usually welcome, and always
in proportion to the degree in which mere figures and statistics are
subordinated to the _ideas_ suggested by such travel to the writer's
mind, which, of course, vary infinitely according to the culture,
sympathy and enthusiasm of the individual. Thus, in a similar way,
the keys of all pianos are the same; yet it is not the bits of ivory
themselves that hold us spell-bound, but the magnetic fingers that move
over them, and the musical interpretation and expression given by the
performer.
If only accurate statistics and detailed descriptions were desired,
guide-books would be sufficient; but who ever reads a guide-book for
amusement?
Such thoughts have encouraged the author of these volumes to present in
printed form lectures which for eighteen years have been received with
never-failing kindness by an indulgent public. _Verba volant; Scripta
manent_ (Words are fleeting, but what is written remains). The voice
of the speaker dies away, and what he says is soon forgotten, but on
these printed pages, that which has really caused whatever success the
"Stoddard Lectures" have achieved, may be recalled precisely as the
lectures were heard, accompanied too by even more embellishment than
illustrated them at the time of their delivery. It has always given the
writer a singular sensation to meet his audiences season after season
after the separation of a year. Were they the same individuals whom he
had last addressed? He could not tell. They could be absolutely sure of
his identity, but he was quite unable to determine theirs. Beyond the
curve of platform or of stage, he could not distinguish the auditors
of former years from those who were seated there for the first time.
Sometimes they seemed to him scarcely more real and tangible than were
the views that came and went so noiselessly upon the screen. He looked
for a few moments at an amphitheatre of expectant faces, then darkness
would transform them into rows of phantoms, and at the end he saw them
rise and disappear, like a great fleet of ships that separates and
scatters on a trackless sea.
In these volumes, however, he hopes to meet his audiences more
frequently, and for a longer time than ever before. If, then, the oral
lectures may have given the public some enjoyment in the past, it is
the author's hope that when he himself no longer greets his former
listeners, year by year, these souvenirs of travel may in this form
find a more enduring place among the pleasures of their memories.
In that case he will not be utterly forgotten, for pleasant memories
can never be taken from us; they are the only joys of which we can be
absolutely sure.
John L. Stoddard.
[Illustration: A NORWEGIAN YOUTH.]