Liberation from One's Place.
The instinct which drives men to travel is at bottom identical with
that which fills men with passionate desire to know what is in life.
Time and strength are often wasted in restless change from place to
place; but real wandering, however aimless in mood, is always
education. To know one's neighbours and to be on good terms with the
community in which one lives are the beginning of sound relations to
the world at large; but one never knows his village in any real sense
until he knows the world. The distant hills which seem to be always
calling the imaginative boy away from the familiar fields and hearth
do not conspire against his peace, however much they may conspire
against his comfort; they help him to the fulfilment of his destiny by
suggesting to his imagination the deeper experience, the richer
growth, the higher tasks which await him in the world beyond the
horizon. Man is a wanderer by the law of his life; and if he never
leaves his home in which he is born, he never builds a home of his
own.
It is the law of life that a child should leave his father and
separate himself from his inherited surroundings, in order that by
self-unfolding and self-realisation he may substitute a conscious for
an unconscious, a moral for an instinctive relation. The instinct of
the myth-makers was sound when it led them to attach such importance
to the wandering and the return; the separation effected in order that
individuality and character might be realised through isolation and
experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of
the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of
the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born
into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away
from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and
from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume
these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of
their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his
home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the
first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in
the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and
shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper
years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer
matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.
The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the
time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of
the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a
provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial
tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the
landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great
movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he
shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give
each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with
the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that
greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not
disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for
exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life
which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon
clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.
The wanderings of individuals and races, which form so large a part of
the substance of history, are witnesses of that craving for deeper
experience and wider knowledge which is one of the springs of human
progress. The American cares for Europe not for its more skilful and
elaborate ministration to his comfort; he is drawn towards it through
the appeal of its rich historic life to his imagination and through
the diversity and variety of its social and racial phenomena. And in
like manner the European seeks the East, not simply as a matter of
idle curiosity, but because he finds in the East conditions which are
set in such sharp contrast with those with which he is familiar. The
instinct for expansion which gives human history its meaning and
interest is constantly urging the man of sensitive mind to secure by
observation that which he cannot get by experience.
To secure the most complete development one must live in one's time
and yet live above it, and one must also live in one's home and yet
live, at the same time, in the world. The life which is bounded in
knowledge, interest, and activity by the invisible but real and
limiting walls of a small community is often definite in aim,
effective in action, and upright in intention; but it cannot be rich,
varied, generous, and stimulating. The life, on the other hand, which
is entirely detached from local associations and tasks is often
interesting, liberalising, and catholic in spirit; but it cannot be
original or productive. A sound life--balanced, poised, and
intelligently directed--must stand strongly in both local and
universal relations; it must have the vitality and warmth of the
first, and the breadth and range of the second.
This liberation from provincialism is not only one of the signs of
culture, but it is also one of its finest results; it registers a high
degree of advancement. For the man who has passed beyond the
prejudices, misconceptions, and narrowness of provincialism has gone
far on the road to self-education. He has made as marked an advance on
the position of the great mass of his contemporaries as that position
is an advance on the earlier stages of barbarism. The barbarian lives
only in his tribe; the civilised man, in the exact degree in which he
is civilised, lives with humanity. Books are among the richest
resources against narrowing local influences; they are the ripest
expositions of the world-spirit. To know the typical books of the race
is to be in touch with those elements of thought and experience which
are shared by men of all countries. Without a knowledge of these books
a man never really gets at the life of localities which are foreign to
him; never really sees those historic places about which the
traditions of civilisation have gathered. Travel is robbed of half its
educational value unless one carries with him a knowledge of that
which he looks at for the first time with his own eyes. No American
sees England unless he carries England in his memory and imagination.
Westminster Abbey is devoid of spiritual significance to the man who
is ignorant of the life out of which it grew, and of the history which
is written in its architecture and its memorials. The emancipation
from the limitations of locality is greatly aided by travel, but it is
accomplished only by intimate knowledge of the greater books.