CHAPTER XIII
THE TRAVELLER
In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let die, it has been stated that "Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for legislation ad hoc. He seems to think nobody minds His books being all of different kinds." They certainly do mind. They ask what an author is. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.
There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history: but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most important of the materials out of which his history has been made.
The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a training to him, and we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done, but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.
Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and which we inhabit.
These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied. Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders in dealing with foreign nations.
Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this description into the mouth of a character in an essay:
Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden the voice of God.