I had, myself, experienced vicariously some of the delights of filling in the blank spaces on the map of the world with picturesque scenes and animated figures. I had noted with interest how the habit of observation seemed to lead inevitably to comparison, and that to generalization and conclusion. It had been no small satisfaction to learn how adequately the human frame and mind had met and withstood the severer experiences of the more daring—how small, after all, were the world’s greatest difficulties and dangers to the unconquerable spirit. But it was most gratifying of all to realize that the general experience had resulted not in distrust, but in belief in the fundamental kindliness, if not goodness, of general human nature; and in a firm conviction that the world as a whole was visibly advancing in material, mental, and moral well-being.

I had, naturally, never questioned the charm of travel as a recreation, but this evening gave me a new sense of its superior value as experience and education. I knew, of course, that travel required no ordinary equipment of perception, knowledge, and judgment—of sensitiveness to impressions, with material to compare and ability to value; that indifferent travel would serve only, as Rousseau said of indifferent reading, “to make presumptuous ignoramuses.” But, although I had long believed that the observant and thoughtful home-keeping man might attain an understanding of himself and even of his nation, I came now to doubt that there was any means other than foreign travel for developing a realization of what is really fundamental to the general human spirit.

In voicing to Professor Maturin my gratitude for the pleasure and profit of the evening, I found that he had observed me growing a trifle stale, and had designedly administered this meeting as a remedy. He expressed his opinion that I was already out of danger, judging from my evident appreciation, with Shakespeare, that “a good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner.” And he beamed on me as mellowly as the moon when, at parting, I expressed my intention of continuing the medicine, homoeopathically, through books of travel, until my wonted tone was entirely restored. The whole prescription worked such wonders as a tonic that I strongly recommend it to others.

III
Foreign Travel at Home

“I THANK you,” said Professor Maturin, laying aside the manuscript he had been reading me, in order to test its appeal,—“I thank you. I am only afraid that you are too generous. But, in any case, I am very grateful, and I hope that you will allow me to be at your service during the remainder of the evening. Do I not see you looking somewhat dispirited again? Are you not neglecting your mental hygiene?” and, leaning forward from his circle of lamplight, he peered at me anxiously.

I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended—the atmosphere of foreign travel—no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’—not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.

“You will not think me unsympathetic when I say that I have been waiting for this symptom,” he continued. “It is an important part of your cure. Some day I will explain to you my entire system of mental hygiene, but there is not time for that to-night, nor are you quite ready for it until you act upon my next and final recommendation.

“You will remember that Emerson said, ‘Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. The truest visions, the best spectacles I have seen, I might have had at home.’ He did not himself practice his preachment, but that does not invalidate it. Kant, however, I believe, never travelled more than forty miles from Königsberg; and Sainte-Beuve for fifty years seldom left Paris. What, of course, one wants is not to subject himself to the miscellaneous and often distracting impacts of foreign travel, but to realize What essential elements he needs, where to find, and how to apply them. As one of our poets has put it:

Who journeys far may lack the seeing eye: