[TRAVELLERS AND TRAVELLING.]
What does one gain by travelling? says some old wiseacre, with a shake of the head. Better the man that settles down and grows with his native or adopted dwelling-place. “The rolling stone gathers no moss,” is a venerable saying. Men who stay only a short time in one place can never be sufficiently known or loved by any people, and hence their credit and fortune cannot increase.
What does one not gain by travelling? says the boy who is just old enough to relish Robinson Crusoe, whose natural curiosity is feverish for knowledge. For him, all countries are more interesting than his own. He longs to climb the hill that bounds his native plain, to see what lies beyond. No one for him so interesting as the soldier or sailor come back from foreign lands, and he asks, with deep, attentive inquiry, “if there are boys in such places, too, and whether they are born there, or if they also went away from here?” Power, wealth, beauty, have no charm for him. Money he values merely because it opens his path to distant lands; and his instinctive desire to know is the passion of his youth. This is the story of all of us, at least all of us boys. It is only when our curiosity is satisfied either by personal experience or by credible hearsay, when we meet members of the whole human family, and find them seeking in our country that peace and beauty which we used to ascribe to theirs—it is then we realize that life is not poetry; that one’s native land is generally happiest for him; and that the best thing for one to do is to choose a spot thereof, and, as “H. G.” used to say, “to settle down and rise with it.”
Between the sturdy proverb of the oldest inhabitant and the boundless dream of the boy exists the medium wherein we shall find the uses of travel. There is nothing which may not be abused, and travelling may degenerate into a passion in individuals; but the strength of the ties of country, home, and family, whereby nature has bound us, forbids any but solitary instances of men who have wandered, useless vagabonds on the earth, trespassing on all countries, and aiding none; while, if the Holy Ghost call forth some apostle from his kindred to sound the trump of faith among many peoples, the Lord, who gives him an extraordinary mission, will endow him with special grace, and the world will gain by his vocation. This is the greatest traveller: who goes forth, not to his own gain, nor to further his nation’s weal, but to extend the kingdom of God on earth; to enlighten those who sit in darkness, and bring them to the knowledge of the truth.
Why do people travel? People travel for health, for pleasure, for business, and for knowledge. Some fifty thousand Americans travelled in Europe last summer with one or other of these objects in view. Have they all gained by their trip? Has the nation profited? Are they healthier, happier, richer, wiser, for their tour in Europe? A general answer to these questions cannot be given. All depends on the character of the individuals who composed that large army. Their particular circumstances and characteristics may have caused some to gain, others to lose, both when there is question of health, as well as when we speak of enjoyment, riches, and useful knowledge. I was one of that invading army that descended on Europe last year, and will try to make others partakers of whatever is communicable of the advantages derived from the trip which under advice I took to the other hemisphere. We will see who are they that lose by going abroad, what danger and damage they incur, and the reasons why. We will also find what persons profit by the excursion, what dispositions are required for this; and, by contrasting and comparing each, we shall be enabled to conclude how much of loss and how much of gain there is in travel, how the one is avoided, and the other achieved. All this I will make bold to illustrate from my own experience.
A change of air is well known to influence one’s health very much; for a man lives as much on good air as on what are commonly considered the elements of sustenance. I heard a gentleman state that the change from Newburg to New York in summer had caused him to gain eleven pounds in a fortnight. It was all in the change. A citizen flying from this pent-up atmosphere to the expanded vision and pure breezes of that delightful town could hardly have gained more in the same period. Hence the doctors prescribe change of air so frequently. An English physician says: “It is undoubted, explain it how we may, that a change of air, diet, and scene rouses the faculties, improves the appetite, and raises the spirits. When you set out for France, then, on your little trip of twenty-five miles across the channel, pray Heaven you may get thoroughly sea-sick, that nothing old or vitiated may make a bad foundation for the new man you are going to build up.” People from the plain gain by a change to the mountains; people from the mountain by visiting the plains. People from inland by going to the sea-shore, and those from the beach by retiring to the meadows. As with the body, so with the mind. Our faculties become as it were choked up and stagnant by continual monotony; even the most brilliant conversation, music, the best jokes of a friend, fail at last to please or rouse the spirit. Activity and exercise are necessary for the mind and soul as well as for the body, and are obtained by seeking contact and conflict with new ideas, sights, and wonders to move the imagination; and the consequent enlivening of the spirits acts at once on the body, and does more to restore physical power than any material food. It is by visiting foreign places; seeing strange customs which excite our curiosity; wondering at Alpine heights and Rhenish castles; sympathizing with the decayed glories of Venice and old Rome; confronting ourselves with the soul-entrancing beauty of the Bay of Naples and the awe of that burning mountain which stirs the depths of the spirit—it is thus we produce that friction, that reaction requisite for rousing soul and body from tepidity and the stagnancy of hypochondria and disease. Our spirits rise, the circulation is quickened by the winds of France and the music of Italy, the strange cuisine of other lands start all our organs into activity, and happiness and health are the result.
There are those, however, who travel, and yet gain neither in spirits nor in health. What often makes the difference, other things being equal, is the bigotry and contrariety of certain individuals. Some persons are so ignorant, and therefore so bigoted, that they will never tolerate customs different from their own, hold all who think otherwise than they in profound contempt, and will persist in following their own ways no matter where they go, and although the habits and opinions of an entire nation are opposed to them. Such persons never gain good spirits; for they will not open the windows of their miserable little souls, to let in the rays of happiness in which the people about are basking. An Englishman of fifty years ago, for instance, sets out with the notion that whatever is not English is contemptible. Hence, he is disgusted with the pleasant sounds of the French tongue; the agreeable politeness of the lady in the restaurant irritates him—perhaps he feels angry that a Frenchwoman should be so much at ease in his presence; the play he despises, because his taste is too debased to rise to its enjoyment, or because Parisians applaud it. He will have his beefsteak in the morning and his heavy slices of bread, no matter though the whole French nation should think a light breakfast more healthful. Hence, it is impossible that this man’s health should improve. Instead of getting mentally sea-sick (he can’t help getting bodily so; and the prouder he is, the more amusing his appearance then), and throwing off prejudice, he keeps in his mind a bile that jaundices his views, and corrodes every healthy idea that may possibly enter his soul. He follows his own notions at the table; and, as the food and habits of his northern isle do not suit southern latitudes, of course he gains nothing in health, and often becomes sick, and returns home disgusted with dons and messieurs, signors and mynheers, and tells you “there’s no use in travel—he tried it.” The first requisite, then, is, when you go to Rome, to do as the Romans do. The customs of a place show what its inhabitants prefer; and it is silly in any man to set his own little ideas against the experience of a whole people.
My friend and I had the misfortune to meet one of this class on setting out on our trip, and thrown together as we necessarily were on an ocean steamship, it caused us a great deal of inconvenience. The poor man was actually yellow from dyspepsia and bigotry. I am sorry to say he passed for an American. Whether his bigotry caused that viselike fastening up of his better nature, and, reacting on his body, ruined his digestion, as might easily be, or whether the desperate state of his chylopoetic fluids produced a corresponding straitness in his soul, which we assumed as the more charitable supposition, I can’t say; but certainly all the benefit of new and entertaining society, all the advantages of sea air, change of diet, etc., were lost, necessarily lost to him. What was the cause of his old-fogyism? One dreadful incubus—you might call it a standing evil, a nightmare (diurnal as well as nocturnal)—was the presence at the same table, and in the willing association of those whom he also preferred, and whose company he courted, of us two priests. The man could not look us in the face, could not accept the salt at our hands, would not “do us the pleasure of wine,” as they say on English ships; in fact, his bigotry stood between him and his own enjoyment and good appetite, rendered our position disagreeable, caused the rest of the company (Protestants themselves) to condemn his behavior in the strongest terms on deck, and ruined the pleasure of our voyage, at least during the time spent at table. One of his acquaintances was a whole-souled, honest, generous gentleman, a Methodist from Brooklyn. He, on his part, took every opportunity to throw sunshine about him, and to be polite to us especially, as if to make up for the fellow’s savageness; and one day, when the dyspeptic was complaining to the waiter as bitterly as if he were being flayed alive, the other turned to him, and said aloud: “Ebenezer, if I was an undertaker getting up a funeral, I’d hire you for chief mourner.” John invited us to his cabin, and the other turned away from its door when he saw us within. John proposed to take his cheerful, amiable wife to Ireland first; Ebenezer declared his abhorrence of the Irish and his contempt for Killarney. “He wouldn’t advise anybody to go to Ireland; he’d been there three times, and there was nothing to see but beggars.” John took him up before the company: “Why did you go there the second and third time, Eben?”—a question which disconcerted the dyspeptic, and caused intense amusement to the passengers. Such an one had no use to go travelling for health or anything else. You must open the windows of your soul, slacken the risible muscles of your face, and reduce yourself to a soft, pliable, impressionable condition, if you want to benefit by change of air, scenery, and society. Dry, hard wax does not receive the impression of the seal. But let a man set out with proper dispositions, leave care and prejudice behind, be ready to speak of men and things as he will find them, let no thought of business come up for a while, but move along easily and quietly through the scenes and people of other lands, and he will experience the advantages of travelling for health.
Another motive for travel is business. The post and the telegraph afford wonderful facilities for carrying on commercial relations between different firms and branches of the same house in different countries; but many circumstances render personal visits and interviews often necessary. Hence, the number of travellers on business is very large. Many New York houses send trusty men to Europe annually or oftener to buy the stuffs and to inspect and select the styles which fickle fashion imposes on her votaries.
The American is not satisfied with looking through foreign eyes, for he knows that short or long-sightedness is often the defect of even business men in those old countries. Hence, he goes to see and inspect for himself, and commonly finds an opening where the Frenchman, the German, even the Englishman, did not suspect its existence; throws a bridge over a chasm which to them seemed impassable; works his way through difficulties they thought unsurmountable; and pushing on over precipices and untrodden ways, “that banner with the strange device, Excelsior,” in his hands, astonishes the natives, and secures the trade of the world. Thus Singer, the sewing-machine man, goes to the ancient mediæval city of Nürnberg, amongst other places—a city seemingly so dead as to have recently erected another monument to Albrecht Dürer, the artist, the only statue in the town; as if the last man of push and note they produced was dead 350 years. Singer goes to this sleepy old city, and, in spite of the depth and inflexibility of the old channels in which trade had been running for a thousand years, attempts to revolutionize it all at once with his sewing-machine. In spite of the opposition of the tailors, which similar endeavors in parts of Great Britain failed to overcome, he succeeds; for, instead of hiring a plain office, in the simple manner of the country, and cautiously investing a little capital at the outset, the American, with characteristic enterprise and self-approved wisdom, spends hundreds in advertising and thousands in erecting a building the most imposing and expensive of its kind in the venerable city, astonishes the slow Bavarians while attracting them by the employment he gives, makes them believe that he is indeed the bringer of the great good he claims, obtains their trade, and, while filling his own pockets, is a herald of his country’s genius and enterprise. Another instance: while sailing down the Rhine last October in one of those steamers which approach nearest to the graceful beauties of our own rivers, and which are therefore most highly praised by tourists, we were a little surprised and considerably proud at seeing “Lent’s Floating American Circus” (like a vast floating bath) paying a visit to one of the cities of that noble stream, up and down whose banks it for ever roves, catering for the amusement and instruction and picking up the loose thalers of Fatherland with as much sang-froid as Dan Rice on our Mississippi. When the people of the Continent behold the Americans coming three thousand miles over the sea, passing inside England, from whom we learnt these very institutions, whose child our nation was, they naturally form a very high opinion of the superior enterprise and skill of the republic, so that our democratic institutions gain respect and our flag honor, while English influence gradually decays. Thus George Pullman goes over and steps in before John Bull, and secures the sleeping-car business on the Continent. Nay, it is only now that, roused by his aggressive boldness, England begins to adopt our great improvements in travel, afraid of being left still more shamefully behind. Thus does the business traveller, while making his own fortune, advance his country’s name and influence; and his successful policy is always that of generosity, accommodation, and politeness.