Why We Don't Stay at Home

PEREGRINE CABOT

Reasons—Snobbish, Conscientious and Frivolous—for Journeying into Far Lands

WHY not stay at home? It is a question which, to any one who frequents the resorts of international tourists, constantly and insistently presents itself. For international tourists are, in the main, a gloomy looking tribe. Some, no doubt, have every right to look glum; they have left home on business or in search of health. But the majority of the men and women who fill the hotels of Paris and Florence, of Vienna and Rome, are there "for pleasure", as the phrase goes. Being there for pleasure they ought to look jolly; it is obvious. But jolly, I must say, they very rarely look, except on those occasions when a few of them band together and pretend for a short precarious hour that they are at home again.

The fact seems to be that very few travellers really like travelling. If they go to the trouble and expense of travelling, it is not so much out of curiosity, for fun and because they like to see things beautiful and strange, as out of a kind of snobbery. People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art, because the best people do it. It is the correct social thing to have been to certain spots on the earth's surface and having been there, one is superior to those who have not. Moreover, travelling gives one something to talk about when one gets home. The subjects of conversation arc not so numerous that one can afford to neglect an opportunity for adding to one's store.

To justify this, a scries of myths has been created. The places which it is socially smart to have visited are aureoled with glamour, till they are made to appear, for those who have not been there, like so many fabled Babylons or Bagdads. Those who have been there have a personal interest in cultivating and developing these myths. For if Paris and Monte Carlo are really so marvellous as is generally supposed, by the inhabitants of Bradford or Milwaukee, of Tomsk or Bergen, that they are—why, then the merit of the travellers who have visited these places is the greater and their superiority over the stay-at-homes the more enormous. It is for this reason that the fables arc kept alive.

Few things are more pathetic than the spectacle of inexperienced travellers, brought up on these myths, desperately doing their best to make reality square with fable. It is for the sake of the myths and, less consciously, in the name of snobbery that they left their homes; to admit disappointment in the reality would be to admit their own foolishness in having believed the fables, would detract from their merit in having undertaken the pilgrimage. Out of the hundreds of thousands of AngloSaxons who frequent the night-clubs and dancing salons of Paris, there arc a good many, no doubt, who genuinely like that sort of thing. But there arc also very many who do not. In their hearts, secretly, they are bored and a little disgusted. But they have been brought up to believe in a fabulous "gay Parcc", where everything is deliriously exciting and where alone it is impossible to see what is technically known as "life". Conscientiously they strive, while in Paris, to be gay. Night after night the dance-halls and the bordellos are thronged by earnest young compatriots of Emerson and Matthew Arnold engaged in seeing life, neither very steadily nor whole, through ever thickening mists of Heidsieck and Roedcrer.

STILL more courageously determined are their female companions; for they, mostly, have not the Roedcrer to assist them in finding Paris gay. The saddest sight I ever saw was in a Montmartre boite at about five o'clock in the morning. At a table in the corner of the hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adventurously seeing life by themselves. In front of them, on the table, stood the regulation bottles of champagne; but for preference, perhaps on principle, they were sipping lemonade. The jazz band played on monotonously; in couples, in groups the guests departed. But grimly, indomitably, in spite of their fatigue, in spite of the boredom which so clearly expressed itself in their charming and ingenuous faces, the three young girls sat on. They were still there when I left. What stories, I reflected, they would tell when they were home again! And how envious they would make their friends! "Paris is wonderful. . . ."

To the Parisians the fable brings in several hundred milliards a year; they give it a generous publicity. Business is business. But if I were the manager of a Montmartre dancing hall, I should tell my waiters to act their parts a little better. "My men," I should say to them, "you ought to look as though you too believed in 'gay Paree'. Smile, be merry. Your present expression, which is a mingling of weariness, disgusted contempt for your clients and cynical rapacity, is not inspiring. One day the clients might be sober enough to notice it. And where should we be then?"

But Paris and Monte Carlo are not the only resorts of these pilgrimages; there are also Rome and Florence. There are picture galleries, churches and ruins as well as shops and casinos. And the snobbery that decrees that one must like Art—that one should visit the place where one can see Art—is as tyrannous as that which bids one go to the places where one can see life.

All of us are more or less interested in life— even in that dingy slice of it that is to be found in Montmartre. But a taste for art— or, at any rate, for the sort of art one sees in churches and museums—is by no means universal. Hence, the case of the tourists who, from motives of snobbery, visit Rome and Florence is even more pathetic than the case of those who repair for the same reason to Paris and Monte Carlo. Tourists "doing" a church wear a mask of dutiful interest; but what lassitude, what utter weariness of spirit looks out, too often, at their eyes! And the weariness is felt, within, more acutely, because of the necessity of simulating this rapt attentiveness, of even going hypocritically into raptures over the things that are starred in the Baedeker. There are moments when flesh and blood can bear the strain of this hypocrisy no more. Philistinism refuses to pay for a moment longer the tribute it owes to taste.

EXASPFRATF.D, the tourist declines to put his nose into another church, preferring to pass his days in the hotel lounge reading the continental Daily Mail. I remember an example of this rebellion which I observed at Venice. A motor boat company advertised excursions to the island of Torcello. We booked seats and at the appointed time set off, in company with seven or eight other tourists. Romantic in its desolation, Torcello rose out ol the waters ol the lagoon. The boatman drew up alongside of a mouldering jetty. A quarter of a mile away through the fields stood the church. It contains some of the most beautiful mosaics in Italy. We climbed on shore—all of us, except one strong-minded American family who, on learning that the object of interest on this island was only another church, decided to remain comfortably seated in the boat till such time as the rest of the party should return. I admired them for their honesty; but at the same time it seemed to me rather a melancholy thing that they should have come all this way, spent all this money, merely for the pleasure of sitting in a motor boat tied to a rotting wharf. And they were only at Venice. There was still so much, I reflected, to be done. Padua, Ferrara, Ravenna, Bologna, Florence, Perugia, Assisi and Rome, with all their innumerable churches, had still to be looked at, before— arrived at last in Naples—they could be permitted to take the liner home again across the Atlantic. Poor slaves of a tyrannous master!

We call such people travellers because they do not stay at home. But they arc not genuine travellers, not travellers born. For they travel, not for travelling's sake, but for convention's. They set out nourished on fables and with fantastic hopes, to return, whether they avow it or not, disappointed. Their interest in the real and actual is insufficiently lively; they hanker after mythology, and the facts, however curious, beautiful and varied, arc a disillusionment. It is only the society of their fellow travellers (with whom they conspire to make a little oasis of home in the foreign wilderness), coupled with the consciousness of social duty done, that keeps them cheerful in face .of the depressing facts.

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Your genuine traveller, on the other hand, is interested in real things and does not believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, loves all that is unfamiliar for its unfamiliarity, takes pleasure in the beautiful. For him, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious; it demands his time, his money, his energy, the sacrifice of his comfort. It demands, and the born traveller gives, willingly, eagerly even. Most vices, it may be added, demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasures. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful—if strenuously led—as Christian's in the "Pilgrim's Progress". The chief difference between Christian and the vicious man is that the first gets something out of his hardships—gets it here and now in the shape of spiritual well-being, to say nothing of what he may get in that sadly problematical Jerusalem beyond the river—while the second gets very little beyond gout and general paralysis of the insane.

The vice of travelling, it is true, does not necessarily bring with it these two particular diseases; nor, for that matter, any diseases at all, unless, of course, your wanderings take you as far as the tropics. No bodily diseases; for travelling is not a vice of the body (which, indeed, it mortifies), but of the mind. Your aimless traveller-fortravelling's-sake is like your desultory reader—a man addicted to mental self-indulgence. Like all other vicious men, the reader and the traveller have a whole armoury of justifications with which to defend themselves. Reading and travelling, they say, broaden the mind, provoke imagination and reflection, are a liberal education. And so on. They are specious arguments, but nobody is much impressed by them. For though it may be quite true that, for certain people, reading and travelling are highly educative, it is not for that reason that most true readers and travellers indulge their tastes. We read and travel, not that we may broaden and enrich our minds, but that we may pleasantly forget that they exist. We love reading and travelling because they are the most delightful of all the many substitutes for thought. Sophisticated and somewhat rarefied substitutes. That is why they are not everybody's diversions. Your congenital reader or traveller is one of those more fastidious spirits who cannot find the distractions he requires in betting, mah jong or foxtrots.

Finally, there are the very few who travel and, for that matter, read, with purpose and system. This is a morally admirable class. And it is the class to which, in general, the people who achieve things belong. Not always, however. For, alas, one may have a high purpose and a fine character, but no talent.

With me, travelling is frankly a vice; and the temptation to read promiscuously and without purpose is one which I find it very hard to resist. From time to time I make desperate resolutions to mend my ways. I sketch out programmes of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old •ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.