At home, among one’s regular occupations, one is never bored. Ennui is essentially a holiday feeling. (Is it not the chronic disease of the leisured?) It is for that very reason that your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of his comfort. It claims; and the born traveller gives, willingly, even eagerly. Most vices, it may be added parenthetically, demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. 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 a certain spiritual well-being, to say nothing of what he may get in that sadly problematical Jerusalem beyond the river—while the second gets nothing, except, perhaps, 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 indeed any diseases at all, unless your wanderings take you as far as the tropics. No bodily diseases; for travelling is not a vice of the body (which it mortifies) but of the mind. Your traveller-for-travelling’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, stimulate imagination, are a liberal education. And so on. These are specious arguments; but nobody is very much impressed by them. For though it may be quite true that, for certain people, desultory reading and aimless travelling are richly educative, it is not for that reason that most true readers and travellers born indulge their tastes. We read and travel, not that we may broaden, and enrich our minds, but that we may pleasantly forget 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 every man’s diversion. The congenital reader or traveller is one of those more fastidious spirits who cannot find the distractions they require in betting, mah-jongg, drink, golf or fox-trots.
There exist a few, a very few, who travel and, for that matter, who read, with purpose and a definite system. This is a morally admirable class. And it is the class to which, in general, the people who achieve something in the world belong. Not always, however, by any means. For, alas, one may have a high purpose and a fine character, but no talent. Some of the most self-indulgent and aimless of travellers and readers have known how to profit by their vices.
Desultory reading was Dr. Johnson’s besetting sin; he read every book that came under his hand and none to the end. And yet his achievement was not small. And there are frivolous travellers, like Beckford, who have gone about the world, indulging their wanton curiosity, to almost as good purpose. Virtue is its own reward; but the grapes which talent knows how to pluck—are they not a little sour?
With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution 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 bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.
WANDER-BIRDS
Fair-haired, bare-headed, with faces burned darker than their hair, they trudge along the dusty roads. They wear shorts; their Tyrolean knees are brown. Enormous boots, heavy with nails, click metallically over the flagstones of the churches into which, conscientious Kunstforschers, they penetrate. On their backs they carry knapsacks and in their hands, sometimes a stick, sometimes a stout umbrella; I have seen them making the ascent of the Viale dei Colli at Florence with ice-axes. They are the wander-birds, and they come, as their name (so romantic and applied so unironically), their Schillerian name too manifestly proclaims, from Germany. Many of them have walked all the way, across the Alps from Berlin to Taranto and back, with no money, living on bread and water, sleeping in barns or by the roadside. Adventurous and hardy youths! I feel the profoundest admiration for them. I even envy them, wishing that I possessed their energy, their hardiness. But I do not imitate them.
‘The saints of old,’ says the hymnologist, ‘went up to Heaven
With sorrow, toil and pain.
Lord, unto us may strength be given
To follow in the train.’
For me, I confess, even the train has become a means of travelling too inconvenient to be much employed. I would amend the last two lines of the hymn to, ‘Lord, unto us may wealth be given to follow in the car.’ The prayer has been granted—partially, at any rate; for whether a ten-horse-power Citroën can really be called a car is questionable. Owners of Napiers, Vauxhalls, Delages or Voisins, would certainly deny it. I shall not argue the point. All I claim for the ten-horse-power Citroën is this: that it works. In a modest and unassuming way, not very rapidly, indeed, but steadily and reliably, it takes one about. This particular specimen has carried us a good many thousand miles over the roads of Italy, France, Belgium and Holland; which, for all who are acquainted with those roads, is saying a good deal.
At this point, if I had any strength of mind, I should stop talking about Citroëns and return to higher themes. But the temptation of talking about cars, when one has a car, is quite irresistible. Before I bought a Citroën no subject had less interest for me; none, now, has more. I can talk for hours about motors with other car-owners. And I am ruthlessly prepared to bore the non-motorist by talking interminably of this delightful subject even to him. I waste much precious time reading the motoring papers, study passionately the news from the racing tracks, gravely peruse technical lucubrations which I do not understand. It is a madness, but a delightful one.
The spiritual effects of being a car-owner are not, I notice, entirely beneficial. Introspection and the conversation of other motorists have shown me, indeed, that car-owning may have the worst effect on the character. To begin with every car-owner is a liar. He cannot tell the truth about his machine. He exaggerates his speed, the number of miles he goes to the gallon of petrol, his prowess as a hill climber. In the heat of conversation I myself have erred in this respect, more than once; and even coolly, with malice aforethought, I have given utterance, on this subject, to frigid and calculated lies. They do not weigh very heavily on my conscience. I am no casuist, but it seems to me that a lie which one tells, expecting nobody to believe it, is venial. The motorist, like the fisherman, never really supposes that his vaunts will be believed.
Myself, I have long ceased to give the slightest credit to anything my fellow-motorists may tell me. My last vestige of confidence was destroyed by the Belgian driver who told me that two hours were ample time to allow for the journey from Brussels to Ostend; he himself, he declared, did it constantly and never took more. I trusted him and did not consult the road book. If I had, I should have found that the distance from Brussels to Ostend is something over seventy miles, that the road is cobbled all the way and badly cobbled at that, and that one has to pass through three large towns and about twenty villages. As it was we started late in the afternoon and were hopelessly benighted. Now, when motorists tell me how long it takes them to get from one place to another, I add on, according to their character, from thirty to sixty per cent. to the figure they mention. In this way I reach approximate truth.
Another horrible sin encouraged by the owning of an automobile, particularly of a small automobile, is envy. What bitter discontentment fills the mind of the 10 H.P. man as the 40 H.P. shoots silently past him! How fiercely he loathes the owner of
