The Traveller's Motives
Traveller's Quest. Essays by several hands. (William Hodge. i is.) To travel is an urge present, to a greater or lesser extent, in almost everyone. Only a small proportion succeed in following up this urge, but almost every traveller records his impressions for the stay-at-homes. Not to do so would, perhaps, be to resemble a poet who kept his stanzas to himself or a painter who locked his canvases in a cellar, and would bear out Masefield when he said, " Wander- ing by itself is just a form of self-indulgence." In this book, edited and introduced by M. A. Michael, sixteen well-known travellers have recorded just what quest it is that forces them to'leave normal existence. Some have been specifically attracted by the sea ; some by the mountains, deserts or arctic wildernesses. Some have com- bined travel with a calling as painter, archaeologist, journalist (Frank Illingworth, the journalist, begins with candour, " My first visit to the Arctic was made purely for monetary reasons . . ."). There are travellers who set out to " prove " themselves or to quell some specific curiosity. The book ends with Walter Starkie's accounts of gipsies, the " eternal travellers."
These essays, naturally enough, are not all of the same standard, and many are distinctly self-conscious, though a surprising pro- portion of travellers turn out to be excellent writers. But all are agreed that the real traveller is neither in search of adventure nor is an escapist in the common sense of the word—he must have something to escape to as well as from. All eschew modern trans- port ; " travel begins where transportstops," an ascetic pursuit of which one essential feature is more or less direct contact with terra firma. Mule and even bicycle are permitted ; car and aero- plane are not. And though scientific invention has so time-slip:Ink the world and hardly an untrodden spot remains, there is still, fortunately, plenty of scope for real " travel when you look for it.
Each of these voyagers has something to say of occasional moments of revelation, of " a fundamental beauty that silences the tongue." (The notorious limitations of language for dealing with abstract emotions are well demonstrated here.) And the total effect of his travels, in which prolonged solitude has thrown him entirely upon his own thinking, brings him a knowledge of himself which it is impossible to achieve in the routine of modern life. " Only the inward journey is real." Freya Stark, in the shortest and most profound essay in the book, suggests that travel does this by taking one out of the temporal and, at bottom, base struggle which our existence tends to be, placing one in a simplified world, without personal attachments, where one can " see the proper shape of things."
Some of the essays have turned into rather discursive and auto- biographical reminiscences, not all of which are very satisfying. But many retain their interest despite condensation, such as Alec Waugh's rendering of Russia in 1934 (all too like 1984 even then), or Cora Gordon's evocation of a night of noxious smells in Dalmatia. This is a digressive book, admirable for the armchair traveller, and a book also of natural philosophy, of the determina- tion of individuals not only against physical obstacles but against the almost irresistible force of the collective. A change from the usual collection of travellers' tales. ANTHONY HUXLEY.
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