The Uncommercial Traveller
Places. Essays by Hilaire Belloc. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.)
SOME new fashion, says Mr. Belloc, is long overdue in literary travel. " Will it," -he asks, " be mere merchandise: travel for gain? " To him the object of travel is a mixture of information, novelty and enlargement. Which is the new and which the old of these two fashions he leaves us to debate.
By chance I have travelled with one whose object was mere merchandise : gain. *In the heat of a Levantine day he would vanish and come back with news of a deal which would pay for a month of journeyings. In the Arctic he went sealing, in the South Seas he grew vanilla, in Hollywood he taught boxing, always at a profit. In the Austrian Alps he asked a party of mountaineers why they should bother about climbing since he could reach higher altitudes in his car.
Whether that is very modern or very Phoenician Mr. Belloc may decide. Why I am glad to have gone huckstering abroad is because now I can like Mr. Belloc's way all the more. Not that his word can be accepted slavishly, for travel narrows far more often than it enlarges : the typical English traveller is a bigot. If he sets out from Westminster, he cultivates ideas from Westminster In Xanadu or Atlantis and returns with another crop of the same ideas to Westminster.
There is need to learn from Mr. Belloc the ways and -means 01 enlargement. He describes how he broke his journey in a little tram-train because of a simple plank which bore painted upon it, rather roughly, the single word " Carthage." Yet what was it he saw? Around him was desolation, but to his inward eye, "Here had lifted the towers of that imperial city, of the city that radiated over the Mediterranean, and drew to itself the luxury and wealth of every shore." This magnificent musing unfortunately links itse with a story in another chapter.
It is of' a man who became inspired with something like oar- ship when he saw the Acropolis of Athens rising in splendid fas through the half light from the harbour of the Piraeus a 01 before true dawn. Before it was full day he discovered the sacred rock to be, in fact, a neighbouring warehouse, with a penthouse for the Parthenon and a few chimney-pots for columns.
Schoolboys who have been deceived by the castellated towers of Gothic gas-works and then refuse to be " taken in " by the red- brick pile at St. Albans, indicate the problem of travel. It barely exists for Mr. Belloc ; with his garnered scholarship and unerring sense of time and space, he knows both the past and present of what he is looking at. He marshals his facts so confi- dently that nothing seems simpler than to stand in front of his- tory and recognise it. Anybody who has lived long enough to feel kinship with the worshipper in the false dawn beyond the Piraeus will envy him.
There is another side to certainty. When Mr. Belloc writes of " The Salvation of Spain," and likens Civil War to a Crusade, some of us may be thankful for a less positive faith. " Worse luck for those who do not understand these things! " says Mr. Belloc, for- getting that in another place he has said concerning the future, " We do not know, we cannot know, and the less we pretend to know the less the chance of making fools of ourselves."
M. WILLSON DISHER.
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