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»travel-university.org - A selection of original reference articles about travel
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Travel is far from being the privilege or prerogative of modern times. It is one of the earliest and oldest of man's activities, its history coextensive with that of the race itself, a primary impulse of the human species and a major determinant of history. Whether as migration or explorations, science or pleasure, enforced displacement or irrational wanderlust, it has figured as a condition of every race and age, era or culture. So far it is a recognized fact of human record and experience. But two other facts soon appear: that there are as many kinds of travel as there are men and occasions, and that throughout its long history travel has had not only a mixed reputation but what may be called a mixed press. In some periods its repute is high, in others surprisingly low. In some times or societies it becomes a criterion of the cultivated life, a standard of civilized action and purpose. In others of which obvious contemporary instances suggest themselves it falls under the reproof of patriots, nationalists, and xenophobes as a demoralizer of states or a threat to the integrity of races.
If travel has been praised for its civilizing value, it has also given large scope to moral self-righteousness and warning, and it has required of its chroniclers a great deal of apology and justification. Some have made a science of it, others a means of survival or rehabilitation, still others a function of politics and propaganda. The one ambition that appears always to have animated the civilized traveler has been to make an art of it; and to many people even today it is one of the few means of art or creative action they find open to diem.
But if the one definable feature of travel is that it has been a constant in human history, an irresistible lure to ambition or imagination, it has never achieved a reliable standing in literature. There has, in fact, always attached to it a hint of the deceptive or the deluding. "There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life": the warning is as old as Homer, if its opposite "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" is also as old as the Old Testament. Seneca's "Every change of scene is a delight," Hesiod's "New air gives new Me," are reproved by Talmudic censure: "Three things are weakening: fear, sin, and travel." If one man, Sterne, says that "Nothing is so perfectly amusement as a total change of ideas," another, Chesterfield, holds that "Those who travel heedlessly from place to place ... set out fools, and will certainly return so." If Johnson advises that "the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are," Shakespeare says, "When I was at home, I was in a better place." Hazlitt's enthusiasm-"The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases" is corrected by French realism: Voyager, c'est travailler. And men seem never to have rid themselves of one of the stubbornest irritants of the footloose conscience that escape and change are equally impossible and that a man carries himself and his soul with him wherever he goes.
Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects; and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home. Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel.
A traveler is very often disposed to ask himself whether it has been worth while to leave his home- whatever his home may have been only to see new forms of human suffering, only to be reminded that toil and privation, hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of the great majority of his fellow-men. To travel is, as it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle; and there is something heartless in stepping forth into the streets of a foreign town to feast upon novelty when the novelty consists simply of the slightly different costume in which hunger and labour present themselves.
The sentimental tourist makes images in advance; they grow up in his mind by a logic of their own. He finds himself thinking of an unknown, unseen place, as having such and such a shape and figure rather than such another. It assumes in his mind a certain complexion, a certain colour which frequently turns out to be singularly at variance with reality.
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