The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Blindness of the Sightseer

I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, `Well, I can't see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for'. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea--how general I cannot imagine-- that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook--the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall--thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.

Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things-- silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man's history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.

In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that consitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.