Part 2

The dinner, although entirely without pose, was intentionally and interestingly exotic. Russian preserved cucumbers and a soup of chestnuts from the south of France were followed by an entrée of lamb, prepared according to a Constantinople recipe, and by boned capon. The colonel mixed a Filipino salad-dressing, and with it the archaeologist supplied cigarettes made of coffee leaves. Finally, the engineer introduced a South American dessert of ripe red bananas, guava jelly, and sharp cheese, and with this was served Carlsbad burnt-fig coffee. The wines, although poured sparingly, were as interesting as the food. The cigars were Cuban vegueras. The endeavor, which was surely realized throughout, had evidently been to seek the unusual, not for the sake of mere strangeness, but for an excellence unattainable through the ordinary.

The same might be said of the talk which accompanied the meal. It was anything but conscious or formal, and yet I noticed that leading questions were not only allowed but expected, and that it was the custom of the entire company to listen when any conversation became generally interesting. In this way I enjoyed a whole series of descriptions of forests and mountains, rivers and deserts, of barbarous and unfrequented countries, of harbors and fortifications, cities and courts, cathedrals and colleges, libraries and museums; with anecdotes of experience and adventure, of state and society, of beautiful women and distinguished men.

The near distance of Europe was by no means forgotten, but it was discussed in a way that made me feel that I must, in Bacon’s phrase, have gone there “hooded,” or, at least, as the mythical American who checked off each city in his Baedeker after a hurried glance about him from the top of some tall building. In particular, I was possessed with successive desires to make good my deficiencies by going at once to live at a wonderful small hotel across the river in Paris, visiting a certain sculptor’s studio in Madrid, dreaming on the terraces of Lake Maggiore, and hearing the opera by telephone at Budapest. When the talk ranged more widely, as it did for the most part, I longed to observe a volcano and experience an earthquake in action, and determined to journey without delay to Damascus for the sake of its baths and cafés, “the most exquisitely luxurious in the world;” that is, if I did not decide, instead, for Shepherd’s hotel at Cairo, or, perhaps, the vale of Thingvalla in Iceland.

With the cigars, the conversation shifted from details of observation and experience, by way of penetrative comment on men and manners, until it reached what seemed, at least to me, profound conclusions concerning national and social characteristics. The classical scholar, with a majority of the other members, opposed the craftsman and the engineer, in ascribing a certain monotony and shallowness to Japanese life, in spite of its old aestheticism and its new efficiency. Both of the diplomats endorsed the Persian specialist’s statement that “the hope of the East is in Western inoculation; it will never regenerate itself.” “Nor be regenerated,” growled the colonel. “From my point of view,” replied the artist, “it has no need to. Nature is the absolute artist, and nowhere else do people live so close to her. Rare natural beauty, a constant sun, and a mellow atmosphere give existence there such an intensity and richness that mere living becomes an art--‘pure pomegranate, not banana,’ as they say in Egypt.” “It takes the eyes of love to see angels,” concluded the archaeologist. “Natural savages may be noble, but effete races are not, and such most of the Eastern peoples seem to me. However, I may be wrong, or at least narrow; toleration is the great lesson of travel.”

After a number of such discussions, which were listened to by all, the company returned by general consent to more specific topics--plans, principally, for future journeys. These had but a melancholy interest for me, who had not the remotest hope of realizing any of them, until the conversation became once more general in outlining an ideal rapid journey around the world. This whirled me past Honolulu palm trees and craters, amid Japanese cherry-blossoms and wistaria, along the Great Wall of China, through Canton gardens and bazaars, into Calcutta palaces and Delhi temples, by dahabeah in Egypt and camel in Syria, until I caught my breath once more in the midst of the Mediterranean.

But the most valuable part of the evening, and to me the most enjoyable, if satisfaction is to be measured by what one remembers longest, was the concluding half-hour, when every member of the group, quite unconsciously I am sure, fell to felicitating every other member on the success of the evening, the value of travel, and the pleasure and profit of thus discussing it.

I had, myself, experienced vicariously some of the delights of filling in the blank spaces on the map of the world with picturesque scenes and animated figures. I had noted with interest how the habit of observation seemed to lead inevitably to comparison, and that to generalization and conclusion. It had been no small satisfaction to learn how adequately the human frame and mind had met and withstood the severer experiences of the more daring--how small, after all, were the world’s greatest difficulties and dangers to the unconquerable spirit. But it was most gratifying of all to realize that the general experience had resulted not in distrust, but in belief in the fundamental kindliness, if not goodness, of general human nature; and in a firm conviction that the world as a whole was visibly advancing in material, mental, and moral well-being.

I had, naturally, never questioned the charm of travel as a recreation, but this evening gave me a new sense of its superior value as experience and education. I knew, of course, that travel required no ordinary equipment of perception, knowledge, and judgment--of sensitiveness to impressions, with material to compare and ability to value; that indifferent travel would serve only, as Rousseau said of indifferent reading, “to make presumptuous ignoramuses.” But, although I had long believed that the observant and thoughtful home-keeping man might attain an understanding of himself and even of his nation, I came now to doubt that there was any means other than foreign travel for developing a realization of what is really fundamental to the general human spirit.

In voicing to Professor Maturin my gratitude for the pleasure and profit of the evening, I found that he had observed me growing a trifle stale, and had designedly administered this meeting as a remedy. He expressed his opinion that I was already out of danger, judging from my evident appreciation, with Shakespeare, that “a good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner.” And he beamed on me as mellowly as the moon when, at parting, I expressed my intention of continuing the medicine, homoeopathically, through books of travel, until my wonted tone was entirely restored. The whole prescription worked such wonders as a tonic that I strongly recommend it to others.

III

_Foreign Travel at Home_

“I thank you,” said Professor Maturin, laying aside the manuscript he had been reading me, in order to test its appeal,--“I thank you. I am only afraid that you are too generous. But, in any case, I am very grateful, and I hope that you will allow me to be at your service during the remainder of the evening. Do I not see you looking somewhat dispirited again? Are you not neglecting your mental hygiene?” and, leaning forward from his circle of lamplight, he peered at me anxiously.

I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended--the atmosphere of foreign travel--no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’--not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.

“You will not think me unsympathetic when I say that I have been waiting for this symptom,” he continued. “It is an important part of your cure. Some day I will explain to you my entire system of mental hygiene, but there is not time for that to-night, nor are you quite ready for it until you act upon my next and final recommendation.

“You will remember that Emerson said, ‘Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. The truest visions, the best spectacles I have seen, I might have had at home.’ He did not himself practice his preachment, but that does not invalidate it. Kant, however, I believe, never travelled more than forty miles from Königsberg; and Sainte-Beuve for fifty years seldom left Paris. What, of course, one wants is not to subject himself to the miscellaneous and often distracting impacts of foreign travel, but to realize What essential elements he needs, where to find, and how to apply them. As one of our poets has put it:

_Who journeys far may lack the seeing eye: Stay, thou, and know what wonders round thee lie._

“At one time in my life I travelled continually. But now that I am older and wiser, I know that I can find practically everything I want here at home. At different times I want an almost infinite variety of things, but they are all here in New York. This city is the true cosmopolis: eighty nations are represented in its public schools; four-fifths of the parents of its citizens came from the ends of the earth; there are more than a million Germans; more than a million Irish; more, and vastly more fortunate Hebrews than in all Palestine; and so on--you know the figures.

“Now, I need not insist that what is most important in foreign travel is not the novel sensations to which it gives rise,--the sense of a different climate, the flavor of new dishes, the fragrance of strange flowers, the sound of unfamiliar music, even the sight of ancient buildings or famous pictures--pleasurable and profitable as all of these are; and, fortunately, most of them may be enjoyed here, directly or indirectly. The fundamental value of travel is in the realization that it gives of ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, other than our own; and these, along with many of their outward manifestations, our new Americans bring with them.

“Thus, for example, if you are weary of the physical and mental traits of a land where all things are yet new, you may find the inscrutable calm of the immemorial East in Chinatown, where life flows as it did before Confucius. The ceremonial prescribed by Moses is still carried out here in many synagogues, and I can introduce you to more than one turbaned swami who will talk like Buddha. Unfortunately, our best illustration of the rigid solidity of the Egyptian spirit vanished when the old Tombs prison was torn down, but there is still the obelisk in the Park; and if you read Rossetti’s poem in the midst of the New York Historical Society’s Assyrian marbles, you will surely feel yourself in ancient Nineveh.

“If material crudities or social unrest distress you, you have but to reopen your Aeschylus or your Cicero to recall the balanced strength and fineness of Greece, the early law and order of Rome. Our nearest approaches to Greek architecture are perhaps the porticoes of the Sub-Treasury and the Columbia Library, or the choragic Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Riverside Drive. But from time to time the local Greeks revive their ancient games and enact their classic dramas--for particulars, see their newspaper, _Atlantis_, if you read modern Greek. As for Rome, High Bridge might fitly stand on the Campagna, or Washington Arch by the Forum; and for both, the Metropolitan Museum is full of casts of sculpture and of actual remains, from the Etruscan chariot to whole walls from Pompeii.

“Would you reap anew the fruits of the Teutonic invasion, you need only observe how it has brought force and endurance, solidity and creature comfort, family affection and social sentiment, good humor and good sense, to New York, as it did to Rome. The city would not be itself, without its delicatessen shops or its Christmas trees; much less without German scholarship or German music--Wagner and Beethoven having become ours even more than Berlin’s.

“Or, if you prefer oil to butter,--that is, are Latin rather than Teutonic in temper,--you may cultivate your mood by a morning with the tower of Madison Square Garden, which is a copy of the Giralda at Seville, and an afternoon in the new Hispanic Museum in Audubon Park. For mediaeval Italy you need but read your Dante in the Church of the Paulist Fathers. For the Renaissance, as for the Gothic, you may study the architecture of any one of a score of our public buildings, or the sculpture and painting in the Metropolitan Museum. Rome itself has now no more Italian citizens than New York, and it hears far less Italian music. While as for French music, French art, French cookery, and French amenity--we have appropriated them as thoroughly as we have the name Lafayette. Our rich men imitate French châteaux; the rest of us bless or revile the French invention of the apartment house.

“Or, if you hold rather to the Anglo-Saxon temper: the English satisfaction in the serious, the solid, the useful; the English habit of accumulation, experiment, and certain conclusion; and the English ideals of physical and mental health and exercise--these traits and their tangible results are happily still so native to us that they can in no sense be considered foreign.

“But even should your need or desire be for the mere sensations of foreign travel, these also may be had in New York. You may taste strange dishes and hear strange music in more foreign cafés in New York than in any other city in the world. In the local shop of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tobacco monopoly you may smoke a water-pipe, calling it hookah, chibouque, or nargileh, according to the place in which you would like to be. You may eat real spaghetti and see marionettes enact the story of Roland on Macdougal Street. You need go no farther east than the East Side to buy Damascus inlaid metals, or Chinese medallion ware, or Japanese flowered playing-cards. It is possible, even, to become an importer in a small way, by buying for five dollars, on Allen Street, Russian brasses that cost seven dollars and fifty cents when transported to Twenty-second Street, or ten dollars and seventy-five cents when they arrive on Fifth Avenue. You may hear the service of the Greek Catholic Church, celebrated by an archbishop, in a cathedral on Ninety-seventh Street. Bohemians, Syrians, and even Egyptians have made whole sections of the city practically their own, so far as manners and customs are concerned. Nearly one hundred newspapers and periodicals are published in New York in more than a score of foreign tongues. Perhaps you would care to read a New York daily that is printed in Arabic?”

Rising, Professor Maturin drew from a drawer and held before me a copy of _Kawkab Amerika_, a goodly-sized sheet, in strange characters, but with a pictured heading eloquent to all. There I saw the desert, with mosques to the right, and pyramids and Sphinx to the left. Between were hosts of desert-dwellers, on foot, on horseback, on camel, but all gazing and pointing to the central sky, where appeared a radiant vision of our harbor statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.

“And it is no mirage to them,” said Professor Maturin, after a pause, “and that is the best of it all to me. The strangeness of these newcomers is, indeed, refreshing, but I like better to think of them as most of them really are, or soon will be--the most genuine of Americans. They are so through choice and, often, hard endeavor; you and I, perhaps, only through accident. You know the fundamental loyalty of the typical German-American. The Spanish press of the city was staunchly American during our last war. The Turkish periodicals applauded our demonstrations against the Porte; and Hungarians, Servians, Syrians, and Persians have each formally organized for the purpose of influencing their fatherlands to become more like the land of their adoption.

“And so we come to the most valuable of all the ends of travel--the greater realization and appreciation of home. We return from other nations with relief--for there are few American emigrants--to a yet new land of fertile soil and mineral wealth; to a people varied, yet homogeneous, energetic, aggressive, ingenious, and self-reliant. We face, it is true, problems such as the world has never known before, but with unprecedented belief in idealism, morality, order, and education; not apprehensive of danger, but quick in recognizing and decisive in meeting it. Our successes in transportation, in architecture, and in material well-being in general; our achievement of the welfare of the whole people over that of section or class, of equality of opportunity for each and of benevolence toward all, have already taught the whole world new lessons of peace, tolerance, and faith in the average man. Nor do I see any reason, as we become more and more a new race, blended of many, why our good fortunes should not continue and increase. Anything else would falsify our trust in a wide and a wise humanity--and that is unthinkable.

“But, I beg your pardon,” said Professor Maturin, as I rose to say good-night, “I did not mean to take the stump; and yet, I believe that it is good sometimes to give utterance to these things which all of us feel. Nothing revives the vigor of one’s spirit like the conscious realization of being in harmony with fundamental law.”

IV

_Country Life_

I have never seen my friend Professor Maturin in better health or spirits than he was when I met him the other evening at the Athenaeum. He had just finished dinner, and indicated that he was in the mood for talk by ordering two of the Cuban vegueras that he keeps in a private box at the club, for use on special occasions.

“I am just back from the best vacation I have ever had,” he began. “I have been spending a month with a friend up the river, at a most delightful place, built and planted about fifty years ago by his father, from memories of the villas about Florence, where he once lived. The house has window balconies, a tower, a loggia opening west and south, and a red-flagged terrace with a stone balustrade, all complete. Below this slopes a wide lawn, then many flowering shrubs, and finally splendid groupings of trees between and over which you may see the river, here at its widest. The hills beyond and the highlands to the north complete the picture.

“After breakfasting alone, at any time my fancy chose, according to the happy custom of the house, I spent whole mornings on the terrace, looking through the aisles of ancient oaks at the river, or at the heaped-up summer clouds as they drifted south. I have heard the Hudson called epic, because of its breadth and power. It is no less so in its incidental embellishments of sunlight and shadow. I often watched it from its morning silver, through all shades of reflected blue, until at night it looked like a texture of royal purple into which the moonlight and the stars were being woven. The clouds were better than any Alpine mountains. Their mass and light and dark were as definite, and they had other clouds about their peaks and oceans of vapor at their feet. In addition they changed constantly, and turned to gold and opal at evening.

“At luncheon, or shortly before, I met my host and hostess. If before, we often strolled through a catalpa avenue to a semi-circular stone seat overlooking the river, or along a pine walk to a lookout toward the highlands, or past an orchard back of the house to a certain sunset hill, for the widest view of all, where we could see the river for twenty miles. Sometimes the hostess led us to sections which she called ‘nature’s gardens,’ because of the wild flowers, of which she was particularly fond.

“About such flowers I knew so little that I would have been tempted to revive my ancient botany had I not a good while ago learned the necessity of limiting the number of one’s avocations and of resisting the temptation to rob them of time, to spend on this new thing and that. I felt the same way about the trees, which, I was told, represented every indigenous variety. I knew by name only oak and elm, beech and maple, and a few others; but I made the most of the compensations of my ignorance, by noting, with all the freshness of discovery, the characteristic angle or curve of the different boughs, the varied form, texture, and characteristic movement of branch and leaf, the innumerable greens of the foliage, and their infinite modulations under light and shade.

“I am sure that we often know too much to get the full value of our impressions. For a long time painters could not represent trees because they remembered what each leaf was like; Claude painted his landscapes from what he knew, rather than what he saw, Constable from what he loved, Turner from what he imagined. It was not until the Barbizon men lived in the forest that Rousseau caught the actual form and Corot the fragrance of nature, and Monet could paint true light and air. It is said that the most interesting writing is done by generally cultivated people concerning subjects that are new to them. The greatest enjoyment of nature often comes in the same way. It is quite possible to be ‘connoisseured out of one’s senses.’

“At our luncheons the talk was always delightful, for my friend’s ample fortune gives him both occupation enough to keep him contemporary, and leisure enough to allow him to be Coleridge’s ideal man of letters, reaping only the choicest and most spontaneous growths of a richly cultivated mind. After luncheon we usually sat awhile in the large, although simple, conservatory, which adjoined the dining-room--if the word ‘simple’ may properly be applied to a place where orange and lemon trees attained their natural size, roses bloomed by the hundred, and where we picked ripe pomegranates and figs for our dessert. This, too, was due to the genius of the founder of the house, whose works my friend delighted to honor and cherish.

“When we separated again I usually retired to my room for a book and a nap, which lasted I know not how long, one of the charms of the place being that artificial timepieces were absent, or, at least, invisible and inaudible, everything, apparently, being regulated by the sun. This source of light and heat usually led me in the late afternoon to the loggia to watch the earliest anticipations of the evening glow, and to listen to an orchestra of mocking-birds in an open-air cage, accompanied by their wild neighbors, of whom there seemed to be multitudes. English sparrows were ruthlessly banished, but every other sort of bird was protected, with the reward of the almost familiar companionship of orioles, cardinals, wrens, and humming-birds, and the constant song of warbler, thrush, and meadow-lark. In nothing, I think, is the country more delightfully different from the town than in its sounds. Even the winds and the rains sound different there.