The True Traveller  
The Speaker, June 8, 1901

A Wanderer: From the papers of the late H. Ogram Matuce. By C. F. Keary. R. Brimley Johnson

Nothing is more characteristic of our day than a whole class of literature which may be called the literature of escape. We have surrounded ourselves so elaborately with the palace of civilisation, that we have suddenly discovererd that we are not kings but captives. The Cosmos is full of jests, and man is the greatest jest of all, for he is a spider caught in his own web. We have come to look for escape from our own works almost as we might look for a miracle. The idea pervades contemporary literature, even farce and pantomime express it. We follow the woeful adventures of some farcical hero with pleasure because we feel that all the trials and tumbles would be tolerable if we could only live for twelve hours in a world in which every house was full of trapdoors and the clock of time itself went extravagantly wrong. But another and more dignified form of the literature of escape is the form in which it appears as the literature of travel and the escape into nature. This is the underlying thought of Mr. Keary's new book, The Wanderer, which opens with a vivid and true picture of the slavery of the London clerk and the manner in which he revolts, when he is a man of sensitive or imaginative temperament, against the unmeaning ferocity of his toil. It might be suggested that what constitutes the clerk's tragedy is not so much the mere work as the peculiar atmosphere of personal dependence and humiliation, from which the artisan is often free. Again, the class of clerks who sicken of their work and cannot throw themselves into it are no doubt refined, but I doubt whether they are imaginative. True imagination sees the full meaning of any kind of work; the man of imagination knows he is not merely turning a handle but driving a machine. The idea is quaint, but I can quite conceive a race of truly poetical bankers' clerks who, with the eye of imagination, saw passing through their hands, not slips of paper endorsed on the back, but fruit and flowers and great houses and rich lands. A cheque is a symbol, like a cross or a graven image. Mr. Keary throws scorn upon the idea that a clerk's soul can be his own. "Is it?" he asks. "Is a bill of lading the thing your soul delights to feed on?" In most cultured people probably it is not. But we fancy it is more the fault of the soul than of the bill of lading.

Mr. Keary thoroughly understands the true art of travelling, which is the reverse of touring. He does not hurry to see the "view" of a particular mountain as if it were something that would run away if he did not make haste. He does not visit the falls of some everlasting river as if it were a circus performance which began at a certain hour. He loves the casual, fleeting, spontaneous beauties which, like sunsets, cannot be put down in any guide-book. He sees every place and every natural beauty as Adam saw it, with the supreme advantage of not knowing its name. With his remarks upon the superiority of walking to every other form of travelling I warmly agree. A bicycle is an admirable instrument for getting rapidly from place to place: so is a railway-train, and both are extremelv poetical in their way. But if once you admit the element of machinery, your libertv is alike curtailed, whether you travel on two wheels or twenty. Travel is a reassertion of our physical nature; that physical nature must be free, and not tied to a treadmill, even a rapidly progressmg one. You cannot cross a rocky beach on a bicycle; you cannot wade a rapid river on a bicycle; you cannot (I am credibly informed by experts) climb a tree on a bicycle. You may not want to do any of these things in the whole course of your walk, but unless you feel that you could do them you lose your liberty, and become merely an ox in a long tether.

But although Mr. Keary understands, as few men understand it, the true wayward spirit of travel, the spirit that picks from, and therefore possesses, the whole earth, there are, we think, false notes here and there. When the clerk breaks from his bondage, and holds himself free to walk out of the office like any millionaire, he goes to Sweden. But why to Sweden? It was not locality that he wanted, but liberty. Unless we are much mistaken, he would find his greatest pleasure in merely walking the streets that he had always walked, and feeling that the streets were old but the man new. London would become, as it is, an elemental thing the moment that he became elemental. This going to Sweden makes the whole affair materialistic; it is the tourist's notion of freedom. We do not need to seek for the picturesque; what we need is the time to look at it. Mr. Matuce would have found plenty of poetry in the city if he had waited for it. "How busy," he says, speaking of the blackbirds in a Swedish wood- "how busy are these citizens, the native burghers of this desert city! Busy as clerks in Cheapside." We venture to suggest that not only are the blackbirds as busy as clerks, but the clerks are, to the truly imaginative, quite as romantic as blackbirds.

Or, again, if Mr. Matuce must have the country, why should it be Swedish country? To go to Sweden involves getting into a steamer, which is quite as mechanical as getting on to a bicycle. We should have preferred him to have strolled slowly and spontaneously into some corner of English country, far more nameless and remote essentially, than the places of the continent. He might have taken those weird places, the suburbs, as stages in his Odyssey. He might have discovered Clapham: he might have been the first that ever burst into the silence of Surbiton. To the imagination, which is the only real arbiter, the tourist-centres of Europe seem quite close, while Clapham and Surbiton are afar off, wild landscapes on the borderland of creation. Of such a place as Upper Tooting, for instance, one has a wholly mythical conception, as of sublime peaks splintering up into the sky. Passing through all these strange cities, Mr. Matuce might have really discovered the country, tracing it from the first hedge to the last lamp-post. We know quite enough of Mr. Keary's unquestionable powers of imagination to be sure that he would have found in the last lamp-post fully as much poetry as he finds in a Scandinavian forest at midnight. He is not one to talk the fastidious folly that is talked about "good" and "bad" scenery. He knows that every scene has an individuality which cannot be matched: that an English hedge and road at twilight can no more be judged by the standard of a Swiss mountain at sunrise than a swan by the standard of an elephant. To say disdainfully of a piece of country that it is "quite flat" is like saying disdainfully of a lily that it is "quite white." I think, therefore, that Mr. Keary (or Mr. Matuce) would have enjoyed himself quite as much in an English lane; and he would have had the advantage that his progress, being entirely pedestrian, would have been quite natural and unrestricted. He would have seemed more of a traveller by not crossing the sea: he would have gone further by staying at home.

Of the singularly beautiful style in which the book is written it is unnecessary, to any reader of Mr. Keary, to speak. But in a subject like this Mr. Keary's excellence is his chief danger. He has hold of a great and primitive truth, the fact that travel is not a whim of culture, but a function of man. He is far more likely to bury this idea in the beauties of his method than to fail in exhibiting them. It is likely to be the tragedy of many men of letters in our time, that any bold conceptions they possess should be taken as fancies of the intellect rather than as instincts of the heart. Surely no irony that can be conceived would equal the fate of a man of genius who should rise and bid the sun and moon stand still with the elemental exultation of Joshua, and only be congratulated upon a graceful figure of speech.