there is a great consolation lying all bottled and matured for those who choose to take it, in the modern world—and yet how few turn to it and drink the bracing draft! it is a consolation for dust and frequency and fatigue and despair—this consolation is the discovery of the world.
the world has no end to it. you can discover one town which you had thought well known, or one quarter of the town, or one house in the quarter of the town, or one room in that house, or one picture in that room. the avenues of discovery open out infinite in number and quite a little distance from their centre (which is yourself and your local, tired, repeated experience) these avenues diverge outwards and lead to the most amazingly different things.
[pg 39]
you can take some place of which you have heard so often and in so vulgar a connotation that you could wish never to hear of it again, and coming there you will find it holding you, and you will enjoy many happy surprises, unveiling things you could not dream were there.
how much more true is it not, then, that discovery awaits you if you will take the least little step off the high road, or the least little exploration into the past of a place you visit.
most men inhabiting a countryside know nothing of its aspect even quite close to their homes, save as it is seen from the main roads. if they will but cross a couple of fields or so, they may come, for the first time in many years of habitation, upon a landscape that seems quite new and a sight of their own hills which makes them look like the hills of a strange country.
in youth we all know this. in youth and early manhood we wonder what is behind some rise of land, or on the other side of some wood which bounded our horizon in childhood. then[pg 40] comes a day when we manfully explore the unknown places and go to find what we shall find.
as life advances we imagine that all this chance of discovery has been taken from us by our increased experience. it is an illusion. if we are so dull it is we that have changed and not the world; and what is more we can recover from that dulness, and there is a simple medicine for it, which is to repeat the old experiment: to go out and see what we may see.
some will grant this true of the sudden little new discoveries quite close to home, but not of travel. travel, they think, must always be to-day by some known road to some known place, with dust upon the mind at the setting out and at the coming in. it is a great error. you can choose some place too famous in europe and even too peopled and too large, and yet make the most ample discoveries there.
"oh, but," a man will say, "most places have been so written of that one knows them already long before seeing them."
no: one does nothing of the kind. even[pg 41] the pictured and the storied places are full enough of newness if one will but shake off routine and if one will but peer.
speak to five men of some place which they have all visited, perhaps together, and find out what each noticed most: you will be amazed at the five different impressions.
enter by some new entry a town which hitherto you had always entered by one fixed way, and again vary your entry, and again, and you will see a new town every time.
there are many, many thousand englishmen who know the wonderful sight of rouen from the railway bridge below the town, for that lies on the high road to paris, and there are many thousand, though not so many, who know rouen from bon-secours. there are a few hundred who know it from the approach by the great woods to the north. there are a dozen or so perhaps who have come in from the east, walking from picardy. the great town lying in its cup of hills is quite different every way.
[pg 42]
there is a view of naples which has been photographed and printed and painted until we are all tired of it. it is a view taken from the hill which makes the northern horn of the bay; there is a big pine tree in the foreground and vesuvius smoking in the background, and i will bargain that most people who read this have seen that view upon a postcard, or in a shop window, and that a good many of them would rightly say that it was the most hackneyed thing in europe.
now some years ago i had occasion to go to naples, a town i had always avoided for that very reason—that one heard of it until one was tired and that this view had become like last year's music-hall tunes.
i went, not of my own choice but because i had to go, and when i got there i made as complete a discovery as ever columbus made or those sailors who first rounded africa and found the indian seas.
naples was utterly unlike anything i had imagined. vesuvius was not a cone smoking[pg 43] upon the horizon—it was a great angry pyramid toppling right above me. the town was not a lazy, dirty town with all the marks of antiquity and none of energy. it was alive with commerce and all the evils and all the good of commerce. it was angrily alive; it was like a wasp nest.
i will state the plain truth at the risk of being thought paradoxical. naples recalled to me an american seaboard town so vividly that i could have thought myself upon the pacific. i could have gone on for days digging into all this new experience, turning it over and fructifying it. my business allowed me not twenty-four hours, but the vision was one i shall never forget, and it was as completely new and as wholly creative, or re-creative, of the mind, as is that land-fall which an adventurous sailor makes when he finds a new island at dawn upon a sea not yet travelled.
every one, therefore, should go out to discover, five miles from home, or five hundred.[pg 44] every one should assure himself against the cheating tedium which books and maps create in us, that the world is perpetually new: and oddly enough it is not a matter of money.
