boorstin4

8o Front Traveler to Tourirt:

come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his Life without any real risk at all. He expects that the exotic and the familiar can be madę to order: that a nearby vacation spot can give him Old World charm, and also that if he chooses the right accommodations he can have the comforts of home in the heart of Africa. Expecting all this, he demands that it be ' supplied to him. Having paidjfor it, he likes to think he has got his money’s worth. He has demanded that the whole world be madę,a stage ifor pseudo-events. And there has been no lack of honest and enterprising suppliers who try to give him what he wants, to help him inflate his expectations, and to gratify his insatiable appetite for the impossible.

^ I

Until almost the present century. travel abroad was un-comrortable, difficult, and expensive. The middle-class American did not go for “fun.” Foreign capitals offered sophisticated pleasures: conversation with the great and the witty, views of painting, sculpture, and architecture, roman-tic musings in the ruins of vanished civilizations, pilgrimages to the birthplaces of poets, to the scenes of glory of statesmen and orators. Men seeing the “Wonders of the World” felt a wonderment for which they usually were well prepared. This had long been the pattern of European travel by Europeans. “As soon as we have got hołd of a bit of Latin,” the French wit Saint-fivremond caricatured in one of his comedies in the seventeenth century, “we prepare to start on our travels. . . . When our travellers are of a literary turn of mind, they invariably take with them a book consisting solely of blank pages nicely bound, which they cali an Album Ami-Corwm^Armed with this, they make a point of calling on the various leamed men of the locality they happen to be visiting, and beg them to inscribe their names in it.”

The Lott Art of Trtwel    g j

The, serious attitude) in the late eighteenth century was expressed by an aristocratic scholar, the Comte de Volney, who explained that, having received a smali inheritance:

On refiection, I thought the sum too inconsiderable to make any sensible addition to my income and too great to be dissipated in frivolous expenses. Some fortunate circumstances had habituated me to study; I had ac-quired a taste, and even a passion for knowledge, and the accession to my fortunę appeared to me a fresh means of gratifying my inclination, and opening a new way to improvement. I had read and frequently heard repeated, that of all methods of adoming the mind, and forming the judgment, travelling is the most efficacious^

I determined, therefore, on a plan of travelling, but to what part of the world to direct my course remained still to be chosen: I wished the scene of my observations to be new, or at least brilliant.

Volney decided to go to the Middle East, and his joumey through Syria and Egypt (1783-85) produced a travel classic. Arthur Young, the English agriculturalist, took three trips to nearby France in 1787, 1788, and 1789, as a self-appointed surveyor of farming ways; his joumal (published 1792) helped revolutionize the agronomy of England and reached its influence far out to the young United States. Jefferson, in France and Italy about the same time, eamestly sought out new plants for Virginia and found the architectural models which shaped the University of Virginia.

The young aristocrat went abroad also[togrow_uj(> and to sow his wild oats. He could enjoy his rakish pleasures at a comfortable distance from home and reputation. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nadons (1776), recorded that in his day it was the custom among those who could afford it “to send young people to travel in foreign countries immedi-ately upon their Ieaving school, and without sending them to any university. Our young people, it is said, generally return home much fimproved by their travels. ,A young man who