boorstin5

82 From Trtmeler to Tourist:

goes abroad at seventeen or eighteen, and retums home at one-and-twenty, returns three or four years older than he was when he went abroad; and at that age it is very difficult not to improve a good deal in three or four years.” Smith objected, however, that this was a risky practice which often corrupted the young; the custom, he said, could not have arisen except for the Iow State of English universities. The wealth of Eng-land had enabled her young people on the continent (as a German observer somewhat enviously remarked in 1760) to “give a loose to their propensities to pleasure, even in Italy . . . having a great deal of money toi Iąyis.h'<ąway, it not only gives them morę spirit to engage in adventures, but likewise furnishes them with means for removing impedi- ( ^ents,, or buying off any ill-consequences.” Casanova’s amorous Memoirs (1826—38), we sometimes forget, were a record of travels which had taken him through the capitals of Europę—to Venice, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Madrid, and as far east as Constantinople.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Euro-pean men of culture liked to boast of having madę morę than one country their own. Fo travel was to become a man of the world. Unless one was a man of the world, he might not seem tfultivated in his own country. The young Italian, Antonio Conti, for example (as Paul Hazard recalls), was bom in Padua, lived for a while in Paris, then in London in 1715 joined a discussion of the recently invented infinitesimal calculus, afterwards stopped to pay his respects to Leeuwen-hoek, the naturalist and microscope maker, in Holland—all on his way to meet the philosopher Leibniz in Hanover. In the old Grand Tour (recounted, for example, in Laurence Sttvnc's{Sentimental JourneyJ the young gentleman rounded off his education. Locke, Gibbon, and Hume knew France from extended visits. Gibbon did much of his writing in Switzerland. Monarchs often went abroad, and not only when they abdicated or were banished. Prince Hamlet went abroad to study. Christina of Sweden lived for a while in Paris, and died in Romę in 1689. Peter the Great at the end

The Lost Art of Travel

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of the seventeenth century traveled in Germany, Holland, England, and Austria. For Europeans foreign travel was an institution of exi!ed monarchs, adventuring aristocrats, mer-chant princes, and wandering scholars.

For Americans, too, until nearly the end of the nineteenth century foreign travel (still mostly European travel) was the experience of a {'priyilcged fcwj Franklin’s great overseas success was in the committee rooms of the House of Com-mons and in the salons (and bedrooms) of Paris. Jefferson and other cultivated Americans, who still believed in a world-wide “Republic of Letters,” were eager to meet their European fellow citizens. Henry Adams in Berlin, Romę, London, Paris was an idealized American yersion of the European on Grand Tour. Ali the success that Adams or his father or grandfather achieved, so Henry said, “was chiefly due to the field that Europę gave them,’’ and it was morę than likely that without the help of Europę they would have all re-mained local politicians or lawyers, like their nfeighbors, to the end. When a Franklin, a Jefferson, a Charles Sumner, or a Henry Adams arrived in Europę, he was armed with introductions to the great and famous. Henry Adams called the European joumey his third or fourth attempt at educa-tion. Like other means of education, such travel had its delights, but it was^J..hard work.)

The scarcity of postał facilities and the lack of newspapers gave an added incentive to travel. At the same time, the hardships of a virtually roadless landscape restricted the foreign joumey to those with a serious or at least earnestly frivolous purpose, who were willing to i riskjrobbers, cut-throats, and disease, and tolfind their ovVn wayfhrough track-less heath, yaśfswamps) and mud that came up to the car-riage axles. “Under the best of conditions,” one historian of the eighteenth century records, “six horses were required to drag across country the lumbering coaches off the gentry, and not infrequently the assistance of pxen)was required.” It was not until nearly 1800—and the work of two Scottish engi-neers, Thomas Telford and John Macadam—that the modern