By-Ways of Europe
By . New York : G. P. Putnam and Son.
THE Familiar Letter which Mr. Taylor addresses to the reader is to our mind the pleasantest thing in this volume, though the book contains some of the author’s freshest and most fortunate studies of travel. These have already appeared, with one or two exceptions, in the Atlantic, and our readers know their quality, — easy, quiet, unaffected descriptions of the life and scenery beside or beyond the great tourist lines — people and places that offered something like novelty even to so much-travelled a man as Mr. Taylor. To most readers we imagine that “ The Little Land of Appenzell” is all as new as if Switzerland were not a vast hostelry from the bottom of its valleys to the top of its mountains, and as if there were not an Alpine Club in the world. Mr. Taylor’s journey thither had something of the joy of discovery, and he makes his readers share this pleasure. But for him, too, Majorca and Minorca have been long so untouched by travel, that they are almost “fresh woods and pastures new.” “Catalonian Bridle Roads” is a delightful and careful study of unhackneyed Spanish character and Spanish scenery not yet photographed ; and the account of the Republic of Andorra is in all respects a worthy pendant to that of “ The Little Land of Appenzell.” Not less Charmingly written are the papers on more visited places, Capri, Ischia, Corsica; and no one can deny that Mr. Taylor’s “ Distant View of Caprera ” offers peculiar and surprising features. The three chapters on life in Russia have the attraction felt in all the rest, that is to say, they are pleasantly and lightly written, in the spirit of experienced and intelligent observation, and with such a thorough conscientiousness that fact is never sacrificed to effect, nor truth to point; they are graphic and distinct, but the pictures once brought before the reader, the author’s work is done; he does not comment upon them any more than he sentimentalizes them ; and we imagine it is for this reason that we find them so satisfactory, in contrast with the many impertinences of most modern travellers.
The reader will think none the less of them, and certainly none the less of their author, that, in the Familiar Letter we have already mentioned, he rates these sketches and his other books of travel so modestly. They will, of course, establish their own place in literature quite independently of his judgment, and of that of the generation to which they were first addressed ; but, in the mean time, we cannot fail to be touched and instructed by the frankness with which, in announcing that he expects to write no more books of travel, he speaks of his past efforts as so many studies, so many processes of education, — with the one advantage that, however immature they may be, nothing in them is forced or affected, — and regrets that his want of systematic training disabled him from producing scientific works of travel. “ Narratives of travel serve either to measure our knowledge of other lands, in which case they stand only until superseded by more thorough research, or to exhibit the coloring which those lands take when painted for us by individual minds, in which case their value must be fixed by the common standards of literature. For the former class, the widest scientific culture is demanded ; for the latter, something of the grace and freedom and keen mental insight which we require in a work of fiction. The only traveller in whom the two characters were thoroughly combined was Goethe.”
The readers of Mr. Taylor’s poems and novels will believe that it is only from the purely incidental, not to say accidental, character of his career as a traveller, that he has not produced any work of imaginative travel; and they might not unreasonably look to him yet for a philosophized review of his wide experience and observation, which should supply this want. As to the scientific value of his books, it is a question which seems very sensibly and definitely treated for him and for us by the greatest of scientific travellers. We have a peculiar pleasure in quoting this opinion here, because it refutes one of those stories with which the public now and then loves to disgrace its favorites : —
“I never thought it worth while to contradict a story which, for eight or nine years past, has appeared from time to time in the newspapers, to the effect that Humboldt had said of me : ‘He has travelled more and seen less than any man living.’ The simple publication of a letter from Humboldt to myself would have silenced this invention ; but I desisted, because I knew its originator, and did not care to take that much notice of him. The same newspapers afterwards informed me that he had confessed the slander, shortly before his death. I mention the circumstance now, in order to say that the sentence attributed to Humboldt was no doubt kept alive by the grain of truth at the bottom of it. Had Humboldt actually said, ‘No man who has published so many volumes of travel has contributed so little to positive science,’ he would have spoken the truth, and I should have agreed with him. But when, during my last interview with that great student of Nature, I remarked that he would find in my volumes nothing of the special knowledge which he needed, it was very grateful to me when he replied : ' But you paint the world as we explorers of science cannot. Do not undervalue what you have done. It is a real service; and the unscientific traveller, who knows the use of his eyes, observes for us always, without being aware of it.’ ”
We are always grateful for what an author chooses to tell us of himself; and Mr. Taylor’s bit of autobiography is so amiably and sincerely written, that it not only appeals successfully to the reader’s good feeling, and enlists his sympathy in the emotion with which the author must close a long chapter in his life, but will awaken a new interest in his future literary career. It is also valuable as one of the first efforts of an American author in self-criticism, and it is full of suggestion to the student of our literature ; for it expresses, with delicacy and discretion, in regard to one member, what we feel to be measurably true of a great part of our literary body.