G K Chesterton

What I Saw in America G K Chesterton

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man mustmake a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing hismind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtlesstourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and claspingPatagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go andsee what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort ofnonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On thecontrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside anymen. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as hethought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those wholabour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By goingto look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves infantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalitieshad only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supremedanger-the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which ameeting meant a duel. Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers are so much amused...