Under the Sky

Extract

Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ announced the disconcerting Bacon, but I think there is more to be said for travel than that. ‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases,’ declares Hazlitt in the most charming of his essays. For him travel was a journeying into solitude—none of your collective hiking for him.’ For once let me have a truce with impertinence,’ he says. ‘Give me the dear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before.’ And in the same essay : ‘I cannot talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing by fits and starts. “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment .... I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical.’ There is no need to deny the sympathy that Sterne’s beautiful sentence invokes, even though in principle Hazlitt may command our assent. At the heart of the essayist’s rather forcibly expressed preference is a pleasure in the continuous addition of impressions in tranquillity; his notion of a journey is a solitary pilgrimage to the very bosom of a peaceful countryside; he is the dreaming watcher of sunset skies who resents unnecessary talk.