ii · Section 2

ii

In the course of reading a great number of travel books, I have come to prefer my Baedekers to all others. The worthy Karl’s “handbooks for travellers” are not only the standard guides (and likely to remain so) but they seem to me perfect in their exactitude, their literalness and their discreet prescriptions for the visitor’s emotions. If I wish to know the number of yards to walk from the castle gate and the right entrance through which to pass to emerge upon a View, I wish also to know in a general way how to graduate my feelings on beholding the spectacle spread out at my feet. And this, Baedeker tells me. By the unstarred, starred or double-starred nature of his reference to the View, I know with reassurance whether my emotional response should be elementary, intermediate or advanced. Moreover, there is lacking no concrete detail from which the fancy may launch itself. To read Baedeker is to use one’s own wings, and not somebody else’s. This is a great virtue; for in book travels, as perhaps in other travel, it is much more desirable to make one’s own appraisal than to accept another’s description of the beauties of a place.

And I really have known a novelist to reject every particular travel book dealing with a certain town or region in which his scene was laid, because he felt hampered by their emotionality and their impressionism and a quality of vagueness, and turn with joy and relief to his _Baedeker’s Mediterranean_ or _Northern Italy_ or _Spain and Portugal_. Here the matters essential to accuracy were given--and only a novelist who has heard the protest of literal-minded readers can know the penalties of a topographical mistake--but the perfectly-set stage stood cleared for the actors of his writer’s imagination. For the benefit of those attending the assemblies of the League of Nations, one of the most freshly revised volumes is _Baedeker’s Switzerland_; another of equal recency is the guide to Canada.

In spite of the twenty-seven books of the Baedeker series, there is a good deal of the world which is not even touched upon in these famous guides, which are, after all and with slight exception, properties for the tourist in Europe and the Mediterranean countries. The tourist, however, more and more declines to stick to Europe, a large number of him having seen Europe pretty thoroughly anyway. As for the tourist in fancy, he goes everywhere. The business man is another traveller who is omni-itinerant. I suppose the widest audience for the series of books called “Carpenter’s World Travels” is composed of what one commentator rightly describes as “the incalculable company of stay-at-home travellers.” Frank G. Carpenter himself is the best guarantee that the matter and form of the planned twenty-five volumes will remain as excellent as in the seven already brought out. For over thirty years this highly skilled journalist has walked the earth, even to the ends of the earth, and written of what he saw. Some four million copies of his Geographic Readers have sold to the public schools, and an equal number of families now open their newspapers once a week to find his new series of letters from the countries of Europe.

In fact, Mr. Carpenter is a publicist of so vast and important an audience that Governments have been glad to give him access to every official source of information, and various rulers and prime ministers have at one and another time especially commissioned him in facilitation of his work. The many and exceptional photographs in his hands have made it possible to plan the use of about one hundred of the best in each volume of the series now under way. _Java and the East Indies_ and _France to Scandinavia_ (France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden) are his latest additions to the beginning made with _The Holy Land and Syria_. _From Tangier to Tripoli_ (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the Sahara), _Alaska, Our Northern Wonderland_, _The Tail of the Hemisphere_ (Chile and Argentina) and _Cairo to Kisumu_ (Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and British East Africa) were the intermediate books.

“Adopted as a motto this year, ‘The world is my parish,’” wrote down Stephen Graham, at the end of his travel record for 1921--a record that begins with that first pilgrimage of his to Russia in 1906. Even so, he finds parts of his parish yet unvisited, and the next year saw him off on fresh Latin trails. It had come over him, indeed, to traverse some 15,000 miles that represent one of the most fabulous of mankind’s adventures. Graham had a thought to approach our present America in the path of those first explorers and in the spirit of the conquistadores, following Columbus from Spain to the Indies, Balboa to the peak in Darien whence he saw the Pacific, Cortes to the conquest of Montezuma’s capital, and Coronado on the fruitless quest into the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. What happened? Why, in the words of Vachel Lindsay, Graham’s tramp companion in the Rockies:

Then I had religion, then I had a vision--

and Graham, whose intimacy with Russian life and thought has deeply enriched a natural mystical endowment, found a significant theme in the Spanish quest for gold succeeded, after four centuries, by the American quest of power--religion the sanctification of one, pan-Americanism the credo of the other. It is this spiritual penetration that makes the fine distinction of Stephen Graham’s _In Quest of El Dorado_, joined to the man’s unusual literary skill, taste and sense of form. On the point of form there is something more than usually admirable in the start of the book from Madrid and Cadiz and in the conclusion (on a note of wonder) amid the ruins of Mitla, as if the quester for El Dorado would do well to seek its whereabouts in the indecipherable inscriptions placed on their massive memorials by a race that had sunk into silence long before the imperious advent of the Children of the Sun. These are the refinements of the book for the reader of philosophical or æsthetic tastes; but as such matters should be, they are entirely unobtrusive--present to those who seek them, hidden to those who are indifferent--and in externals Stephen Graham offers a first-hand travel study with cowboys and conquistadores, Indians and Mexicans, the Panama Canal and the jingle of spurs in the changing foreground.

Among those authors whose books of travel win their appreciation from the personality of the adventurer, Mary Roberts Rinehart seems to me quite plainly the foremost. The considerable time that has elapsed since the publication of _Through Glacier Park_ and _Tenting Tonight_ will sharpen many appetites for the camp fare offered in her new book, _The Out Trail_. With none of the acerbity of her own Tish, Mrs. Rinehart has to the full that lady’s derring-do. “I have roughed it,” she explains at the beginning of _The Out Trail_, “in one wilderness after another, in camp and on the trail, in the air and on water, in war abroad and in peace at home. I have been scared to death more times than I can remember. Led,” she confesses, “by the exigencies of my profession, by feminine curiosity, or by the determination not to be left at home, I have been shaken, thrown, bitten, sunburned, rained on, shot at, stone-bruised, frozen, broiled, and scared, with monotonous regularity.” And she adds that on several occasions she has been placed in situations of real danger from which she has clamoured to be extricated with all possible despatch.

Two things, if we may judge by her chronicle, seem never to have failed her, in whatever emergency: her sense of drama and her sense of humour. At least, they are keenly in evidence on all the pages of _The Out Trail_, and make it easily among the most entertaining books of its kind--not infrequently exciting, too! If someone thinks that the sense of the humorous must have been missing at the time and have been recaptured later in writing of the adventures, I suspect he is mistaken; for I recall that not so long after I had written a chapter on “The Vitality of Mary Roberts Rinehart” as a novelist, I met Mrs. Rinehart. She was suffering from one of those ferocious colds which make cowards and pessimists of us all, but she only remarked: “I’m afraid you will find the vitality you have just celebrated rather low this morning.” This, I submit, is such stuff as humorists are made on.