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Haunted Journeys
Desire And Transgression In European Travel Writing
By Dennis Porter PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06850-3
CHAPTER 1
USES OF THE GRAND TOUR: BOSWELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
By the time the young James Boswell undertook his grand tour in the 1760s, the quantity and scope of European travel writing had become a widely attested phenomenon of the age. In the wake of the discovery, exploration, conquest and colonization of the New World in particular, writers from the Renaissance on had spawned a wide variety of literary forms that were centered on travel well beyond the confines of Europe as well as within it. And the New Science of the seventeenth century stimulated a fresh vogue of discovery and speculation that gave rise to further kinds of voyage literature. Thus, alongside the nonfictional but frequently fanciful accounts of the navigators, conquistadores, freebooters, or diplomatic emissaries, there developed down through the sixteenth and seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries an often marginal but popular literature composed of romances, tales of exotic adventure, voyages that are alternatively defined as imaginary, fantastic, extraordinary, extraterrestial or as "robinsonades," and journeys of a utopian, critical, and satirical cast.
As a result of the quest for increasingly exact knowledge of the planet and its creatures, or of the newly discovered variety of human racial types, a more determined critical effort was made, beginning early in the eighteenth century, to separate out the factual from the fabulous, to distinguish between genres, and to condemn those "fireside travelers" whose fabrications complicated the task of acquiring accurate information about remoter regions of the globe. At the same time, the increasing possibilities for travel, especially in the continental European countries and the British Isles, meant that men and women of letters, philosophers, naturalists, and amateurs of the arts or of exotic landscapes undertook to report on their journeys to an educated reading public that was eager to be informed and diverted by such accounts. Voyages of discovery came to be better equipped with appropriately trained personnel and scientific instruments as the century progressed. And, closer to home, the more inhospitable regions of Europe from the Swiss Alps to the Hebrides and Corsica were the focus of a new curiosity.
Moreover, the centrality of travel writing meant that at one time or another it engaged the attention of most of the important writers and thinkers of the age. A great many of them published major works in one or another of the genres in which travel and travelers played a central role. On the English side of the channel, one thinks immediately of Addison, Defoe, Swift, Johnson, Boswell, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. And in France more than one generation of missionaries, libertines, freethinkers, moralists, philosophes, or plain honnêtes hommes, from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Louis Armand de Lahontan, Cyrano de Bergerac, Fontenelle, and Fénelon to Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, De Brosses, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, found in different forms of travel writing appropriate outlets for their critical explorations of the natural and social world of their time.
At the same time, it was widely assumed throughout Europe that travel within the boundaries of the Continent was indispensable to the education of an enlightened man of the world. In part as a consequence of the classical literary tradition in which they were educated and, in part, out of a sense that modern European society since the Renaissance had developed an advanced form of civilized life that needed to be observed at first hand, the grand tour or its equivalent in continental countries was taken to be the proper culmination of the education of a young gentleman. Yet such a view did not go unchallenged. In Britain especially the debate on the value of the grand tour was a matter of lively controversy throughout the century, for reasons that concern one of the central themes of this study: namely, the implicitly transgressive character of a great deal of travel.
Richard Hurd's 1763 essay "On the Uses of Foreign Travel"'! is representative of the tenor of the debate insofar as it takes the form of a dialogue between two older men concerning the value of travel for young men. John Locke and Lord Shaftesbury are the interlocutors who discuss the grand tour in connection with "the education of a young man of rank and quality." But briefly, at the end, Locke is made to introduce the idea of a very different kind of journey; he contrasts the dubious value for young men of travel within Europe in a philosophic age with the importance of voyages around the globe for the proper study of the human species. The opposition is between travel for the sake of education and travel for the sake of the emerging science of man.
In any case, Shaftesbury is made a foil for the elderly Locke's disquisition on the goals of education, on the one hand—"the business of education is to form the UNDERSTANDING and regulate the HEART ("Uses," p. 138)—and on the moral and intellectual malleability of boys, on the other. "Knowledge of the world" for Bishop Hurd's Locke concerns, not "virtuososship," but "the study and contemplation of men" ("Uses," p. 122). And it is acquired not by "sauntering within the circle of the grand Tour" in the company of "shallow, servile, and interested governors" ("Uses," p. 104), but by patient nurturing and a discreet surveillance at home. An education that produces "useful and able men" ("Uses," p. 149) presupposes the benevolent authoritarianism of family life.
Granted the ubiquity of vice and temptation in England as well as abroad, Locke affirms: "I should still imagine our youth to be safer from the infection at home, under the eye and wing of their own parents and families, than wandering at large in foreign countries" ("Uses," p. 103). In short, travel more often than not corrupts, unless, of course, one is already fully formed and something of a "citizen of the world," in which case it is not Europe but the globe that one should visit. The philosopher argues that "the tour of Europe is a paltry thing: a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect." Instead, "to study HUMAN NATURE to purpose, a traveller must enlarge his circuit beyond the bounds of Europe. He must go, and catch her undressed, nay quite naked, in North America, and at the Cape of Good Hope" ("Uses," p. 197). And that, of course, was what, as the century progressed, increasing numbers of Europeans were doing in North and South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the South Seas.
Whether the benefits of foreign travel outweighed its disadvantages for the young is, then a recurring topic of debate throughout the eighteenth century. And the reason why is clear from Boswell's journal of his continental tour; there he expresses passionately and energetically the point of view of one of the young grand tourists in opposition to the voice of paternal authority adopted by Hurd's Locke.
In this respect, it is significant that in his introduction to the second half of Boswell on the Grand Tour, which is devoted to Italy, Corsica, and France, Frank Brady comments: "James Boswell's main concerns during the period of his life covered by this volume were sex, religion, and politics—the three subjects of conversation forbidden in polite society" (Italy, p. ix). I would add, first, that those concerns preoccupy, to varying degrees and in more or less explicit ways, a great many of the writers of travel books and, second, that what at bottom those same concerns have in common in the question of happiness. In their different ways the apparently disparate spheres of sex, religion, and politics are invested with movements of a personal or a collective desire that individual human subjects find it easy to identify with. Leaving home always has an element of promise as well as danger, of pleasurable adventure and of risk, that either solidifies the traveler's faith in inherited norms and values or puts them to the seductive test of difference—something that Locke in Hurd's dialogue, concerned with producing educated men and future "senators" for English public life identifies as a threat.
To travel through the world is to gather a series of impressions and to make a succession of more or less conscious notations on the superiority or inferiority of other societies, when compared with one's own, in respect of the satisfactions they afford their members, mostly in this world but occasionally in the next. To go on to ask why it is we are not happy all the time and to wonder whether perpetual happiness has been achieved by others at other times and places is to raise the ancient question of paradise or of that version of paradise which emerged in the speculative thought of the Renaissance, utopia. Whether or not the question of the perfect society is raised in an explicit way, however, what the religious beliefs, political institutions, and sexual practices of a given society make possible or deny in the way of happiness or personal gratification is a crucial and enduring preoccupation of most travel writers since long before the eighteenth century.
Yet, as Henri Baudet has noted, it was not until the Enlightenment and the emergence of critical philosophy that European travelers began to make systematic comparisons between their homeland and non-European societies: "The problem of whether our civilization was heading in the right direction was a subject of debate throughout the century. Speculation like this is, of course, a common phenomenon that may be found in almost any period. But the practice of making comparisons with non-Western peoples did not play a major role until the advent of the eighteenth century." Such comparisons will be the topic of my chapter on cicumnavigation. Comparisons between one's European homeland and other European societies present and past, on the other hand, have a much older history and will be the focus of this chapter and the next. In many ways, they constituted much of the raison d'être of grand tour literature since the Renaissance.
I do not, of course, intend to imply any uniformity in the manner in which questions of sex, religion, and politics come to be formulated or the pursuit of happiness fantasized. On the contrary, a great deal of the interest of the works under discussion lies in the way national, period, class, sexual, and generational differences as well as specific familial dynamics often give rise to radically contradictory representations of the way the world is or ought to be. Boswell's travel journals, therefore, manage to be both representative and unique. At the same time, because they are wonderfully candid and often more wide-ranging, elliptical, and less studied than many later works, they allow me to bring into immediate focus the tensions and recurring problematics of travel writing.
As Charles L. Batten has reminded us, for a long time in eighteenth-century England the model for accounts of the grand tour was Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, published in 1705. It was characterized by its sobriety, the relative absence of narrative elements, and the concentration on the sites and artistic monuments of Italy. But such is, for the most part, far from the case with Boswell's journal. If according to the critical commentary of the century the aim in travel writing was for a long time the neoclassical balance implied by the Horadan notion of utile dulce, then more often than not it is an aim that Boswell fails to achieve. By Addison's standards the focus is too often on the traveler, rather than on his observations. Boswell is altogether too confessional and anecdotal or, something the reviewers of travel writings of the age denounced almost as much as they berated fictional travel passed off as fact, too "egotic." Yet, from the point of view of a modern reader, such liberties taken with the conventions of the genre constitute much of the journal's vitality.
Maturer points of view than Boswell's on the significance of the grand tour for the education of eighteenth-century English gentlemen are to be found in the works of Edward Gibbon and Tobias Smollett. And some limited attention will be paid to the Autobiography and Travels Through France and Italy, respectively, further on in this chapter in order to suggest the context in which Boswell wrote. In addition, it is important to note that the continental travels on which the relevant portions of the works I am concerned with depend, occurred in the 1760s. So we have three British, upper-class, male travelers who were yet positioned differently and who, within the limits imposed by the regularities and exclusions of eighteenth-century discourse, yield three different articulations of the experience of continental travel.
* * *
Between November 1762 and February 1766, James Boswell produced an extensive body of writings that in the Yale editions of the Private Papers have been published as four volumes, of which the first three are of interest here: namely, Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763, Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764 and Boswell on the Grand Tour, 1764–1766, parts 1 and 2. The period of time covered by these works runs from the moment of Boswell's arrival in London from his native Scotland, for his second visit at age twenty-two—this time with his father's acquiescence—to his return to London after two and a half years on the Continent, when he was in his twenty-fifth year. As the title of the first of these volumes suggests, there is a sense in which all these writings have the character of journals. If one can also make the claim that they belong to the literature of travel, it is because their focus is outward as well as inward. The young Scot, who had been struggling for a number of years to escape from the paternal home and homeland, finally found himself free and financially equipped to face a wider and more brilliant world than the one he had been used to. And he made full use of the leisure afforded him to record the way he indulged his curiosity and put himself to the test by exploring the fashions and manners, pleasures, sexual behavior, taste, institutions, morals, and beliefs of the different societies through which he passed, beginning with mid-eighteenth-century London.
Boswell on the Grand Tour is one of the most representative accounts of the significance of the tour for the eighteenth-century in more than one sense. Its author was not one of the major writers or thinkers of his age; nor at the time of his journey did he have a specific vocation or passionate interest of a kind that concentrated his thinking and perceptions. He was not a painter, poet, musician, art historian, diplomat, merchant, soldier, collector, or even a passionate amateur of the beaux arts insofar as one can tell from the journal, in spite of occasional dutiful notations on famed sites, buildings, sculpture, and paintings.
He was, on the contrary, a representative fils de famille, an intelligent young man with a solid classical education and a developed taste for letters and the theater. He was still young enough to be enthralled by the variety of life's possibilities and pleasures, still in search of a career and of a place in the world, still uncertain of his abilities and given to alternating moods of self-assurance and self-doubt, still undecided as to whether he was at heart merely "a man of pleasure" or one who was morally and intellectually destined for a nobler role. He was sufficiently well-off to travel decently and with a servant, but not in luxury: "I do not intend to travel as a milord anglais," he notes apropos of his projected Italian journey, "but merely as a scholar and a man of elegant curiosity" (Germany, p. 75). He was not an aristocrat, but was from an ancient Scottish landowning family and well enough connected to have an entrée into the courts and upper-class circles of most European countries. He was, finally, enough of a critical observer of his life and times to recognize intellectual distinction and to seek out some of the major thinkers and men of letters of the age, from David Hume, David Garrick, Dr. Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith in Britain to Rousseau and Voltaire in Switzerland and France, respectively.
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Excerpted from Haunted Journeys by Dennis Porter. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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