Places and Persons

...but who knows what profound and simple experience may not be his when his head is buried in the sand...

...It was a far cry from the wine-dark sea and the wrath of Poseidon, for these were the last words of Odysseus: . . . wherefore I preye to all rederes and hereres of this boke, yif it please hem, that thei wold preyen to God for me...

...In Ulysses, according to Sidney, the things to be followed are temperance and wisdom...

...Moreover, though the fourteenth century had its poets, apart from Chaucer and Gower—the poets of Gawayne and The Pearl were artists and very well aware of it—prose was scarcely recognized as anything but a bald necessity...

...And so this must be in a world where mountains are measured and deserts mapped, where savages are classified and seas policed, where Odysseus landing on the Lotus Isle would have to show his papers, and Mandeville his passport on the frontiers of Armenia, where Turner harmlessly singing of "Chimborazo, Cotopaxi," or Flecker of Samarcand, will always find someone to tell him how many fleas go to make the one and how many pecks of dust the other...

...the manner deliberate and truthful...

...The real author was one Jean d'Outremouse, a rascally physician of Liege, and very much of a genius as well, who collected a number of travelers' tales, and screened himself behind a finer sounding name, so that what was really a library compilation might appear as authentic record of travel...

...To us it is fiction disguised as fact...

...What he told them then was more than a splendid tale—it was a theory, almost a creed of travel, a structure which many poets helped to build who have not even the immortality of a footnote...

...This is a strange event for that time, and marks the enormous difference between him and contemporary translators, none of whom you will surprise in meditation before the word...

...but I cannot help feeling that if I am sent a colored postcard of Shanghai or a copy of Round the World on a Bicycle, I must give thanks to that same Marco Polo: but that if anyone were disposed to send me an Alice in Wonderland, I should drop a tear for what is left of Mandeville...

...The nature of their past does not deny them a future...

...To us Mandeville is two things—the fourteenth-century conception of a great traveler, and the name by which we recognize one of the finest of English translators...

...and whatever it believed it made worth believing, as in the case of Mandeville, where unbelief would have been a backward step...

...Even upon the slight evidence of a few excerpts in almost any anthology it is possible to see that the substance of this book is truth, distorted truth, legend and plain fairy-tale...

...they were creative travelers...

...In his Epilogue Mandeville says that he had come home because of "gowtes artytykes"—arthritic gout, crippling him in his old age...

...Not that scientific travel from Marco Polo onwards has not produced its own magnificences...

...But underneath this crust it had one certain virtue—a singleness of spirit, a desire to believe, an enormous capacity for belief, which was not credulity, for credulity is the expense of belief upon mean objects...

...and the "ipotayne"—"Behemoth, that great monster"—is shrunk to the proportions of the creased hippotamus sitting in a pool in Central Park...

...The strict advance of latitudes and longitudes has driven them from one stronghold to another...

...He was a tourist in the tradition of Mandeville, if you like, for these tales were responsible for much of the Italianate horror of Elizabethan tragedy...

...Both Mandeville and Wyclif were often clumsy, dull, and obscure...

...Aldous Huxley, men who travel intelligently among bric-a-brac "ad jactationem magis quam ad usum reipublicae, to crack, gaze, see fine sights and fashions, spend time, yet it availeth howsoever...

...But what has Mandeville, or rather the century that believed in him, to say to ours ? It was not a communicative century...

...Mandeville's tomb cannot be found today, and his influence, like all things unscientific, was confined to an age of geographical unreason, and came to an end with the beginning of the seventeenth century...

...For this was a bitter, dirty, fumbling century, shifting uncertainly from old to new...

...So that Mandeville and Wyclif stand alone...

...They had their fiction already, or what passed for it—their Guy of Nanteuil, Doon of Mayence, Aimery of Narbonne, Thibaut of Arraby and so forth...

...and alle tho that seyn for me a Paternoster, with an Ave Maria, that God foryeve me my synnes, I make hem partnerres and graunte hem parte of all the gode pilgrymages . . . that I have don...

...This Mandeville is familiar to most of us as the author of the Voiage and Travayle, the record of his journeys to Jerusalem and the far East, a book which stirred the imagination and compelled the belief of two centuries, a book that is at once ridiculous, monstrous and sublime...

...He further declares that all the facts of his Travels are born out by a Latin book (we may guess what sort of book) "the whiche the Mappa Mundi was made after...

...Most people who have read their Chaucer suppose him to have given a fairly comprehensive picture of it but Chaucer was far ahead of his time...

...Odysseus, alas, is dead...

...Some have found a last retreat in heraldry...

...The Prologue gives us the old figures in the new perspective...

...He must first see, then believe what he sees, then communicate his belief to other people...

...for to have but one foot or no head, to be horned and hoofed and to grunt like a swine, to be covered with feathers, bearded like a cat, or to live entirely upon the scent of wild apples, was something only to be expected in a disorderly world...

...but most of them have either disappeared altogether or sunk to something infinitely ungracious...

...The English translation is so superior to its French original, and so far in advance of any contemporary prose, except Wyclif's, that it must be ranked with what, to my mind, are our two other great English translations—I mean Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Florio's Montaigne...

...the style of great merit...

...The book was first written in French and then translated into Latin and English...

...That tradition Chatterton might have revived and Jules Verne, too, but they were born too late...

...In such a world, so full of information, our most important travelers must be such as M. Paul Morand or Mr...

...that is only to be expected...

...And the gist of it was this: Your real traveler, the man who travels to any purpose, must expect to find other things in the sea than fish, nor be surprised upon landing if he encounter a cannibal giant with one eye in the middle of his head who is expert at making cheese...

...to the fourteenth century it was fact...

...and because it was received with enthusiastic belief, it should, for that reason alone, be of more than ordinary interest to every one of us...

...I am unwillingly a scientific traveler...

...But the orderly world and the scientific map have no room for monsters...

...But if you recall that memorable night when Odysseus declared himself to the Phaeacians, one thing should be clear enough...

...This world is not so old that Hector, Achilles, Penelope and (thank heaven) Nausicaa, cannot be born into it again...

...but in the tradition of Mandeville he had ceased to be a traveler...

...For even your Elizabethan, though he lived in what we call an age of great travel, was generally no more than a tourist...

...It could only reach a very limited public with a strange taste for what was lengthy and dull and moral—Michael of Northgate's Ayenbyte of Inwyt affords a good example...

...A careless reader might consider Mandeville both awkward and quaint...

...He must remember that this English, struggling out of its middle period, was a harsh, involved and refractory medium...

...Places and Persons ODYSSEUS IN THE GOLDEN AGE By GEORGE DANGERFIELD «' T F THE poet do his part aright," wrote Sir Philip I Sidney, "he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, ¦*¦ and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned...

...With such a map as chart it is small wonder that Mandeville could travel among his fantastic landscapes and their monstrous inhabitants...

...He must not reason with a miracle, nor laugh away a belief...

...For the modern travel book, however admirable its motives, however skilful its execution, can only satisfy curiosity...

...Let us consider whether this virtue has not, for the most of us, been dispersed into all sorts of curiosities...

...I cannot make a journey without being constantly reminded that I am not going with them, nor read a travel book without measuring the distance between us...

...they created none the less a body of prose that was not only conscious of its future but was also capable in some measure of anticipating it...

...And Mandeville was cast in the mold of Odysseus more completely than any traveler before or afterward...

...It persisted on and off until the end of the fourteenth century A. D., and numbered Herodotus and Pliny among its professors, in whom I imagine Odysseus to have had a partial reincarnation...

...but if we examine the structure of his sentence, we find Mandeville searching, when occasion arises, for the exact expression, the exact word or combination of words...

...a century that for all its native humor and courage and occasional graces, was cruel, surly and almost inarticulate...

...Mandeville, in relation to his time, is singularly unawkward...

...Now the Mappa Mundi was one of those "thin-filled maps" in which the earth was shaped according to the taste of the cartographer and sometimes, one might almost imagine, according to the steadiness of his hand...

...Mandeville, like Odysseus, probably never existed at all...

...And because it counteracted the parochial tendencies of such reading, tendencies common to all conventional literature, the Voiage and Travayle was a very valuable book...

...So widely has the gulf yawned between his conception of travel and ours, between that splendid theory we hear from the hall of Alcinous and a library in fourteenth-century Liege, and the literary fact we can buy for a dollar at the remainder counter in any drugstore...

...faith he would seem to have overlooked...

...an incoherent and angry century...

...Wyclif wrote a more corporate prose—he had more sense of continuity...

...As lacking faith and as lacking a dependence upon the world I live in, I cannot travel with Odysseus and Mandeville...

...so completely that Odysseus also died and was buried in the year 1372, and nothing except another deluge and consequently another earth, will ever bring him to life again...

...But Odysseus . . . Odysseus has no future...

...whether the ordinary man, to whom science is something of a demagogue, and who has a nodding acquaintance with a complicated system of universes, has not already lost whatever made that acquaintance worth cultivating...

...And the last time he found it was in the body of an old man, crippled with gout and very near his end...

...in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed...

...As a creed this was naturally difficult to kill...

...It is something of a literary scandal, which we may safely leave to literary historians...

...And since of Odysseus it was said, through the indirect channels of Hecuba and Sir Thomas Browne, that "he cared not how meanly he lived, so he might find a noble tomb after death," that tomb would appear to be a Latin inscription in the Church of the Guillemins at Liege, which had disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century...

...And the Voiage and Travayle is a great book, whatever its origin, and a difficult book to understand by the same token—difficult because we can no longer believe in it, and it is a book that was once believed in...

...This inscription attested the virtues of Sir John Mandeville, knight, who, toto quasi orbe lustrato, died in the year 1372...

...He must have faith...

...And quaintness—the unfamiliarity of the sound, meaning and appearance of words —is likely to confuse us in our distinction between what is good and bad until Dryden's triumphant essays and possibly beyond...

...We had better go back to Langland and listen to Ball...

...Like other Homeric characters, he looked for a fleshly habitation so that he could enjoy his world again...

...For the ostrich with his beak in the air is a confused and arrogant bird...

...Of this prose, indeed, much could be written...

...And the point at which Mandeville died was when the seacoast of Bohemia was not to be found upon the new map with the augmentation of the Indies...

...We must say goodbye to Odysseus, as we have had to say goodbye to other things and other people, whom the seventeeth century killed and the eigtheenth century buried under a mass of Augustan marble...

...the dragon is a sort of lizard...

...It was difficult to memorize and therefore difficult to recite...

...The mermaid, for instance, is a dugong...

...he went to Venice, as in these less expansive days we go to Paris, and came back hot-foot like Robert Greene with tales of having "seen and practised such villainy as it is abominable to describe...

...the Boke of the Duchesse, the House of Fame, give us the old convention in a new coat of paint, which Troilus and Criseyde destroys with the new psychology...