Ordinary travel usually obscures and confuses quite as much as it reveals in the character of the traveller. His excitement, his moral detachment, his intellectual dislocation, unless he is a person of extraordinary firmness and poise, are apt to make him lose himself much more than they help him to find himself. In these strange and transient experiences his action lacks meaning and relation. He is carried away. He is uprooted. He is swept along by the current of external novelty. This may be good for him or bad for him. I do not ask this question. I am not moralizing. I am observing. The point is that under these conditions I do not see the real man more clearly, but less clearly. To paraphrase a Greek saying, I wish not to study Philip when he is a little exhilarated, but Philip when he is sober: not when he is at a Persian banquet, but when he is with his Macedonians. Moreover, if I mistake not, the native environment, the chosen or accepted task, the definite place in the great world-work, is part of the man himself. There are no human atoms. Relation is inseparable from quality. Absolute isolation would be invisibility. Displacement is deformity. You remember what Emerson says in his poem, _Each and All_:-- "The delicate shells lay on the shore: The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home, But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar." So I would see my man where he belongs, in the midst of the things which have produced him and which he has helped to produce. I would understand something of his relation to them. I would watch him at his work, the daily labour which not only earns his living but also moulds and forms his life. I would see how he takes hold of it, with reluctance or with alacrity, and how he regards it, with honour or with contempt. I would consider the way in which he uses its tangible results; to what purpose he applies them; for what objects he spends the fruit of his toil; what kind of bread he buys with the sweat of his brow or his brain. I would trace in his environment the influence of those who have gone before him. I would read the secrets of his heart in the uncompleted projects which he forms for those who are to come after him. In short, I would see the roots from which he springs, and the hopes in which his heart flowers. Thus, and thus only, the real man, the entire man, would become more clear to me. He might appear more or less admirable. I might like him more, or less. That would make no difference. The one thing that is sure is that I should know him better. I should know the soul of the man.