Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
At the same time the increase in touring which really took place
would be greatly over-estimated if one considered the evidence of
bibliography as all-sufficient. Almost all that the latter proves is
an increase in writing about it, due to the greatly increased demand
for the written word which was the outcome of printing. Morelli, in
his essay[12] on little-known Venetian travellers, quotes Giosaffate
Barbaro as writing in 1487, "I have experienced and seen much that
would probably be accounted rubbish by those who have, so to speak,
never been outside Venice, by reason that such things are not customary
there. And this has been the chief reason for my never having cared to
write of what I have seen, nor even to speak much thereof." Yet by 1600
there were probably few countries in Europe in which recent accounts
of the regions visited by Barbaro could not be read in the vernacular,
accounts out of which some one expected to see a profit. Indications,
on the contrary, of enormous numbers leaving home may be found in
this one fact; that the names are known of twelve hundred Germans who
passed beyond the limits of civilised Christendom during the sixteenth
century.[13] What must then be the number of Europeans, ascertainable
and otherwise, who were going about Europe then?
As regards the Average Tourist, however, we are not left to our
imagination. He is often to be found in person, young, rich, abroad to
learn. Yet—why should he, rather than his contemporaries of the lower
classes, need teaching? The answer will come of its own accord if we
stop to consider the similarities and divergences existent between the
Jesuits and the Salvation Army. Both are the outcome of the same form
of human energy, that of Christianity militant against present-day
evils; it is circumstances that have caused the divergence. The Jesuits
were as keen at first for social reform as the Salvation Army have
become; the Salvation Army used to be as much preoccupied with theology
as the Jesuits. In details the resemblance is more picturesque without
being any more accidental. The Salvation Army describe themselves
after the fashion of the Papal title of "servus servorum Dei," as
the "servants of all"; and the first thing that Loyola did when his
associates insisted on his adopting the same title that "General" Booth
has assumed, was to go downstairs and do the cooking. The two societies
with one and the same root-idea essentially, have been drawn into
ministering to the lower class in the nineteenth century and the upper
class three hundred years earlier: the identity of spirit consisting
in the class that was ministered to being that which possessed the
greatest potentialities and the greatest needs.[14] And in all the
prescribed occupations of the Average Tourist we shall find this
implied, that the future of his country depended on the use he made of
his tour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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