FELLOW-TRAVELLERS.
NOW that moat of one's friends are already in Switzerland, good advice about travel, we fear, must be offered with a sense of unpunctuality,—not, indeed, unusual in its production, but exceedingly unsuitable to any contribution towards the prosperity of a journey. That which is here set before the reader, alas !,is belated in another sense, and if it referred to material matters, might be set aside as too late in the century, as well as in the year. Bat we aspire to no Cook-like ambition ; we would lay a finger on no man's railway-ticket, and contribute not a single hint towards shortening his hotel-bill. Oar aim lies in a region where the critic may dismiss all anxiety about being not well np to date. We see no sign that it is less the fashion to find one's fellow-travellers trying than it used to be.
The difficulty of mutual forbearance has certainly lasted from the time of Paul and Silas to our own day ; we are inclined to trace it to a more venerable origin. That unknown writer who has said such odious things on the malignity of Herodotus, had access, we are convinced, to the family papers of some companion whose ancestor accompanied the Father of History up the Nile. At all events, these difficulties have formed a prominent feature in every journey we ever heard much about. "He told me all my faults before we parted, though I kept my opinion of his to myself," said once a disappointed traveller; and his hearer silently wondered whether the other party was not at the same moment using the very same words. Somehow, uncongenial fellow-travellers do always seem to be telling one all one's faults, and one is not aware that one makes them feel the same.
And then, as to the appropriateness of offering advice on the choice of a travelling companion in the month of August, we would urge that the chief value of our suggestions lie in their influence on the reminiscences of November. Something we might say on the choice beforehand, but not mach. Our maxims, indeed, might all be condensed into the brief warning, " Avoid a new friend !" Fellow-pilgrims should be either familiar enough to know each other's failings, or unfamiliar enough to discover them without concern ; and the wise man, therefore, will stick to old friends and new acquaintance in his choice, or else go alone. Bat, in truth, it is only by a polite fiction that most people can be said to have any choice in the matter, except in this negative form. Anybody can fall back upon his own society ; but the person who is able to select a companion, even eo far as Paris, mast be gifted by Nature and Fortune much beyond the average of humanity. We address ourselves to the ordinary mortal, who is forced to take what offers, and shall feel satisfied if we induce him to believe that joint-stock travelling is an arduous thing, and to admit some faint suspicion that a friend in whom the air of Switzerland developed symptoms of rapacity, greediness, selfishness, and arrogauce, was, in truth, only showing that he was human.
For do but consider how impossible it is for any amount of social intercourse to test the qualities needed in travel. The first day of a common journey reveals defects that have been hidden from even intimate acquaintance for years. How often might we dine beside a companion whose conversation sparkles like the champagne, before we found out that he was stingy ! What long, thought-stirring discussions might not memory associate with the cool shades of some country-house library, without suggesting to us a momentary suspicion that our delightful new friend was lavish in money to the edge of dis- honesty, and a little beyond it ! Either quality is enough to poison a tour. Well do we remember the sympathy with which we listened to the description of a journey made when a journey in England had something of those anxieties and interests for which we mast now cross the Channel, and at which the elder lady was in the habit of offering the postboys tracts instead of half.crowns. What beauty of scenery would have been capable of engaging the attention of her young companion about the time of a change of horses P The other extreme in just as disastrous. What hope of genial relations when we discover that our friend is impoverishing no, needlessly and fruitlessly, at every meal, every walk, and every halt P In our social visits to these rocks are entirely submerged beneath the tide of hospitality ; we have floated over them unawares many and many a time, and we discern them only as we crash against them. And then, too, it must be remembered that we make the discovery in circumstances which preclude us from ignoring its vexatiousness. We cannot tarn away our attention from what is irritating for no better reason than our own pleasure. We may unite to work with companions very distasteful to us ; the lawyer's opinion, or official letter, or whatever it is, takes the mind into a region where many an ugly little fact may be forgotten. But if our whole bond is a determination to enjoy ourselves, difficulties about money prove fatal to it, and none are more likely to trouble the peace of fellow-travellers.
Or, again, take the discovery which a joint tour forces upon average humanity, that care for bodily ease and comfort is a great deal stronger than polite convention allows, and only consider how, by the mere parallax of mental vision, we all see this first in the case of somebody else ! It is a truth of humanity. We disguise it from ourselves with a variety of polite phrases, but sacrifice of comfort is a great sacrifice. When two people are travelling in one carriage, one of them wanting the window open and the other wanting it shut, one of them must be uncomfortable. It is not a greater discomfort than one would be willing to put up with if it were asked as a favour, and in ordinary intercourse it is asked as a favour. If either party were the owner of the carriage, the host would be eager to make his friend comfortable, and the guest would be careful not to make any demand ; but as it is, they are just fragments of humanity with nothing but eternal and immutable morality to induce either to renounce any part of his half-right to the carriage ; and if anybody thinks eternal and immutable morality makes it easy to be a little colder than one likes, or a little hotter than one likes, in compliance with an unreasonable wish of one's neighbour, he is but slightly acquainted with human nature. Of coarse, it is unreasonable in anybody to wish for a different temperature from one's self. At least, we have met with the concession that two persons may be reasonably happy in different temperatures about as often as we have met with first-rate genius. "The Freehairians are all persecutors," remember being said mournfully by a victim, and a hundred voices would swell the lament. But all rival heretics are persecutors at heart ; and while we would denounce the bigot zeal of some hygienic Pharisee who enforces his gospel that " whate'er is good and great in men May be traced to oxygen," at the cost of face-ache and rheumatism, we have plenty of indignation left for the sturdy common-sense which refuses to believe in incipient suffocation till the patient faints away. If we could only root in our readers' minds a firm conviction that a small need for oxygen is compatible with every virtue, or, on the other hand, that a sound understanding is sometimes united with great sensitiveness to a bad smell, we should consider ourselves to have made a contribution to the welfare of fellow-travellers equal to a contribution of 50 per cent.
on their expenses. The virulent element in jarring tastes is not selfishness, bat self-righteous contempt. Is it not enough that you have your way about the window from which I must suffer, or the fire for half of which I most pay ; but are you to feel
yourself into the bargain my moral teacher, curing my fancies, or enlightening my hygienic ideas I,- Away with such hypocrisy !
Let us battle out our likings on equal ground, and not entangle the preferences of sensation with the solemnity of conscience and the imperious claim of a sacred duty. We shall find it quite hard enough to set aside our tastes at any rate, without enthroning them as principles.
And indeed a common tour, with a certain regard to economy, is the only thing that makes many people aware that they care a gooddeal about what they eat and drink. There are some persons who are as indifferent to their daily fare as all grown-up and well- bred members of society are supposed to be ; but these are net many, and when we put aide by side some large difference of opinion, and a variety of wish about a common meal, the remain apt to be humiliating. We get over our friend's atrocious politics ; but when we find he wants us to go to a pension where we get uo meat for breakfast— I And then, ten to one, he will not only owe us a grudge if we refuse to spare his parse in matters about which he is indifferent, but will further, in conformity to the abominable heresy of the hour, take upon himself the airs of a physician whose advice has been rejected. His comrade has no choice but to be despised or uncomfortable, and very often he has to accept both.
Our advice to persons about to make a journey together may appear not less terse or simple than Punch's advice to persons about to marry. But, in truth, it is no mote our aim to abolish the practice of travelling in company, than it was the aim of the sage in Rasselas to convince the Prince of Abyssinia that "no mortal could be a poet." We are merely urging upon the reader that he should lower his antici- pations of companionship when he has to enter on it without any framework of hospitality. This principle always borne in mind is almost all that people of average good nature needin order to get through their difficulties very creditably. It is the notion that they have nothing to do but to cross the Channel in order to enter a realm of enjoyment, that makes them feel injured and cheated at every jar and rub. We are merely urging the pilgrim to trace the difficulties, which he must account for somehow, to circumstance rather than character. Think only what is involved in companionship without hospitality ! Those who enter on it undertake to replace the oldest of the virtues by an original code of justice, and to supersede the tradi- tions of scores of generations by an impartial equity that can be trusted against self ! And while all are selfish more or less, selfishness is infinitely various. It is not as if we all
wanted the same thing; then at least one of us would not want to open the window, and another to shut it. It is not as if we wanted different things ; then at least each would claim his open or shut window with a certain modesty, and accept it with admiration for his friend's generosity. As it is, no one can tell what really involves sacrifice in a fellow•traveller. You blame his sulkiness when you would, if you knew all, admire his generosity, and look down upon him as a voluptuary when keener discernment might teach you almost to look up to him as an ascetic. At least, let us rectify the associations of travel as they linger in memory ; let not the grand and lovely panorama be unrolled in vain before "that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude ;" as the snowy peaks once more flush with the dawn, or inscribe their delicate tracery against the noonday turquoise, do not spoil that bliss by the contemplation of human malignity. Let us learn to give those films of discomfort that must still haunt the memory, the softness of exhalations from the marsh of human frailty, and cease to see in them the lurid opacity of fumes from some volcano on the crest of which we have trodden with rash foot, and from the perils of which we have escaped with difficulty.
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