Leading the Blind

ENVOI

Having brought our traveller safely back to his own by no means unendowed country from foreign parts I will now mention, as a means of conclusion, a guidebook to the homeland published in French, dealing mainly with spas, seaside resorts, and known beauty spots: Through Great Britain by Charles Sarolea, issued by the Fédération des Syndicats d’Initiative des Municipalités Britanniques. Published in the fateful year of 1914, it was unable to serve its intended purpose of drawing French holidaymakers to Britain.

The main feature of the book is not so much its contents as the long introduction by the author who, though he may not have known it, sounded the perfect lights-out on an age of travel which, on the familiar routes at least, had reached the apex of comfort and freedom. The fédération in whose honour the book was produced was to hold its first congress in Great Britain that summer. Dignitaries from England and France were to take part and, it was hoped, on their return home the French were to tell ‘their compatriots of the friendship and hospitality they had received, and of the beauties of the English landscape. To frankly appreciate the importance of the task, account must be taken of the lamentable isolation of England, and of the extraordinary insularity of the English character. The European Continent is becoming more and more internationalised, and only Great Britain is not participating in this movement.’

Sarolea gives a picture of a more or less culturally united Mainland Europe, proved, he goes on, by the fact that many cities have large foreign colonies: ‘Ostend, Biarritz, Wiesbaden, Carlsbad, and even the far-off small towns of Bohemia and the Carpathian Mountains; even Biskra on the edge of the desert in Algeria has become a cosmopolitan centre, while the English towns remain the preserve of the English.’

With uncanny echoes of the early English guidebooks to the Continent, only in reverse, because England was now in need of the revenues from tourism, Sarolea explains: ‘… the English hotels are not yet good enough to rival those of Switzerland, and English hotel keepers have not yet learned to cater to the desires of foreigners, though these inconveniences may be exaggerated, and English hotels in general do not deserve the bad reputation that they have among those who live on the Continent.’

The author’s reasons as to why the French in particular should be attracted to the United Kingdom are curious. Ever since the Norman Conquest, he says, the two peoples have had very strong feelings for each other, either an invincible revulsion, or attractions not less irresistible, and yet the best qualities of the French and English have much to teach both nations.

The Englishman is an individualist, the Frenchman is socially and civically inclined. The Englishman is practical, the Frenchman an idealist. In England the imagination dominates, in France intelligence. The Englishman believes in versatility, the Frenchman in unity. The Englishman triumphs in local administration, the Frenchman in centralisation. The Englishman glorifies the spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Frenchman prefers to cultivate the art of good living. It is because of that diversity of civilisation and difference in national temperament that France will always be for the English the country of intellect and art, and England for the French the teacher of initiative and energy. It is not too much to say that Great Britain can show the French traveller a new world. Even a short stay will be for the Frenchman the best school in moral and political science.

It is a long and intelligent essay on the necessity of French and English union, and of European friendship and cooperation, but it was too late, for in August of 1914 the Great War began. In the immortal words of Sir Edward Gray, the lights went out all over Europe, only to come on again, finally, in 1989, two hundred years after the Cannonade of Valmy had ensured the survival of the French Revolution.

The bibliographies of many guidebooks before the Great War refer the reader to articles on the various countries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because of their authority and comprehensive range such entries were sometimes the length of short books, written by people of experience and scholarship. The Britannica of 1911–12 — the famous Eleventh Edition — could in fact be said to have been the guide of guides, a thirty-volume handbook to all that had been of note in Western Civilization. No more perfect encyclopaedia has been produced since.

A paragraph to a supplementary volume put out just after the Great War is worth quoting in full as a sad and fitting summing up to the end of a great era. The editor explains the difficulties of bringing out a new edition, similar to the Eleventh, after 1918:

Irrespectively, indeed, of the question whether as good a complete edition as the Eleventh could have been produced de novo now, it would cost in any case at least twice as much to make as it did in 1911, and it would have to be sold at a far higher price. But, from the editorial point of view, the important fact is that it could not be made to-day so as to have anything like the scholarly value of the work produced before the war by the contributors to the Eleventh Edition. Neither the minds nor the wills that are required for such an undertaking are any longer obtainable in any corresponding degree, nor probably can they be again for years to come. This is partly due to sheer ‘war-weariness,’ which has taken many forms. A shifting of interest has taken place among writers of the academic type, so that there is a disinclination to make the exertion needed for entering anew into their old subjects — a necessary condition for just that stimulating, vital presentation of old issues in the light of all the accumulated knowledge about them, which was so valuable a feature of the Eleventh Edition; the impulse has temporarily been stifled by the pressure of contemporary problems. Many of the pre-war authorities, moreover, have died without leaving any lineal successors, and others have aged disproportionately during the decade, while the younger generation has had its intellectual energies diverted by the war to work of a different order. Again (a most essential factor), it would have been impossible to attain the same full measure of international cooperation, among representatives of nations so recently in conflict, and in a world still divided in 1921 by the consequences of the war almost as seriously as while hostilities were actually raging.