Month: October 2014

What you bring away with you from a tour of Europe depends largely upon your reading. If through great writers you know intimately the history, art and architecture of a country, you will find that your travels serve mainly to stamp indelibly upon the memory many of the impressions formed from the books you have read. … Americans are too apt to neglect this reading, which forms a vital part of the education of the European. … Hence they lose that perfect blending of romance and reality, as one does who listens to a great opera of which he knows neither the words nor the story.

In 1912, San Francisco Chronicle sent critic George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) on a seven-month trip around the world, from which he cabled daily dispatches for publication in the newspaper. After his return, Fitch distilled his stories into two books: The Critic in the Orient (featured last time), and today’s spotlight, The Critic in the Occident. The books were published by Paul Elder in September 1913.

Fitch’s itinerary in the West was:

• Greece, The Fountainhead of all Art and Letters
• Italy, Home of Art and Monuments
• France, Land of Romance, Thrift and Artistic Life
• London, Seat of the Founders of World-wide Empire
• New York City, The Skyscraping Marvel of the New World

Fitch devotes a chapter to the ruins of Pompeii, which had been discovered in 1599 and later rediscovered in 1748. The well-read Fitch was clearly not a prude, but is not very fond of the overtly erotic nature of many of the murals and mosaics, which he blames on the inferior nature of the Roman’s pagan faith:

The Roman phallic worship tinctures all the art in Pompeii and brutalizes it. It is shown in the stone phallus, built into the walls of many buildings, to keep off evil spirits. … From these remains the conclusion is inevitable that the ancient roman was not immoral but unmoral. Christianity introduced a new code of morals in which purity of thought was one of the leading features. Beside it the Pagan religions are unspeakably gross and vile. It was not strange that the Egyptian worship of Isis found many followers in Pompeii and that the initiation of novices degenerated into the most fantastic orgies.

Fitch is far more impressed with Venice: “The charm of Venice lies in its unlikeness to any other place. You may have read of its canals and its lagoons, its palaces and its prisons, its gondolas that glide mysteriously through dark stretches of glassy water, but the reality comes upon you with unexpected force.”

Paris “is a city of surprises and disappointments. As a place of magnificent vistas it surpasses one’s conceptions, but its buildings and its statuary disappoint the tourist fresh from Italy. Its shops, which were once the wonder of Europe, are now easily surpassed in artistic quality by the shops of second-rate cities like Rome and Naples. Its gayety and brightness it has not lost, nor it fondness for the outdoor life of the cafes and boulevards and great public parks.”

London: “The first impression that London makes is one of immensity. To the sensitive tourist it seems impossible in a short visit to see anything of this huge city, with its miles of streets and its thousands of famous buildings. This impression is heightened by the gloom due to a cloudy sky and a pall of soft coal smoke.”

New York: “The first sight of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor and of the ships flying the Stars and Stripes looks very good to the man who has scarcely seen an American flag since he left home seven months before. Then comes that awe-inspiring skyline of New York, which is changed by every new skyscraper–a spectacle more impressive than anything that can be seen in Europe.”

This book of impressions of the Far East is called The Critic in the Orient, because the writer for over thirty years has been a professional critic of new books–one trained to get at the best in all literary works and reveal it to the reader. This critical work would have been deadly, save for a love of books so deep and enduring that it has turned drudgery into pastime and an enthusiasm for discovering good things in every new book which no amount of literary trash was ever able to smother.

In 1912, San Francisco Chronicle sent critic George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) on a seven-month trip around the world, from which he cabled daily dispatches for publication in the newspaper. After his return, Fitch distilled his stories into a two-book set; the present volume and The Critic in the Occident (which will be featured next time). The books were published by Paul Elder in September 1913.

Fitch’s itinerary in the East was:

• Japan, The Picture Country of the Orient
• Manila, Transformed by the Americans
• Hong Kong, Canton, Singapore and Rangoon
• India, The Land of Temples, Palaces and Monuments
• Egypt, The Home of Hieroglyphs, Tombs and Mummies

One of the pitfalls of vintage travel literature is encountering language that we would now call patronizing or even bigoted. I am not qualified to write a comprehensive sociological criticism of Fitch’s work, but I see more to praise than to condemn. Most painful to modern ears is his use of “race” when today we would use “nationality,” and noting that India is “the seat of the Aryan civilization and that, though the Hindoo is as dark as many of the American negroes, he is of Aryan stock like ourselves.”

On the other hand, to his credit Fitch admits his preconceptions about Japan were wrong, and devotes the opening 48 pages to that country.

One of the best results of foreign travel is that it makes on revise his estimate of alien races. When I started out it was with a strong prejudice against the Japanese, probably due to my observation of some rather unlovely specimens whom I had encountered in San Francisco. A short stay in Japan served to give me a new point of view of both the people and the country of the Mikado.

Fitch ends with a couple valuable reference sections: “Hints for Travelers,” and, in keeping with Fitch’s belief that the literate traveler is a happy traveler, a bibliography. In the Hints section, Fitch starts by recommending which agency to use to go on your own world tour:

For a round-the-world trip the best plan is to buy a Cook’s ticket for six hundred and thirty-nine dollars and ten cents. This provides transportation from any place in the United States around the world to the starting point. The advantage of a Cook’s ticket is that this firm has the best organized force, with large offices in the big cities and with banks as agencies in hundreds of places where you may cash its money orders. This is a great convenience as it saves the risk of carrying considerable sums of money in lands where thievery is a fine art.

Of course, $639 was a huge sum in 1913, when the average worker’s annual salary was about half that. Then there was the matter of taking seven months off work, plus the expenses along the way. Extended world travel, then as now, was mostly a rich man’s pastime.