Gifts of Fortune, by H. M. Tomlinson

Gifts of Fortune is not a travel-book. It is not even, as the jacket describes it, a book of travel memories. Travel in this case is a stream of reflections, where images intertwine with dark thoughts and obscure emotion, and the whole flows on turbulent and deep and transitory. It is reflection, thinking back on travel and on life, and in the mirror sense, throwing back snatches of image.

Mr. Tomlinson’s own title: Gifts of Fortune: With Some Hints to Those About to Travel is a little grimly misleading. Those about to travel, in the quite commonplace sense of the word, will find very few encouraging hints in the long essay which occupies a third of this book, and is entitled, “Hints to Those About to Travel.” The chief hint they would hear would be, perhaps, the sinister suggestion that they had better stay at home.

There are travellers and travellers, as Mr. Tomlinson himself makes plain. There are scientific ones, game-shooting ones, Thomas Cook ones, thrilled ones, and bored ones. And none of these, as such, will find a single “hint” in all the sixty-six hinting pages, which will be of any use to them.

Mr. Tomlinson is travelling in retrospect, in soul rather than in the flesh, and his hints are to other souls. To travelling bodies he says little.

The sea tempts one to travel. But what is the nature of the temptation? To what are we tempted? Mr. Tomlinson gives us the hint, for his own case. “What draws us to the sea is the light over it,” etc.

There you have the key to this book. Coasts of illusion! “There are other worlds.” A man who has travelled this world in the flesh travels again, sails once more wilfully along coasts of illusion, and wilfully steers into other worlds. Take then the illusion, accept the gifts of fortune, “that passes as a shadow on the wall.”

“My journeys have all been the fault of books, though Lamb would never have called them that.” Mr. Tomlinson is a little weary of books, though he has here written another. A talk with seamen in the forecastle of a ship has meant more to him than any book. So he says. But that is how a man feels, at times. As a matter of fact, from these essays it is obvious that books like Bates’s Amazon, Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcisstis, and Melville’s Moby Dick have gone deeper into him than any talk with seamen in forecastles of steamers.

How could it be otherwise? Seamen see few coasts of illusion. They see very little of anything. And what is Mr. Tomlinson after? What are we all after, if it comes to that? It is our yearning to land on the coasts of illusion, it is our passion for other worlds that carries us on. And with Bates or Conrad or Melville we are already away over the intangible seas. As Mr. Tomlinson makes very plain, a P. & O. liner will only take us from one hotel to another. Which isn’t what we set out for, at all. That is not crossing seas.

And this is the theme of the Hints to Those. We travel in order to cross seas and land on other coasts. We do not travel in order to go from one hotel to another, and see a few side-shows. We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hes- perides, of running our boat up a little creek and landing in the Garden of Eden.

This hope is always defeated. There is no Garden of Eden, and the Hesperides never were. Yet, in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion, and come into contact with other worlds.

This world remains the same, wherever we go. Every ship is a money-investment, and must be made to pay. The earth exists to be exploited, and is exploited. Malay head-hunters are now playing football instead of hunting heads. The voice of the gramophone is heard in the deepest jungle.

That is the world of disillusion. Travel, and you’ll know it. It is just as well to know it. Our world is a world of disillusion, whether it’s Siam or Kamchatka or Athabaska: the same exploitation, the same mechanical lifelessness.

But travelling through our world of disillusion until we are finally and bitterly disillusioned, we come home at last, after the long voyage, home to the rain and the dismalness of England. And how marvellously well Mr. Tomlinson gives the feeling of a ship at the end of the voyage, coming in at night, in the rain, the engines slowed down, then stopped: and in the unspeakable emptiness and blankness of silent engines and rain and nothingness, the passengers wait for the tug, staring out upon utter emptiness, from a ship that has gone suddenly quite dead! It is the end of the voyage of disillusion.

But behold, in the morning, England, England, in her own wan sun, her strange, quiet Englishmen, so silent and intent and self- resourceful! It is the coast of illusion, the other world itself.

This is the gist of the Hints to Those About to Travel. You’ll never find what you look for. There are no happy lands. But you’ll come upon coasts of illusion when you’re not expecting them.

Following the Hints come three sketches which are true travel memories, one on the Amazon, one in the Malay States, one in Borneo. They are old memories, and they gleam with illusion, with the iridescence of illusion and disillusion at once. Far off, we are in the midst of exploitation and mechanical civilization, just the same. Far off, in the elysium of a beautiful spot in Borneo, the missionary’s wife sits and weeps for home, when she sees an outgoing ship. Far off, there is the mad Rajah, whom we turned out, with all kinds of medals and number-plates on his breast, thinking himself grander than ever, though he is a beggar.

And all the same, far off, there is that other world, or one of those other worlds, that give the lie to those realities we are supposed to accept.

The rest of the book is all England. There is a sketch: “Conrad Is Dead.” And another, an appreciation of Moby Dick. But for the rest, it is the cruel disillusion, and then the infinitely soothing illusion of this world of ours.

Mr. Tomlinson has at the back of his mind, for ever, the grisly vision of his war experience. In itself, this is a horror of disillusion in the world of man. We cannot get away from it, and we have no business to. Man has turned the world into a thing of horror. What we have to do is to face the fact.

And facing it, accept other values and make another world. “We now open a new volume on sport,” says Mr. Tomlinson, “with an antipathy we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent narrative by an American who had been collecting in Africa for an American museum. He confessed he would have felt some remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the infant without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother.”

We share Mr. Tomlinson’s antipathy to such sportsmen and such scientists absolutely. And it is not mere pity on our part for the gorilla. It is an absolute detestation of the insentience of armed, bullying men, in face of living, sentient things. Surely the most beastly offence against life is this degenerate insentience. It is not cruelty, exactly, which makes such a sportsman. It is crass insentience, a crass stupidity and deadness of fibre. Such overweening fellows, called men, are barren of the feeling for life. A gorilla is a live thing, with a strange unknown life of its own. Even to get a glimpse of its weird life, one little gleam of insight, makes our own life so much the wider, more vital. As a dead thing it can only depress us. We must have a feeling for life itself.

And this Mr. Tomlinson conveys: the strangeness and the beauty of life. Once be disillusioned with the man-made world, and you still see the magic, the beauty, the delicate realness of all the other life. Mr. Tomlinson sees it in flashes of great beauty. It comes home to him even in the black moth he caught. “It was quiet making a haze,” etc. He sees the strange terror of the world of insects. “A statue to St. George killing a mosquito instead of a dragon would look ridiculous. But it was lucky for the Saint he had only a dragon to overcome.”

Life! Life exists: and perhaps men do not truly exist. “And for a wolf who runs up and down his cage, sullenly ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we did not exist, we begin to feel there is something to be said.”

“And consider the fascination of the octopus!”

“I heard a farmer,” etc.

“At sunrise today,” etc.

“Perhaps the common notion,” etc.

One gradually gets a new vision of the world, if one goes through the disillusion absolutely. It is a world where all things are alive, and where the life of strange creatures and beings flickers on us and makes it take strange new developments. “But in this estuary,” etc. And it is exactly so The earth is a planet, and we are inhabitants of the planet, along with many other strange creatures. Life is a strange planetary phenomenon, all interwoven.

Mr. Tomlinson gives us glimpses of a new vision, what we might call the planetary instead of the mundane vision. The glimpses are of extreme beauty, so sensitive to the other life in things. And how grateful we ought to be to a man who sets new visions, new feelings sensitively quivering in us.