H.V. Morton: Enchanted Travel
H.V. Morton wrote more than thirty travel books over a span of fifty years, chronicling his travels across the Middle East, through Europe, and up and down the British Isles. His books are the most charming and engaging travel books I’ve ever read. They are full not only of his observations of the physical landscapes and the traditions and customs of the lands he traveled through, but also of the many, many people whom he befriended. Most charmingly of all, the books burst with how he felt about everything he saw and everyone he met. Morton can be very, very funny but he was also completely uninhibited in expressing how deeply moved he was by a cathedral or the sun setting over a lake or an old man he’d met on the road. I just finished his In Search of England, first published in 1927, and I was transported, enchanted by this England before World War II and fascinated by her people.
The variety of people whom he met make the Morton books unique in travel literature, not only for the humorous and insightful way he describes them but also for the fact that many of these types — for example, in In Search of England, Morton meets bowl turners, milkmaids, vergers, the blacksmith who doubles as a priest for secret marriages, vagabonds who can depend on a cup of ale and loaf of bread every week from a local monastery, vicars who grow every variety of flower and know every body in the cemetery and have yet to hear a wireless — are gone forever, preserved only in the observations of Morton. Not only are these types interesting in themselves but each one shared with Morton some little known legend about their village or bit of grass, and Morton shares each story, legend, and tidbit with us. There is the saint of one village, her saintliness proved by the fact that when her lantern went out, she carried on reading her prayers by the light of her fingertips; the same lady went naked every night to swim in the local pond, and no one bothered her in her nightly ablutions.
There is wisdom to be found in Morton (over The Pump Room in Bath, the town famous for its waters since the Romans, hangs the motto “Water is the Best Policy”, good advice for the ages) and there is wonder, as when Morton describes dusk in Beaulieu, “There is one moment at sunset in the country when the whole visible world seems to gather itself in prayer, and it seems to you strange that men should move on unconscious of this with spades on their shoulders, instead of falling on their knees in the grass; for in that hush, in the benediction of seconds before the first star shines, the universe seems waiting for a revelation, as if the clouds might part and Man know something of his destiny….” or when he describes his first sighting of a tiny lake of the Lake District: “It was a clear, moonlit night, with no breath of wind among the trees. In the middle of the little lake, round and gold as a guinea, lay the moon. Sights such as this, hiding around a corner, lurking behind trees and suddenly revealed, pull a man up sharply and fling him on his knees.” I long to see the lake, be flung to my knees, and rejoice in England (or Palestine or Italy or Spain, or any of the other places he wrote about). At the end of In Search of England, Morton writes,
“as long as one English field lies against another there is something left in the world for a man to love.” As long as I can read books like this, there will always be new places for me to visit — and love — without even leaving my chair. And when I do travel, taking Morton with me makes the trip even better. I read his A Traveler in Rome when I first visited Rome; the trip and the book are linked as my wonderful experience of that great place.
Morton said that “all journeys should have a soul” and so should all books. Morton’s journeys and books all have soul, a very old soul and a luminescent one, to light the way to enchantment with beautiful lands, interesting people, and enchanting tales.
