The Sense of Wonder

Something valuable went out of the world when the last blank spaces on the map were filled in. The age-old area of myth and fable, which had helped to condition men’s minds ever since men first had minds to develop, shrank to the vanishing point, and an odd constriction of the human spirit seems to have begun. Western man lost his sense of wonder; his world became smaller than it had been, and having no more room for surprises it appeared also to have less room for opportunity.

Perhaps all that had happened was that Western man grew up. Knowing more about the world, he began to realize—as any youth does, when he gets on into full manhood—that most of the infinite possibilities which once beguiled him were simply part of a mirage. Yet growing up is a painful process, even a crippling one. The ultimate horizon turns out to be nearer than had been supposed, and what lies beyond it will be about what lies on this side. The universe hereafter is just a little less stimulating.

The loss of that sense of wonder may have odd effects. As far as Western man is concerned it seems to have been accompanied by a certain loss of drive, almost a loss of vitality. One of the great characteristics of the age of exploration and discovery which dawned in western Europe five centuries ago was the unbounded energy that it evoked. The lid was off, and anything could happen. Western man had a sense of destiny; facing the unknown, he had a bubbling confidence that he could master anything he might discover. Precisely because the world was so uncertain, he developed an enormous certainty about the part he himself was going to play.

So small nations attempted great things. There was Portugal, for instance: a minor nation, menaced by Spain and by the Moslems, poor, with a scanty population scratching a living from an inadequate countryside and with no visible prospects worth betting on. Yet it was Portugal that led the way in the great break-through, opening the sea road to the East, developing the ships and the men with which the unknown was first approached, producing such world figures as Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama, and incidentally winning for itself a fabulous empire half a world away. The slow development, in this unpromising land, of the knowledge, the skill, and above all the energy which made all of this possible is succinctly detailed by Bailey W. Diffie in a meaty little book called Prelude to Empire, which sheds an interestins’ lieht on the wav in which the business eot started.

Prelude to Empire: Portugal Overseas Before Henry the Navigator, by Bailey W. Diffie. University of Nebraska Press. 127 pp. $1.95.

Portugal, to repeat, started with nothing much except a very old seafaring tradition and a strategic location on one of the world’s early trade routes. Before the Renaissance, ships from the Mediterranean were going out past Gibraltar to carry goods to France and the Low Countries, clinging to the coast as they went, calling at the sea towns of Portugal. Portuguese exporters contributed their own goods, and Portuguese ships carried their share, and the nation began to see that its future lay on the open sea. But there were problems. Sea-borne commerce then was an odd mixture of piracy, hot-and-cold war, and commercial chicanery. The ocean was cold, rough, and cruel; to trade by sea and survive at all called for a genuinely unusual combination of talents.

The Portuguese made it. Most of the time, as the author of this book makes clear, they were thinking about nothing much more than the business of making a living. Yet their picture of the world began to expand. You trade with the Low Countries, with England, with Genoa, with North Africa, and bit by bit you get a new idea. The sea is a highway rather than a barrier; with all of its desperate hazards it is a way into a broader universe; get tough, figure all of the angles, develop better ships, sharper merchants, more daring princes—and in the end you may have a great deal more than you thought about when you started.

So the far horizon became a challenge rather than a limitation. Trying to do no more than make a profit, the traders and adventurers of Portugal (the two had to be one and the same, just then) found themselves bringing on the great age of discovery. They developed the caravel, the ship that could go far with few hands at low expense, a fit instrument for men who wanted to go beyond the curving edge of the known world; they developed also the body of knowledge that would be needed for the great explorers; and with all of this they generated an immense driving force that would not be satisfied with the trade to the Low Countries but that would insist on surpassing the bounds of the known and familiar. As Mr. Diffie remarks: “There was energy to spare in Portugal. The question was not if it would burst out, but when and where.”

This uprush of energy, of vital force, of daring and know-how and hard determination, grew out of the simple business of trying to make a living at sea. Sea captains wandered to places we still do not know about, came back and deposited the odds and ends of their knowledge with wealthy patrons or in waterfront taverns, talked vaguely of far-off islands no one else had seen, and of the possibilities that might come if a seafaring man shot the works—and suddenly this small nation was ready to lead the Western world into a new era where the possibilities, at least for a few generations, would be infinite.

The break-through came in 1415, when Portugal somehow found the resources and the driving force to seize the Moslem stronghold at Ceuta, in Africa. Ceuta was not far away, but it was a first step; beyond it, down the coast, was the western bulge of the continent, beyond that was the cape, and beyond that was the road to the East, the road to an illimitable expansion of the European horizon, the open road to everywhere. Nobody was quite ready to take this road in 1415; but this small nation was ready for the great Henry, for serious attention to what might be done beyond the known seas, for Vasco da Gama and what came after him. Thinking to do no more than survive, these people accomplished something far greater than they had intended.

End of the Road

It ended, apparently, in Africa, just about a century ago, and no one who had anything to do with it thought for one moment that anything was ending. On the contrary, men supposed that a new threshold had been crossed, and that more doors would be opened as the years went on. But the last blank places on the map were at last being filled, and without any warning at all the old driving energy went to seed. The moment of final triumph was also the beginning of the end. The great age of discovery was nickering out; as it did so, Western man’s confidence, his inbred certainty that he and no one else was in charge of what was going to happen to the world, began to flicker out with it. It took a century for this fact to become apparent, but the process was at work.

This comes through in Alan Moorehead’s excellent The White Nile, which covers roughly the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, when the Nile was finally traced to its source, and the broad light of modern day fell upon the last recesses of the dark continent. Richard Francis Burton, Captain James Grant, and John Hanning Speke, abandoning the old effort to go up the Nile from Egypt, cut cross-lots from Zanzibar and got into the area of Africa’s great lakes. They were followed, presently, by Sir Samuel Baker, and then by Dr. David Livingstone and the slightly incredible Henry M. Stanley; after which, in the fullness of time, came General Charles George Gordon, who was killed at Khartoum. The great era of privately financed expeditions came to an end, and the European governments took over; General Kitchener led an army up the Nile and broke native power in the Sudan, accompanied—so recent was all of this, and so long is one man’s life span—by a brash young man named Winston Churchill. By the end of the century the Nile was known and was open (controlled, incidentally, all the way to Central Africa by Great Britain), and the great age of exploration had just about come to its close.

The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead. Harper & Brothers. 385 pp. $5.95.

Yet somehow it is what happened afterward that is most particularly interesting. The world today looks very different from the way it looked in 1900, and nowhere is the difference more striking than in Africa. Awaiting final exploration, Africa, as far as any man could tell, was simply one more sizable portion of the earth which Western society would first examine, then control, and at last exploit; and it went without saying that the exploitation would benefit not only Western society but the Africans themselves. Africa would be given the blessings of modern civilization, its age-old evils would be reformed—contemplating the atrocious slave trade, Dr. Livings tone called down Heaven’s blessing on any outsiders “who will help to heal this open sore of the world”—and in the not-distant future the whole continent would be enfolded in the dynamic and forever expanding system of the Western world.

The men who played their parts in the whole operation were almost fantastically unlike one another, but they did have one thing in common: a deep sense of mission, of destiny, of certainty. They might have had doubts about what they would find when they reached the sources of the Nile, but they had no doubts at all about either the Tightness of what they were trying to do or the permanence of the new regime which, in one way or another, they were bringing to this newly opened country. The old vitality which had transplanted Western institutions to the New World and had asserted control over the Orient was still at work; what had happened in other places would assuredly happen here. Africa would be a useful and rewarding member of the European community.

As it turned out, Africa had other ideas. So, in the course of a few decades, did the European community. The Nile is indeed open, but it is not under the sort of control which the explorers envisaged. The serene confidence that this immense continent would provide new bases for empires has all but entirely evaporated; if Western man today can be said to have a settled thought in regard to Africa it can be expressed in the simple question: “What on earth is going to happen next?”

It would of course be a violent over-simplification to say that the limitless energy with which Western society went about the business of shaping the world to its own liking ran thin just because the age of exploration ended and the map was filled in to the last remote township. A good many things happened to that energy. A great deal of it was exhausted in the terrible convulsion of the First World War, and more of it was dissipated in the confused and frantic generation that followed. Opening the dark places of the earth, Europeans and Americans gave to the people living in those places a new notion of how life there might be transformed; a new notion, and a certain aptitude for having a try at it. Without realizing that they were doing it, the Westerners released more energy than they could control; at the same time the West came to see that it had problems at home which were immediate and pressing enough to absorb all of society’s vital forces for some time to come. If the broad expectations of the last of the great explorers and exploiters came to much less than was anticipated, there are solid reasons for it.

Yet no one will ever again see what the early navigators saw when they ventured without charts into seas which might contain unimaginable marvels and mysteries, what the weary explorers saw when they first looked on the sources of the Nile, on the empty plains beyond the Missouri, or on the lonely river that goes north from Great Slave Lake; and because no one will ever look at anything on earth in just that way, something behind the eye of the beholder has undergone a subtle change. Where does the sense of wonder come from, and what does it do when it possesses a man? What happens when it leaves? Does energy then die?

Cause and effect, or just happenstance?

ON CHOOSING A SUBJECT

The biographer in between books is doubly vulnerable because biography seems to be everybody’s business. For the novelist, the plot of his next book is a private matter between himself and his typewriter—a happy secrecy, permitting conception without interference of seduction or extracurricular rape. With me at least, my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated. Telegrams propose a day and hour of appointment, when I can have the privilege of learning the circumstances and (irresistible) character of the deceased. Sometimes the subject is not decently dead but signs the telegram, in which case wires must be dispatched, stating regret and my plans for immediate departure to far places. Subjects have been known to ring my doorbell, unannounced, and standing upon the mat, all in the open air begin what salesmen call their pitch.

Rival publishers send tactful letters. (How gratified one would have been to receive them, twenty years ago!) If my publisher has not already made the suggestion, their own list could profitably include a biography of George Washington, Jane Addams, Edna Millay, Justice Brandeis, John Marshall, Roger Taney, Clara Schumann or old Judge Sewall of Massachusetts who sentenced the witches and repented. My own publisher, however, is not sleeping. He telephones from Boston with two suggestions, which he refers to as “ideas.” Two beauties, he says cheerfully. What is the matter, don’t I even want to hear the names?

I do not, and it is best to say so. The fact is that suggested subjects can be dangerous for the biographer, especially if they are forced and pushed, with rewards offered. Some literary forms do not lend themselves to commission-writing; the product emerges tasting of the shop, like fruits laid on, a hothouse breed, lacking the tang and scent of the native product. It is my contention (and it is not original) that an author’s books, no matter what his professed subject, are actually about the author. It does not follow that the product is egotistical; Boswell bore little likeness to Samuel Johnson. Yet, whatever form the writer chooses—fiction, poetry, biography—his books are written because he has something to discharge, some ghost within that struggles for release. In company with other writers, I am often asked if I am “with book,” or when I expect to “give birth.” There is reason for this tired witticism; in his book an author actually is discharging some part of himself. Could one imagine Carlyle’s French Revolution being conceived, as subject, by anyone but the author—Froude’s History of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Parkman’s Oregon Trail, De Voto’s Across the Wide Missouri? The very titles bear their author’s stamp. Here, nothing is machine-made. It is all done by hand, as we used to say of good millinery; its very faults are the craftsman’s and convey his message. These books proceed unevenly, like human beings, one moment prosy, the next moment dramatic. They are marked, in short, by that quality which beyond all qualities is difficult for the artist to achieve and impossible to counterfeit, the quality of life itself.

—Catherine Drinker Bowen, Adventures of a Biographer. Little, Brown ir Co. in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright 1946, © 1958, 1959 by Catherine Drinker Bowen.