God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor

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       Chapter Two

      The next year, out of a reverence for the memory of Erasmus, Jos. Scaliger, etc., I passed in Holland learning Hollandish … I spent some months also at Louvain and the winter at Mentone (I had always rather poor health). I travelled then in Italy and passed the next winter in Spain, and most of the next year at Athens; and that winter went forward to the Bible lands …

      Letter to D. G. Hogarth, August 1913

      The Charles Doughty who left England for the continent in 1870 was a man who had been emotionally battered almost to submission – shy, retiring, and without a shred of emotional self-confidence. At twenty-seven, he was a Master of Arts, a scholar widely read in medieval literature and with some knowledge of geology and science, a man filled with literary and academic ambition, but without any obvious means of earning a living. His studies provided one safe retreat from the daunting world of human relationships; the lonely life of a solitary wanderer would be another.

      There was no need to reach back to the sixteenth century for explanations for his decision to travel. The idea of paying homage to Scaliger¹ and Erasmus,² the one looking back from his own time to ancient history, the other rejecting the calling of a churchman and then leaving Cambridge to wander Europe as a peripatetic scholar, was appealing to his intellectual self-esteem, but it did little to explain his real motives.

      One manifestation of his chronic lack of confidence was his constant wittering concern about his health. It had already led him to abandon his studies at Cambridge for a year, and he would claim later in his life³ that his hard work in the Bodleian had left him weak, ill, and in need of a change of climate. It was a common predilection: the hotels and sanatoria of Menton and the other Mediterranean resorts were full of sickly Englishmen taking the air, although few of them would have undertaken travels as extensive or as energetic as Doughty himself was embarking upon.

      Like some of them, he had a pressing financial motive for leaving Britain. He had neither possessions nor prospects to keep him in England, and contemporary guidebooks estimated that something under ten shillings a day⁴ should be sufficient for walking tours in remote areas of Europe. Life could be lived much more cheaply travelling the streets of the continent than at home; the future would have to look after itself.

      So to save his money and to preserve his health, he decided to go abroad. But the letter to Hogarth more than forty years later puts his supposed weak constitution into context: the hardships and discomforts he was to endure over the next eight years would have killed a less hardy individual. He was a man dedicated to living his life through his books and scholarship – and yet, at this time of personal crisis, Doughty the diffident intellectual was determinedly pitting himself against a series of physical challenges. It would not be the last time.

      It was not exactly a Grand Tour that he undertook: Europe was in ferment, with either open fighting or sullen, smouldering peace in France, North Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Doughty faced the prospect not just with courage but with all the insouciance of an English gentleman as he picked his way from troublespot to troublespot, peering superciliously past the shattered landscapes and the weary people to jot down his reflections about the ancient ruins he had come to see.

      For his first few months out of England, though – ‘a long year’, he called it later⁵ – he stayed in Leiden and the nearby Dutch towns, following his lonely studies and applying himself to learning the language.

      He had a vague idea of investigating the historical background of the English civilization which fascinated him – but when he left Holland, he had, like Sandys before him, no plan for where his travels or his studies would lead him. The opportunity to observe the life of the travelling Arabs at first hand – the opportunity which was to provide him with the raw material for his greatest literary work – came to him by chance rather than by intent. One of his greatest talents was in allowing his life to be taken over by such chances and in seizing the benefit of them.

      The next two years are the first period of Doughty’s life for which his own detailed and contemporary records exist. His diary, painstakingly written in his neat, precise hand, with its occasional pen and ink or pencil diagrams and sketches of landscapes, archaeological remains, or whatever else caught his attention, is far from exhaustive: some vital moments are casually skipped, there are occasional long gaps with no entries at all, and the whole account ends in March 1873, with Doughty still in Italy. His later travels around Greece, Egypt, Sinai and the Middle East can only be pieced together from letters, later memories and other patchy records. Even more frustrating, for much of the time as he wandered around Europe, his imagination seemed infuriatingly disengaged. But the hardback notebook which is now kept in the library of Caius College, Cambridge, faded and battered at the edges, gives an intimate picture of his intellectual and emotional development over a crucial spell of his young adulthood.

      It starts as he leaves Leiden for Louvain, with a distaste for his surroundings which was to become familiar over the next few months: Doughty’s impressions of northern Europe were less than enthusiastic. In Louvain – a ‘very filthy and unwholesome’ town – he noted ‘the obscene manners of the people who piddle openly in every place’, although the observation was carefully crossed out in the diary. Presumably it was a little too crude even for a personal notebook. It remains legible, though, behind Doughty’s pencil scribble, as his fastidious indictment of the Belgian people.

      He presents much the same litany of dissatisfaction that any middle-class traveller from Britain at that time might have recited. The people, being foreign, were grubby, unhealthy and – worst of all – Catholic.

      As he toured the small towns of Holland and Belgium, Doughty displayed an almost comically fastidious obsession with cleanliness: the details that do excite his imagination are those that arouse his distaste – the people of Louvain piddling in the street, or the ‘slack, ill complexions’ of the Belgian women. But what is noticeable throughout the young Doughty’s notes of his travels in Europe is how conventional, dismissive and simply unobservant they generally are. For the most part, the man who would later tease out the most intimate, most significant details of life among the Arabs appeared to take only the most cursory interest in the places and people he met. It was the primitiveness and frequent brutality of Arabia which would excite his imagination; travel in Europe was often little more than inconvenient, uncomfortable, and not notably relieved, for him at least, by any architectural beauty.

      His courage is already evident; but though there is no note of fear or nervousness as he describes his journey through northern France, there is no sense of personal involvement either. His interest was never engaged by politics, even though he was travelling through a Europe that was in political turmoil. Only a few months before, Bismarck had swept aside the French army and the government of Napoleon III: France was buzzing with ideas and arguments, alive with revolutionary and anarchist institutions. While Doughty was in Louvain, observing with distaste the ill-manners and grubby habits of the Belgians, some 25,000 people were being massacred in Paris as the French troops of the government of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune⁶ СКАЧАТЬ