The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity,
is one of the striking figures created by the manners
and customs of our present epoch. May he not,
in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which
welds a period of material enterprise to the period
of intellectual strength? Our century will bind
the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in
creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling
might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast
among the masses, and being itself controlled by the
principle of unity,—the final expression
of all societies. Do we not find the dead level
of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular
thought and the last struggles of those civilizations
which accumulated the treasures of the world in one
direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm
of ideas what our stage-coaches are to men and things?
He is their vehicle; he sets them going, carries them
along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters
it broadcast among the drowsy populations of the duller
regions. This human pyrotechnic is a scholar
without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an
unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he
expounds all the better for his want of faith.
Curious being! He has seen everything, known
everything, and is up in all the ways of the world.
Soaked in the vices of Paris, he affects to be the
fellow-well-met of the provinces. He is the
link which connects the village with the capital;
though essentially he is neither Parisian nor provincial,
—he is a traveller. He sees nothing
to the core: men and places he knows by their
names; as for things, he looks merely at their surface,
and he has his own little tape-line with which to measure
them. His glance shoots over all things and penetrates
none. He occupies himself with a great deal,
yet nothing occupies him.
Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms with
all political opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom
of his soul. A capital mimic, he knows how to
put on, turn and turn about, the smiles of persuasion,
satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop them for the
normal expression of his natural man. He is compelled
to be an observer of a certain sort in the interests
of his trade. He must probe men with a glance
and guess their habits, wants, and above all their
solvency. To economize time he must come to quick
decisions as to his chances of success,—a
practice that makes him more or less a man of judgment;
on the strength of which he sets up as a judge of
theatres, and discourses about those of Paris and
the provinces.
