Can be no need to exaggerate his greatness, or to invest him
with imaginary attributes.[4]
[Sidenote: His personal attributes seen but dimly.]
68. What manner of man was Ser Marco? It is a question hard to answer.
Some critics cry out against personal detail in books of Travel; but as
regards him who would not welcome a little more egotism! In his Book
impersonality is carried to excess; and we are often driven to discern by
indirect and doubtful indications alone, whether he is speaking of a place
from personal knowledge or only from hearsay. In truth, though there are
delightful exceptions, and nearly every part of the book suggests
interesting questions, a desperate meagreness and baldness does extend
over considerable tracts of the story. In fact his book reminds us
sometimes of his own description of Khorasan: - "On chevauche par beaus
plains et belles costieres, la ou il a moult beaus herbages et bonne
pasture et fruis assez.... Et aucune fois y treuve l'en un desert de
soixante milles ou de mains, esquels desers ne treuve l'en point d'eaue;
mais la convient porter o lui!"
Still, some shadowy image of the man may be seen in the Book; a practical
man, brave, shrewd, prudent, keen in affairs, and never losing his
interest in mercantile details, very fond of the chase, sparing of speech;
with a deep wondering respect for Saints, even though they be Pagan
Saints, and their asceticism, but a contempt for Patarins and such like,
whose consciences would not run in customary grooves, and on his own part
a keen appreciation of the World's pomps and vanities. See, on the one
hand, his undisguised admiration of the hard life and long fastings of
Sakya Muni; and on the other how enthusiastic he gets in speaking of the
great Kaan's command of the good things of the world, but above all of his
matchless opportunities of sport![5]
[Illustration: PROBABLE VIEW OF MARCO POLO'S OWN GEOGRAPHY]
Of humour there are hardly any signs in his Book. His almost solitary joke
(I know but one more, and it pertains to the [Greek: ouk anaekonta])
occurs in speaking of the Kaan's paper-money when he observes that Kublai
might be said to have the true Philosopher's Stone, for he made his money
at pleasure out of the bark of Trees.[6] Even the oddest eccentricities of
outlandish tribes scarcely seem to disturb his gravity; as when he relates
in his brief way of the people called Gold-Teeth on the frontier of Burma,
that ludicrous custom which Mr. Tylor has so well illustrated under the
name of the Couvade. There is more savour of laughter in the few lines
of a Greek Epic, which relate precisely the same custom of a people on the
Euxine: -
- "In the Tibarenian Land
When some good woman bears her lord a babe,
'Tis he is swathed and groaning put to bed;
Whilst she, arising, tends his baths, and serves
Nice possets for her husband in the straw."[7]
[Sidenote: Absence of scientific notions.]
69. Of scientific notions, such as we find in the unveracious Maundevile,
we have no trace in truthful Marco. The former, "lying with a
circumstance," tells us boldly that he was in 33 deg. of South Latitude; the
latter is full of wonder that some of the Indian Islands where he had been
lay so far to the south that you lost sight of the Pole-star. When it
rises again on his horizon he estimates the Latitude by the Pole-star's
being so many cubits high. So the gallant Baber speaks of the sun having
mounted spear-high when the onset of battle began at Paniput. Such
expressions convey no notion at all to such as have had their ideas
sophisticated by angular perceptions of altitude, but similar expressions
are common among Orientals,[8] and indeed I have heard them from educated
Englishmen. In another place Marco states regarding certain islands in the
Northern Ocean that they lie so very far to the north that in going
thither one actually leaves the Pole-star a trifle behind towards the
south; a statement to which we know only one parallel, to wit, in the
voyage of that adventurous Dutch skipper who told Master Moxon, King
Charles II.'s Hydrographer, that he had sailed two degrees beyond the
Pole!
[Sidenote: Map constructed on Polo's data.]
70. The Book, however, is full of bearings and distances, and I have
thought it worth while to construct a map from its indications, in order
to get some approximation to Polo's own idea of the face of that world
which he had traversed so extensively. There are three allusions to maps
in the course of his work (II. 245, 312, 424).
In his own bearings, at least on land journeys, he usually carries us
along a great general traverse line, without much caring about small
changes of direction. Thus on the great outward journey from the frontier
of Persia to that of China the line runs almost continuously "entre
Levant et Grec" or E.N.E. In his journey from Cambaluc or Peking to Mien
or Burma, it is always Ponent or W.; and in that from Peking to Zayton
in Fo-kien, the port of embarkation for India, it is Sceloc or S.E. The
line of bearings in which he deviates most widely from truth is that of
the cities on the Arabian Coast from Aden to Hormuz, which he makes to run
steadily vers Maistre or N.W., a conception which it has not been very
easy to realise on the map.[9]
[Sidenote: Singular omissions of Polo in regard to China; Historical
inaccuracies.]
71. In the early part of the Book we are told that Marco acquired several
of the languages current in the Mongol Empire, and no less than four
written characters.
