The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 1

by Marco himself, and that I see none; though I have so much faith in Marco’s veracity that I am loath to believe that the facts admit of no reconciliation.

Our faint attempt to appreciate some of Marco’s qualities, as gathered from his work, will seem far below the very high estimates that have been pronounced, not only by some who have delighted rather to enlarge upon his frame than to make themselves acquainted with his work,[14] but also by persons whose studies and opinions have been worthy of all respect. Our estimate, however, does not abate a jot of our intense interest in his Book and affection for his memory. And we have a strong feeling that, owing partly to his reticence, and partly to the great disadvantages under which the Book was committed to writing, we have in it a singularly imperfect image of the Man.

[Sidenote: Was Polo’s Book materially affected by the Scribe Rusticiano?]

72. A question naturally suggests itself, how far Polo’s narrative, at least in its expression, was modified by passing under the pen of a professed littérateur of somewhat humble claims, such as Rusticiano was. The case is not a singular one, and in our own day the ill-judged use of such assistance has been fatal to the reputation of an adventurous Traveller.

We have, however, already expressed our own view that in the Geographic Text we have the nearest possible approach to a photographic impression of Marco’s oral narrative. If there be an exception to this we should seek it in the descriptions of battles, in which we find the narrator to fall constantly into a certain vein of bombastic commonplaces, which look like the stock phrases of a professed romancer, and which indeed have a strong resemblance to the actual phraseology of certain metrical romances.[15] Whether this feature be due to Rusticiano I cannot say, but I have not been able to trace anything of the same character in a cursory inspection of some of his romance-compilations. Still one finds it impossible to conceive of our sober and reticent Messer Marco pacing the floor of his Genoese dungeon, and seven times over rolling out this magniloquent bombast, with sufficient deliberation to be overtaken by the pen of the faithful amanuensis!

[Sidenote: Marco’s reading embraced the Alexandrian Romances. Examples.]

73. On the other hand, though Marco, who had left home at fifteen years of age, naturally shows very few signs of reading, there are indications that he had read romances, especially those dealing with the fabulous adventures of Alexander.

To these he refers explicitly or tacitly in his notices of the Irongate and of Gog and Magog, in his allusions to the marriage of Alexander with Darius’s daughter, and to the battle between those two heroes, and in his repeated mention of the Arbre Sol or Arbre Sec on the Khorasan frontier.