Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries!
He is as old as his calves--his garteries....
--_Meditations of Andrew McGill_.
"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea."
This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of
William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near
Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in
any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that
the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by
all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps
arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are
barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth
would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic
pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have
traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of
exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other
stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was
indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is
most excellent in his writings."
A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost
heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous
precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one
sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a
gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life":
Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the
streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to
go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was
carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon
earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.
Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes
upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When
he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of
sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He
writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are
often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because
walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to
that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.
Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking.
The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether
Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road)
to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically
from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was
Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that
spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends,
and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy
the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of
their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little
walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient
Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the
adventure.
De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth
and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile
all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first
meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement
of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself
with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind
hastening to decay.
I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised
before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's
famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth
century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving
meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days
and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary
travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any
of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up.
Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century
earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many
lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads.
It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of
his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it
over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than
a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long
before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that
cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one
foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him
as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.
After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you
paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On
Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than
the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October,
1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He
must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on
Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know
that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the
financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to
better purpose!
There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker:
get these by rote in some membrane of memory:
The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky
sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of
state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel
playing before it.
The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns
were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of
Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith,
Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first
read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August,
1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George
Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of
the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom
Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to
that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous
half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not
dominate the conversation.
There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the
Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on
the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed
in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for
the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them."
There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One
could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though
literature were a co-product of legs and head.
Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due
course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall
Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight
the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious
as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one
goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the
country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the
harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and
muscle exercised alike.
Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no
soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who
salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to
grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are
his months:
For love we Earth then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours:
We fall, or view our treasures fall,
Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
When lowly, with a broken neck,
The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the
bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary
of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's
"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals
from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay,
and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands
"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to
utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education,"
by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in
1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious
essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert
Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has
beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who
has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in
walking tours:
No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should
ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in
arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of
men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall
be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and
two, since the world began, there have always been young men who
have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still
one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for
him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys.
Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so
ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be
taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now,
one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake
before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be
confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they
fill.
They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey.
They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with
them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters;
and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they
would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or
yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot
rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of
going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape
from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in
yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to
that great order called society that you have for a period got away
from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a
vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with
him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of
etiquette.
He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has
fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment,
to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which
he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on
earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a
breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of
course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural
instinct of women.
Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of
locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be
admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make
memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published.
Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an
itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed
stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he
proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know
he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives
and deacons tremble!
Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems
at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their
eating; but despite the naïveté of his eagerness to sing, there is a
plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to
know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote
a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at
all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know
that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been
fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a
year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but
he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the
local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will
be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore
spats in his life.
But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets
at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut
carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers
and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday
night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least
two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising
humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the
full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming
measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence
of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty
of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and
celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream
soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark
Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he
finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and
beauty.
This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has
scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and
puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping
when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging
his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any
American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little
pamphlet used on many a road: