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WALKING ESSAYS
WALKING ESSAYS
BY
A. H. SIDGWICK
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1912
_All rights reserved_
_DEDICATION_
_COMITIBUS_
_O you who walked the ways with me
On hill and plain and hollow:
I ask your pardon, frank and free,
For all the things that follow.
Let me at least make one thing clear;
In these--I know no name for them--
These dreary talks on futile themes,
Dim visions from a dullards dreams,
At least you take no blame for them._
_You cheered my heart, made short the road,
And kept me philanthropic;
I only write this little ode
Which desecrates the topic.
You trode with me the mountain ridge
And clove the cloud wreaths over it;
I take the web of memories
We wove beneath the summer skies
And lo! the ink-spots cover it._
_How vain my effort, how absurd,
Considered as a symbol!
How lame and dull the written word
To you the swift and nimble!
How alien to the walkers mind,
Earth-deep, heaven-high, unfillable,
These petty snarls and jests ill-laid
And all the profitless parade
Of pompous polysyllable!_
_But yet, I feel, though weak my phrase,
My rhetoric though rotten,
At least our tale of Walks and Days
Should not go unforgotten;
At least some printed word should mark
The walker and his wanderings,
The strides which lay the miles behind
And lap the contemplative mind
In calm, unfathomed ponderings._
_And one rebuke I need not fear
From those of our profession,
That Walking Essays should appear
To be one long digression.
Let others take the hard high-road
And earn its gift, callosity:
For us the path that twists at will
Through wood and field, and up the hill
In easy tortuosity._
_Therefore, companions of the boot,
Joint-heirs of wind and weather,
In kindness take this little fruit
Of all our walks together.
For aught it has of wit or truth
I reckon you my creditors;
Its dulness, errors, want of taste,
Inconsequence, may all be placed
To my account, the editor’s._
_And haply you skim the work
In skilled eclectic hurry,
Some word may find the place where lurk
Your memories of Surrey;
Or, as you read and doze and droop
Well on the way to slumberland,
Before you some dim shapes will float,
Austere, magnificent, remote,
Their Majesties of Cumberland._
_Dream but awhile: and clouds will lift
To show the peaks at muster,
The driving shadows shape and shift
Before the hill-wind’s bluster:
Below far down the earth lies spread
With all its care and fretfulness,
But here the crumpled soul unfolds,
And every rock-strewn gully holds
The waters of Forgetfulness._
_So dream; and through your dreams shall roll
The rhythm of limbs free-striding,
Which moulds your being to a whole
And heals the worlds dividing;
So dream, and you shall be a man
Free on the open road again;
So dream the long night through, and wake
With better heart to rise and take
The burden of your load again._
PREFATORY NOTES
1. I have to thank two friends, who read or listened to large portions
of this work, for their sympathy, long-suffering, and good advice, and
to acquit them of all further complicity.
2. I must also thank a fellow-walker, who, on Maundy Thursday of 1910,
as we climbed the road out of Marlborough into Savernake Forest,
suggested to me the magnificent quotation from Cicero which heads the
essay on Walking and Music.
3. I have stolen the substance of one epigram from an _obiter dictum_ in
‘My System for Ladies,’ by J. P. Müller; but it was too good to miss.
4. None of the remarks about beer apply to Munich beer.
A. H. S.
_August 1912._
CONTENTS
PAGE
DEDICATION, v
I. WALKING AND CONVERSATION, 3
II. WALKER MILES, 43
III. WALKING AND MUSIC, WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING, 65
IV. WALKING, SPORT AND ATHLETICS, 109
V. WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM, 147
VI. WALKING IN LITERATURE, 181
VII. WALKING EQUIPMENT, 215
VIII. WALKING ALONE, WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING, 249
EPILOGUE, 273
I
WALKING AND CONVERSATION
‘The heavenly bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is
philosophy. If there’s a screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s
philosophy; and if there’s a screw loose in an earthly body, that’s
philosophy too; or it may be that sometimes there’s a little metaphysics
in it, but that’s not often. Philosophy’s the chap for me.’
I
WALKING AND CONVERSATION
About the year 1887 there was still in existence a nursery joke:--
‘King Charles walked and talked;
Half an hour after his head was cut off.’
This, pronounced as a consecutive sentence, gave the infant mind its
first experience of paradox. At the time we thought it funny. Later on,
in the last decade of Victorianism, when we were struggling with ‘post,’
‘postquam,’ and ‘postea,’ the joke appeared less funny. But later still,
in Edwardian times, a deep moral meaning began (as was customary in
those times) to appear underlying the joke. Take the two sentences as
they stand above: construe ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in their strict sense:
generalise King Charles: convert the ‘post hoc’ into a ‘propter hoc’;
and you will have a motto to which all good walkers will add ‘ὣς
ἀπόλοιτο....’
I do not mean, of course, that any or all forms of walking and talking
are incompatible. It is possible, simultaneously, to stroll and to
babble, to stroll and to talk, to walk and to babble. Strolling, the
mere reflex action of the legs, is compatible with that sustained and
coherent activity of the mind which alone deserves the name of talking.
Babbling, the corresponding reflex action of the mind, is equally
compatible with that supreme activity of the whole being which men call
walking. But the attempt so often made to combine real walking with real
talking is disastrous. Better the man who babbles and strolls, who
trails his feet across country and his tongue across commonplace, than
the man who tries to ventilate fundamental things while his body is
braced to the conquest of road and hill.
‘A Voice’ at this point says ‘Yes, but we are not all scorchers,’ and
thereby makes manifest a very common delusion. The Voice, and the body
of opinion which it represents, are convinced that the difference
between strolling and walking consists in the merely material point of
speed, and that walkers cannot talk because they are bent solely on
record-breaking, and have one eye ever on the milestones and one on the
stop-watch, and no attention to spare for anything else. This is a gross
and palpable error. Record-breaking is, of course, a possible form of
walking, and most of us have indulged in it at one time or another; it
is interesting, and sometimes even salutary, to abandon all higher
thoughts, and go for a record frankly and whole-heartedly. But to the
true walker this is only an occasional indulgence. Record-breaking is
ultimately a degrading and (literally) a brutalising pursuit. It is the
mere pitting of the brute animal powers against the brute inanimate
conditions of time and space. If we are to be men and not animals,
walking must be something more than a mere swing of the legs, and the
country something more than a colourless aliquantum of miles.
Record-breaking, if it becomes a habit, will be as a blight in the fair
garden of walking, as a sarrusophone in the pedestrian symphony.
A casual observation of true walkers no doubt lends some colour to the
Voice’s delusion. Walkers have generally an air of being intent upon the
business in hand: they do not (as explained below) talk much: and as a
mere matter of fact they generally walk at a good round pace. But their
pace is only accidental and subordinate to their main purpose. The full
swing of the legs, like all physical activities, is a fine thing in
itself, but it is merely physical. The great fact is that such an
activity leads more directly than others to that sense of intimacy with
air and sun and hills and green things, which is the walker’s ideal.
This sense of intimacy is not to be won by strolling; a man must do his
best with his body before the gates are opened to him.
Another Voice may here interject ‘Wordsworth’; but, with all reverence
and respect, I doubt if that great man ever was really an intimate of
his surroundings in the sense which I mean. With him it was a mystical
communion rather than an intimacy. He loved the country with a kind of
austere and detached benevolence; I doubt if he really felt its
idiosyncrasies like a friend. In his altitudes of thought there was
probably little perceptible difference when he climbed Loughrigg after
tea and when he took a whole day over the Langdale Pikes and Serjeant
Man (if he ever did). Like the God of Aristotle, he experienced a single
and continuous pleasure, instead of the infinitely varied and minutely
individualised feelings of the ordinary walker. And the reason, I think,
was simply that he was not, in the true sense, a walker. He records
expeditions, of course, but these were generally made with his wife and
sister, which in the then state of feminine development would give
little chance of walking. There is no evidence that he ever laid his
body at full stretch to the conquest of a mountain; hence they were to
him merely mountains, full of general sublimities, and not individuals,
each with its own idiosyncrasy, full of the variety and interest which
are the staple food of friendship. His higher faculties, in short,
operated abstractedly; he missed that concrete body of feeling to which
even you and I can attain by ministering to the soul through the body.
It is a great thing, no doubt, to be catholic, to feel the same
immensities on Silver Howe as on the Great Gable; but there is something
to be said for the humbler lot of the ordinary walker, who, if he misses
the immensities on Silver Howe, yet gains that sudden jump and uplifting
of his whole being as he approaches Esk Hause from the south-east,
leaving behind the soft outlines and mere prettiness of the south, and
on an instant lifts his head into a world of gods and giants.
The attainment of such a feeling requires a certain receptivity and even
passivity of mind. You cannot grasp the character of country by a
conscious effort of discursive reason; all you can do is to set your
body fairly to its task, and to leave the intimate character of your
surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by
the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk,
the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible
influences of sense. You must lay aside for the time being that formal
and conscious reasoning which (you fondly think) gives you your
distinctiveness and individuality in ordinary life; you must win back to
deeper and commoner things: you must become mere man upon the face of
your mother earth. Only in a state of humility and simplicity, with all
views and arguments and chains of reasoning--all, in fact, that divides
man from man--laid aside and utterly forsworn, can you enter the great
democracy of walkers.
* * * * *
Which things being prefaced, the utter incompatibility of walking and
talking needs no further demonstration, but only (what walkers much
prefer) dogmatic reiteration. Talking requires a definite activity of
the mind: walking demands passivity. Talking tends to make men aware of
their differences; walking rests on their identity. Talking may be the
same on a fine day or on a wet day, in spring or autumn, on Snowdon or
Leith Hill; walking varies according to each and every one of these
conditions. In a word, when you can paste a photograph on to the middle
of an Old Master, or set a gramophone going in an orchestra, then, and
not till then, can you walk and talk simultaneously.
Those who try to combine the two usually fail to achieve either.
Sometimes, of course, a talker may be tamed: if securely buttressed by a
large company of walkers, he may be subdued by a judicious mixture of
silence, irrelevance, or frivolity; or he may be carried along at such a
pace that he is reduced to voicelessness, if not to a proper state of
quiescent reverence. But usually a single talker in a walking company
will infect the whole; he will provoke them to argument and disputation;
he will expose the inmost parts of his soul and gradually allure them to
a like indecency. In such a case walking goes by the board; the company
either loiters and trails in clenched controversy, or, what is worse
sacrilege, strides blindly across country like a herd of animals,
recking little of whence they come or whither they are going,
desecrating the face of nature with sophism and inference and authority
and regurgitated Blue Book. At the end of such a day, what have they
profited? Their gross and perishable physical frames may have been
refreshed: their less gross but equally perishable minds may have been
exercised: but what of their immortal being? It has been starved between
the blind swing of the legs below and the fruitless flickering of the
mind above, instead of receiving, through the agency of a quiet mind and
a co-ordinated body, the gentle nutriment which is its due.
If, then, we are to walk, the talker should be eliminated before
starting. But this does not mean that our walk will be a silent one.
There are many forms of utterance besides talking, strictly so called;
and nearly all of these are possible and even desirable concomitants of
walking. Thus, there is the simple and natural babble of the first few
miles, while the body is settling down to work: the intellect, so to
say, is blowing off steam preparatory to a period of quiescence. Then
there is monologue of the purely spontaneous kind, which asks for no
listener and desires no reply--the mere happy wagging of a tongue and
jaw only remotely connected with anything that could be called a
meaning. There may even be relatively continuous and intelligible
statements or discussions, provided that these arise naturally out of
the walk and the surrounding circumstances--for example, discussions on
the weather, the way, the place for lunch, the utility of hard-boiled
eggs, the peculiar pungency of wedding-cake in the open air. All of
these fit in easily with the walking frame of mind.
The question of the rhythmic and musical elements in walking is so
important as to require separate discussion; but there is one form of
utterance, related to music much as babbling is related to talking,
which is so intimately associated with the greater moments of life that
I cannot forbear mentioning it here. I mean the After Lunch Song. If
lunch is taken properly, that is to say lightly, without strong drink,
in the open, the period which follows is the very heart of the day. The
limbs are well attuned to their work: the soul has begun to receive its
appropriate message: there are long hours ahead, clean food within, the
face of nature without. At such a time a man can, if he will, do his
greatest feats of mere space-devouring. But it is better, if time
permits, to abate something of the full speed, and to allow the
heart-felt sensations of gratitude and content to find their natural
utterance in song. It need not be an appropriate song: nay, it need not
be a song at all in the ordinary sense: above all, the whole company may
sing without regard to one another or to any laws of time and harmony.
It is the utterance alone which matters. I remember well a party of
three which climbed the northern face of the Bookham Downs on a summer
Sunday, with Schubert’s Müllerin cycle going in front against two
distinct Sullivan operettas behind; and there was in our hearts no more
thought of discord than there is between the chiff-chaff and cuckoo when
the reiterated fourth of the one blends with the other’s major third in
a different key.
Superficial observers may think from the preceding passage that the
walker as there represented is a morose and unsociable person. Nothing
can be further from the truth. Only by construing sociability in the
very narrow sense of compliance with current social conventions, can you
justify such a position: and even so, I would ask, are walkers the only
men who have ever omitted calls or trifled with dance invitations? But
if sociability is taken in its true sense as indicating a friendly
attitude of mind, I say there is more of it between two walkers treading
the eighteenth mile without a word spoken, than between any two
diners-out talking twenty-four to the dozen, as if there were a tax on
unaccompanied monologue, and a graduated super-tax on silence. When put
to the ultimate test of fact this becomes clear. If you have walked with
a man you will lend him tobacco, half-a-crown, nay, you will lend him
your map; if you have only dined with him, I doubt if you would lend him
a silk hat.
But even when judged by the merely physical test of the volume and
quality of words uttered, walkers have no need to fear comparison with
any other class of men. It is true that while engaged in their own
particular craft their words are few: but does the artist talk much
while he is painting, or the motorist while driving? Is the conversation
of the golfer while golfing--even with the shorter sentences
omitted--such as he could repeat in a drawing-room which he respects? If
we are to apply comparative tests we must take the specialists, not when
they are specialising, but when they are mixed with one another and with
ordinary men and women. In such circumstances I say that the walker
shines: he possesses, on the average, all the conversational qualities
of ordinary men, and, in addition, has certain special advantages. As
these have been slighted and overlooked by other observers, I proceed to
set them forth.
The first point is that walkers generalise much better than other men,
whether on morals, politics, art, or any other of the worn topics of
society. Their generalities may not be so frequent or facile: but when
they occur they will be far more weighty. The ordinary man generalises
by the action of a feverish brain working above a sluggish and disparate
body; hence his utterance is that of the brain only, of the quarter man.
But walking induces a more concrete habit of thinking. When you have let
a problem simmer at the back of your head for the whole of a twenty mile
walk, you will find at the end that it has worked itself into your
system, and your verdict on it is the concrete verdict of your whole
being. And such a verdict is invincible, disdaining argument and
scouting refutation. What chance have the merely logical beliefs of the
ordinary diner-out against the ingrown and seasoned prejudices of the
walker? The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis we pedestrians know.
The first great merit, then, of a walker in ordinary society is a power
of authoritative and Delphic utterance on subjects which other men
approach humbly with reasoning, aggregated evidence, and formal
disputation. It may be urged that this has the effect of killing the
subject. That is true: but the real fact is that such subjects ought to
be killed once the first opinions are spoken. General topics have really
no permanent place in civilised conversation; they are useful only as
guides to enable people to adjust themselves easily to each other’s
mental and spiritual conformation. When this has been effected,
generalities can be cast aside; and the particularities of persons and
things and times and places, which form the staple food of conversation,
can begin. The walker by a single bold utterance of a prejudice deeply
felt at once defines the position. _Ex pede Herculem_; the conversation
can then proceed comfortably.
The second great point in a walker’s conversation is that his ‘shop’ is
less shoppy and more interesting than that of other men. The minutiae of
his own craft are homely and human things--boots and coats and knapsacks
and hobnails and ordnance maps. The golfer’s talk of Dreadnought Drivers
and eclectic scores and the fathomless iniquities of caddies has only a
limited interest; the motorist is little better with his accelerators
and carburettors and police traps and organised perjury. Few people
really care to hear how a matchless car was bought in Long Acre (where
the bow drawn was also long), went from Land’s End to John o’ Groats in
ninety-five minutes (or hours), paid for a new county asylum in fines,
killed four chickens, a human being, and a chauffeur, and finally
exploded and fell into the Devil’s Punchbowl. (I summarise from vague
memories the folklore of motorists.) But all turn round with a pleased
smile when a friend of mine begins the life history of his famous boots;
how they were originally bought as football boots and scored
twenty-seven goals in two seasons; how they were then resoled and nailed
by a Swiss cobbler and went up Mont Blanc; how they subsequently covered
nine hundred miles in the Home Counties; how they lost all their nails
and became ordinary boots and went to a garden party; how they split on
a critical occasion and were under-girded (like St. Paul’s ship) with
string, bootlaces, and a Government strap; how, finally, when they were
past their work, they were offered to (and only refused after a struggle
by) the Pitt-Rivers anthropological collection in the Oxford Museum; and
how they now repose in a glass case inscribed with the words _Bene
Merentibus_.
* * * * *
It is thus clear (if it is not, I decline to argue) that as regards
conversation under ordinary conditions, so far from being at a
disadvantage, the walker is better qualified than most men to speak with
his enemies in the gate--that is with his acquaintances in the
drawing-room or dining room. In the structural part of conversation,
dogmatism, his touch is firmer and more impressive; in its constituent
material he can on his own subject display a pleasing virtuosity. Over
the rest of the ordinary range of conversation I make no extravagant
claims for the walker: it is enough to say that he is at no disadvantage
as regards persons and events and anecdotes and gossip and generally
What Has Happened and What They Are Saying About It. He is, in virtue of
his craft, above all things, sane and concrete, and has therefore
little difficulty in observing the ordinary conversational traditions.
But he is no blind acceptor of conventional limitations. On the
contrary, he ever seeks to extend the limits of the conversational
range, adding new topics of interest. And there are in particular a few
topics which (like the souls of the young ladies in the song) the blind
world despises, and has therefore excluded from the realm of proper
conversation. These it is the walker’s business to reclaim and invest
with a due sense of their real importance.
The first of these is the weather. For some obscure and probably
discreditable reason the weather is regarded as a trivial subject. At
most it is permitted in less advanced circles as a mere preliminary
conversational flourish, comparable to the stray chords with which a
pianist settles himself to his work and his audience to listening or
slumber. In the more intense intellectual circles the weather is
altogether taboo. If you mention it in Hampstead or Chelsea you are set
down as a trifler and not asked again. Now of all those unintelligently
transmitted, mystically apprehended, and devotionally guarded traditions
which uphold the fabric of current cant, this seems the blindest, the
most foolish, the least defensible. There is nothing really so
interesting as the weather: nothing so omnipotent in its workings, so
far-reaching in its effects, so inscrutable in its variety, so
compelling in its fascination. And yet the heathen in his blindness--a
fair description of the intellectual in his detachment--is pleased to
rule out the weather as a triviality. He plumes himself on the
universality of his social and political range, on his familiarity with
the forces which lie behind the working of our ordinary life; but what
force is so effectual and so omnipresent in every moment of every man’s
existence as the weather? A political or financial crisis occurs, and
some few of us become excited for some twenty-fourth of our day-to-day
life; a drought or a frost or an anticyclone occurs and all of us in all
our doings are directly or remotely affected by it. Yet we may talk
crisis until our brains reel; we may say nothing of the weather. The
intellectual plunges eagerly into the depths of art and literature and
the drama, and talks with a glib facility of the clash of cosmic forces;
let him open a window and put out his head if he would know what a clash
of cosmic forces really is. When kings are philosophers and philosophers
are kings, their first act will be to reinstate the weather as a subject
of supreme interest and importance; to relegate to a secondary place in
the newspapers the present seventeen columns of murders and suicides,
the seven columns of politics and the seventy times seven columns of
sport, and to print at the head in large and golden letters the really
valuable and significant part of the news, namely the weather report. In
those days, let us hope, the critic and the politician and the
sociologist and the biologist and all other sentimental empiricists will
be removed from the popular pulpit: and the most sacred crown of
unfading bay will be laid on the head of the meteorologist, the ordained
and initiated interpreter of depressions and vortices and anti-cyclones
and Atlantic secondaries, the hierophant of the celestial pageant. And
at the head of the great Philippic which shall then be uttered to
disestablish the tyranny of the intellectuals, there will stand the
words _Quousque, Chelsea, abutere patientia nostra_? How long will you
debar us from discussing the weather?
The struggle has already begun, and in the forefront of the fighting
line are the walkers. To them even more than other men the weather is a
matter of vital and compelling significance. It is not so much that the
tangible weather conditions affect them more nearly: no man who plies
his craft in the open can be indifferent to sun and wind and wetness and
drouth. It is rather that the walker in virtue of his craft is more
intimately attuned to the temper of earth and sky; his soul and body are
more of a piece, and his nature consequently responds with a subtler
sympathy to the influences of weather. When a dry northeaster is
stiffening the earth, the walker is a man of dour endurance: he attacks
unpalatable tasks--arrears of letter-writing, the sorting of papers,
the ordering of clothes--with readiness, almost with gusto. Then the
wind dies down and the sky clears and a frost anti-cyclone sets in:
forthwith he becomes a Stoic, thinking high and abstract thoughts,
determining lofty resolutions, conceiving pure outlines of things. Then
comes the herald of the most magical of all shifts, an Atlantic
disturbance; there are hints of soft air from the south-west and smells
of coming rain. At once the walker’s nature responds: the iron
resolutions begin to break down, the pure outlines are blurred; through
every sense steals in the charm of detail and colour; he becomes less
stoical, more humane, a fitter companion for the spring that is being
ushered in without.
The weather, then, is the first of the conversational provinces which
walkers have to reclaim from a servile status of alleged triviality. It
is their duty, as it is their pleasure, to set up against the so-called
Pathetic Fallacy that nature is in sympathy with man, the Joyful Fact
that man, if whole, is in sympathy with nature. There are already signs
of the coming Restoration: even now, where two or three kindred souls
are assembled, the weather begins to take precedence of other subjects.
Recently, on a Saturday night, I happened to remark, in company, that as
I walked to the house the wind was swinging round to the north, the sky
was clear, the streets were dry, and there was promise of a brilliant
Sunday. My host, who wished to discuss the merits of Zoroastrianism as a
working creed for urban civilisations, became rather restive, and
mentally I saw the blue pencil going through my name in his wife’s _rota
umbrarum_; but across the room I observed a man fixing an eager eye on
me in total disregard of his neighbours. One look was enough. As soon as
I had rebuffed the Zoroastrian with a few firmly enunciated prejudices,
I moved across to my man and said, ‘Do you know the track above
Pickett’s Hole?’ He answered, ‘Yes, but it’s just been ploughed up and
wants marking out again.’ So, as Touchstone says, we swore brothers.
* * * * *
The second topic of conversation, which is especially the property of
walkers, is the topic of food and drink. This, like the weather, is
generally taboo in polite circles; but through our country as a whole it
is a popular and almost universal topic, especially the second half of
it. Hence the walker’s function in this case is to introduce not so much
a new topic as a new treatment. He has to substitute for the levity with
which food and drink are usually treated a proper and befitting gravity.
The word ‘levity’ may seem strange to those who are familiar with a
certain type of conversations, not rare among our island race, on the
subject of food and drink. It is easy for the moralist to draw a
terrible picture of bull-necked financiers dining in clubs or City
restaurants--men gorged with high living, to whom the past is a memory
of business enlightened by eating and drinking, and the future a dear
vision of eating and drinking uninterrupted by business. But the real
fault of such men’s conversation is its levity. A glutton is only a
tenth of a man. When food and drink have begun to occupy the whole area
of mental discourse, the human being becomes only a digestive and
ruminative apparatus informed by a rudimentary consciousness. The
conversation issuing from such a system is mere animal grunt with little
human element intermixed; hence, for all its avoirdupois, it has from
the standpoint of eternity a very real levity, a very real lightness in
the spiritual scales.
Conversations on food and drink between normal persons are far
pleasanter to listen to, and have much more real gravity. They start, as
a rule, with bald statements of likes and dislikes, which, as dogmas
incapable of proof or argumentation, are excellent props to the
framework of discourse. But as the general topic of Things I Like begins
to particularise itself under the heading of Meals I Have Eaten, the
conversation takes a wider range. The great meals of the past are
necessarily associated in memory with their surroundings--the walk, the
bathe, the scenery, the fine day. Viewed in isolation, a meal is not
much; viewed in its relation to the day and the day’s work, it is an
interesting, important, even essential element. What walker is there
who does not treasure in his inmost heart the memory of some chocolate
consumed on a mountain top, some stream drunk dry among the eternal
hills, some sandwich eaten in a palpitating shadow-land of shifting
mist? Such memories are indeed part of his being: and when they issue
forth in conversation they come with no glutton’s levity, but with the
gravity of the whole nature of man.
‘All very fine,’ says A Voice at this point; ‘but are walkers the only
men who treat the subject of eating and drinking with gravity? What
about those French fellows--gourmets, aren’t they called? And, in your
beastly antiquity, were there not Epicureans?’ My dear Voice, Epicurus
was a simple-hearted old man who lived in a garden on cabbages, was
notably kind to children, and disestablished existing systems of
religion out of pure conscientiousness and in the interests of geniality
and good feeling; his most famous Roman disciple talks of eating and
drinking and other things of sense in a way which makes an article in
the _Medical Encyclopædia_ seem relatively warm and passionate; and his
nearest modern equivalent is Bernard Shaw. No doubt subsequent gluttons
called themselves Epicureans: but they have thereby no more claim to
philosophic gravity than any half-baked philanderer who talks of
Platonic Love. As to gourmets, I dare say they exist, and I am still
hoping to meet one, in order to discover what in spite of all the talk
on the subject seems very doubtful--that is, whether there can be a real
art of eating and drinking in the least worthy of the name, whether the
sense of taste is capable of an aesthetic experience even remotely
comparable to those of sight and sound.
In the interim, I hold that the last word on the subject was uttered by
the gentleman in _Punch_:--‘Oh, what a ’eavenly dinner we’ve
’ad!’--‘Enough to make yer wish yer was born ’oller.’ The gourmet’s art,
in short, operates, if at all, only during the actual process of the
deglutition of food; it has no concern with what happens afterwards. (I
hope it is unnecessary to apologise for this vulgar but vital
distinction.) Food and drink are regarded merely as ticklers of the
palate, and not as builders and preservers of the body. Now surely this
is once more an error of abstraction. Properly regarded, the sandwich
does not cease when it is swallowed; it gives shape and colour to the
subsequent pipe: it braces the heart for the afternoon walk; its swan
song calls us to tea; last of all, its spirit is linked and welded into
the imperishable memories of the day. Can the gourmet say the same of
his lobster salad? Is it not, when once its brief domination of the
palate is over, at best a fruitless and dissociated memory, at worst a
torment and a foe? Once again, the walker by adhering to the concrete
view gains sanity and width of vision: the abstract specialist is left
with a half-discerned and therefore disordered world.
There is one further cause which tends to set apart the walker’s food
and his conversation about it, from that of other men; he usually
carries it, at least for the midday meal or meals, on his person. It is
thus far more intimately associated with him than the food which issues
at stated intervals from the mysterious economy of the home. There is no
formal process of sanctification so real and so significant: the gilding
of the horns of the sacrificial victim, the solemn procession and the
prayer, the incense and meal and sacred fire--these are but vain
symbols, compared with the sublimation and even transubstantiation which
ensues from carrying food in the pocket. Better a simple marmalade
sandwich which has climbed a hill with you firmly stuck to your pouch
and your ordnance map, than all the flesh-pots of Egypt, if connected
with you only by the extrinsic relation of eating.
To sum up, then, or rather to reiterate, food and drink are to the
walker a very vital and central part of his being, of the concrete world
without and the concrete man within. Hence, they form very nearly the
most intimate and essential part of his conversation. It is sometimes
thought that a test of friendship is the ease and frequency of
conversation upon lofty and abstract themes. For myself, I set little
store by the friendship of two men or women who talk largely of life and
death and the beginnings of things: such talk, especially about death,
is better kept for one’s enemies. But when two men talk freely about
food and drink, then you may be sure that a real intimacy has begun; and
when a youth and a maiden talk thus, their feet are on the high road to
the great adventure. Recently I overheard Mr. Jones say to Miss
Robinson, ‘Hard-boiled eggs are all very well for a family party, but
not much good if you mean real business’; to which she answered, ‘I only
like them on mountains in the winter.’ Finding that my friends--a
deplorable and indeed indefensible practice--were offering seven to two
against the engagement, I caused some astonishment by taking the odds. I
have not yet been paid, but I saw young Jones in Kensington Gardens the
other day beating his sister with a hazel switch.
* * * * *
The third of the walker’s special subjects of conversation, the subject
of Places, ought perhaps to be classed under the general head of shop.
Places are to the walker what the goal is to the athlete or victory to
the election agent--the ultimate and determining elements in his
activity to which all the rest is subordinated. We cannot desire the
process, but only the object--the actual swoop of the ball into the
goal, the triumphant and epoch-making return of Mr. X. So--in the
pleasant land of ultimates--we cannot desire walking: we can only desire
places. But just as the casual outsider is more interested in the goal
than in the brilliant forward combination which produced it; just as he
is excited about the announcement of the poll and quite calm about the
speaking, pamphleteering, canvassing and other stimuli which led to it;
so for the walker places lie nearer than walking to the common interests
of man, and may therefore perhaps be regarded as a general subject of
conversation.
In the widest sense, of course, topography is one of the safest and most
familiar subjects of conversation, and ‘Do you know (somewhere)?’ as a
dinner-table opening is as good or better than the classic ‘Do you know
(some one)?’ The latter might, perhaps, be compared by a chess player to
the orthodox King’s Knight openings--well-tried and well-worn methods
which, as the text-books say, generally lead to a solid and instructive
game. If so, the places opening is more of a gambit, less safe but more
attractive. The following is a specimen. 1. _P-K_4. ‘Do you know
Surrey?’ 1. _P-K_4. ‘Yes.’ 2. _P-K B_4. ‘Do you know Dorking?’ 2. _P_ ×
_P_. (gambit accepted) ‘Yes; delightful country, isn’t it?’ 3. _K Kt-K
B_3. ‘Yes; which part do you prefer?’ 3. _P-K Kt_4. ‘Oh, I am very fond
of Leith Hill.’ 4. _B-B_4. (plunging) ‘Do you know many ways up it?’ 4.
_P-K Kt_5. ‘Four or five.’ 5. Castles (the pun is quite accidental).
‘The Rookeries, perhaps?’ 5. _P_ × _Kt_. ‘Yes, very well,’ and the Muzio
gambit, that most sensational of openings, is established. If the other
party is a man he should be a good fellow; if not, it is time for you to
begin to think seriously.
Such an opening is of course exceptional (like the Muzio gambit) and
requires a kindred spirit; otherwise gambit is not accepted, and the
game may become dull. But as a general rule most people have something
to say about places: both literally and metaphorically, the subject is
common ground to many different interests. Take a simple bit of road,
such as that in the Mole valley by Burford Bridge. To the walker it is a
quiet interlude between the classical austerity of the Roman Road and
the more romantic interest of Denbies and Ranmore Common. To the
motorist it is a brief moment in the morning scorch to Lewes and back in
time for the inquest at noon. To the cyclist it is the last lap before
the second shandy-gaff. To the Box-Hill picnicker it is the way to
heaven; to the Meredithian, the road to Mecca. One and all can meet on
this ground and speak each other in passing. And the walker, if he is
wise, will neglect none of these other interests and points of view:
there is no element which is really alien, no interest really
irrelevant, to the concrete view of places which is his peculiar
privilege. It is well to think of the cycling and motoring communities
as you cross Burford Bridge; it is better to hear the giggles and
gallant conversation of the young parties struggling up the grass slope
of Box Hill; it is best of all to turn one glance to that ugly house and
its little wooden annexe--and then, as you strike up through Denbies, to
think of Diana and the woods which witnessed her great wrong and later
on ministered to her broken spirit.
But interesting and relevant though such associations may be to the
walker, they are only elements in the real meaning which places have for
him. This meaning is hard to analyse and impossible to define: in the
last resort we are driven back on the metaphor of personal relations.
There are places which are, so to speak, given to us from the beginning
without our choice, like parents and family, places which are part of us
and are not to be criticised or regarded from outside. There are places,
on the other hand, like casual acquaintances which we choose for
ourselves, which we see, and even see often, with pleasure, but with
which we have little permanent intimacy. And there are places of a third
kind, somewhere between the two former, which seem partly chosen by our
conscious choice, partly given to us by a pre-ordained kinship, which
may be viewed both from within and without, which have for us a special
meaning and a special individuality. Whether the metaphor can be driven
to a romantic-idealist conclusion, whether there is for everybody one
especial place of the third type reserved for one unique intimacy, I
would not venture to say. It may be so; it might, on the other hand,
prove to be a case of pressing a comparison too far, and invalidating in
the interests of dialectic symmetry, if not the great institution of
monogamy, at least its idealistic interpretation. When it comes to
places, I doubt if some of us have rounded Cape Turk.
Conversations about places are thus really like conversations about
persons, and have all the charm and interest of this familiar
conversational mode. We are interested when Jones has met our family
acquaintances or friends; we are also interested when he has met our
parent places (wherever they are), our acquaintance Helvellyn, or our
very dear friend Bowfell. Did Jones merely visit Bowfell casually (via
Esk Hause), or did he dine with him and converse until a late hour in
the smoking-room (Hell Gill route)? Such talk is both lively and
profitable: it brightens up both parties and speedily shows them whether
they are destined for friendship or acquaintance. It may be that Jones
is a mere trifler, who went up Bowfell as he would have gone up Skiddaw
(that mountain of banality) and talked by the way, or tried to set up a
record; if so, you may treat him kindly, but it is better to pass on to
Wordsworth or politics or immortality or some more trivial subject. But
it may prove that he is a real walker, of a reverent and concrete mind,
and then you may get out your map and go over it with him, and talk
about food and the weather.
It is in this detailed talk that the walker takes his highest flight.
It may be evening, in London, in company: yet the noise of the traffic
dies away; the glare of the light and the babble of others drops from
you: you are alone with a kindred soul and (if possible) a map spread
out between you. Then point by point and detail by detail you recall and
redintegrate in memory the larger moments of your life; every path that
you have taken, every stone and summit on which you stood, revive and
take shape under the plastic stress of your joint memories; the outline
of the eternal hills stands before you, hard and high as the call of
duty: once more the soft rain enwraps you or the clean wind whips you
into ecstasy. For a moment, in the midst of our dividing and abstracting
civilisation, you are again a man whole and concrete. This is something
better than sympathetic conversation: it is the colloquy of two beings
joined by a real bond: it is common talk.
II
WALKER MILES
E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen
Qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda vitae,
Te sequor ... inque tuis nunc
Ficta pedum pono pressis vestigia signis,
Non ita certandi cupidus, quam propter amorem
Quod te imitari aveo.
LUCR. iii. 1.
II
WALKER MILES
When Macaulay’s New Zealander has finished his meditations on London
Bridge, and comes to sum up the history of this country, he will, if he
is a wise man, have something to say on the subject of names. In Book
VII. Chapter iv. Section 48 on Individualism, he will point out how we
always tried to ascribe events to single individuals, and to stamp them
with a great name; how we worshipped our national heroes when they were
dead, and ascribed all our glories to them; how we hung their statues
with garlands on appointed days, or wore flowers which were somebody
else’s favourites. But he will add that this tendency did not stop
there: that a great many things which were really public and national
institutions, having originated in individual effort, remained to the
end marked with the individual name. Bradshaw, Whitaker, Crockford,
Hazell, Haydn, Kelly--in another country we should have had long
official and descriptive titles, but in England all these great
works--the very props of our domestic life--still bear the names of
their creators, though these have in some cases passed from us. We cling
passionately, with something of an anthropomorphic instinct, to the idea
of a single man in each case, of one colossal brain issuing annually or
at intervals in these magnificent aggregations of indispensable fact.
In this list there is a name lacking, and it is one which, far more
truly than the rest, stands for unaided effort and individual
enterprise. I mean Walker Miles, the author of _Field Path Rambles_ and
other guide-books for walking in the home counties. Less wide in his
scope than Whitaker, less exuberant in detail than Bradshaw, he yet
stands, in virtue of his subject, on a far higher plane than either.
Bradshaw can lay before us, with masterly lucidity and conciseness and
a wealth of symbolic resource, a picture of our country’s passenger
transport system; Whitaker articulates for us the whole skeleton of its
official being. But our country is something more than a complex of
railways or a structure of offices and salaries; and the true
Englishman, or at least the true Londoner, when he has expended a proper
veneration on the other masters of actuality, should at any rate have a
thought to spare for Walker Miles.
Walker Miles was not, it may be inferred, his real name. There are
colleagues of his, co-heirs of his renown, who deal with other parts of
the country: and one of them bears the name of Alf Holliday. Both names
were clearly pleasantries, adopted possibly from modesty, possibly from
a feeling that their task was too sacred to be associated with the name
of an actual man. But it is as Walker Miles that we know him: as Walker
Miles he influences our lives, guides our steps, and points us to the
inner secrets of our native land. And, among his colleagues, he was
clearly the leader and the pioneer. Alf Holliday and Noah Weston have
great moments: Hertfordshire is theirs and the Northern Heights are
theirs: theirs are Chipperfield Common and St. Albans and the valley of
the Chess. But Walker Miles has Kent and the whole of Surrey; the Oxted
hills and the Epsom Downs, and that wonderful triangle whose apices are
Guildford and Leatherhead and Leith Hill; all these, to his eternal
honour, are marked with his name.
The task which he undertook may be indicated by the words with which he
himself begins his immortal work on the Surrey hills. ‘It has been
remarked, and with much truth, that to any one with a good knowledge of
our field paths and bridle roads, England may be said to be one vast
open space for the enjoyment and recreation of its people. This
knowledge, however, is somewhat difficult of attainment, owing mainly to
the frequent absence of any distinctive mark or indication by which a
public right-of-way may be known. Even the ordnance maps afford no
assistance in this direction.’ It was to the spreading of this ‘good
knowledge’ that he addressed himself. With consummate care and
precision, he set himself to select from the vast complex of footpaths
the best and most interesting, to weave them into continuous walks
bearing a practical relation to the facilities for railway travel and
food supply, and then, by instructions which even the most careless
could hardly mistake, to lay them open to his followers. We can picture
him with his note-book and compass, piecing together the stray and
apparently purposeless fragments of path which abound in our country,
harking back, altering, revising, adding touches of detail for the
guidance of the inexperienced, suppressing all superfluity, sparing no
pains in his effort to spread the good knowledge, to reveal the vast
open space for enjoyment and recreation, and, in a very real sense, to
restore England to the English.