An exhaustive treatment of the footpaths of any district, however
concise and summary, would run into quartos: it was the essence of
Walker Miles’s books that they must be small and portable. The most,
therefore, that he could hope to do was to adumbrate certain main routes
and to leave others to work out in detail all the countless variations
and combinations. And since every man has his own predilections in
footpaths as much as in poetry, Walker Miles labours under all the
limitations and all the vulnerability of the anthologist. There is no
one of us but could pick out here and there points in which the Walker
Miles route could (as we think) be improved upon; there are few who do
not habitually abandon his guidance at times and take a favourite line
of their own. But such variations neither undo his work nor disestablish
his primacy among home-county walkers: it was only through following his
way that we were able to improve upon it; and we may be sure that he
himself would never have wished the good knowledge to be limited within
the necessarily narrow confines of his own work, but would rather have
welcomed any subsequent variations which amplified without superseding
it.
Perhaps one general criticism of his work may be allowed which rests on
something more than a personal predilection. He seems hardly to have
realised the fascination of the straight line. Of course he had to cater
for all types--the six-miler, the twelve-miler, the eighteen-miler, and
the twenty-four-miler--the four great classes of walkers which are
separated by more than a numerical distinction; and stations and inns
had to be provided at suitable points to meet all these tastes. Even so,
the routes seem often unnecessarily tortuous; and although the
tortuosities are never objectless, and often lead to exceptionally
fascinating pieces of scenery, yet there is lacking that grandeur of
conception about the walk as a whole, that sense of a sustained purpose,
which attaches to a straight-line walk of twenty miles or more. There is
a certain sublimity, such as the Roman road-makers must have felt, in
holding a general direction across country regardless of the rise and
fall of the ground: most of all when the direction is southward, and
the sun swings slowly round from the left cheek to the nose and on to
the right cheek and the right ear. So man goes straight to his goal
while the constellations swing round him. Still, if we wish to improve
on Walker Miles in this way, the remedy is in our own hands; and more,
we shall often find that some of the greatest moments of our line are
his. Of the two big lines in the central Surrey district, that from
Epsom to Guildford (it is not quite straight) is made up of three Walker
Miles fragments (Epsom--Burford Bridge--Ranmore--Guildford); while that
from Esher to Leith Hill, perhaps the greatest of all, reaches its
climax in Walker Miles’s track through the Rookeries and up the
Tillingbourne valley, or the even nobler route through Deerleap Wood and
Wotton.
* * * * *
The mention of straight lines suggests one of the most difficult of
walking questions, namely the functions and limitations of trespassing.
There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own
sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked
‘Private,’ in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and
impotent. There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the
history of English commons and rights-of-way, of the organised piracy
upon the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it
is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one little pebble on
our own account, if only for old sake’s sake, at the forehead of
Goliath. But like other unregenerate impulses, this carries its
punishment with it. To indulge the love of trespassing involves
ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this--like
the twin passion for short-cuts as ends in themselves--is disastrous to
walking. It may rest on a mere natural love for law-breaking: it
may--and often does--rest on higher and deeply considered motives; but
in either case it is an alien element in the commonwealth of walking.
Trespassing on high moral grounds has the further disadvantage that it
leads to meticulous hair-splitting. I know walkers who think it right to
trespass on the grounds of a large landowner, but not on those of a
small landowner. They consequently draw a line at five acres or so, and
have to consider, whenever trespassing is proposed, on which side of the
line the field of action lies. Under conditions of urgency--the only
conditions which unquestionably justify trespassing--there is little
time for such refinements of casuistry, and as a matter of fact moral
considerations usually go by the board in any real crisis. I have myself
seen one of the most fervent upholders of the five-acre doctrine open
the gate of a blameless householder at Caterham, walk down his ten-foot
garden path, climb his back-fence, and so issue on to a private
golf-links.
There are practical disadvantages, too, in the way of the hardened
trespasser. Sooner or later, at the end of his trespassing, waits
Nemesis for him--the keeper, flanked by dogs and fortified by a gun,
purple-faced in hate of a wrong not his, ingeminating the awkward
question, ‘Did you see the notice-boards or did you not?’ And there
follows the mean and abject retreat to the nearest road, with the vision
of the landed aristocracy calm and triumphant.
And there are deeper reasons which make trespassing for its own sake a
passion unworthy of a walker. The desire to affront the landed
aristocracy is just one of those disconnected and abstract impulses
which walking should mould and settle into the structure of larger
thought. He who walks over English country in a proper and receptive
frame of mind must catch something of its spirit, of the age-long order
of possession. It is not only the voice of the keeper and landowner that
is lifted against the casual trespasser: it is the voice of a long
tradition, a settled convention, the voice, in a sense, of the country
itself. The force which settled the forms of wood and field and
hedgerow, which fixed the very conditions of our walking, is the same
force which (dimly comprehended) pulsates in the breast of the
indignant keeper and hardens the faces of the ‘Private’ notice-boards
against us. In the concrete imagination of the practised walker such a
force must have its due place; and, beside it, the vague and abstract
love of trespassing is but a shadowy phantom of to-day.
But if we can respect the rights of others, we can also respect our own;
and it is here that Walker Miles is at once our prophet and our guide.
As ancient as the fields themselves, as securely based upon the ages and
sanctified by the use of our fathers, the footpaths and field-tracks
stand as the living embodiment of popular rights. Beside the way which
the feet of generations have worn to church or inn, the loftiest
dwellings and widest parks are mere parvenus. If the trespasser wishes
to commit an act of symbolic defiance against the landed aristocracy, he
need not climb their fences or jump through their flower-beds: he can
tread the right-of-way which existed before they were thought of, which
conditioned the laying out of their estates, which often cuts clean
through their property with all the contempt of an oak for a mushroom.
Some rights-of-way may have been lost to us, in the manner mentioned
above; but many yet remain which the Romans trod, and the Saxons trod,
and our later ancestors trod; and all the forces of darkness have not
prevailed against them.
The preservation of commons and footpaths has now passed into the hands
of a great and beneficent society; Pompeius has set sail on the
Mediterranean, and the pirates have been subdued. But there is no surer
guard for our rights than a steady and regular patrolling of our
possessions; and in this Walker Miles is a safe guide. He is a master of
all the tricks by which the public is at present cheated, all the last
desperate devices of defeated piracy. The locked gate of the farmyard,
the ‘Trespassers’ board planted by the stile within a foot of the path,
the track which appears to lead up to the doors of a private house--all
these figure in his stately prelude, and are exemplified again and again
in the course of his works. Following in his steps we need fear no
keeper: and if ever a bar or board stand in our way we can disregard
it. Beside one of the Oxted paths there lie (or lay) the shattered
remains of a notice-board which some usurper had planted in the very
centre of the way. I can claim no credit for its destruction, for by the
time I came there was in truth very little destroying left to be done;
but I like to think of that unknown devotee of Walker Miles, pursuing
his placid way, faced suddenly by the intruder, and with one splendid
motion laying it low and (as far as could be judged) jumping on it
afterwards.
* * * * *
The style of Walker Miles is perhaps an acquired taste. He wrote under
peculiar conditions: he had to be at once clear and compendious, that
the careless walker might not miss his way nor the weakling stagger
under the weight of a large volume. He had thus little use for
rhetorical tropes and flourishes; his words had to be cut down to the
bare minimum necessary to express his meaning. But, to the initiated,
this rigorous conciseness lends his style a peculiar value: every word
has its appointed function: we feel that we could not sacrifice a single
line; nay, those who have unintentionally done so by skipping a few
lines in the middle of the page have regretted it when the subsequent
directions became unintelligible. And the fact--also necessitated by his
conditions--that most of the verbs are in the imperative mood exercises
a singular charm; we feel that the author is in an intimate relation
with us, addressing us personally and not merely discoursing from afar.
As a sample of his style, I take a section of the walk from Leith Hill
to Felday.
‘Another lane is soon reached. Cross this lane, and take the
opposite path uphill towards the entrance-gate of the approach-road
to Highashes-farm. Pass through this gateway, and upon reaching the
first outhouse, note a wicket gate on the left. Pass through it and
follow the track downhill between banks. Upon coming out upon an
open path through the wood, still keep straight ahead along the
hillside, with a copse overhead on the right, and a grand
larch-wood below on the left. In another quarter-of-a-mile the
SEVENTEENTH MILE point will be reached and then for half-a-mile
further the path still continues easily up and down the picturesque
undulations of the wood.’
Within the compass of six sentences we have traversed perhaps the most
wonderful mile in all the author’s works. The uninformed may regard the
passage as dull, but to those who know their Walker Miles, and above all
to those who know the Highashes Farm bridle-path, there is more meaning
in these simple words than in all the laboured enthusiasms of a
guide-book or a local-colour novelist. In the whole passage there are
but two descriptive epithets, and these of the most temperate kind; but
both their rarity and their temperance give to the epithets of Walker
Miles a special value: he only uses them when there is something which
deserves epithet. As the short and businesslike sentences pass before us
in ordered succession, we may fairly recall another author who knew how
to gain vividness by sacrificing ornament; we catch again something of
the quick, uplifting stringendo of Thucydides.
Works of reference are traditionally the butts for small wit; and it is
possible that as Walker Miles becomes more widely known a legend will
spring up that his directions are obscure, like the sister legend,
fostered by dying or dead humourists, that Bradshaw is unintelligible.
The Bradshaw myth has by now got some footing, and it will take a few
generations of increasing good sense to kill it; but it may be hoped
that all walkers will combine to strangle any embryo Walker Miles legend
at birth. If a man knows the four points of the compass, can distinguish
between his right hand and his left, and (occasionally) can recognise a
holly or an oak, he has all the equipment necessary for understanding
Walker Miles. I have followed his directions now for some years, and
have only come to grief from my own carelessness, or from actual changes
in the country which have made his directions out of date. Now and then
the course of a footpath has been altered: for example, the Highashes
Farm track now debouches not into the Felday road, but into the
cross-road to Abinger, so that one turns to the left instead of the
right. Here and there, too, a stile has been removed or a gate has
become a gap. But the great bulk of Walker Miles is still accurate, and
none but a fool need go astray.
Under which term I include, with the deepest respect, betrothed couples:
in the honourable and Shakesperean sense they are fools, being too much
occupied with supramundane things to be able to attend properly to the
business in hand. It was my good fortune one Whit-Monday to overtake two
such couples on a Walker Miles track, both with the master’s work in
hand and both somewhat puzzled as to his meaning; but I was able to set
both right by precept and example, and I trust that there are now two
happy homes where Walker Miles stands in the place of honour in the
front-parlour, ousting East Lynne and the other customary household
gods. There is also a story about a minister of state, but that has
nothing to do with Walker Miles.
Useful, accurate, concise, intelligible--it is no light thing to be able
to predicate these qualities without reservation of a man’s work: and I
doubt if he himself would have desired further praise. There is no trace
of trumpet-blowing in his writings: indeed, he leaves the reader in
doubt whether he himself realised the full measure of his achievements.
‘Though the main roads to Leith Hill,’ he says, ‘are perhaps some of the
most charming in the country, it is, nevertheless, strange how few
except thorough-going ramblers know of any other routes. The five
following rambles will, therefore, it is to be hoped, find favour with
those who like to get off the “beaten track.” They are all different,
both going and returning, and are of varying lengths, as will be seen by
reference to page 65.’ In this masterpiece of understatement it is
difficult to know whether a smile of Socratic irony is not lurking on
the master’s lips, waiting the answering smile of the disciple who
understands. Where another would have let loose the big trumpet of the
‘Exegi monumentum’ timbre, he merely states the fact. ‘They are all
different, both going and returning.’
He himself has gone to return no more, and only his works remain. But I
like to think that somewhere on the Elysian plain, where prophet and
hero and poet tread together down the well-worn paths, a single figure
quests somewhat aside, writing words of gold upon an ivory tablet as he
goes. ‘Continuing on past the Happy Groves take the well-marked track to
the right, but at the third clump of asphodel, note a grassy track
diverging to the left, and follow this until it leads into an open space
covered with amaranth and moly.’
III
WALKING AND MUSIC
WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING
Saltatorem appellat L. Murenam Cato. Maledictum est, si vere obiicitur,
vehementis accusatoris; sin falso, maledici conviciatoris. Quare cum
ista sis auctoritate, non debes, M. Cato, arripere maledictum ex trivio
... neque temere consulem populi Romani saltatorem vocare; sed
conspicere, quibus praeterea vitiis affectum esse necesse sit eum, cui
vere istud obiici potest. Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte
insanit.
CIC. _Pro Mur._ vi. 13.
The waltzer is characterized by great delicacy and stupidity. The
death-rate is higher amongst them than amongst ordinary tame mice.... A
waltzer cannot escape; it cannot keep up a run in a direct line for
long, and soon lapses into spinning.
A. D. DARBISHIRE,
_Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery_, pp. 85-6.
III
WALKING AND MUSIC
WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING
The poet Juvenal in a well-known line remarked that the penniless
traveller (or walker) will sing within earshot of a robber. In modern
times the picture has rather lost its poignancy, since robbers have
deserted our highroads and content themselves with organising bazaars;
but the significant conjunction of the words ‘Cantabit’ and ‘viator’
remains. To sing, hum, burble, whistle or generally adumbrate music is
at once the distinction and the pride, the duty and the pleasure, of
walkers. Under the influence of a fine day and a pleasant country the
voiceless and tone-deaf have been known to emit sounds coming well
within the orchestral range (interpreted liberally and so as to include
the instruments of percussion), while the most moderately and modestly
musical of men become on a walk encyclopaedic in their range of melody
and Protean in their variety of tone-colour. There is surely some
natural kinship between walking and music; the musical terms--andante,
movement, accompaniment--are full of suggestive metaphor; and the sacred
symbol of both arts is the wooden stick which marks the strides of the
walker and pulsates to the heart-beats of the orchestra.
The most obvious ground for this kinship is rhythm. The simple beat of
the foot on the ground, with the natural swing of the body above it,
suggests inevitably the beat of the musical bar. It is difficult to walk
for long under the sway of that regular ‘one, two, one, two’ without
fitting a melody to it; it is even more difficult to hear a melody
played or sung when walking without dropping instinctively into its
rhythm. A London crowd, that most apathetic of masses, begins to march
in unison when a barrel-organ strikes up the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ or
the Intermezzo of Mascagni or some other item from the repertory of
mechanical music; and if ever you wish to deride, contemn, trample on
and spiritually triumph over a tune (which happens to all of us
sometimes), there is nothing more satisfying than to walk past the band
or gramophone from whence it issues at a step cutting clean across its
rhythm. Had the Sirens lived on land, Odysseus would have needed no wax
in his ears; he could have waited till they began their incantation (in
A flat, three-four time, sixty bars to the minute, lusingando), and then
walked by at a brisk step, matched to a breezy anapaestic song or to the
incomparable rhythm of his own hexameters.
The simple foot-beat is undoubtedly a potent link between walkers and
music; I doubt, however, if it is the only or the chief ground of their
musical susceptibility. There are other activities besides walking which
have a regular and emphatic rhythm, and yet are not markedly associated
with music. Some of these will be treated in more detail later; here it
will suffice to mention carpet-beating, the treadmill, and bicycling.
The cause is no doubt partly physiological; the carpet-beater and the
felon operate in awkward positions, while the bicyclist, even if he does
not stoop over his handle-bars and so cramp his lungs, has a current of
air in his face which parches his throat and impedes the flexibility of
his whistle. The same applies even more forcibly to motorists, were it
possible to conceive them as in any relation to music or as fit for
anything but treasons, stratagems and spoils--the stratagems being
conceived, and the spoils exacted, by the police.
A more potent reason, I think, is the actual bodily condition of a
walker, that perfect harmony which comes of a frame well occupied. The
carpet-beater operates from the waist upwards, his lower half being as
irrelevant as that of a stranded mermaid; the bicyclist forswears his
birthright by allying himself to a machine. But the walker is an
organism, and therefore a fit vehicle for music. And this inner fitness
is matched by the merely material conditions of the walker’s physique.
His bodily habit is the right one for singing--for the exercise of the
vocal mechanism irrespective of the kind of music produced. A good
walker means an instrument in good condition, with a wide compass and a
ripe quality of tone. That high A after which you strive at other times
with tears and sweat comes without effort; you make trees and the
mountain tops that freeze bow their heads with notes which at other
times would merely make the accompanist blench; your runs sound like a
bird soaring into the empyrean and not like a lame man going upstairs;
your trill is at last a trill, clearly distinguishable from a yodel. And
when the day is done, what singing is there like that of a walker in his
bath?
* * * * *
These two facts, the natural beat of the foot and the bodily
exhilaration of walking, account for a good many of the ordinary walking
songs, the cheerful melodies of simple rhythm, which recall a flagging
company to courage and unison. Chief of these is the famous ‘John
Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.’ Tradition dictates that
this must be sung on the principle of cumulative omission--the first
verse in full, the second without the word ‘grave,’ the third without
‘his grave’ and so on, the blanks being filled by beats of the foot.
Thus in the last verse but one, the first three lines consists only of
the word ‘John’ and seven foot-beats, thrice repeated; while in the last
verse of all there are twenty-three beats in complete silence, until the
whole company comes in on the words, ‘But his soul goes marching on.’ It
is a point of honour to count these beats and the pause preceding them
exactly right, so as to get a unanimous attack with no false starts. For
reviving the attention and good feeling of a tired company, there is
nothing like John Brown; and, it may be mentioned, it will carry them
over 576 paces if ‘a-mouldering’ is reckoned one word, or 640 if it is
reckoned two, as the more orthodox hold.
Walkers may be thought perverse in making a fetish of a song like ‘John
Brown’--which is in origin, I suppose, a threnody on the death of an
eminent man--when there lies ready to hand such a store of specifically
walking tunes. I allude, of course, to that ancient and well-established
form of music, the March. There is no age of man which has not had its
marches, whether it called them anapaests or war-songs or what not.
Further, the feelings which marches express are wide in range and highly
impressive in character. Military glory, religious pomp, state
ceremonial, weddings and funerals--all these have their appropriate
setting in the march rhythm. Or, in other words, when man celebrates his
greatest achievements or his highest aspirations, when he makes the big
adventure of his life or the greater adventure of his death, the most
natural and human expression of feeling is to walk to the strains of
music. Marching, in short, is the epic form of walking, and march tunes
are the epics of music--the formal embodiments of communal feeling on
the great occasions of life.