what a stupendous growth they represent. Games of various kinds have
always flourished in this country, but the growth of athletics since
1870 or so is something too huge, both in bulk and variety, to be
ascribed to any normal development. Since that time cricket must have
increased at least tenfold; football has developed into three colossal
and quite distinct branches, not to mention Colonial and American
variations and the historic cults of English schools; golf has grown
from the recreation of a few Scots to the business of ten thousand
Britons; lawn-tennis, purged of its garden-party birthstain, has become
a game of the first rank; hockey has lived down the derision of its
youth and commands its thousands of devotees; cross-country running
holds its head high; lacrosse has become a bond of Empire; _quid plura_?
I have not even mentioned women’s athletics. If Lord Macaulay were to
return to earth to-morrow, he would be surprised at many things--at our
style of drawing-room furniture, at the respect paid to Plato, at the
universal prevalence of pipe-smoking, not to speak of Marconigrams and
promenade concerts; but his biggest shock would come if he stood at a
London terminus at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and watched the
youth of the nation--and its middle-age, too--speeding forth in their
thousands on athletic pursuits, to toil and labour and sweat, and even
to spend money, for an idea.
This enormous growth in the staple forms of sport cannot be attributed
only to the sporting instinct. There must be some other element in them
which commands general support and admiration, whether or no a strictly
sporting struggle is involved. Now, what is the common character of
these activities? Three points are clear at once: they all take place in
the open air; they all involve some physical expertness; they all
involve, what is quite a different thing, hard physical exercise. Or, to
put it negatively, they can none of them be undertaken in a house, by an
incompetent, without bodily labour. These three things, far more than
the pure sporting instinct, are the fundamental characters of the
athletic movement; it is these which really evoke popular admiration.
And because most of the sporting activities and some of the hunting
activities share in these characters, all sporting activities and all
hunting activities are lumped together in the popular mind as ‘sport,’
and this term, thus endowed with favourable associations of fresh air,
physical expertness and exercise, is then applied alike to billiards,
grouse-shooting, and betting on horse-races.
Even so, the claims of walking to a place among the staple forms of
athletics seem dubious. Every one would agree that it takes place in
the open air, not many that it is hard exercise, fewer still that it
involves physical expertness. It may be admitted at once that there are
certain physical states to which the walker can never attain. He never
knows what it is to concentrate all his energies, like the runner or
rower or footballer, within five minutes or twenty minutes or seventy
minutes, reaching at the end that complete and satisfying state of
exhaustion, that sense of having come to the end of the tether, which
uplifts the soul like death or exile or any other finality. His fatigue
is a slower and less inspiring sensation, a thing of muscle rather than
wind. Nor, again, has he ever the feeling of having done something
really clever and unusual with his body, like the three-quarter when he
swerves or the rower when he gets his hands away. The walker’s motions
are things, apparently, which any one can do.
None the less, walking at its best comes very near the greater
athletics. A full day’s walk at a good pace is not a thing to be
despised; the worst that can be said is that it does not need that
superfine concert pitch of physical competency, that little extra
cleanness of wind and limb above the normal, to which rowers and runners
attain for about ten days in each year. Granted this, still walking is
no activity for the grossly untrained or incapable. There are moments in
it which test the body as keenly as any football or hockey; there is the
peculiar and special demon of inertia always waiting for you at the
eighth mile, and again about the eighteenth, ready to seize on the
slightest weakness, a demon only to be exorcised by a genuine effort. If
you can conquer him, you may at least claim a leaf from the athlete’s
crown. Even in the matter of physical expertness, where walkers contrast
most strongly with other athletes, they are not altogether beneath
consideration. A proper stride is not a mere gift of the gods; it can be
cultivated, increased in ease and length, made a more useful servant.
There is no little difference at the end of the day between the walker
who can move his feet lithely and delicately, making a rhythmic bar of
each stride, and the walker who hoists them up anyhow and lets them
fall with a bang, like instruments of percussion. The adjustment of gait
to slopes and to varying kinds of ground is also a matter of some
expertness. And, above all, there is the very subtle art, when you are
coming down a steepening hill, of knowing the moment at which to abandon
care, swing out and run.
Running on a walk is a subject strictly outside the ambit of this work,
but I cannot pass it by unpraised. It is quite unlike ordinary running;
it generally takes place down a violent slope and could not possibly be
managed in spiked shoes and bare legs. It is of many kinds, all of them
good. Running down a hard grass hill is good, on the flat of the foot,
with short strides, each step sending a jerk from the extreme toe to the
topmost hair; then, as the slope flattens near the bottom, you swing
out, stride enormously and fly. (Thus do, descending from Scarf Gap to
Buttermere, and turn to the left at the foot beyond the stream, to the
pool with the grassy promontory which washes you clean of mortal ills.)
Screerunning is good, when you have clambered gingerly down the crags,
and find them issuing below in fine slopes of shale; here forget your
toes, trust only to your heels, and look out for rocks. But best of all
is the grassy head of a valley, soft with moss and hidden bog; here you
must rush at full stride, watching your leader (if there is one) for
bog-holes; if not, trusting in Providence. If your foot fall on good
ground, it is well; if there be a sudden yielding beneath it, leap but
the more wildly off the other, and it will rise from the bog with a
sound like a giant’s kiss, and a tingle of cold water within your boot.
Thus come wise men from Esk Hause to Borrodale by Grain Gill, forsaking
the path of the foolish by Styhead Pass; and at the bottom there is a
pool for them only less worthy than that of Buttermere, and thereafter
they move down Borrodale in the dusk among silent sheep-folds, ennobled
and perfected men, the long memories of the day rounded with the rapture
of their run.
This, however, is by the way: the fact that some walkers run on a walk
does not make walking a form of athletics any more than the fact that
some company promoters write poetry in the evenings makes stockbroking a
branch of poetry. Of the legitimate claims of walking in itself and by
itself to be considered a form of athletics, the athletes will probably
remain unconvinced. They will continue to regard it as a thing any one
can do, and to rate walkers on a level with grouse-shooters and
beaglers, and only a little higher than rabbit-shooters. Let it be so;
if a little exclusiveness is needed to maintain the aristocracy of
physique, no walker will grudge it. But when this has been fully
granted, and the primacy of athletics proper firmly established, let the
athletes remember that they themselves make use of walking. I do not
mean only that they walk down the street when they cannot afford a cab;
I mean that often in the utmost rigour of their training they use
walking as one of the most effective means to that training. This is
notably the case with boxers, who of all athletes need to be the most
carefully and scientifically trained. There must surely then be
something in walking akin to, if not identical with, the highest
capacities of the body; when a man is reaching his physical maximum, he
does not grouse-shoot or beagle or dance or play billiards, but he does
walk.
The reason of this can be understood, and the tone of this discussion
raised, by the help of a moral analogue. Consider some athlete of
action--a statesman, a general, a bishop, or a merchant-prince; when he
is preparing for some supreme feat--a bill, a battle, a wholesale
conversion, or a corner in nitrates--he does not keep his energies
entirely on the lofty plane which such feats demand; he busies himself,
if wise, with a number of minor affairs requiring only his ordinary
capacity and not the special effort of the feat. In other words, he
exercises his normal powers to the full, and so prepares himself for an
abnormal strain. It is the same with the athlete; when he is getting
ready for the abnormal strain of a race or a cup-tie, he needs to keep
his normal physical powers in good condition; hence, as the most normal
and central of all bodily activities, he walks. I do not in the least
mean by this that he needs special muscles for his main feat and resorts
to walking because this uses other muscles; this would be untrue, would
spoil the analogue, and, worst of all, would be quite out of date. The
physiology which divided a man’s bodily activities by muscles, is like
the old psychology which divided his mental activities by ‘faculties’;
nobody now believes such things, except possibly some physiologists or
psychologists. The man, whether mentally or physically, is a whole: he
has a normal mental self and a normal bodily self, and the two are
closely allied. In either case, he must keep the normal self in full
swing by means of its most congenial activities when he is preparing for
an abnormal effort.
Consider the analogue further, and a second profound truth emerges. Not
only will the normal activities of the statesman, general, bishop, or
merchant-prince conduce to great feats, but also the high condition they
are in will react on the performance of their normal activities. The
week before the great feat takes place, the statesman will deal with
questions and estimates in a particularly masterly way; the general’s
regulation of camp routine will be a marvel; the bishop’s diocese will
be a Utopia; and the merchant-prince will forecast the fluctuations of
stock with deadly accuracy. Each of them will feel that he is taking
ordinary affairs (note this metaphor) in his stride, and with a peculiar
sensation of completeness, confidence, and well-being he will march to
meet the event of the week following. And whenever, in the course of
years, he resumes and maintains this high condition of training, there
will be the same superb feeling of mastery, the consciousness of a fine
faculty fully exercised, the recollection of the great moments of the
feat.
Need I point the parallel? Every foot-pound which the athlete adds to
his physical capacity is felt in his walking. There is nothing you can
do in your physical life which will not affect you for better or for
worse as you walk. Walking is the book of the recording angel of the
body, who never forgets or forgives. If you have sat up late, or eaten
and drunk unwisely, or breathed foul air, or listened to or participated
in waltzes, or done all these things simultaneously, which is quite
easy--you will know it at the eighth mile next day. But if you have
trained your body, and given it its due of food and drink and sun and
air, then you will walk with a peculiar exaltation; you will swing your
legs to the full rhythm of your physical being; you will feel yourself
one with all the greatest moments of your bodily past--that last sprint
up the straight, when your legs felt like somebody else’s; those
forty-five frenzied seconds in the wash of the boat in front, until your
nose grated on her stern; that wild gallop down the left wing with the
half-back in pursuit and that sweeping centre which the inside right did
(or did not) put through.
Once this is understood, further argument about the relative merits of
walking and athletics becomes futile and absurd. The two are simply
different but related modes of expressing one idea, the idea, that is,
of realising the body’s capacity as a thing good in itself. This common
interest outweighs any differences of expression. Walkers and athletes
are working to the same end, and are closely allied. Indeed, it is no
matter for argument; for the idea, like other ideas, can never be
completely proved. We only know, instinctively, that athletics are good,
that in training and exercising ourselves to the full we feel a natural
satisfaction, and that walking at its best shares in this feeling. The
idea works itself out in the usual way of idealism; in the beginning it
calls to us dogmatically to exercise our bodies, and only as we continue
in the process do we begin to realise its meaning; we can never
completely justify it in argument, since it is an idea, and therefore
demands faith as well as reason. But this at least can be said, that any
other explanation breaks down. If we try to explain athletics and
walking by reference to any standard outside themselves--to anything
other than the pure bodily idea--utter confusion ensues.
There is one particularly insidious line of argument which starts from
the conception of Health, and exhibits walking and athletics and most
other things as part of a general Health Movement. It looks extremely
attractive--the single cause exhibiting itself in a numerous and varied
selection of phenomena, sanitation laws, food reform, fresh air,
physical training, the simple life, hygiene, health-conscience, _mens
sana in corpore sano_ and the rest. On this view, we walk and undertake
athletics for the same reason which makes us open our windows and keep
regular hours and observe moderation in food and drink--namely, to
preserve health. It is all very impressive and scientific, until we
begin to apply it in detail, and consider various forms of athletics
from the health standpoint. Disturbing questions then arise. Is it not
the fact that running is apt to strain the heart? Does not rowing need
to be supplemented by something a little more jerky to keep the liver in
order? Does not football lead to an abnormal and ill-distributed
development of the frame, so that the professional footballer is neither
hygienically nor artistically a model? Is not walking, as a mild and
equable form of exercise, really healthier than any other form of
athletics, operating more beneficially upon the heart, liver, lungs,
digestion, motor-centres, blood-corpuscles, opsonin index, and the rest
of the catalogue of modern psychology? Finally, is not the best
exercise, from the health standpoint, a carefully graduated system of
physical culture, nicely adapted by an expert to each individual’s
needs, and performed in correct clothing in a sterilised atmosphere of
57° Fahrenheit?
This argument is dangerous in many ways. It goes near the truth and just
manages to miss it completely. It holds out a bait to walkers to desert
the cause of athletics that their own craft may be exalted. It
encourages people who dislike athletics, but can walk in a fashion, to
distinguish between walking and sport and say that all sport is
unhealthy as well as demoralising. It sets a gulf between athletics and
physical training, so that the man who pursues both is in an equivocal
position. It encourages doctors to talk about health, which they
misunderstand, being preoccupied with illness. Finally, it lets in
philosophers, who begin to say that a healthy activity must be
spontaneous, that all health movements, including athletics, are fads,
and that the only sound rule is to do what you like and eat what you
like and drink what you like--particularly this last. So in the end
walkers, athletes, doctors, hygienists, physical trainers and
philosophers are set by the ears and the intellectual Riot Act is read.
The whole trouble arises from treating ‘health’ as something that can be
analysed and defined. Really, it is one of the ultimate terms, like
happiness or virtue or poetry. Doctors can, of course, define health in
a limited and negative way as the absence of specific disease; and so
far it may be possible to analyse the body into a catalogue of organs,
to enter against each item the effects of the different kinds of
exercise, and then to add up the entries and pronounce a result.
Granted that this is a genuine scientific process, and not gross
empiricism got up so as to impress the statistically susceptible, it
still does not carry us very far. Health in the true sense is a single
and positive thing: it is the active well-being of the body. To prove a
man healthy, it is not enough to go through the items in his catalogue
and give each a satisfactory mark; it is not enough even to group his
items and show that A. B. C. prove that he can breathe properly, and D.
E. F. that he can digest food, and X. Y. Z. that he can sleep. Health is
not, any more than morality, the capacity to do things: it is the actual
doing of them. It is good for a man to jump and run and walk and breathe
and eat and sleep--not medically good in the sense that vaseline is good
for chapped hands, but fundamentally and categorically and inexplicably
good: it is what the body was made for, the realisation of its idea.
Whether these activities are also good in the medical sense, whether,
that is, they keep A. B. C. and the other items in good condition, is
of quite secondary importance. As a matter of fact, if we disregard
medical evidence for and against, it is pretty clear that they are good
in this sense: the things which the body naturally finds good also tend
to preserve and strengthen it. This, after all, is only what we should
expect, assuming the body not to have been invented as a bad joke. But
the medical consequences are secondary: the primary thing is the
activity itself.
Once admit the primacy of health in this wide sense, which is the same
as the primacy of the bodily idea, and the rest of the tangle is easily
cleared up. We regulate food, drink and sleep, not because this is
medically good for our organs, still less because discipline is good in
itself, but simply because this enables the body to do its best. We open
our windows, not in order to make our atmosphere approximate in chemical
composition most nearly to what doctors think the best, but because the
body naturally craves for fresh air as its environment. We promote
sanitation and public health, not in order to reduce the number of
bacilli per cubic inch, but because smells and dirt and darkness are
nasty things, instinctively condemned by a clean body. And, finally, we
walk because it is good, and run and jump and perform athletics because
they are good, and not because they enable us to work harder or earn
more, or win the next battle of Waterloo.
But the surest test of the validity of this view is the extreme case of
physical training, the absurdum to which the health argument is reduced.
The philosophers would say that we must either take the health position,
in which case physical training is clearly the best form of exercise;
or, when this is laughed out of court, we must abandon it altogether,
and admit that the only good activities must be the spontaneous ones.
But on the idealist view no such absolute opposition is necessary: there
is a place for physical training in the kingdom of bodily ends. Let it
be admitted at once that the proper athletic activities are best, and
that if we had these to the full, any system of physical training would
be superfluous and unthinkable. But the hypothesis is a large one: it
assumes perfect physical conditions for every one, full leisure and
opportunities for every kind of exercise. Such conditions are not often
realised at present: we live largely in towns, within doors, seated,
clothed, avoiding sunlight, shirking rain and wind. This being so, is it
unthinkable that we should try in our scant leisure to remedy the defect
as best we can, to concentrate into a few moments something of the
bodily experience which we lack? The point has been often obscured by
the particularism of certain systems of physical training. To move a
dumb-bell up and down in order to expand and harden the biceps muscle
is--or rather was--an absurdity deserving every hard name which
philosophers can invent; it was as silly as smiling on purpose in order
to cultivate a habit of cheerfulness. Indian clubs were a little better,
since they brought the whole of the upper part of the body into play;
there was occasionally in the motion something reminiscent of a golf
swing or a tennis drive or the whirl of a stick in a walker’s hand. The
modern systems still sometimes talk about muscles, but this is only
their fun: what they are really concerned with is the body as a whole,
and they twist it and stretch it and strain it and rub it with the
primary object of giving it the most varied and exciting experience
possible within a limited time. At the end of your daily quotum you can,
of course, if you wish, go through a list of your muscles and note how
each has been exercised; but to say that this is the aim of physical
training is simply to mistake the trees for the wood. What has really
happened is that you have experienced, in a concentrated form and on a
small scale, the feeling of a well-exercised body: you have swung, as
when you rowed; you have bent the leg, as when you climbed; you have
twisted, as in the most crucial moment of the scrum. And the feel of
your skin when the daily exercises are over may perhaps recall to you
those times when you ran down a mountain, bathed in a stream, and lay
prone in the sun thereafter.
Let there be peace, therefore, and co-operation, between all who are
interested in and use the body, athletes, walkers, hygienists, physical
trainers: their interests are so largely the same, and the apathy they
have to face is so overwhelming, that they cannot afford to quarrel. Let
each pursue his own calling whole-heartedly, and he will find later or
sooner that he needs the others to fight against the common foe. If any
philosophers give trouble, refer them to the primacy of the bodily idea
and see how they like that; if any doctors give trouble, refer them to
the other doctors who have said the opposite thing. For the rest, let
there be peace; and as time goes on, windows will begin to open and
sunlight and water and exercise will begin to become popular; and at
last people will realise that the body is not a joke or a plaything, a
catalogue of organs or an arena of moral combats, but a trust for which
each man is responsible, to make or mar.
Poor, ill-used, neglected, misunderstood body! Our ancestors soddened
you with port: our grandfathers overlooked you while they muddled with
the soul and mind which are bound up with you: ascetics starved you and
hedonists cultivated you in patches: doctors analysed you till there was
nothing left but a catalogue of inanimate fragments: economic forces
penned you in dens and prisons: fashion clothed you in impossible
garments, and kept you up at hours and in atmospheres which outraged
your most sacred instincts. And now I make you sit here
writing--writing! For heaven’s sake, come out for a walk.
V
WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM
Sociati incedunto.
WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM.
On the subject of walking and driving there is but little to be said,
for the simple reason that the time thus passed in the open air is
usually passed by persons in the company of members of their own
families. The usual fashionable hour for walking, both in the metropolis
and at watering-places or seaside towns, is from twelve to two o’clock.
_Manners and Tone of Good Society,
by a Member of the Aristocracy._
Chapter xiv. (4th edition; n.d.)
V
WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM