moments in which equipment will be charged with the full force of the
poetic current. One is at the very beginning of a walk, when everything
is fresh and clean, when shirts are cool and unrumpled, and boots are
new-greased, and the walking-stick lies cold and hard in the hand, and
the knapsack sits on the shoulders like a bird new-poised and still
unfamiliar with its perch. At such a moment who can think of practical
and material purposes? Reason may whisper that the grease will make our
boots pliable, that the stick will prove useful, that the knapsack
contains many indispensable things for the ending of the day. But at the
moment we have no such thoughts of the practical value of equipment: we
feel only that we are equipped, that we are armed for the combat with
time and space and wind and weather and mental depression and abstract
thinking; and so we fling out our chests and stamp our feet on Mother
Earth, and away to the rhythm of the dotted tribrach. ‘And Telemachus
girt on his sharp sword and grasped his spear and stood by his seat at
his father’s side armed with gleaming bronze.’
The other moment comes later, when we are some days upon our way. Boots
have grown limp: clothes have settled into natural skin-like rumples:
the stick is warm and smooth to our touch: the map slips easily in and
out of the pocket, lucubrated by dog’s-ears: every article in the
knapsack has found its natural place, and the whole has settled on to
our shoulders as its home. The equipment is no longer an external armour
of which we are conscious: it is part of ourselves that has come through
the combat with us, and is indissolubly linked with its memories. At the
start this coat was a glorious thing to face the world in: now it is
merely an outer skin. At the start this stick was mine: now it is
myself.
When it is all over the coat will go back to the cupboard and the curved
suspensor, and the shirts and stockings will go to the wash, to resume
conventional form and texture, and take their place in the humdrum
world. But the stick will stand in the corner unchanged, with mellowed
memories of the miles we went together, with every dent upon it
recalling the austerities of the high hills, and every tear in its bark
reminding me of the rocks of the Gable and Bowfell. And in the darkest
hours of urban depression I will sometimes take out that dog’s-eared
map and dream awhile of more spacious days; and perhaps a dried blade of
grass will fall out of it to remind me that once I was a free man on the
hills, and sang the Seventh Symphony to the sheep on Wetherlam.
VIII
WALKING ALONE
WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING
‘Lass, O Welt, O lass mich sein.’
VIII
WALKING ALONE
WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING
Walking alone is, of course, on a much lower moral plane than walking in
company. It falls under the general ban on individual as opposed to
communal pursuits. The solitary walker, like the golfer or sculler, is a
selfish and limited being, unlike the rower, footballer, or cricketer,
who is a member of a community. The point cannot be seriously argued.
Prevaricators may call attention artlessly to certain features of
communal pursuits--to cricket scores and lists of averages and
interviews with eminent athletes; they may even review our country as a
whole, and expatiate on the widely diffused spirit of toleration, mutual
good-will, and readiness to co-operate which our national sports have
produced. But their gibes are unavailing: it is plainly better to do
things in company than alone: and the solitary walker, if he is honest,
will at once resign all claim to the halo of patriotism, disinterested
devotion, esprit de corps and good citizenship which encircles the brow
of the footballer.
I will not even pray in aid the great names of Stevenson and Hazlitt.
Their defence of solitary walking rested largely on the mistaken idea
that if you walk in company you are bound to talk; they did not realise
that even silence can be corporate, nay, that there is a concrete and
positive taciturnity of two far more satisfying than the negative
voicelessness of one. They did not know how grunts can reveal the man
and ejaculations create and foster friendship. The silent contemplation
of walking is aided, not hindered, by the presence of another silent
contemplator at your side.
Walking alone, then, is a thing only to be justified by special
circumstances; it is an abnormal function of life, a subject for
pathology rather than physiology. But as life is not yet quite perfect
and normal in all departments, there is a place for pathology: as the
proper circumstances of walking are not always attainable, there is a
place for walking alone. Without elaborating a scheme of casuistry, we
can imagine certain conditions under which walking alone is defensible
if not laudable; and it is only fair to the solitary walker, pursuing
his lonely way under the ban of moral disapproval, to indicate some of
these.
I have mentioned above four classes of walkers--six milers, twelve
milers, eighteen milers, and twenty-four milers. The figures are not to
be taken too literally; but I think walkers, as a whole, fall more or
less definitely into four groups, whose average daily maxima are at, or
near, these figures. The differences extend to other points--to pace, to
length of stride, even, I think, to opinions and disposition, although
here the classification becomes less definite. Class A, the twenty-four
milers, average about 4½ miles an hour on a good road, and stride 40
inches or over: they tend to be mugwumps, mistrusters of rhetoric,
lovers of the classic in art and music and literature, of the distilled
and clarified products of human imagination or insight. Class B, the
eighteen milers, average 4 miles an hour, and stride 36 inches: they are
generally those who might have been in Class A but for a lack of real
comprehensive capacity and for a love of talking and disputation: they
tend to spasmodic intensities within a limited area instead of the wide
and equable appreciation of Class A: they read Meredith, but talk about
his philosophy, and have no proper grasp of Dickens. Class C, average 3½
miles an hour and call it ‘about 4,’ and stride 30 inches: they often
have Class A capacities, but are physically disabled: they insist on
large meals and a good deal of drink, and talk much of ‘scorching.’
Class D, average 2½ miles an hour, and stride 25 inches: they have no
illusions about either, and are mainly occupied in catching a train home
at the earliest opportunity.
Now it is obvious that if a Class B walker is set down to walk with one
from Class D, one of two things must happen: either the D man must rise
above his normal maxima, or the B man must sink below them. The usual
supposition is that B must give way, on the ground that it is dangerous
and distressing for D to exceed his limits. It is not generally
recognised in such cases what a sacrifice is imposed on B. He has got to
drop his pace from 4 miles to 2½; he has got to shorten his stride from
36 to 25 inches; he will probably not be allowed to talk politics; D has
never read Meredith’s poetry, and by the time B is feeling a little
warm, D will be beginning to think about the trains home. Now suppose
that B has had a hard week’s work, is mentally confused, is
contemplating marriage or an investment, is just changing his politics
or metaphysics, or is in some other condition when his mind wants
cleaning up and straightening out: would he not be to some extent
justified in refusing to modify his distance, pace, and stride, and in
offering D the alternatives of either complying with the B conditions or
going to the D--that is, consorting with other members of his own class?
Those who hold that B would not be justified miss, I think, the
distinction between walking and strolling; they consider that B will
get some sort of motion through pleasant country, and that this ought to
be enough for him, whatever his condition. The instance taken is
purposely extreme; normally, it is admitted, a stroll in company is
better than a walk alone. But there are times when B must have a proper
walk, at whatever cost; when his primary need is for 18 miles at 4 miles
an hour; nay, there are times when he is simply not fit for company, and
must go walking alone, and recapture something of himself before he can
properly consort with his fellows.
This condition of B’s which justifies solitary walking is called by many
names in medical works or in the impassioned autobiographies of
advertisement--neurasthenia, brain-fag, nervous collapse, or even
Weltschmerz. But there is a better and more expressive name, covering a
larger range of symptoms, which popular idiom created for us, and a poet
then marked for ever as our own. I mean the Hump. The use of this phrase
illustrates once more the truth that once we are conscious of a thing we
have subdued it. When a man says he has neurasthenia, he understands
nothing except a vague sense of discomfort somewhere unlocalised in
himself: but when he says he has the Hump, the very word brings a clear
vision of something unnatural and extraneous, of a definite deformity
which he can attack and cure. The disease is isolated and identified,
and is no longer a vague oppression; it is something which is not his
real self, but is temporarily connected with him, and may, by an effort,
be shaken off. Civilisation has pressed too heavily on one part of him,
on his porter’s shoulder-knot; and the forces of his being, which should
be employed in varying ways on different tasks, have concentrated
themselves unnaturally to resist the pressure: his shoulder has become
hypertrophied: in short, he has the Hump. Let him take a walk, let his
being resume its natural course: let the forces settle instinctively
back into their natural channels: let him realise the world around and
about him, calling and answering to each of his separate faculties and
not to one only; and lo! the pressure is lightened, the Hump is
reduced, and he resumes his natural shape, and is fit for the company
of his fellows.
And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the garden too,
Have lifted that Hump, that horrible Hump,
The Hump that was black and blue.
The poet, it is true, wrote of the Hump that comes from having too
little to do: but his words apply equally to that which comes of too
much.
But it is not only abnormal mental conditions, such as the Hump, which
justify solitary walking: there are abnormal physical conditions which
at times render it necessary. Chief among these are the peculiar
conditions of streets, pavements, and aggregated humanity which make up
towns. Walking in company in a town is really a mockery. Not only are
you hampered by other people, so that your attention is kept perpetually
on them and off your companions: but your line is for ever being broken
and reuniting, so that there is no chance of developing a communal swing
and stride. Worse than that, the atmosphere of a town induces that
dangerous combination of physical oppression and mental activity which
leads to brilliant conversation: you shout epigrams across the roar of
the traffic, and coruscate with wit as you dodge among perambulators.
Town-walking in company, in fact, tends to become like an evening party,
and the only possible thing in a town is to walk alone.
This being so, it may be asked whether town-walking is worth doing at
all. Many people would say that it is not, and as regards the great
majority of towns I should agree with them; the only thing to be done
with such towns is to walk away from them as quickly as possible, and to
achieve this it is pardonable to undergo the degradation of bicycling or
even being driven in a vehicle. But there is one exception, and that is
London. London walking is a quite distinct and peculiar thing, utterly
unlike any other town-walking. It is a unique branch of walking in
general and solitary walking in particular: for all the circumstances
which make town-walking solitary apply tenthousandfold in London. But if
you accept this condition, and walk London alone, you will find a very
curious thing, namely that in this biggest and most monstrous of all
towns you approach most nearly to pure rusticity. The strictly physical
conditions, dirt, noise, smell, constriction of outlook, multiplicity of
people, are as bad or worse in London than other towns; but in certain
other points, by no means unimportant to a walker, the end of the series
is like the beginning, the infinite is like the infinitesimal. What was
possible on the South Downs, difficult in Cheltenham, and unthinkable in
Liverpool, becomes possible again in London.
It all springs from one simple fact: there are so many people in London
that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest
attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight. It is
physically impossible for him to notice every one he sees; consequently,
he gets into the habit of simply overlooking them, and as their _esse_
is _percipi_, they become, for practical purposes, not there. A Londoner
walking along a crowded street is really alone in the wilderness: the
men are simply as trees walking. The difference between walking along
Oxford Street and along the Embankment is only the difference between
walking through a copse where there are many trees or on a field track
where there are few.
From this two important consequences follow; first, that in London you
can wear what you please. No one will notice or criticise, and even if
they did there are always a hundred people worse dressed than you, with
dirtier boots, with more _négligé_ hats, with baggier trousers. You may,
of course, meet some one you know; but here again the abnormal size of
London comes to your aid. If it is 5 to 1 on meeting a friend in
Cheltenham, it is 50 to 1 against in London. Second, and even more
important, is the fact that in London you can sing in the streets. The
roar of the traffic will drown all but the strongest passages in the
highest register: and even if this lulls for a moment nobody will
notice. You can even conduct with your stick if the beat of your foot is
not enough. Difficult orchestral passages with variations of colour can
be safely attempted in London streets: even the difference between a
trumpet and a horn (which involves making faces if it is done properly)
can be represented without any one heeding you.
Traversing thus the London streets, singing and in comfortable clothes,
unheeding and unheeded by other people, the solitary walker can come
near to, if he cannot attain, the proper mood of walking. It is true
that a crowd may disturb his repose at times, and dodging the people and
the traffic may break the rhythm of his stride: but the sixth sense
which Londoners develop enables him to avoid most obstructions without
thinking, and it is surprising, as a matter of fact, how rarely one’s
stride is broken in a London street. The rhythm of street walking can
never be quite the same as the rhythm of country walking: there is
always something hard and metallic in the contact of foot and paved
surface. None the less, there is a rhythm, and it can do something
towards pacifying the body, enlarging the mind, and beating the
disordered discourse of intellect into the smooth series of
contemplation. Here again the mere size of London comes to the solitary
walker’s aid. It is large enough to give him the feeling of direction,
to feed his innate craving for big lines. True, in London as in other
towns you have frequently to make a sharp turn, giving a violent wrench
to your internal organ of orientation. But if your main line be a
sufficiently big one, as it can be in London, it is possible to regard
these turns as temporary irregularities, and merge them in a larger
whole. For example, as you go from Charing Cross to Chelsea, you start
with a piece of the Strand, turn a little to cut across the lower end of
Trafalgar Square and out into the Mall, and then swing round to the
left, to the right, again to the right and again to the left, before you
resume the big line of the King’s Road.[6] But if you envisage the
whole in a sufficiently large spirit, the little irregularity of
Trafalgar Square and the four turns necessitated by the intrusion of
Buckingham Palace need not trouble you; they are mere modern
excrescences on a line which must have existed before Buckingham Palace
was built or Trafalgar fought, the line by which the citizens of London
went to Chelsea to eat buns.
By walking in this way along big lines it is possible to gain some real
idea of London, the relations of its parts, and the characteristic of
each. The bus or cab-rider cannot really understand London: by allowing
himself to be carried he loses all grip of actuality. The underground
traveller is even more benighted: to him London is an unintelligible
congeries of districts linked by memories of the under world. He
conceives Hampstead Heath as something near Hampstead station--an awful
perversion. But the walker realises Hampstead Heath in its relation to
London; he has approached it through the drab monochrome vistas of
Camden Town (with the sudden leap into modernity, red brick, and green
blinds at the lower end of the heath) or along the pompous and
innocently self-satisfied High Street, or up the interminable sameness
of Fitz John’s Avenue. He knows Parliament Hill as the end of an hour’s
hard walk, from which he looks back over the way that he has come: he
knows the cattle-trough as the first landmark in Alf Holliday’s famous
walk out of London to St. Albans, which drops him over the Spaniard’s
Road into a new world, with a high ridge between him and London, twists
him deftly through Temple Fortune, takes him into Hendon the back way by
the recreation ground, and speeds him from the foot of the hill across
the thirteen fields traversed by the river Silk, where a man can stretch
his legs and forget all urban things awhile until confronted by the
imposing structure of the Hendon Union workhouse.
But the greatest and most inspiring thing in London is the river. On the
purely physical side, it ventilates the town as nothing else can do; on
the most stifling days, when stone and brick have been so heated
overnight that they have killed the freshness of dawn and brought the
new day to birth already old, when the feet are as lead and every breath
is an oppression, when the most congenial music is a symphony of
Tschaikowsky--there is still some freshness beside the river. On the
aesthetic side, who shall fitly sing the praises of the river, with the
morning sun catching it as one drops on to the embankment from the
north, the silver mornings when the air is clear, the gold mornings with
a slight fog, and the copper mornings with a thicker fog? Or the
November view up river at sunset from one of the Chelsea bridges? But
the best gift of the river to London is simply itself, the long curving
line on which the whole town is based, which links Fulham to Westminster
and Battersea to the Docks, which shapes as nothing else can shape the
walker’s conception of London. Give me the man that knows his bridges
and has walked the whole range of all the embankments, from Blackfriars
to the uttermost parts of Chelsea beneath the shadow of the four
chimneys; he alone is the true Londoner.
It is clear then that at least in London there is something to be said
for solitary walking; the London walker can come near to the mood of
true walking. If he is debarred from real country he can yet gain
something of the country conditions; though a townsman, he approaches in
many ways to rusticity. A curious confirmation of this view may be found
in the Local Government system of this country. While every other town
has its Borough Council, London has a County Council; on the South Downs
you are in a county, in Liverpool you are in a borough, but in London
you are in a county again. In the eye of the Local Government Board, we
Londoners are mere chawbacons; we are tending sheep, and sowing corn,
and abiding the verdict of the seasons; we dwell beneath our own
vine-trees, and wait for a chance traveller to come by and tell us
whether Ladysmith is relieved. There is much humanity in Acts of
Parliament.
* * * * *
But however much we may make of London walking, let it never be
considered as anything but a _pis aller_. The first principle of all
walkers who live in London is to get away, if possible. If you must
remain in London, walk there by all means, and trump up whatever defence
of it looks most plausible. But as soon as it becomes possible to get
away, do not dream for an instant of remaining; beside a real country
walk, the biggest London line, the finest view from the Embankment, the
most transcendental conception of Hampstead are as dust in the balance.
Have done with all such flummery; take your stick and your Walker Miles
and go. And, unless you have the hump, do not go alone. Walking _from_
London (as opposed to walking _in_ London) is one of the finest forms of
communal walking; as an education in citizenship it need fear no
comparison, whether with cricket, football, or any other organised
game.
Consider for a moment the qualities needed by one who has undertaken the
organisation of a party of walkers--if a mixed party, so much the
better. To perform his functions successfully he must be a combination
of Cook’s agent, weather-prophet, geographical specialist, Bradshaw
expert, commissariat officer, guide, nurse, hostess, and chaperon. First
he must arrange the day and time, and train, so as to suit everybody,
which involves a hail of postcards, telephone conversations, and
personal interviews. Then he must provide a fine day--by far his easiest
task. Then he must arrange the route, his choice being limited only by
the fact that each member of the party has his own views about pace,
distance, time for lunch, and character of country, agreeing only that
there must be no undue hurrying or waiting for the train home at the end
of the walk. Then his functions as guide begin: he must necessarily lead
the party, while keeping an eye behind to see that no one is straggling;
he must never show even a momentary hesitation as to the route; he must
receive with gratitude and attention the suggestions of his companions,
who don’t care about the map, but are sure they came that way with their
uncle some years ago, and are quite certain the guide is wrong; he must
watch the time all through, making painful mental calculations of rates
and distances; he must be sure, if the route passes any ancient
churches, public-houses, or registry offices, that no members of the
party whose tastes incline thereto linger too long with irretrievable
results; and unless and until the party have reached a proper
taciturnity, he must originate and stimulate interesting conversation.
If the walk continues into the late afternoon--as it will if the leader
has an ounce of sporting instinct--he must find a suitable place for tea
at exactly the right time, and finally march his party down to their
train with not more than five minutes to wait.
Many walkers when guiding a party prefer to stick to familiar routes,
and so lessen some of the difficulties; but, if this plan is safer, it
misses some of the most exciting moments of walking in company. There is
nothing in life quite like guiding a company against time across
unknown or dimly remembered country. With a map it is stimulating
enough; but it is perhaps even more fun with Walker Miles. For the
leader feels that not only himself but also Walker Miles is on his
trial; he has to justify to the company not only his own intelligence,
but also that of his master. And he knows that tracks may have been
changed or landmarks moved, and that a passage is just coming in the
text which requires careful attention to make certain of the master’s
meaning. He turns the critical corner at the dividing of the ways, and
has to decide instantly and without hesitation on the right route. He
chooses one, and looks ahead to the next point in the text which marks a
decisive point--a fork in the road, or a stile in the hedge. Time passes
and the track continues, every yard more fatal if the last turn was
wrong. And then in a sudden glory the track forks or the stile appears;
the master is justified; and with something of the feeling of Wellington
when Blucher appeared, or Euclid when the forty-seventh proposition
worked out, he brushes the doubt and anxiety of the past from his mind,
and hurls himself joyously on the next problem.
* * * * *