The Footpath Way
AN ANTHOLOGY FOR WALKERS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Hilaire Belloc
[Illustration: Logo]
LONDON
Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd.
1911
_All Rights Reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
_H. Belloc_
WALKING AN ANTIDOTE TO CITY POISON 17
_Sidney Smith_
ON GOING A JOURNEY 19
_William Hazlitt_
THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY'S HORSE 37
_Izaak Walton_
A STROLLING PEDLAR 39
_Sir Walter Scott_
A STOUT PEDESTRIAN 42
_Sir Walter Scott_
LAKE SCENERY 48
_William Wordsworth_
WALKING, AND THE WILD 52
_H. D. Thoreau_
A YOUNG TRAMP 104
_Charles Dickens_
DE QUINCEY LEADS THE SIMPLE LIFE 111
_Thomas de Quincey_
A RESOLUTION 116
_George Borrow_
THE SNOWDON RANGER 131
_George Borrow_
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD 143
_Walt Whitman_
WALKING TOURS 159
_R. L. Stevenson_
SYLVANUS URBAN DISCOVERS A GOOD BREW 173
_Gentleman's Magazine_
MINCHMOOR 175
_Dr John Brown_
IN PRAISE OF WALKING 191
_Leslie Stephen_
THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD 221
_John Burroughs_
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The thanks of the publishers are due to: Messrs Chatto & Windus, Messrs
Duckworth, and Messrs Houghton Miflin of Boston, U.S.A., for permission
to include R. L. Stevenson's _Walking Tours_; Sir Leslie Stephen's _In
Praise of Walking_; and Mr John Burroughs' _The Exhilarations of the
Road_, from "Winter Sunshine"; also to Mr A. H. Bullen for the extract
from _The Gentleman's Magazine_.
Introduction
So long as man does not bother about what he is or whence he came or
whither he is going, the whole thing seems as simple as the verb "to
be"; and you may say that the moment he does begin thinking about what
he is (which is more than thinking that he is) and whence he came and
whither he is going, he gets on to a lot of roads that lead nowhere,
and that spread like the fingers of a hand or the sticks of a fan;
so that if he pursues two or more of them he soon gets beyond his
straddle, and if he pursues only one he gets farther and farther from
the rest of all knowledge as he proceeds. You may say that and it will
be true. But there is one kind of knowledge a man does get when he
thinks about what he is, whence he came and whither he is going, which
is this: that it is the only important question he can ask himself.
Now the moment a man begins asking himself those questions (and all men
begin at some time or another if you give them rope enough) man finds
himself a very puzzling fellow. There was a school--it can hardly be
called a school of philosophy--and it is now as dead as mutton, but
anyhow there _was_ a school which explained the business in the very
simple method known to the learned as tautology--that is, saying the
same thing over and over again. For just as the woman in MoliËre was
dumb because she was affected with the quality of dumbness, so man,
according to this school, did all the extraordinary things he does do
because he had developed in that way. They took in a lot of people
while they were alive (I believe a few of the very old ones still
survive), they took in nobody more than themselves; but they have
not taken in any of the younger generation. We who come after these
scientists continue to ask ourselves the old question, and if there is
no finding of an answer to it, so much the worse; for asking it, every
instinct of our nature tells us, is the proper curiosity of man.
Of the great many things which man does which he should not do or need
not do, if he were wholly explained by the verb "to be," you may count
walking. Of course if you build up a long series of guesses as to the
steps by which he learnt to walk, and call _that_ an explanation, there
is no more to be said. It is as though I were to ask you why Mr Smith
went to Liverpool, and you were to answer by giving me a list of all
the stations between Euston and Lime Street, in their exact order. At
least that is what it would be like if your guesses were accurate,
not only in their statement, but also in their proportion, and also
in their order. It is millions to one that your guesses are nothing
of the kind. But even granted by a miracle that you have got them all
quite right (which is more than the wildest fanatic would grant to the
dearest of his geologians) it tells me nothing.
What on earth persuaded the animal to go on like that? Or was it
nothing on earth but something in heaven?
Just watch a man walking, if he is a proper man, and see the business
of it: how he expresses his pride, or his determination, or his
tenacity, or his curiosity, or perhaps his very purpose in his stride!
Well, all that business of walking that you are looking at is a piece
of extraordinarily skilful trick-acting, such that were the animal
not known to do it you would swear he could never be trained to it by
any process, however lengthy, or however minute, or however strict.
This is what happens when a man walks: first of all he is in stable
equilibrium, though the arc of stability is minute. If he stands with
his feet well apart, his centre of gravity (which is about half way
up him or a little more) may oscillate within an arc of about five
degrees on either side of stability and tend to return to rest. But
if it oscillates beyond that five degrees or so, the stability of his
equilibrium is lost, and down he comes. Men have been known to sleep
standing up without a support, especially on military service, which is
the most fatiguing thing in the world; but it is extremely rare, and
you may say of a man so standing, even with his feet well spread, that
he is already doing a fine athletic feat.
But wait a moment: he desires to go, to proceed, to reach a distant
point, and instead of going on all fours, where equilibrium would
indeed be stable, what does he do? He deliberately lifts one of his
supports off the ground, and sends his equilibrium to the devil; at the
same time he leans a little forward so as to make himself fall towards
the object he desires to attain. You do not know that he does this,
but that is because you are a man and your ignorance of it is like the
ignorance in which so many really healthy people stand to religion, or
the ignorance of a child who thinks his family established for ever in
comfort, wealth and security. What you really do, man, when you want to
get to that distant place (and let this be a parable of all adventure
and of all desire) is to take an enormous risk, the risk of coming
down bang and breaking something: you lift one foot off the ground,
and, as though that were not enough, you deliberately throw your centre
of gravity forward so that you begin to fall.
That is the first act of the comedy.
The second act is that you check your fall by bringing the foot which
you had swung into the air down upon the ground again.
That you would say was enough of a bout. Slide the other foot up, take
a rest, get your breath again and glory in your feat. But not a bit of
it! The moment you have got that loose foot of yours firm on the earth,
you use the impetus of your first tumble to begin another one. You get
your centre of gravity by the momentum of your going well forward of
the foot that has found the ground, you lift the other foot without
a care, you let it swing in the fashion of a pendulum, and you check
your second fall in the same manner as you checked your first; and even
after that second clever little success you do not bring your feet
both firmly to the ground to recover yourself before the next venture:
you go on with the business, get your centre of gravity forward of the
foot that is now on the ground, swinging the other beyond it like a
pendulum, stopping your third catastrophe, and so on; and you have
come to do all this so that you think it the most natural thing in the
world!
Not only do you manage to do it but you can do it in a thousand ways,
as a really clever acrobat will astonish his audience not only by
walking on the tight-rope but by eating his dinner on it. You can walk
quickly or slowly, or look over your shoulder as you walk, or shoot
fairly accurately as you walk; you can saunter, you can force your
pace, you can turn which way you will. You certainly did not teach
yourself to accomplish this marvel, nor did your nurse. There was a
spirit within you that taught you and that brought you out; and as it
is with walking, so it is with speech, and so at last with humour and
with irony, and with affection, and with the sense of colour and of
form, and even with honour, and at last with prayer.
By all this you may see that man is very remarkable, and this should
make you humble, not proud; for you have been designed in spite of
yourself for some astonishing fate, of which these mortal extravagances
so accurately seized and so well moulded to your being are but the
symbols.
Walking, like talking (which rhymes with it, I am glad to say), being
so natural a thing to man, so varied and so unthought about, is
necessarily not only among his chief occupations but among his most
entertaining subjects of commonplace and of exercise.
Thus to walk without an object is an intense burden, as it is to talk
without an object. To walk because it is good for you warps the soul,
just as it warps the soul for a man to talk for hire or because he
thinks it his duty. On the other hand, walking with an object brings
out all that there is in a man, just as talking with an object does.
And those who understand the human body, when they confine themselves
to what they know and are therefore legitimately interesting, tell us
this very interesting thing which experience proves to be true: that
walking of every form of exercise is the most general and the most
complete, and that while a man may be endangered by riding a horse
or by running or swimming, or while a man may easily exaggerate any
violent movement, walking will always be to his benefit--that is, of
course, so long as he does not warp his soul by the detestable habit of
walking for no object but exercise. For it has been so arranged that
the moment we begin any minor and terrestrial thing as an object in
itself, or with merely the furtherance of some other material thing,
we hurt the inward part of us that governs all. But walk for glory or
for adventure, or to see new sights, or to pay a bill or to escape
the same, and you will very soon find how consonant is walking with
your whole being. The chief proof of this (and how many men have tried
it, and in how many books does not that truth shine out!) is the way
in which a man walking becomes the cousin or the brother of everything
round.
If you will look back upon your life and consider what landscapes
remain fixed in your memory, some perhaps you will discover to have
struck you at the end of long rides or after you have been driven for
hours, dragged by an animal or a machine. But much the most of these
visions have come to you when you were performing that little miracle
with a description of which I began this: and what is more, the visions
that you get when you are walking, merge pleasantly into each other.
Some are greater, some lesser, and they make a continuous whole. The
great moments are led up to and are fittingly framed.
There is no time or weather, in England at least, in which a man
walking does not feel this cousinship with everything round. There
are weathers that are intolerable if you are doing anything else but
walking: if you are crouching still against a storm or if you are
driving against it; or if you are riding in extreme cold; or if you are
running too quickly in extreme heat; but it is not so with walking.
You may walk by night or by day, in summer or in winter, in fair
weather or in foul, in calm or in a gale, and in every case you are
doing something native to yourself and going the best way you could go.
All men have felt this.
Walking, also from this same natural quality which it has, introduces
particular sights to you in their right proportion. A man gets into his
motor car, or more likely into somebody else's, and covers a great many
miles in a very few hours. And what remains to him at the end of it,
when he looks closely into the pictures of his mind, is a curious and
unsatisfactory thing: there are patches of blurred nothingness like an
uneasy sleep, one or two intense pieces of impression, disconnected,
violently vivid and mad, a red cloak, a shining streak of water, and
more particularly a point of danger. In all that ribbon of sights,
each either much too lightly or much too heavily impressed, he is
lucky if there is one great view which for one moment he seized and
retained from a height as he whirled along. The whole record is like a
bit of dry point that has been done by a hand not sure of itself upon
a plate that trembled, now jagged chiselling bit into the metal; now
blurred or hardly impressed it at all: only in some rare moment of
self-possession or of comparative repose did the hand do what it willed
and transfer its power.
You may say that riding upon a horse one has a better chance. That is
true, but after all one is busy riding. Look back upon the very many
times that you have ridden, and though you will remember many things
you will not remember them in that calm and perfect order in which they
presented themselves to you when you were afoot. As for a man running,
if it be for any distance the effort is so unnatural as to concentrate
upon himself all a man's powers, and he is almost blind to exterior
things. Men at the end of such efforts are actually and physically
blind; they fall helpless.
Then there is the way of looking at the world which rich men imagine
they can purchase with money when they build a great house looking over
some view--but it is not in the same street with walking! You see the
sight nine times out of ten when you are ill attuned to it, when your
blood is slow and unmoved, and when the machine is not going. When you
are walking the machine is always going, and every sense in you is
doing what it should with the right emphasis and in due discipline to
make a perfect record of all that is about.
Consider how a man walking approaches a little town; he sees it a long
way off upon a hill; he sees its unity, he has time to think about it a
great deal. Next it is hidden from him by a wood, or it is screened by
a roll of land. He tops this and sees the little town again, now much
nearer, and he thinks more particularly of its houses, of the way in
which they stand, and of what has passed in them. The sky, especially
if it has large white clouds in it and is for the rest sunlit and blue,
makes something against which he can see the little town, and gives it
life. Then he is at the outskirts, and he does not suddenly occupy it
with a clamour or a rush, nor does he merely contemplate it, like a man
from a window, unmoving. He enters in. He passes, healthily wearied,
human doors and signs; he can note all the names of the people and the
trade at which they work; he has time to see their faces. The square
broadens before him, or the market-place, and so very naturally and
rightly he comes to his inn, and he has fulfilled one of the great ends
of man.
Lord, how tempted one is here to make a list of those monsters who are
the enemies of inns!
There is your monster who thinks of it as a place to which a man
does not walk but into which he slinks to drink; and there is your
monster who thinks of it as a place to be reached in a railway train
and there to put on fine clothes for dinner and to be waited upon by
Germans. There is your more amiable monster, who says: "I hear there
is a good inn at Little Studley or Bampton Major. Let us go there."
He waits until he has begun to be hungry, and he shoots there in an
enormous automobile. There is your still more amiable monster, who in a
hippo-mobile hippogriffically tools into a town and throws the ribbons
to the person in gaiters with a straw in his mouth, and feels (oh, men,
my brothers) that he is doing something like someone in a book. All
these men, whether they frankly hate or whether they pretend to love,
are the enemies of inns, and the enemies of inns are accursed before
their Creator and their kind.
There are some things which are a consolation for Eden and which
clearly prove to the heavily-burdened race of Adam that it has retained
a memory of diviner things. We have all of us done evil. We have
permitted the modern cities to grow up, and we have told such lies
that now we are accursed with newspapers. And we have so loved wealth
that we are all in debt, and that the poor are a burden to us and the
rich are an offence. But we ought to keep up our hearts and not to
despair, because we can still all of us pray when there is an absolute
necessity to do so, and we have wormed out the way of building up that
splendid thing which all over Christendom men know under many names and
which is called in England an INN.
I have sometimes wondered when I sat in one of these places, remaking
my soul, whether the inn would perish out of Europe. I am convinced
the terror was but the terror which we always feel for whatever is
exceedingly beloved.
There is an inn in the town of Piacenza into which I once walked while
I was still full of immortality, and there I found such good companions
and so much marble, rooms so large and empty and so old, and cooking so
excellent, that I made certain it would survive even that immortality
which, I say, was all around. But no! I came there eight years later,
having by that time heard the noise of the Subterranean River and
being well conscious of mortality. I came to it as to a friend, and
the beastly thing had changed! In place of the grand stone doors there
was a sort of twirlygig like the things that let you in to the Zoo,
where you pay a shilling, and inside there were decorations made up of
meaningless curves like those with which the demons have punished the
city of Berlin; the salt at the table was artificial and largely made
of chalk, and the faces of the host and hostess were no longer kind.
I very well remember another inn which was native to the Chiltern
Hills. This place had bow windows, which were divided into medium-sized
panes, each of the panes a little rounded; and these window-panes were
made of that sort of glass which I will adore until I die, and which
has the property of distorting exterior objects: of such glass the
windows of schoolrooms and of nurseries used to be made. I came to that
place after many years by accident, and I found that Orcus, which has
devoured all lovely things, had devoured this too. The inn was called
"an Hotel," its front was rebuilt, the window's had only two panes,
each quite enormous and flat, one above and one below, and the glass
was that sort of thick, transparent glass through which it is no use to
look, for you might as well be looking through air. All the faces were
strange except that of one old servant in the stable-yard. I asked him
if he regretted the old front, and he said "Lord, no!" Then he told me
in great detail how kind the brewers had been to his master and how
willingly they had rebuilt the whole place. These things reconcile one
with the grave.
Well then, if walking, which has led me into this digression, prepares
one for the inns where they are worthy, it has another character as
great and as symbolic and as worthy of man. For remember that of the
many ways of walking there is one way which is the greatest of all, and
that is to walk away.
Put your hand before your eyes and remember, you that have walked, the
places from which you have walked away, and the wilderness into which
you manfully turned the steps of your abandonment.
There is a place above the Roman Wall beyond the River Tyne where
one can do this thing. Behind one lies the hospitality and the human
noise which have inhabited the town of the river valley for certainly
two thousand years. Before one is the dead line of the road, and that
complete emptiness of the moors as they rise up toward Cheviot on the
one hand and Carter Fell upon the other. The earth is here altogether
deserted and alone: you go out into it because it is your business to
go: you are walking away. As for your memories, they are of no good to
you except to lend you that dignity which can always support a memoried
man; you are bound to forget, and it is your business to leave all that
you have known altogether behind you, and no man has eyes at the back
of his head--go forward. Upon my soul I think that the greatest way of
walking, now I consider the matter, or now that I have stumbled upon
it, is walking away.
H. BELLOC.
Walking an Antidote to City Poison
There is moral as well as bodily wholesomeness in a mountain walk, if
the walker has the understanding heart, and eschews _picnics_. It is
good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend
who knows when silence is more sociable than talk:
"In the wilderness alone,
There where nature worships God."
It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great--where
what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand
years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been
a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is
worth the process.
It is not favourable to religious feeling to hear only of the actions
and interference of man, and to behold nothing but what human ingenuity
has completed. There is an image of God's greatness impressed upon the
outward face of nature fitted to make us all pious, and to breathe
into our hearts a purifying and salutary fear.
In cities everything is man, and man alone. He seems to move and govern
all, and be the Providence of cities; and there we do not render
unto CÊsar the things which are CÊsar's, and unto God the things
which are God's; but God is forgotten, and CÊsar is supreme--all is
human policy, human foresight, human power; nothing reminds us of
_invisible dominion, and concealed omnipotence_--it is all earth, and
no heaven. One cure of this is prayer and the solitary place. As the
body, harassed with the noxious air of cities, seeks relief in the
freedom and the purity of the fields and hills, so the mind, wearied
by commerce with men, resumes its vigour in solitude, and repairs its
dignity.
_Sydney Smith._
On Going a Journey
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.
"The fields his study, nature was his book."
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I
am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of the town in order
to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room, and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
"A friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet."
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel,
do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind,
much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little
breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation
"May plume her feathers, and let grow her wings
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,"
that I absent myself from the town for a while without feeling at
a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a
post-chaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with and vary
the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with
impertinence. Give me the clear blue sky over my head and the green
turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours'
march to dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start
some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.
From the point of yonder rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being,
and revel there, as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave
that wafts him to his native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like
"sunken wrack and sumless treasuries," burst upon my eager sight, and
I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead of an awkward
silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull commonplaces, mine is that
undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.
No one likes puns, alliterations, antitheses, argument, and analysis
better than I do; but I sometimes had rather be without them. "Leave,
oh, leave me to my repose!" I have just now other business in hand,
which would seem idle to you; but is with me "very stuff o' the
conscience." Is not this wild rose sweet without a comment? Does not
this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of emerald? Yet if I were
to explain to you the circumstance that has so endeared it to me, you
would only smile. Had I not better, then, keep it to myself, and let
it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy point, and from
thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be but bad company
all that way, and therefore prefer being alone.
I have heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk
or ride on by yourself, and indulge your reveries. But this looks like
a breach of manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the
time that you ought to rejoin your party. "Out upon such half-faced
fellowship!" say I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely
at the disposal of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still,
to be sociable or solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr
Cobbett's, that "he thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine
with our meals, and that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a
time." So I cannot talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and
lively conversation, by fits and starts. "Let me have a companion of
my way," says Sterne, "were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen
as the sun declines." It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this
continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression
of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment.
If you only hint what you feel in a kind of dumb show, it is insipid;
if you have to explain it, it is making a toil of a pleasure. You
cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the
trouble of translating it for the benefit of others. I am for this
synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical. I am
content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to examine and anatomise
them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions float like the down
of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in
the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like to have it
all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone, or in
such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a point
with anyone for twenty miles of measured road, but not for pleasure.
If you remark the scent of a beanfield crossing the road, perhaps
your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant object,
perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his glass to look at
it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the colour of a cloud,
which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable to
account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after
it, and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill-humour.
Now, I never quarrel with myself, and take all my own conclusions for
granted till I find it necessary to defend them against objections.
It is not merely that you may not be of accord on the objects and
circumstances that present themselves before you--these may recall a
number of objects, and lead to associations too delicate and refined to
be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I love to cherish, and
sometimes still fondly clutch them, when I can escape from the throng
to do so. To give way to our feelings before company seems extravagance
or affectation; and, on the other hand, to have to unravel this mystery
of our being at every turn, and to make others take an equal interest
in it (otherwise the end is not answered), is a task to which few are
competent. We must "give it an understanding, but no tongue." My old
friend Coleridge, however, could do both. He could go on in the most
delightful explanatory way over hill and dale a summer's day, and
convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode. "He talked
far above singing." If I could so clothe my ideas in sounding and
flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have some one with me to admire
the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were it possible for
me still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of All-Foxden. They
had "that fine madness in them which our first poets had"; and if they
could have been caught by some rare instrument, would have breathed
such strains as the following:--
"Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled stream, with flow'rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o'ergrown with woodbines, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, whilst I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she conveyed him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
To kiss her sweetest."
(FLETCHER'S "Faithful Shepherdess.")
Had I words and images at command like these, I would attempt to wake
the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening
clouds; but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is, droops and
closes up its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing out on
the spot: I must have time to collect myself.
In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects; it should be
reserved for Table-Talk. Lamb is, for this reason, I take it, the worst
company in the world out of doors; because he is the best within.
I grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a
journey, and that is, what we shall have for supper when we get to
our inn at night. The open air improves this sort of conversation or
friendly altercation, by setting a keener edge on appetite. Every mile
of the road heightens the flavour of the viands we expect at the end of
it. How fine it is to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at
the approach of nightfall; or to come to some straggling village, with
the lights streaming through the surrounding gloom; and then after
inquiring for the best entertainment that the place affords, to "take
one's ease at one's inn!"
These eventful moments in our lives' history are too precious, too full
of solid, heartfelt happiness, to be frittered and dribbled away in
imperfect sympathy. I would have them all to myself, and drain them to
the last drop; they will do to talk of or to write about afterwards.
What a delicate speculation it is, after drinking whole goblets of tea,
"The cups that cheer, but not inebriate,"
and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we
shall have for supper--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions,
or an excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed on
cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be
disparaged. Then, in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the kitchen
(getting ready for the gentleman in the parlour). _Procul, o procul
este profani!_ These hours are sacred to silence and to musing, to be
treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts
hereafter. I would not waste them in idle talk; or if I must have the
integrity of fancy broken in upon, I would rather it were by a stranger
than a friend.
A stranger takes his hue and character from the time and place; he is a
part of the furniture and costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or from
the West Riding of Yorkshire, so much the better. I do not even try to
sympathise with him, and he breaks no squares. How I love to see the
camps of the gypsies, and to sigh my soul into that sort of life! If I
express this feeling to another, he may qualify and spoil it with some
objection. I associate nothing with my travelling companion but present
objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I
in a manner forget myself. But a friend reminds me of other things,
rips up old grievances, and destroys the abstraction of the scene. He
comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary character. Something
is dropped in the course of conversation that gives a hint of your
profession and pursuits; or from having some one with you that knows
the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that other people
do. You are no longer a citizen of the world; but your "unhoused free
condition is put into circumspection and confine."
The _incognito_ of an inn is one of its striking privileges--"lord of
one's self, uncumbered with a name." Oh, it is great to shake off the
trammels of the world and of public opinion; to lose our importunate,
tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature,
and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties; to hold to
the universe only by a dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing but the
score of the evening; and no longer seeking for applause and meeting
with contempt, to be known by no other title than _the gentleman in the
parlour_!
One may take one's choice of all characters in this romantic state
of uncertainty as to one's real pretensions, and become indefinitely
respectable and negatively right-worshipful. We baffle prejudice
and disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be
objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed commonplaces that we appear in the world; an inn restores
us to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I have
certainly spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I have been
left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical
problem, as once at Witham Common, where I found out the proof that
likeness is not a case of the association of ideas--at other times,
when there have been pictures in the room, as at St Neot's (I think it
was), where I first met with Gribelins' engravings of the Cartoons,
into which I entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of
Wales, where there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings,
which I compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the
admired artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the
Severn standing up in a boat between me and the twilight. At other
times I might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest
in this way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read _Paul and
Virginia_, which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being
drenched in the rain all day; and at the same place I got through two
volumes of Madame D'Arblay's _Camilla_.
It was on the 10th of April 1798, that I sat down to a volume of the
_New HeloÔse_, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a
cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St Preux describes
his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the heights of the Jura
of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as a _bon bouche_ to
crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I had for the first
time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit this delightful
spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk and Wrexham; and
on passing a certain point you come all at once upon the valley, which
opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising in majestic
state on either side, with "green upland swells that echo to the bleat
of flocks" below, and the river Dee babbling over its stony bed in
the midst of them. The valley at this time "glittered green with sunny
showers," and a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in the
chiding stream.
How proud, how glad I was to walk along the highroad that overlooks the
delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have just quoted from
Mr Coleridge's poems! But besides the prospect which opened beneath
my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision on
which were written in letters large as Hope could make them, these four
words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE, which have since faded into the
light of the common day, or mock my idle gaze.
"The beautiful is vanished, and returns not."
Still, I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I
would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that
influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I
could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and
defaced? I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of
years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not
only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has
become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O
sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness, as thou then wert; and thou
shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely!
There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With
change of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We
can by an effort, indeed, transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten
scenes, and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget
those that we have just left. It seems that we can think but of one
place at a time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent,
and if we paint one set of objects upon it, they immediately efface
every other. We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we only shift our point
of view. The landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye; we take
our fill of it, and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty
or grandeur. We pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon that
shuts it from our sight also blots it from our memory like a dream.
In travelling through a wild, barren country, I can form no idea of a
woody and cultivated one. It appears to me that all the world must be
barren, like what I see of it. In the country we forget the town, and
in town we despise the country. "Beyond Hyde Park," says Sir Fopling
Flutter, "all is a desert." All that part of the map that we do not see
before us is blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger
than a nutshell. It is not one prospect expanded into another, county
joined to county, kingdom to kingdom, land to seas, making an image
voluminous and vast; the mind can form no larger idea of space than the
eye can take in at a single glance. The rest is a name written in a
map, a calculation of arithmetic.
For instance, what is the true signification of that immense mass of
territory and population known by the name of China to us? An inch of
pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account than a china orange!
Things near us are seen of the size of life; things at a distance are
diminished to the size of the understanding. We measure the universe
by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our own being only
piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and
places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great
variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession. One idea recalls
another, but at the same time excludes all others. In trying to renew
old recollections, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our
existence; we must pick out the single threads. So in coming to a
place where we have formerly lived, and with which we have intimate
associations, every one must have found that the feeling grows more
vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere anticipation of
the actual impression: we remember circumstances, feelings, persons,
faces, names that we had not thought of for years; but for the time all
the rest of the world is forgotten! To return to the question I have
quitted above:
I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company
with a friend or a party, but rather the contrary, for the former
reason reversed. They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking
about. The sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt.
Salisbury Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a
discussion antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out
on a party of pleasure, the first consideration always is where we
shall go to: in taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we shall
meet with by the way. "The mind is its own place"; nor are we anxious
to arrive at the end of our journey. I can myself do the honours
indifferently well to the works of art and curiosity. I once took a
party to Oxford, with no mean _Èclat_--showed them that seat of the
Muses at a distance,
"With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn'd,"
descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles
and stone walls of halls and colleges; was at home in the Bodleian;
and at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered cicerone that attended
us, and that pointed in vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in
matchless pictures.
As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not feel
confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without
a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my
own language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an
Englishman to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance
of social sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home
increases, this relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion
and an appetite. A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in
the deserts of Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be
allowed to be something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims
the utterance of speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for
any single contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one's
ordinary train of ideas, one seems a species by one's self, a limb
torn off from society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and
support.
Yet I did not feel this want or craving very pressing once, when I
first set my foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled
with novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was
like oil and wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariners' hymn,
which was sung from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as
the sun went down, send an alien sound into my soul. I only breathed
the air of general humanity. I walked over "the vine-covered hills and
gay regions of France," erect and satisfied; for the image of man was
not cast down and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones: I was at
no loss for language, for that of all the great schools of painting
was open to me. The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes,
glory, freedom, all are fled; nothing remains but the Bourbons and the
French people!
There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling into foreign parts
that is to be had nowhere else; but it is more pleasing at the time
than lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be a
common topic of discourse or reference, and, like a dream or another
state of existence, does not piece into our daily modes of life. It is
an animated but a momentary hallucination. It demands an effort to
exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of
our old transports revive very keenly, we must "jump" all our present
comforts and connections. Our romantic and itinerant character is not
to be domesticated. Dr Johnson remarked how little foreign travel
added to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad.
In fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful and, in one
sense, instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial
downright existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the
same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual all the time we
are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves as well as to our
friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings:
"Out of my country and myself I go."
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves
for a while from the ties and objects that recall them: but we can be
said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I
should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life
in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend
afterwards at home!
_William Hazlitt._
The Bishop of Salisbury's Horse
As soon as he was perfectly recovered of this sickness, he took a
journey from Oxford to Exeter, to satisfy and see his good Mother,
being accompanied with a countryman and companion of his own College,
and both on foot; which was then either more in fashion, or want of
money, or their humility made it so: but on foot they went, and took
Salisbury on their way, purposely to see the good Bishop, who made
Mr Hooker and his companion dine with him at his own table: which Mr
Hooker boasted of with much joy and gratitude when he saw his mother
and friends: and at the Bishop's parting with him, the Bishop gave him
good counsel, and his benediction, but forgot to give him money; which
when the Bishop had considered, he sent a servant in all haste to call
Richard back to him: and at Richard's return, the Bishop said to him,
"Richard, I sent for you back to lend you a horse, which hath carried
me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease"; and presently
delivered into his hand a walking-staff, with which he professed he had
travelled through many parts of Germany. And he said, "Richard, I do
not give, but lend you my horse: be sure you be honest, and bring my
horse back to me at your return this way to Oxford. And I do now give
you ten groats, to bear your charges to Exeter: and here is ten groats
more, which I charge you to deliver to your Mother and tell her I send
her a Bishop's benediction with it, and beg the continuance of her
prayers for me. And if you bring my horse back to me, I will give you
ten groats more, to carry you on foot to the College, and so God bless
you, good Richard."
_Izaak Walton._
A Strolling Pedlar
My frame gradually became hardened with my constitution, and being
both tall and muscular, I was rather disfigured than disabled by my
lameness. This personal disadvantage did not prevent me from taking
much exercise on horseback, and making long journeys on foot, in the
course of which I often walked from twenty to thirty miles a day.
A distinct instance occurs to me. I remember walking with poor James
Ramsay, my fellow-apprentice, now no more, and two other friends, to
breakfast at Prestonpans. We spent the forenoon visiting the ruins
at Seton and the field of battle at Preston--dined at Prestonpans on
tiled haddocks very sumptuously--drank half a bottle of port each, and
returned in the evening. This could not be less than thirty miles, nor
do I remember being at all fatigued upon the occasion.