and fear, looked out for the milk-white steed, and "gruppit it fast,"
and "pu'd the rider doon," the young Tamlane, whom, after dipping "in
a stand of milk and then in a stand of water,"
"She wrappit ticht in her green mantle,
And sae her true love won!"
This ended our walk. We found the carriage at the Philiphaugh
home-farm, and we drove home by _Yair_ and _Fernilee_, _Ashestiel_ and
_Elibank_, and passed the bears as ferocious as ever, "the orange sky
of evening" glowing through their wild tusks, the old house looking
even older in the fading light. And is not this a walk worth making?
One of our number had been at the Land's End and Johnnie Groat's, and
now on Minchmoor; and we wondered how many other men had been at all
the three, and how many had enjoyed Minchmoor more than he.
_Dr John Brown._
FOOTNOTE:
[3] The native word for hollows in the hills: thus, Dryhope, Gameshope,
Chapelhope, &c.
In Praise of Walking
As a man grows old, he is told by some moralists that he may find
consolation for increasing infirmities in looking back upon a
well-spent life. No doubt such a retrospect must be very agreeable,
but the question must occur to many of us whether our life offers the
necessary materials for self-complacency. What part of it, if any,
has been well spent? To that I find it convenient to reply, for my
own purposes, any part in which I thoroughly enjoyed myself. If it be
proposed to add "innocently," I will not quarrel with the amendment.
Perhaps, indeed, I may have a momentary regret for some pleasures which
do not quite deserve that epithet, but the pleasure of which I am about
to speak is obtrusively and pre-eminently innocent. Walking is among
recreations what ploughing and fishing are among industrial labours: it
is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth
and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and
no extraneous excitement. It is fit even for poets and philosophers,
and he who can thoroughly enjoy it must have at least some capacity
for worshipping the "cherub Contemplation." He must be able to
enjoy his own society without the factitious stimulants of the more
violent physical recreations. I have always been a humble admirer of
athletic excellence. I retain, in spite of much head-shaking from wise
educationalists, my early veneration for the heroes of the river and
the cricket-field. To me they have still the halo which surrounded them
in the days when "muscular Christianity" was first preached and the
whole duty of man said to consist in fearing God and walking a thousand
miles in a thousand hours. I rejoice unselfishly in these later days to
see the stream of bicyclists restoring animation to deserted highroads
or to watch even respected contemporaries renewing their youth in
the absorbing delights of golf. While honouring all genuine delight
in manly exercises, I regret only the occasional admixture of lower
motives which may lead to its degeneration. Now it is one merit of
walking that its real devotees are little exposed to such temptations.
Of course there are such things as professional pedestrians making
"records" and seeking the applause of the mob. When I read of the
immortal Captain Barclay performing his marvellous feats, I admire
respectfully, but I fear that his motives included a greater admixture
of vanity than of the emotions congenial to the higher intellect. The
true walker is one to whom the pursuit is in itself delightful; who is
not indeed priggish enough to be above a certain complacency in the
physical prowess required for his pursuit, but to whom the muscular
effort of the legs is subsidiary to the "cerebration" stimulated by
the effort; to the quiet musings and imaginings which arise most
spontaneously as he walks, and generate the intellectual harmony which
is the natural accompaniment to the monotonous tramp of his feet. The
cyclist or the golf-player, I am told, can hold such intercourse with
himself in the intervals of striking the ball or working his machine.
But the true pedestrian loves walking because, so far from distracting
his mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant flow of tranquil
and half-conscious meditation. Therefore I should be sorry if the
pleasures of cycling or any other recreation tended to put out of
fashion the habit of the good old walking tour.
For my part, when I try to summon up remembrance of "well-spent"
moments, I find myself taking a kind of inverted view of the past;
inverted, that is, so far as the accidental becomes the essential. If
I turn over the intellectual album which memory is always compiling,
I find that the most distinct pictures which it contains are those
of old walks. Other memories of incomparably greater intrinsic value
coalesce into wholes. They are more massive but less distinct.
The memory of a friendship that has brightened one's whole life
survives not as a series of incidents but as a general impression
of the friend's characteristic qualities due to the superposition
of innumerable forgotten pictures. I remember him, not the specific
conversations by which he revealed himself. The memories of walks, on
the other hand, are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to
particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar
or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung. As I
look back, a long series of little vignettes presents itself, each
representing a definite stage of my earthly pilgrimage summed up and
embodied in a walk. Their background of scenery recalls places once
familiar, and the thoughts associated with the places revive thoughts
of the contemporary occupations. The labour of scribbling books happily
leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever
been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes
incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which
it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the
tramp. My days are bound each to each not by "natural piety" (or not,
let me say, by natural piety alone) but by pedestrian enthusiasm. The
memory of school days, if one may trust to the usual reminiscences,
generally clusters round a flogging, or some solemn words from the
spiritual teacher instilling the seed of a guiding principle of life.
I remember a sermon or two rather ruefully; and I confess to memories
of a flogging so unjust that I am even now stung by the thought of it.
But what comes most spontaneously to my mind is the memory of certain
strolls, "out of bounds," when I could forget the Latin grammar, and
enjoy such a sense of the beauties of nature as is embodied for a child
in a pond haunted by water-rats, or a field made romantic by threats
of "mantraps and spring-guns." Then, after a crude fashion, one was
becoming more or less of a reflecting and individual being, not a mere
automaton set in movement by pedagogic machinery.
The day on which I was fully initiated into the mysteries is marked
by a white stone. It was when I put on a knapsack and started from
Heidelberg for a march through the Odenwald. Then I first knew the
delightful sensation of independence and detachment enjoyed during
a walking tour. Free from all bothers of railway time-tables and
extraneous machinery, you trust to your own legs, stop when you please,
diverge into any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon some
quaint variety of human life at every inn where you put up for the
night. You share for the time the mood in which Borrow settled down
in the dingle after escaping from his bondage in the publishers'
London slums. You have no dignity to support, and the dress-coat of
conventional life has dropped into oblivion, like the bundle from
Christian's shoulders. You are in the world of Lavengro, and would
be prepared to take tea with Miss Isopel Berners or with the Welsh
preacher who thought that he had committed the unpardonable sin.
Borrow, of course, took the life more seriously than the literary
gentleman who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave from the prison-house
of respectability, and is quite unequal to a personal conflict with
"blazing Bosville"--the flaming tinman. He is only dipping in the
element where his model was thoroughly at home. I remember, indeed,
one figure in that first walk which I associate with Benedict Moll,
the strange treasure-seeker whom Borrow encountered in his Spanish
rambles. My acquaintance was a mild German innkeeper, who sat beside me
on a bench while I was trying to assimilate certain pancakes, the only
dinner he could provide, still fearful in memory, but just attackable
after a thirty-miles' tramp. He confided to me that, poor as he was,
he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. He kept his machine
upstairs, where it discharged the humble duty of supplying the place of
a shoe-black; but he was about to go to London to offer it to a British
capitalist. He looked wistfully at me as possibly a capitalist in (very
deep) disguise, and I thought it wise to evade a full explanation. I
have not been worthy to encounter many of such quaint incidents and
characters as seem to have been normal in Borrow's experience; but the
first walk, commonplace enough, remains distinct in my memory. I kept
no journal, but I could still give the narrative day by day--the sights
which I dutifully admired and the very state of my bootlaces. Walking
tours thus rescue a bit of one's life from oblivion. They play in one's
personal recollections the part of those historical passages in which
Carlyle is an unequalled master; the little islands of light in the
midst of the darkening gloom of the past, on which you distinguish
the actors in some old drama actually alive and moving. The devotee
of other athletic sports remembers special incidents: the occasion on
which he hit a cricket-ball over the pavilion at Lord's, or the crab
which he caught as his boat was shooting Barnes Bridge. But those are
memories of exceptional moments of glory or the reverse, and apt to
be tainted by vanity or the spirit of competition. The walks are the
unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk
is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and
catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is
naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the
interests that form the staple of ordinary life.
Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely
to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.
All great men of letters have, therefore, been enthusiastic walkers
(exceptions, of course, excepted). Shakespeare, besides being a
sportsman, a lawyer, a divine, and so forth, conscientiously observed
his own maxim, "Jog on, jog on, the footpath way"; though a full proof
of this could only be given in an octavo volume. Anyhow, he divined the
connection between walking and a "merry heart"; that is, of course, a
cheerful acceptance of our position in the universe founded upon the
deepest moral and philosophical principles. His friend, Ben Jonson,
walked from London to Scotland. Another gentleman of the period (I
forget his name) danced from London to Norwich. Tom Coryate hung up
in his parish church the shoes in which he walked from Venice and
then started to walk (with occasional lifts) to India. Contemporary
walkers of more serious character might be quoted, such as the
admirable Barclay, the famous Quaker apologist, from whom the great
Captain Barclay inherited his prowess. Every one, too, must remember
the incident in Walton's _Life of Hooker_. Walking from Oxford to
Exeter, Hooker went to see his godfather, Bishop Jewel, at Salisbury.
The Bishop said that he would lend him "a horse which hath carried
me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease," and "presently
delivered into his hands a walking staff with which he professed he
had travelled through many parts of Germany." He added ten groats and
munificently promised ten groats more when Hooker should restore the
"horse." When, in later days, Hooker once rode to London, he expressed
more passion than that mild divine was ever known to show upon any
other occasion against a friend who had dissuaded him from "footing
it." The hack, it seems, "trotted when he did not," and discomposed the
thoughts which had been soothed by the walking staff. His biographer
must be counted, I fear, among those who do not enjoy walking without
the incidental stimulus of sport. Yet the _Compleat Angler_ and his
friends start by a walk of twenty good miles before they take their
"morning draught." Swift, perhaps, was the first person to show a
full appreciation of the moral and physical advantages of walking. He
preached constantly upon this text to Stella, and practised his own
advice. It is true that his notions of a journey were somewhat limited.
Ten miles a day was his regular allowance when he went from London to
Holyhead, but then he spent time in lounging at wayside inns to enjoy
the talk of the tramps and ostlers. The fact, though his biographers
are rather scandalised, shows that he really appreciated one of the
true charms of pedestrian expeditions. Wesley is generally credited
with certain moral reforms, but one secret of his power is not always
noticed. In his early expeditions he went on foot to save horse hire,
and made the great discovery that twenty or thirty miles a day was a
wholesome allowance for a healthy man. The fresh air and exercise put
"spirit into his sermons," which could not be rivalled by the ordinary
parson of the period, who too often passed his leisure lounging by
his fireside. Fielding points the contrast. Trulliber, embodying the
clerical somnolence of the day, never gets beyond his pig-sties, but
the model Parson Adams steps out so vigorously that he distances the
stagecoach, and disappears in the distance rapt in the congenial
pleasures of walking and composing a sermon. Fielding, no doubt, shared
his hero's taste, and that explains the contrast between his vigorous
naturalism and the sentimentalism of Richardson, who was to be seen,
as he tells us, "stealing along from Hammersmith to Kensington with
his eyes on the ground, propping his unsteady limbs with a stick."
Even the ponderous Johnson used to dissipate his early hypochondria by
walking from Lichfield to Birmingham and back (thirty-two miles), and
his later melancholy would have changed to a more cheerful view of life
could he have kept up the practice in his beloved London streets. The
literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was obviously
due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.
Wordsworth's poetical autobiography shows how every stage in his early
mental development was connected with some walk in the Lakes. The
sunrise which startled him on a walk after a night spent in dancing
first set him apart as a "dedicated spirit." His walking tour in the
Alps--then a novel performance--roused him to his first considerable
poem. His chief performance is the record of an excursion on foot. He
kept up the practice, and De Quincey calculates somewhere what multiple
of the earth's circumference he had measured on his legs, assuming, it
appears, that he averaged ten miles a day. De Quincey himself, we are
told, slight and fragile as he was, was a good walker, and would run
up a hill "like a squirrel." Opium-eating is not congenial to walking,
yet even Coleridge, after beginning the habit, speaks of walking forty
miles a day in Scotland, and, as we all know, the great manifesto of
the new school of poetry, the Lyrical Ballads, was suggested by the
famous walk with Wordsworth, when the first stanzas of the _Ancient
Mariner_ were composed. A remarkable illustration of the wholesome
influence might be given from the cases of Scott and Byron. Scott, in
spite of his lameness, delighted in walks of twenty and thirty miles
a day, and in climbing crags, trusting to the strength of his arms to
remedy the stumblings of his foot. The early strolls enabled him to
saturate his mind with local traditions, and the passion for walking
under difficulties showed the manly nature which has endeared him to
three generations. Byron's lameness was too severe to admit of walking,
and therefore all the unwholesome humours which would have been walked
off in a good cross-country march accumulated in his brain and caused
the defects, the morbid affectation and perverse misanthropy, which
half ruined the achievement of the most masculine intellect of his
time.
It is needless to accumulate examples of a doctrine which will no
doubt be accepted as soon as it is announced. Walking is the best of
panaceas for the morbid tendencies of authors. It is, I need only
observe, as good for reasoners as for poets. The name of "peripatetic"
suggests the connection. Hobbes walked steadily up and down the hills
in his patron's park when he was in his venerable old age. To the same
practice may be justly ascribed the utilitarian philosophy. Old Jeremy
Bentham kept himself up to his work for eighty years by his regular
"post-jentacular circumgyrations." His chief disciple, James Mill,
walked incessantly and preached as he walked. John Stuart Mill imbibed
at once psychology, political economy, and a love of walks from his
father. Walking was his one recreation; it saved him from becoming
a mere smoke-dried pedant; and though he put forward the pretext of
botanical researches, it helped him to perceive that man is something
besides a mere logic machine. Mill's great rival as a spiritual guide,
Carlyle, was a vigorous walker, and even in his latest years was a
striking figure when performing his regular constitutionals in London.
One of the vivid passages in the _Reminiscences_ describes his walk
with Irving from Glasgow to Drumclog. Here they sat on the "brow
of a peat hag, while far, far away to the westward, over our brown
horizon, towered up white and visible at the many miles of distance a
high irregular pyramid. Ailsa Craig we at once guessed, and thought
of the seas and oceans over yonder." The vision naturally led to a
solemn conversation, which was an event in both lives. Neither Irving
nor Carlyle himself feared any amount of walking in those days, it is
added, and next day Carlyle took his longest walk, fifty-four miles.
Carlyle is unsurpassable in his descriptions of scenery: from the
pictures of mountains in _Sartor Resartus_ to the battle-pieces in
_Frederick_. Ruskin, himself a good walker, is more rhetorical but not
so graphic; and it is self-evident that nothing educates an eye for the
features of a landscape so well as the practice of measuring it by your
own legs.
The great men, it is true, have not always acknowledged their debt to
the genius, whoever he may be, who presides over pedestrian exercise.
Indeed, they have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse.
Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to
understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial
flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical
machinery of legs and stomachs. When long ago the Alps cast their
spell upon me, it was woven in a great degree by the eloquence of
_Modern Painters_. I hoped to share Ruskin's ecstasies in a reverent
worship of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The influence of any cult,
however, depends upon the character of the worshipper, and I fear
that in this case the charm operated rather perversely. I stimulated
a passion for climbing which absorbed my energies and distracted me
from the prophet's loftier teaching. I might have followed him from
the mountains to picture-galleries, and spent among the stones of
Venice hours which I devoted to attacking hitherto unascended peaks
and so losing my last chance of becoming an art critic. I became a
fair judge of an Alpine guide, but I do not even know how to make a
judicious allusion to Botticelli or Tintoretto. I can't say that I
feel the smallest remorse. I had a good time, and at least escaped one
temptation to talking nonsense. It follows, however, that my passion
for the mountains had something earthly in its composition. It is
associated with memories of eating and drinking. It meant delightful
comradeship with some of the best of friends; but our end, I admit,
was not always of the most exalted or Êsthetic strain. A certain
difficulty results. I feel an uncomfortable diffidence. I hold that
Alpine walks are the poetry of the pursuit; I could try to justify the
opinion by relating some of the emotions suggested by the great scenic
effects: the sunrise on the snow fields; the storm-clouds gathering
under the great peaks; the high pasturages knee-deep in flowers; the
torrents plunging through the "cloven ravines," and so forth. But
the thing has been done before, better than I could hope to do it;
and when I look back at those old passages in _Modern Painters_, and
think of the enthusiasm which prompted to exuberant sentences of
three or four hundred words, I am not only abashed by the thought of
their unapproachable eloquence, but feel as though they conveyed a
tacit reproach. You, they seem to say, are, after all, a poor prosaic
creature, affecting a love of sublime scenery as a cloak for more
grovelling motives. I could protest against this judgment, but it is
better at present to omit the topic, even though it would give the
strongest groundwork for my argument.
Perhaps, therefore, it is better to trust the case for walking to
where the external stimulus of splendours and sublimities is not so
overpowering. A philosophic historian divides the world into the
regions where man is stronger than nature and the regions where nature
is stronger than man. The true charm of walking is most unequivocally
shown when it is obviously dependent upon the walker himself. I became
an enthusiast in the Alps, but I have found almost equal pleasure in
walks such as one described by Cowper, where the view from a summit is
bounded, not by Alps or Apennines, but by "a lofty quickset hedge."
Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love
of walking not only makes any English county tolerable but seems to
make the charm inexhaustible. I know only two or three districts
minutely, but the more familiar I have become with any of them the more
I have wished to return, to invent some new combination of old strolls
or to inspect some hitherto unexplored nook. I love the English Lakes,
and certainly not on account of associations. I cannot "associate."
Much as I respect Wordsworth, I don't care to see the cottage in which
he lived: it only suggests to me that anybody else might have lived
there. There is an intrinsic charm about the Lake Country, and to me at
least a music in the very names of Helvellyn and Skiddaw and Scawfell.
But this may be due to the suggestion that it is a miniature of the
Alps. I appeal, therefore, to the Fen Country, the country of which
Alton Locke's farmer boasted that it had none of your "darned ups and
downs" and "was as flat as his barn-door for forty miles on end." I
used to climb the range of the Gogmagogs, to see the tower of Ely, some
sixteen miles across the dead level, and I boasted that every term I
devised a new route for walking to the cathedral from Cambridge. Many
of these routes led by the little public-house called "Five Miles from
Anywhere": which in my day was the Mecca to which a remarkable club,
called--from the name of the village--the "Upware Republic," made
periodic pilgrimages. What its members specifically did when they got
there beyond consuming beer is unknown to me; but the charm was in the
distance "from anywhere"--a sense of solitude under the great canopy of
the heavens, where, like emblems of infinity,
"The trenched waters run from sky to sky."