the great dykes by the monotonous canal with the exuberant vegetation
dozing in its stagnant waters, we were imbibing the spirit of the
scenery. Our talk might be of senior wranglers or the University
crew, but we felt the curious charm of the great flats. The absence,
perhaps, of definite barriers makes you realise that you are on the
surface of a planet rolling through free and boundless space. One
queer figure comes back to me--a kind of scholar-gipsy of the fens.
Certain peculiarities made it undesirable to trust him with cash, and
his family used to support him by periodically paying his score at
riverside publics. They allowed him to print certain poems, moreover,
which he would impart when one met him on the towpath. In my boyhood,
I remember, I used to fancy that the most delightful of all lives must
be that of a bargee--enjoying a perpetual picnic. This gentleman seemed
to have carried out the idea; and in the intervals of lectures, I
could fancy that he had chosen the better part. His poems, alas! have
long vanished from my memory, and I therefore cannot quote what would
doubtless have given the essence of the local sentiment and invested
such names as Wicken Fen or Swaffham Lode with associations equal to
those of Arnold's Hincksey ridge and Fyfield elm.
Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal to more general sympathy. The
voice of the sea, we know, is as powerful as the voice of the mountain;
and, to my taste, it is difficult to say whether the Land's End is not
in itself a more impressive station than the top of Mont Blanc. The
solitude of the frozen peaks suggests tombstones and death. The sea is
always alive and at work. The hovering gulls and plunging gannets and
the rollicking porpoises are animating symbols of a gallant struggle
with wind and wave. Even the unassociative mind has a vague sense
of the Armada and Hakluyt's heroes in the background. America and
Australia are just over the way. "Is not this a dull place?" asked some
one of an old woman whose cottage was near to the Lizard lighthouse.
"No," she replied, "it is so 'cosmopolitan.'" That was a simple-minded
way of expressing the charm suggested in Milton's wonderful phrase:
"Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold."
She could mentally follow the great ships coming and going, and shake
hands with people at the ends of the earth. The very sight of a
fishing-boat, as painters seem to have found out, is a poem in itself.
But is it not all written in _Westward Ho!_ and in the _Prose Idylls_,
in which Kingsley put his most genuine power? Of all walks that I
have made, I can remember none more delightful than those round the
south-western promontory. I have followed the coast at different times
from the mouth of the Bristol Avon by the Land's End to the Isle of
Wight, and I am only puzzled to decide which bay or cape is the most
delightful. I only know that the most delightful was the more enjoyable
when placed in its proper setting by a long walk. When you have made
an early start, followed the coastguard track on the slopes above
the cliffs, struggled through the gold and purple carpeting of gorse
and heather on the moors, dipped down into quaint little coves with
a primitive fishing village, followed the blinding whiteness of the
sands round a lonely bay, and at last emerged upon a headland where
you can settle into a nook of the rocks, look down upon the glorious
blue of the Atlantic waves breaking into foam on the granite, and see
the distant sea-levels glimmering away till they blend imperceptibly
into cloudland; then you can consume your modest sandwiches, light
your pipe, and feel more virtuous and thoroughly at peace with the
universe than it is easy even to conceive yourself elsewhere. I have
fancied myself on such occasions to be a felicitous blend of poet and
saint--which is an agreeable sensation. What I wish to point out,
however, is that the sensation is confined to the walker. I respect the
cyclist, as I have said; but he is enslaved by his machine: he has to
follow the highroad, and can only come upon what points of view open
to the commonplace tourist. He can see nothing of the retired scenery
which may be close to him, and cannot have his mind brought into due
harmony by the solitude and by the long succession of lovely bits of
scenery which stand so coyly aside from public notice.
The cockney cyclist who wisely seeks to escape at intervals from the
region "where houses thick and sewers annoy the air," suffers the
same disadvantages. To me, for many years, it was a necessity of life
to interpolate gulps of fresh air between the periods of inhaling
London fogs. When once beyond the "town" I looked out for notices that
trespassers would be prosecuted. That gave a strong presumption that
the trespass must have some attraction. The cyclist could only reflect
that trespassing for him was not only forbidden but impossible. To me
it was a reminder of the many delicious bits of walking which, even in
the neighbourhood of London, await the man who has no superstitious
reverence for legal rights. It is indeed surprising how many charming
walks can be contrived by a judicious combination of a little
trespassing with the rights of way happily preserved over so many
commons and footpaths. London, it is true, goes on stretching its vast
octopus arms farther into the country. Unlike the devouring dragon of
Wantley, to whom "houses and churches" were like "geese and turkies,"
it spreads houses and churches over the fields of our childhood. And
yet, between the great lines of railway there are still fields not
yet desecrated by advertisements of liver pills. It is a fact that
within twenty miles of London two travellers recently asked their way
at a lonely farmhouse; and that the mistress of the house, seeing that
they were far from an inn, not only gave them a seat and luncheon, but
positively refused to accept payment. That suggested an idyllic state
of society which, it is true, one must not count upon discovering. Yet
hospitality, the virtue of primitive regions, has not quite vanished,
it would appear, even from this over-civilised region. The travellers,
perhaps, had something specially attractive in their manners. In that
or some not distant ramble they made time run back for a couple of
centuries. They visited the quiet grave where Penn lies under the
shadow of the old Friends' meeting-house, and came to the cottage where
the seat on which Milton talked to Ellwood about _Paradise Regained_
seems to be still waiting for his return; and climbed the hill to
the queer monument which records how Captain Cook demonstrated the
goodness of Providence by disproving the existence of a continent in
the South Sea--(the argument is too obvious to require exposition);
and then gazed reverently upon the obelisk, not far off, which marks
the point at which George III. concluded a famous stag hunt. A little
valley in the quiet chalk country of Buckinghamshire leads past these
and other memorials, and the lover of historical associations, with
the help of Thorne's _Environs of London_, may add indefinitely to
the list. I don't object to an association when it presents itself
spontaneously and unobtrusively. It should not be the avowed goal but
the accidental addition to the interest of a walk; and it is then
pleasant to think of one's ancestors as sharers in the pleasures. The
region enclosed within a radius of thirty miles from Charing Cross
has charms enough even for the least historical of minds. You can't
hold a fire in your hand, according to a high authority, by thinking
on the frosty Caucasus; but I can comfort myself now and then, when
the fellow-passengers who tread on my heels in London have put me out
of temper, by thinking of Leith Hill. It only rises to the height of
a thousand feet by help of the "Folly" on the top, but you can see,
says my authority, twelve counties from the tower; and, if certain
legendary ordnance surveyors spoke the truth, distinguish the English
Channel to the south, and Dunstable Hill, far beyond London, to the
north. The Crystal Palace, too, as we are assured, "sparkles like a
diamond." That is gratifying; but to me the panorama suggests a whole
network of paths, which have been the scene of personally conducted
expeditions, in which I displayed the skill on which I most pride
myself--skill, I mean, in devising judicious geographical combinations,
and especially of contriving admirable short cuts. The persistence of
some companions in asserting that my short cuts might be the longest
way round shows that the best of men are not free from jealousy. Mine,
at any rate, led me and my friends through pleasant places innumerable.
My favourite passage in _Pilgrim's Progress_--an allegory which could
have occurred, by the way, to no one who was not both a good man and
a good walker--was always that in which Christian and Hopeful leave
the highroad to cross a stile into "Bypath Meadow." I should certainly
have approved the plan. The path led them, it is true, into the castle
of Giant Despair; but the law of trespass has become milder; and the
incident really added that spice of adventure which is delightful to
the genuine pilgrim. We defied Giant Despair; and if our walks were
not quite so edifying as those of Christian and his friends, they add
a pleasant strand to the thread of memory which joins the past years.
Conversation, we are often told, like letter-writing, is a lost art. We
live too much in crowds. But if ever men can converse pleasantly, it is
when they are invigorated by a good march: when the reserve is lowered
by the long familiarity of a common pursuit, or when, if bored, you can
quietly drop behind, or perhaps increase the pace sufficiently to check
the breath of the persistent argufier.
Nowhere, at least, have I found talk flow so freely and pleasantly as
in a march through pleasant country. And yet there is also a peculiar
charm in the solitary expedition when your interlocutor must be
yourself. That may be enjoyed, perhaps even best enjoyed, in London
streets themselves. I have read somewhere of a distinguished person who
composed his writings during such perambulations, and the statement was
supposed to prove his remarkable power of intellectual concentration.
My own experience would tend to diminish the wonder. I hopelessly
envy men who can think consecutively under conditions distracting to
others--in a crowded meeting or in the midst of their children--for I
am as sensitive as most people to distraction; but if I can think at
all, I am not sure that the roar of the Strand is not a more favourable
environment than the quiet of my own study. The mind--one must only
judge from one's own--seems to me to be a singularly ill-constructed
apparatus. Thoughts are slippery things. It is terribly hard to
keep them in the track presented by logic. They jostle each other,
and suddenly skip aside to make room for irrelevant and accidental
neighbours; till the stream of thought, of which people talk, resembles
rather such a railway journey as one makes in dreams, where at every
few yards you are shunted on to the wrong line. Now, though a London
street is full of distractions, they become so multitudinous that they
neutralise each other. The whirl of conflicting impulses becomes a
continuous current because it is so chaotic and determines a mood of
sentiment if not a particular vein of reflection. Wordsworth describes
the influence upon himself in a curious passage of his _Prelude_.
He wandered through London as a raw country lad, seeing all the
sights from Bartholomew Fair to St Stephen's, and became a unit of
the "monstrous ant-hill in a too busy world." Of course, according
to his custom, he drew a moral, and a most excellent moral, from the
bewildering complexity of his new surroundings. He learnt, it seems, to
recognise the unity of man and to feel that the spirit of nature was
upon him "in London's vast domain" as well as on the mountains. That
comes of being a philosophical poet with a turn for optimism. I will
not try to interpret or to comment, for I am afraid that I have not
shared the emotions which he expresses. A cockney, born and bred, takes
surroundings for granted. The hubbub has ceased to distract him; he is
like the people who were said to become deaf because they always lived
within the roar of a waterfall: he realises the common saying that the
deepest solitude is solitude in a crowd; he derives a certain stimulus
from a vague sympathy with the active life around him, but each
particular stimulus remains, as the phrase goes, "below the threshold
of consciousness." To some such effect, till psychologists will give
me a better theory, I attribute the fact that what I please to call
my "mind" seems to work more continuously and coherently in a street
walk than elsewhere. This, indeed, may sound like a confession of
cynicism. The man who should open his mind to the impressions naturally
suggested by the "monstrous ant-hill" would be in danger of becoming
a philanthropist or a pessimist, of being overpowered by thoughts of
gigantic problems, or of the impotence of the individual to solve them.
Carlyle, if I remember rightly, took Emerson round London in order
to convince his optimistic friend that the devil was still in full
activity. The gates of hell might be found in every street. I remember
how, when coming home from a country walk on a sweltering summer
night, and seeing the squalid population turning out for a gasp of air
in their only playground, the vast labyrinth of hideous lanes, I seemed
to be in Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_. Even the vanishing of
quaint old nooks is painful when one's attention is aroused. There is
a certain churchyard wall, which I pass sometimes, with an inscription
to commemorate the benefactor who erected it "to keep out the pigs." I
regret the pigs and the village green which they presumably imply. The
heart, it may be urged, must be hardened not to be moved by many such
texts for melancholy reflection. I will not argue the point. None of us
can be always thinking over the riddle of the universe, and I confess
that my mind is generally employed on much humbler topics. I do not
defend my insensibility nor argue that London walks are the best. I
only maintain that even in London, walking has a peculiar fascination.
The top of an omnibus is an excellent place for meditation; but it has
not, for me at least, that peculiar hypnotic influence which seems to
be favourable to thinking, and to pleasant daydreaming when locomotion
is carried on by one's own muscles. The charm, however, is that even a
walk in London often vaguely recalls better places and nobler forms of
the exercise. Wordsworth's Susan hears a thrush at the corner of Wood
Street, and straightway sees
"A mountain ascending, a vision of trees,
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside."
The gulls which seem lately to have found out the merits of London
give to occasional Susans, I hope, a whiff of fresh sea-breezes.
But, even without gulls or wood-pigeons, I can often find occasions
in the heart of London for recalling the old memories, without any
definable pretext; little pictures of scenery, sometimes assignable
to no definable place, start up invested with a faint aroma of old
friendly walks and solitary meditations and strenuous exercise, and
I feel convinced that, if I am not a thorough scoundrel, I owe that
relative excellence to the harmless monomania which so often took me,
to appropriate Bunyan's phrase, from the amusements of _Vanity Fair_ to
the _Delectable Mountains_ of pedestrianism.
_Leslie Stephen._
The Exhilarations of the Road
_Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road._
WHITMAN.
Occasionally on the sidewalk, amid the dapper, swiftly-moving,
high-heeled boots and gaiters, I catch a glimpse of the naked human
foot. Nimbly it scuffs along, the toes spread, the sides flatten,
the heel protrudes; it grasps the curbing, or bends to the form of
the uneven surfaces,--a thing sensuous and alive, that seems to take
cognisance of whatever it touches or passes. How primitive and uncivil
it looks in such company,--a real barbarian in the parlour. We are so
unused to the human anatomy, to simple, unadorned nature, that it looks
a little repulsive; but it is beautiful for all that. Though it be a
black foot and an unwashed foot, it shall be exalted. It is a thing of
life amid leather, a free spirit amid cramped, a wild bird amid caged,
an athlete amid consumptives. It is the symbol of my order, the Order
of Walkers. That unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is the
type of the pedestrian, man returned to first principles, in direct
contact and intercourse with the earth and the elements, his faculties
unsheathed, his mind plastic, his body toughened, his heart light, his
soul dilated: while those cramped and distorted members in the calf and
kid are the unfortunate wretches doomed to carriages and cushions.
I am not going to advocate the disuse of boots and shoes, or the
abandoning of the improved modes of travel; but I am going to brag as
lustily as I can on behalf of the pedestrian, and show how all the
shining angels second and accompany the man who goes afoot, while all
the dark spirits are ever looking out for a chance to ride.
When I see the discomforts that able-bodied American men will put up
with rather than go a mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they will
tolerate and encourage, crowding the street car on a little fall in
the temperature or the appearance of an inch or two of snow, packing
up to overflowing, dangling to the straps, treading on each other's
toes, breathing each other's breaths, crushing the women and children,
hanging by tooth and nail to a square inch of the platform, imperilling
their limbs and killing the horses,--I think the commonest tramp in the
street has good reason to felicitate himself on his rare privilege of
going afoot. Indeed, a race that neglects or despises this primitive
gift, that fears the touch of the soil, that has no footpaths, no
community of ownership in the land which they imply, that warns off
the walker as a trespasser, that knows no way but the highway, the
carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot-bridge, that even
ignores the rights of the pedestrian in the public road, providing no
escape for him but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to far
more serious degeneracy.
Shakespeare makes the chief qualification of the walker a merry heart:--
"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."
The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light
rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart. Your sad,
or morose, or embittered, or preoccupied heart settles heavily into
the saddle, and the poor beast, the body, breaks down the first mile.
Indeed, the heaviest thing in the world is a heavy heart. Next to that
the most burdensome to the walker is a heart not in perfect sympathy
and accord with the body--a reluctant or unwilling heart. The horse and
rider must not only both be willing to go the same way, but the rider
must lead the way and infuse his own lightness and eagerness into the
steed. Herein is no doubt our trouble and one reason of the decay of
the noble art in this country. We are unwilling walkers. We are not
innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen
from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies. It
cannot be said that as a people we are so positively sad, or morose, or
melancholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage
of animal spirits that characterised our ancestors, and that springs
from full and harmonious life,--a sound heart in accord with a sound
body. A man must invest himself near at hand and in common things, and
be content with a steady and moderate return, if he would know the
blessedness of a cheerful heart and the sweetness of a walk over the
round earth. This is a lesson the American has yet to learn--capability
of amusement on a low key. He expects rapid and extraordinary returns.
He would make the very elemental laws pay usury. He has nothing to
invest in a walk; it is too slow, too cheap. We crave the astonishing,
the exciting, the far away, and do not know the highways of the
gods when we see them,--always a sign of the decay of the faith and
simplicity of man.
If I say to my neighbour, "Come with me, I have great wonders to show
you," he pricks up his ears and comes forthwith; but when I take him on
the hills under the full blaze of the sun, or along the country road,
our footsteps lighted by the moon and stars, and say to him, "Behold,
these are the wonders, these are the circuits of the gods, this we now
tread is a morning star," he feels defrauded, and as if I had played
him a trick. And yet nothing less than dilatation and enthusiasm like
this is the badge of the master walker.
If we are not sad we are careworn, hurried, discontented, mortgaging
the present for the promise of the future. If we take a walk, it is as
we take a prescription, with about the same relish and with about the
same purpose; and the more the fatigue the greater our faith in the
virtue of the medicine.
Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in spring, or those sallies
of the body in winter, those excursions into space when the foot
strikes fire at every step, when the air tastes like a new and finer
mixture, when we accumulate force and gladness as we go along, when the
sight of objects by the roadside and of the fields and woods pleases
more than pictures or than all the art in the world,--those ten or
twelve mile dashes that are but the wit and affluence of the corporeal
powers,--of such diversion and open road entertainment, I say, most of
us know very little.
I notice with astonishment that at our fashionable watering-places
nobody walks; that of all those vast crowds of health-seekers and
lovers of country air, you can never catch one in the fields or woods,
or guilty of trudging along the country road with dust on his shoes
and sun-tan on his hands and face. The sole amusement seems to be to
eat and dress and sit about the hotels and glare at each other. The
men look bored, the women look tired, and all seem to sigh, "O Lord!
what shall we do to be happy and not be vulgar?" Quite different from
our British cousins across the water, who have plenty of amusement and
hilarity, spending most of the time at their watering-places in the
open air, strolling, picnicking, boating, climbing, briskly walking,
apparently with little fear of sun-tan or of compromising their
"gentility."
It is indeed astonishing with what ease and hilarity the English walk.
To an American it seems a kind of infatuation. When Dickens was in this
country I imagine the aspirants to the honour of a walk with him were
not numerous. In a pedestrian tour of England by an American, I read
that "after breakfast with the Independent minister, he walked with us
for six miles out of town upon our road. Three little boys and girls,
the youngest six years old, also accompanied us. They were romping and
rambling about all the while, and their morning walk must have been
as much as fifteen miles; but they thought nothing of it, and when we
parted were apparently as fresh as when they started, and very loath to
return."
I fear, also, the American is becoming disqualified for the manly art
of walking, by a falling off in the size of his foot. He cherishes and
cultivates this part of his anatomy, and apparently thinks his taste
and good breeding are to be inferred from its diminutive size. A small,
trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is the national vanity. How we
stare at the big feet of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price
of leather in those countries, and where all the aristocratic blood is,
that these plebeian extremities so predominate. If we were admitted
to the confidences of the shoemaker to Her Majesty or to His Royal
Highness, no doubt we would modify our views upon this latter point,
for a truly large and royal nature is never stunted in the extremities;
a little foot never yet supported a great character.