Freedom of the Will, and these are just the words 'freedom' and
'will.' There is no such thing in the bodily frame as a separate
entity or faculty called a 'will' walking about like a pilot on deck
and directing the course; and, if there were, such pilot would not
be 'free' from the influences of wind and tide. The bodily frame is
like a ship, with its captain and crew. The captain has to go by the
chart (that is, by his knowledge and experience of life), and
the crew have to trim the sails (that is, adapt actions to
circumstances). The captain (that is, the higher coordinating
centres) is not 'free,' for he is dependent on his crew (to which
we may compare the nerves and the ganglia)--which, in turn, are
dependent upon weather (that is, our surroundings). The captain may
'will' as much as he likes, but if his crew are mutinous, or the
winds contrary, he will not make port. 'Will power' at bottom
merely means an intelligent captain and an obedient crew; and
'putting-forth' or 'exercising' will power merely means that captain
and crew must work in harmony. So that, if attention, if virtue, if
conduct and character depend upon will power (as of course they do),
Aristotle seems to be perfectly right in saying that the secret of
these is ἑξις, or habit or practice: only a trained crew
can work the ship."[19]
§ 29
One thing only is certain--and whether the certainty derives from a
rational or an emotional, a social or a cosmic, an evolutionary or an
intuitive, a political or an ecclesiastical source, I do not stay to
ask--one thing only is certain: _The evil that there is, it is our
bounden duty to alleviate_; "le monde subsiste pour exercer miséricorde
et jugement"[20]; and I care not a fig that I have no metaphysical,
philosophical, ethical, or religious basis of argument to adduce for
this untransferable onus of Duty.
And I take comfort, also, in the thought that, after all, Reason has had
very little to do with the moral progress of mankind. "C'est le cœur
qui sent Dieu, et non raison."[21] Answer me this one question: Which
have exercised the greater influence for good: reasoned-out systems of
philosophy; or religious evangels whose tenets no one could prove? How
many pious followers has Spinoza or Leibnitz or Nietzsche? And how many
Buddha or Confucius or Mohammed or--with all reverence be added his
name--Jesus of Nazareth?
But the critic will say: If the religious tenet is incapable of
proof, by what criterion can we judge of the authenticity of any
evangel?--Well, if it teaches to alleviate suffering and to do the
Right, that is criterion enough for me.
Return we to the humble topic of walking.
XVII
The Instinct for Walking
§ 30
For many reasons, walking seems to be an ingrained instinct of mankind.
I cling to the perhaps fanciful theory that no primitive instinct of
man is altogether lost. It is modified, amplified, refined; that is all.
With all our culture, we are barbarians still. Man is a clothed savage.
And now and again he delights in doffing the clothing and returning
heartily to savagery. How delightful the feel of the briny breeze and
the boisterous wave on the bare pelt! Mr Edward Carpenter rails at the
(I think) eleven layers of clothing that intervene between our skins and
the airs of heaven. Walt Whitman revelled nude in his sun bath. What a
treat too, sometimes, to get away from the multi-coursed dinner and to
bite downright audibly into simple food in the fresh air, and to lap
water noisily from the brook! Well, walking, perhaps, is the primal
instinct, ancient as Eden, where the Lord God walked in the garden in
the cool of the day. And, if my theory is correct, walking will persist
till in recovered Paradise man walks with his Maker again. No mechanical
contrivance for locomotion will extirpate the tribe of tramps, of those
who walk from love of walking.
XVIII
A Woeful Walk
§ 31
But not all walks are occasions of unmitigated pleasure. By no means. A
certain trudge, which particularly lives in my memory, was one of almost
unmitigated pain.--No; I will not say that, for wert not thou, L----,
cheeriest of companions, with me? What a walk that was! It rained the
long day through, and as we strode westward, a cold, wet wind from
the east blew hard. The roads were impassable for mud; the trees were
leafless; the fields bare. Inns there were none, and at the thirteenth
mile I broke a nice big flask of port wine or e'er a blessed sip of
the liquid (I mean a sip of the blessed liquid) had passed our lips. A
woeful walk was that, and woeful pedestrians were we.--Yet, somehow, it
is with the extremest pleasure that now I recall that trudge. To beguile
the time, and to try to forget the rain, we improvised a play, and
shouted dialogues as we strode. We covered forty miles at a stretch; and
whether it was the play, or the fresh air, or the exercise, or L----'s
indomitable Mark Tapleyism, we limped (no, we lamely ran the last few
yards) into our destination, in spirits, at least, buoyant, jubilant,
and secure.--How mad and bad and sad it was! And oh, how we were stiff!
XIX
Autumn in Canada Again
§ 32
Yet another country walk taken in England's North American dominions
lives most pleasantly in my memory.
Two of the clock one autumn afternoon found me free. I had hoped to have
lost no time in beginning to put enormous stretches of space between me
and my desk. Not that this desk had not its pleasures, and many of them;
but one craves a change of mental atmosphere, however salubrious
that usually respired. The temptation, however, of calmly and in
self-righteously indolent manner enjoying the sweets of freedom was too
strong, so I lounged a whole afternoon, and not till daybreak on the
following morning was I booted, knapsacked, and afoot.
The task of putting space between me and my desk was not one as easy as
I had anticipated. It was hours before the dust of the city was shaken
off, and the mud of the country allowed to take its place; the tedium
of the streets at that unfrequented hour of the day made them seem
interminable. For was I not craving and in search of country sights
and sounds? And yet for miles not one met the eye or ear. Yes, I am
forgetting: there was one which made up for much monotony. On a humble
cottage wall facing the south, far out in the suburbs, was a wealth of
flowering convolvulus such as I had rarely or only in India seen before.
The sight was entrancing. The various-hued blossoms seemed blatantly to
trumpet forth their beauty to the sun, to borrow the terms of sound and
to apply them to colour. And what colour was there! That deep, soft,
velvet purple, powdered with snowy pollen--what a profound, what an
acute sense it produced of something altogether beyond the limitations
of time and space, of something mysterious, beneficent, divine. Never
before did I see so deep a meaning in those words: "Consider the lilies
of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and
yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these." How paltry, how tainted, seemed all human greatness
beside those simple petals; how marred, how deformed! And why? Why
should Nature alone be able to smile openly before her Maker's eyes, and
man be ever hiding himself from the presence of the Lord God? Ah! there
is more than one interpretation of the text, "All have sinned, and come
short of the glory of God." ... Those brilliant blossoms aroused many
a thought. How earnestly have all poets of Nature striven to find
expression for the emotions that natural beauty evokes! And yet none has
completely succeeded, and none will succeed till the hidden links are
discovered between the beautiful thing, the mind that perceives it, and
the Hand that fashions it. How is it that a sunset, a landscape, a green
field even, or a growing fern, will sometimes in a moment of time
cause to blaze up in a man a thrill, a joy, so intense that under
its influence one feels dazed and dumb? A great power is, as it were,
suddenly let loose; beauty incarnated momentarily reveals its divine
presence, and one feels an all but overwhelming impulse to yield oneself
to it and be rapt away whithersoever it leads. But--whither it leads we
cannot go.
Of all poets who have given utterance to this deep and mystical emotion,
Wordsworth perhaps has best succeeded. What can rival the following
lines?--which will bear constant quotation:--
"For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
If only Wordsworth had written oftener in that strain of higher mood! To
me this passage, even with just such narrow meaning as one not worthy to
call himself a Wordsworthian can read into it, has been invaluable. In
the mass of that hidden, cloudy, inner signification with which (I think
it is Mr Ruskin who insists that) all poetry should be instinct, these
lines are marvellous. They more nearly reach the goal of that "struggle
to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, that longing
after the Infinite, that love of God," which Professor Max Müller
describes as the basis of all religions, than all the creeds such
religions have constructed.
Wordsworth saw, as perhaps no one before him ever quite so clearly
saw, the Spiritual Unity underlying those two things:--the one called
External Nature; the other, this spark of life called the Human
Soul--the product of, and burning in, that External Nature, as a flame
feeds upon the air which it illumines.--But to return to my walk.
§ 33
Curiously enough, I had hardly reached the confines of the town which
I was leaving before I fell in with a youth apparently possessed of the
same motive as myself--namely, to enjoy to the full the delights of the
country after a year's inclusion in a thronged city; and, in order the
better to do so, to use as means of locomotion his own two legs, and
a stout stick. I say "apparently," for very short converse with him
revealed the fact that he was utterly blind to the charms of Nature. He
was nice-mannered and polite to a degree; but as a companion to aid in
discovering rural beauty he was simply worse than none at all. His two
negative or denominatorial eyes and ears completely cancelled, made
useless, and altogether put out of existence my two positive or
numeratorial senses. I was prepared to take infinite delight in the
most trivial and insignificant of Nature's works, to extol her most
commonplace manifestations, to find the longest sermons in the tiniest
pebbles; but to do this by the side of the most antipathetic of, to all
intents and purposes, blind and deaf of fellow-pedestrians--it was out
of the question. I nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice when
I say that that utterance of his most pregnant with observation of the
passing scene was contained in the words, "That's a potato-patch!" The
early morning sun fought its way between dense grey clouds, and fell in
cheering light on the tops of the trees, and in silver showers on the
gleaming lake below; the rich green meadows caught the rays, the very
air seemed laden with treasures of sunlight; young and graceful maples,
in crimson autumn tints, like Mænads at vintage-time, flung flaming
torches towards the sky, unmindful of the morn; the sumach and the
gorgeous virginia-creeper were ablaze with beauty; yet of all this
he saw nothing; a brown potato-patch by the highway rim a brown
potato-patch was to him, and it was nothing more. Yes, by the by, it was
something more: it was an appreciable piece of property, a prospective
town lot at so much per foot frontage, one-third cash down and the
balance in half-yearly instalments to suit the purchaser, all local
improvements paid by.... At least some such jargon caught my inattentive
ear. Real estate is, I gladly grant, a topic of (often too) absorbing
interest; but one does not exactly wish to be confronted with intricate
monetary calculations, connected with barter and commerce, when engaged
in the not very kindred and decidedly delicate task of wooing
Nature. Barter and commerce when Wordsworth is ringing in one's ears,
incorporated companies and syndicates when bird and bush ask your
attention--these things, in the language of the pharmacopœia, are
incompatibles.
§ 34
I had thus two causes of complaint against my companion. So I left him:
I took a bypath; he kept to the highway. Nor was I sorry. It is pleasant
now and again for short periods to get away from one's fellow-men.
Familiarity breeds contempt, it is said; perhaps it is as true of
aggregations of men as of individuals. At all events, one comes back
from a temporary seclusion with a sweeter temper, a more kindly and
tolerant regard for those about one. Nor was I sorry. The main road
contained too many curious starers. To walk for pleasure was a thing
wholly outside the limits of their comprehension. "'Tisn't 'cause
'tis cheaper?" asked one irrepressible inquirer (always this matter of
money!); and he was still more puzzled at the explanation that hotel
bills largely exceeded railway fare....
§ 35
Yet one seeks entertainment when travelling long alone. The mind becomes
overfull, it gathers from every sight and sound and scent, and craves
another mind as depositary for the surplus, as sharer of the spoils. In
time also it wearies of constant observation, and would give much for a
companion. In lieu of a concrete one, I found myself quite unconsciously
imitating Macaulay, and substituting an abstract one by quoting Milton;
and never did his ponderous yet marvellously poised lines sound to me
so grand as when rolled _ore rotundo_ to the accompaniment of Ontario's
rolling wave. M. Henri Cochin, Matthew Arnold tells us, speaks of "the
majestic English iambic." It is to Milton surely that the English iambic
owes the praise of majesty. To me, I confess, the exceeding beauty of
much of Milton's verse is a snare--as is also much of Mr Ruskin's prose:
the ear is so captivated by the sound that the mind strays from the
sense.
§ 36
Toronto was my starting point, and my course lay eastwards on the
northern shore of great Lake Ontario by what is always known as the
Kingston Road, one of the oldest in the country, the precursor of the
Grand Trunk Railway, the track of which, indeed, it closely follows.
The country through which it runs varies but little in scenery, being a
great undulating stretch of fertile land thickly settled with farms
and orchards, and as thickly wooded with pine, maple, larch, elm, fir,
beech, hickory, and other trees common in Canada. Here and there a small
river runs to the lake, and here and there the shore rises into cliffs
of eighty or a hundred feet. Cows and sheep, and pigs and poultry, meet
one all along the road, showing us the occupations of the inhabitants;
as do also the fields of barley and wheat, and the great orchards gay
with the unrivalled Canadian apple, which gleams at us from the boughs
with every hue and size. The Kingston Road is a king's highway with a
vengeance; hard, well-travelled, and dotted, I should say, along its
whole length, with comfortable, often elaborate, habitations standing in
the midst of fields and trees. At every ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty
miles these habitations cluster into villages or towns; sometimes
where road and railway intersect, when there spring up factories and
warehouses; sometimes down by the shore, when there rise elevators
and wharves. I cannot pretend to say that these are interesting. They
consist for the most part each of one straggling main street, itself
a part of the Kingston Road, and differentiated from it only by the
unkempt habitations that line its length, and by the inevitable wooden
pavements, broad in the central portions, but narrowing to a single
plank in the outskirts--where, no doubt, it was in reality, if not
in name, the "Lovers' Walk." They were not quaint, no ancient and few
historical traditions clung to them, neither did they appear to me to
possess any distinguishing characteristics.
§ 37
I have spoken of a quiet country town. A country town of a Sunday
afternoon in Canada is the quietest of existing things. Everything in
it seems lifeless. Not a sound is heard from any side. One's own
cough startles one in the very streets. Two cows slowly wend their
way homewards; an over-ripe apple falls heavily in an unkempt front
garden--even these signs of semi-life are a relief. Rows of youths,
all dressed in sombre black, and all smoking cigars fearfully if not
wonderfully made, lean against the walls of the inn at the corner, or
stand in silent knots about the horse-gnawed "hitching-post." The jaded
afternoon sunlight falls slantingly and weariedly on untidy plots in
which weeds strive for mastery successfully with flowers, on empty
verandahs with blistered paint, on the dusty grass encroaching ever on
the street. I enter the inn. It is chilly, and in the common room which
serves many purposes a battered stove lacking two-thirds of its mica
radiates a dry and suffocating heat. On deal chairs, mostly tipped up,
sit the youths but just now lounging without. They say nothing; only
they sit and smoke, and spit--how they spit! They themselves probably
are all unconscious of the incessant salivary sharp-shooting; but I--I
sit in terror, like a nervous woman dreading the pistol shots on the
stage. Soon church bells begin to clang. None heeds them, nor are they
over-inviting; one is cracked, they are not in harmony, and they seem to
be ringing a race in which the hindmost is to win. In the space of about
an hour, however, the youths begin to move, as if with the feeling that
at last will come a small relief from the awful _ennui_ which they cannot
express. Church is coming out. They go out and draw up before the doors.
A heavy yellow light streams across the street, and with it issues an
odour, perhaps, of sanctity, but much disguised by kerosene. Greetings
follow between the out-coming damsels and the waiting youths, and
curious raucous laughs intended to be tender are heard disappearing into
darkened ways. Soon all is again hushed, and but for here and there the
slow and lugubrious sounds of hymn tunes played on old and middle-aged
organs, the little town might be a buried city of the East.
§ 38
Yet no doubt it had its tragedies, this seemingly peaceful and
sequestered spot: indeed signs of most pathetic tragedies came under my
own eyes, few as were the hours which I spent in it. Hanging about the
unpretentious hostelry about which those uncouth youths gathered, were
two specimens of what was once humanity that made the heart ache to look
on. One was a case, I think, hopeless: a gaunt and dirty figure, his
last drink still dripping from his beard, clothed in the vilest of
shirts, and in things that were once trousers, which last hung loose
over large and faded carpet slippers, he moved disgust as well as pity.
The other was of a different class. Drink had been his bane also,
but there was not in his face that absence of all shame, that despair
merging into careless defiance, which stamped his fellow-sufferer's case
as beyond the cure of man. They called him "Doc," and there were still
evidences of birth and education upon his bloated features. What had
driven him thus far? I could not help but conjecture. Was there a
woman at the bottom of it? If so, where and what was she now? Somebody
else's.... But this was idle guesswork. There was yet another case,
a woman herself this time, still more tragic. Her motto, stamped upon
every feature, expressed in every gesture, was "The heart knoweth its
own bitterness." A tall, dark, and once handsome spinster, a _femme de
trente ans_, she waited upon us at table; but with such an air of utter
indifference, with such complete abstraction from things material and
ephemeral, that she awed the very persons to whose wants she ministered.
Her face wore a settled and unaltering expression of something missed
yet never to that day for one moment forgotten. A machine could not
have carried plates and moved dishes with more unfailing stolidity. Her
thoughts were remotely away in the past, and it seemed as if nothing,
nothing upon all this earth, could fetch them back. Cato's statue would
have smiled as soon as she. It was pathetic in the extreme. One longed
to give her if but one moment's peace of mind. Did she _never_ forget?
What was it she brooded on? How long would the feminine heart and
brain stand that strain? Tragedies! Yes, there were tragedies there, as
everywhere else.
§ 39
Such is Sunday in a country town. But in truth, after the rush and hurry
of city life, in the country it seems always Sunday. There is a leisure,
a calm, a restfulness, and, away by the fields, a quiet sanctity
which pervades its every part and unconsciously influences its every
inhabitant. By degrees, too, on the traveller through the country this
calming influence comes. The still green meadows, the gently swaying
boughs, the sunshine sleeping pillowed on the clouds--all tend to
meditative and restful peace, and one reaps the harvest of a quiet eye.
And if one yields to this beneficent mood there is much, very much, to
be gained. Alone with Nature, all around the spacious earth, above the
immeasurable heavens, alone in a vast expanse, one finds oneself, in
Amiel's fine phrase, _tête-à-tête_ with the Infinite. At such times
the great problem of Life flares upon us like a flash of lightning, so
sudden, so intense, so vivid is its irruption on the mental vision. Time
and space, like the darkness of night, are annihilated, earthly bounds
are burst, and there is revealed a realm of Being beyond the confines
of the relative, the limited, the finite. We recognise the infinity of
unity, the brotherhood of all things. Terms of proportion and comparison
lose their significance: there is no great or little, important or
trivial, for the minutest object is an essential part of the All,
without which this All would cease to be.
§ 40
Curious thoughts, or "half-embodyings of thoughts" as Coleridge called
them, that lonely walk aroused. What _was_ this All? And what portion of
this All was I--I, this tiny biped crawling ant-like between earth and
sky? I looked over the flat earth, and remembered that it was not flat
but round, and but one of myriads like itself, and among them, perhaps,
as paltry as, upon it, I. I looked up at the sky, filled with the
radiance of the sun, and again remembered that, sown through space like
seed, were countless other suns, and ours perhaps the least in all that
host. And when night came, and the stars shone, I remembered that even
then I saw only what came in at the pin-prick of the eye, and that to
the mighty All that myriad-studded sky was perhaps as trivial as to it
was earth or sun. Yet, trivial as we were, we were not naught--not quite
nothing. That was the wonder of it. So far from naught, indeed, that
to me, this tiny biped crawling, himself was very important; his
little pains, his aches, even these his questionings were very real. If
incommensurable suns swung high overhead, he at least was the centre of
his own little world, and not the most astounding facts of science could
alter or remove that egocentric view.--And, if not nothing, if something
in all that vast inane, then what? How came it that, prompted by what
entered at that pin-prick eye, something within him could fling itself,
fling itself faster than light, far beyond the outermost boundary of
vision, and put to the immensity of Being questions which, could Being
hear, would surely put it to the blush? Those pains, those aches, were
they nothing to the All? To the tiny mighty atom they were much.--But
the world spun round, and the sun set, and darkness was upon the face of
the deep.
§ 41
It is well now and again, I think, to withdraw into the holy of holies
of one's own self, "where dwells the Nameless,"[22] in its shapeless and
vague impenetrability, "as a cloud." The world is too much with us. The
myriad trivial details of everyday life hide from us that of which they
ought in reality perpetually to remind us. For, after all, what is all
action, even as manifested in these trivial details, but a struggle to
overcome space and time, the limitations of the finite; and what, again,
is all thought but a struggle to conceive the infinite?
§ 42