practical and common-sensible man asking, "is to be gained from
walking--_walking_? Surely walking is the paltriest of sports. Why not
write of riding, driving, rowing, bicycling, motoring, aeroplaning--any
mode of locomotion rather than that of mere trudging?"--Well, in a
technical and paronomasiacal phrase, the question really _solvitur
ambulando_. For one thing, horses have to be baited, boats caulked,
bicycles pumped up, balloons inflated, and motor cars eternally tinkered
at--aeroplanes fly far beyond my welkin. For another thing, not the
least of the practical blessings incident to a walk is that you are
beyond the reach of letters and telegrams and telephones. You are
not likely to be served with a writ when walking; you can laugh at
_capiases_ and injunctions; drafts at sight and judgment summonses
cannot easily overtake you on a trudge. "I have generally found," says
De Quincey, "that, if you are in quest of some certain escape from
Philistines of whatsoever class--sheriff-officers, bores, no
matter what--the surest refuge is to be found amongst hedgerows and
fields."[52] (Had De Quincey lived in the twentieth century, truly he
might have added that it is amongst the fields and hedgerows also
that one gets away from that pest of civilisation, the pene-ubiquitous
advertisement.--And not always even amongst fields and hedgerows, as
the landscape-spoiling hoardings along the routes of our railways prove.
Like Nero, I sometimes wish that the erectors of sky-signs and the
daubers of barns and fences had but one neck that I might ... that I
might--lay upon it a heavy yoke of taxation.--I throw out that hint to
any Finance Minister or Chancellor of the Exchequer that may care to act
upon it.)
But far rather would I reply to my quærist in other words than
mine.--"I went to the woods," says Thoreau, "because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.... I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.... Our life is frittered
away by detail.... In the midst of this chopping sea of civilised life,
such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items
to be allowed for that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go
to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, he must
be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."[53]
Hear, too, Henri-Frédéric Amiel:
"_1st February 1854._--A walk. The atmosphere incredibly pure--a
warm, caressing gentleness in the sunshine--joy in one's whole
being.... I became young again, wondering, and simple, as candour
and ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to life and to nature,
and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness. To open one's heart
in purity to this ever-pure nature, to allow this immortal life of
things to penetrate into one's soul, is at the same time to listen
to the voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, and self-abandonment
an act of devotion."[54]
Or hear a greater man than these--hear the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
he who divided with Voltaire the intellectual realm of the eighteenth
century:
"What I regret most in the details of my life which I have forgotten
is that I did not keep a diary of my travels. Never have I thought
so much, never have I realised my own existence so much, been
so much alive, been so much myself if I may so say, as in those
journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in
it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when
I stay in one place; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to
work. The sight of the country, the succession of beautiful scenes,
the great breeze, the good appetite, the health which I gain by
walking, the getting away from inns, the escape from everything
which reminds me of my lack of independence, from everything which
reminds me of my unlucky fate--all this releases my soul, gives me
greater courage of thought, throws me as it were into the midst of
the immensity of the objects of Nature, which I may combine, from
which I may choose at will, which I may make my own carelessly and
without fear. I make use of all Nature as her master; my heart,
surveying one object after another, unites itself, identifies itself
with those in sympathy with it, surrounds itself with delightful
images, intoxicates itself with emotions the most exquisite. If, in
order to seize these, I amuse myself by describing them to myself,
what a vigorous pencil, what bright colours, what energy of
expression they need! Some have, so they say, discerned something
of these influences in my writings, though composed in my declining
years. Ah! if only those of my early youth had been seen! those
which I have composed but never written down!"[55]
Thus wrote the great Jean-Jacques in the calm of his declining years.
Those walking inspirations must have been potent indeed to have left so
lasting an impression.[56]
§ 65
But Thoreau and Amiel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are perhaps counsellors
of perfection; exemplars too remote for our purpose. Permit me then to
resort to an _argumentum ad hominem_.--I knew a man who one summer tried
to do two and a half men's work in one. For five days in the week it
took him from early in the morning of one day till early in the morning
of the next. On Saturday afternoon he was free, and on Saturday he took
the boat to a village twenty-one miles distant. Sunday afternoon was
devoted (alas, necessarily) again to work,--but in the open air. At
two-thirty on Monday morning he started on his return journey--afoot;
breakfasted halfway in; and was at his desk in as good time as
spirits.--Profit? That early morning walk picked him up for the week.
Pleasure? My dear practical sir, would you had been with him! Would you
had felt the quiet, the serenity, the calming influence of unsullied
Nature; the supreme repose in those early morning hours, the solitude,
the vastness, the expansion of soul and spirit beneath the silent stars,
the quiet morn. He saw the full moon pale and set; he saw great Nature
slowly wake; the sleepy cows knee-deep in clover; the fields begemmed
with dew; the little pools--pools which at noon would be muddy
puddles--glistening like emeralds and garnets in the dawn. By degrees,
growing things were individualised. Each shrub, each creeping thing,
had a life of its own. The veriest weed was exalted into a vegetable
personality which had dealings with the Infinite and the Divine: and
"all flowers in field or forest which unclose their trembling eyelids
to the kiss of day" spake to him.--He was alone--alone with unhurrying,
uncareful Nature. The peace of untold æons entered his soul and couraged
him to battle with the petty and the trivial for five more wearing days
without a qualm.--Profit? Pleasure?--What nag, what buggy, what skiff,
what bike, what motor, what dirigible balloon, or hydro-aeroplane would
have got him that? In simple truth, of all that he learned and did
during those arduous weeks, only those lovely lonely walks live in that
man's memory to-day.--Would that oftener we bathed our thirsty souls in
the dews of the dawn! Would that oftener men gat them away from offices
and counters and desks--nay, from balls and bats and cleeks--away into
the quiet country, where nor strife nor struggle, noble or ignoble,
has place or worth! The world is too much with us. Call-loans--narrow
margins, with a slump in the market--killing races with a dark
horse--quickly changing quotations--prolonged ill luck--unstable
tariffs--strikes and rumours of strikes--such things perturb the human
mind. Well, I know few more efficacious antidotes to mental perturbation
than an early morning walk. It is a psychic as well as a sanitary
investment.
§ 66
It is also a mental tonic--even in homœopathic doses.--I took last
Sunday a little four-mile stroll before breakfast, and its calming and
beneficent influence is with me still. No one was about; I had the whole
country to myself, and I bathed a tired head in the spacious quietude of
earth and sky. From a height I looked over a great and restful country,
across the sleeping town, and far away over the peaceful lake. Above
it all stretched the benevolent heavens, brooding over this pendent
world.--I thought I saw fixity in the midst of motion; substance beneath
evanescence; unity in multiplicity; a sort of goal where everything was
cyclical; an end where all things seemed only means; infinity lurking
in finitude; a divine inhering in the human. After the treadmill of the
week it was uplifting, exalting. I inhaled great draughts of air from
ultra-planetary spaces; I fed on manna fallen from the highest heavens.
This tiny planet, with its trivial cares and duties, vanished from my
eyes, and I cooled my brow in the clouds of the holy of holies.--But
none the less did I recognise the all-importance, to it and to me, of
earth's small cares and duties. Were they not part of that infinite
multiplicity in which lurked that infinite unity? Did they not go to
make up the "spiritual economy"[57] of the cosmos? But I saw them in a
newer light--a larger light than merely solar, and they took on a new
aspect, and declared themselves integral portions of that divine All
without which that divine All would cease to be.
There is something strangely pure and purifying about early morning air.
It is Nature's great steriliser. It is aseptic; and none breathes it
but is more or less cleansed of the taint of noontide life. The noxious
germs of care and anxiety cannot live in it. It is a magnificent
bactericide. Nature is herself then. Even the denizens of Nature seem to
know this, for never is bird or beast more blithesome than at dawn.
§ 67
For lonely souls, for luckless souls, there is, perhaps, after all is
said and done, but one source of solace. "Nothing human," said Eugénie
de Guérin, "nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human supports
it:--
'À l'enfant il faut sa mère,
À mon âme il faut mon Dieu.'"[58]
Well, those who think their God has revealed himself in the Canonical
Books will go to their Bible; those who think he has chosen the
channel of a Church will derive ghostly strength from their spiritual
counsellors; but those who think the Nameless has nowhere so plainly
shown himself as in his works, will seek in the face and lineaments of
Nature that consoling smile which every lonely soul so miserably craves;
and fortunate it is that not over his works, but only over his words,
theologians so wrathfully wrangle.--Art thou cast down, and is thy soul
disquieted within thee? Dost distrust thyself? Has love grown cold? And
hast thou caught on thy leman's lips a sigh not meant for thee? Is there
none to whom thou canst go, on whose bosom to rain out the heavy mist
of tears?--Go thou to Pan; betake thee to the fields; betake thee to
the woods; pour out thy contrite heart at the altar of the universe, and
thou shalt be comforted. What matters it the petty perturbations of the
mind? What signify the paltry upheavings of the heart? Lay thy tired
head on Nature's breast. Friendship may fade, ideals vanish, passion
wane, the darling desire upon which thou hast staked thine all may
prove to have been snatched from thee before thy very eyes.--Take heart.
Always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above
thee, in presence of which the petty and the paltry flee away.
I know no more comfortable medicament than the quiet companionship of
Nature. The trees breathe a salutary air. The fields invite to repose.
A calming influence pervades unwalled, unceilinged earth, and there
the crumpled soul has room in which to smooth itself out: the noxious
bacilli which infest its folds are swept away; ill-natured thoughts take
flight. How paltry seems a passing quarrel beneath the boughs of a hoary
oak that has witnessed a hundred fights! How puny a callous rage beneath
the capacious sky!
For, believe me, Great Pan is _not_ dead. Nor, believe me, are any that
go to him in any wise cast out. He cares not of what Church thou art a
child, nor does he fence his tables. Worship at whatsoever shrine thou
choosest, always he will welcome thee to his, for Pan is beloved of all
the gods.
Ach! There comes a time when nothing seems worth while; when gaiety
palls, and even sorrow dulls instead of stirs; when nothing seems of
any use, and one feels inclined to give up, to give up.--To such I would
say, pull on thick boots, clutch a stout stick, and go for a country
walk--rain or shine.--It sounds a preposterous remedy, but try it.
Nature never gives up. Not a pygmy weed, trodden under foot of man, and
covered up and overwhelmed with rival growths, but battles for its life
with vim. Nor does it ask for what it battles. Neither does it question
why more favoured plants are so carefully nurtured, and it, poor thing,
is dragged up by the roots.--Take a country walk, and look at the weeds
if at nothing else.
And remember, this is a legitimate remedy, preposterous though
it may sound. So many prescriptions for the heartache are
illegitimate--stimulants, or narcotics, or stimulant-narcotics: sport,
work, play, hazardous adventure, the gaming-table or the betting-ring,
to say nothing of the cup that inebriates but does not cheer. A country
walk is but "letting Nature have her way," is but giving an opportunity
for the _vis medicatrix naturæ_. Try it; do not, like Naaman, prate
of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, but go wash in Jordan seven
times.
XXVII
Is Walking Selfish?
§ 68
But is it not a selfish pleasure, this that is to be gained by rural
peregrination, I shall be asked. Bluntly I answer, No. A country walk
makes one blithesome; and than blithesomeness there is no greater foe
to selfishness. Had Bacon not declared that gardening was the purest of
human pleasures, I should be inclined to give the palm to walking.
We are too gregarious. We live too much in herds, and we consider too
much what the herd will think of our petty individual ways. Civilisation
is not an unmixed boon, and artificial combinations of men taint
the natural simplicity of the race. In combining together for mutual
protection against a common foe we forget that sometimes a man's foes
are those of his own household. Each feels that the eyes of the world
are upon him, and always he is subconsciously occupied in conforming
himself to the world. A political community not only curtails the
individual's freedom of action for the good of the whole, it curtails
also his freedom of thought and manner. What is the result? The result
is that "self-consciousness" has taken on a new and sinister meaning.
Instead of denoting the especial and distinguishing characteristic of
emancipated reason, self-consciousness has come to denote a painful
cognisance of the fetters that our fellow-reasoners have put upon
reason. We are the slaves of ourselves. Only the child and the savage
are free to "live deliberately," to "live deep and suck out all the
marrow of life." Long before the child has developed into the grown, and
the savage into the civilised, man, that silent and unseen but tireless
architect, Convention, builds about him an invisible but infrangible
wall of reserve: his spontaneous emotions, his natural affections, his
aspirations and ambitions, must filter through crevices and peepholes
instead of exhaling from him as a rich and original aura.
Already the taint is perceptible in our literature. The centripetal
tendency is not a purely economic one. Commerce and industry draw the
crowds to the cities, and immediately there arises a set of writers who
write only of the city. How large a proportion of our fiction portrays
only the wretched drawing-room intrigue, the wretched rivalries of
wretched citizens. The Epic was buried three hundred years ago. The Ode
is dead. The Lyric is dying. Now we have the Novel and the Problem Play,
the sensational Newspaper and the Picture Magazine. In time, I suppose,
we shall come to the Snapshot and the Paperette. Already we are almost
there.--Was it for this that the mighty Areopagitical pleader for the
Liberty of Unlicensed Printing strove?
I wish that whole populations of crowded cities could be turned out
hebdomadally to take long week-end walks in the country, there to mew
its mighty youth and kindle its undazzled eyes at the full midday beam;
there to slough off the skin of daily toil, cleanse itself from the
dross of money-getting, and learn that there is something in life more
worth living for than the weekly wage, and other joys than those
of _panem et circenses_.--But this is a wild dream. As well try to
rehabilitate the Bacchic dance and Chian wine in place of Football and
beer or Baseball and peanuts.--Yet methinks I have heard of wilder. What
did Jean-Jacques and his school really mean by "back to nature"?
To me, I confess, this polipetal or city-seeking tendency in modern life
(if I may so call it) wears a most serious, a most sinister aspect. So,
I am inclined to think, it did to Ruskin. "I had once purposed," wrote
John Ruskin half-a-century ago, "to show what kind of evidence existed
respecting the possible influence of country life on men; it seeming to
me, then, likely that here and there a reader would perceive this to be
a grave question, more than most which we contend about, political
or social, and might care to follow it out with me earnestly. The day
will assuredly come when men will see that it _is_ a grave question."[59]
If we read history aright, always the bloated city succumbs to the pagan
horde. It is in the crowded city that all that is in the world, the lust
of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,[60] have
most free play. And it is in the city, where division of labour is daily
carried to greater extremes, that men's activities as a whole have least
free play. The result is twofold: the nobler emotions are stunted;
the baser passions are stimulated. Socialism (whatever the precise
prescription so labelled may be) is no remedy for this. Perhaps Rousseau
reasoned better than he knew.
In a sense, however--thanks to whatever gods may be!--as a matter of
fact there is quietly going on a constant recurrence to Nature. The
United States of America, Canada, Australia, South Africa--what but
wholesale emigration from over-populous or over-pragmatical centres is
the source and origin of these? Colonisation is the protest against
the social, political, economical, or religious constrictions of the
crowd.--It is precisely these constrictions, my practical quærist, that
I am tempting thee now and again to flee. _De te fabula narratur._
XXVIII
The Pæan of Being
§ 69
Have I too much belauded the country walk? I do not thereby decry
the outdoor sport. The thorough sportsman is the noblest work of God
(apologies to the shade of Alexander Pope!). Athletics, said that
acute philosophical historian, Goldwin Smith, "wash the brain." Well,
sometimes I think a really good country walk cleans the soul. You
get away from rivalries and trivialities; from scandal, gossip, and
paltriness; you get away from your compeers and your neighbours--perhaps
you learn for the first time who your neighbour is--namely, your
fellow-farer in distress, as the Good Samaritan long ago taught; you get
away from barter and commerce, from manners and customs, from forms and
ceremonies; from the thousand and one complications that arise when a
multitude of hearts that do not beat as one try to live in a too close
contiguity. It was only when the inevitable third party appeared upon
the scene (as I think someone must have said) that Adam and Eve ceased
to be good, put on clothes, and hid themselves from the voice of the
Lord God walking in the garden. It is easy to be generous amongst trees
and grass and running water; one feels good 'neath the blue firmament on
the open earth; ghosts vanish that scent the morning air, and glow-worms
pale their uneffectual fire. For to everyone--I care not whether theist,
deist, or atheist--to everyone Nature instinctively, spontaneously,
proclaims herself an infinitely adorable Mystery. If there is anything
above and beyond the ephemeral and the fleeting; if there is somewhere
some immensity of Being, some source of All, would it not be well
sometimes to make haste and bow the head towards the earth and
worship?[61]
Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature
points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms
of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths,
they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great
pæan of Being that Nature chants. By them it is that we perceive "the
immense circulation of life which throbs in the ample bosom of Nature, a
life which surges from an invisible source and swells the veins of
this universe."[62] Through them it is that we detect the enormous
but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable
multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of
the wind in the pines--these are but notes in the divine diapason of
Life, of Life singing its cosmic song, unmindful who may hear.--Alas,
that so few hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!
INDEX
A
Abbott, Charles C., 13
Action, a struggle to overcome space and time, 131
Advertisements, hint as to taxing, 200
Alcohol, proper use of, 142 _et seq._
All, the, 129 _et seq._
Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 128;
quoted, 201, 202
Aphrodites, the two, 165
Appearance, something behind, 87
Arve, the river, 167
Autumn in Canada, 107 _et seq._
Autumn reveries, 29
Avebury, Lord, quoted, 185, 186
B
Bannock, the, 156
Beans, how to cook, 157, 158
Beauty, 110;
the appeal of, 164 _et seq._;
subjective character of, 165;
various kinds of, _ibid._;
Goethe on, 194;
Shelley on, 195
Being, the pæan of, 223 _et seq._;
immensity of, 225
Belloc, Hilaire, quoted, 151
Beverages, 142 _et seq._
Blood corpuscles, an analogy from, 93 _et seq._
Boots, 135
Borrow, George, 14;
quoted, 160, 161
Browning, Robert, quoted, 163, 164
Buckinghamshire, a walk in, 31 _et seq._
Burma, 15
Burroughs, John, 12;
quoted, 75, 76
Byways, English, 21 _et seq._
C
Calm, Matthew Arnold on, 77
Campbell, Professor W. W., quoted, 177
Canada, spring in, 45 _et seq._;
autumn in, 107 _et seq._;
53 _et seq._;
winter in, 59 _et seq._
Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 196, 197
Carpenter, Edward, 103;
quoted, 195, 196
Cattle, mountain, 172
Cave man, the, 138, 139
Cities, crowded populations of, 218 _et seq._
Civilisation a mixed boon, 216 _et seq._
Companion, an uncongenial, 113, 114
Conscience, 42 _et seq._
Cosmos, the, 93
Country, the, calming influence of, 127
D
Darwin, Charles, quoted, 170, 171
Death, a change, 95
De Quincey, Thomas, quoted, 199
Details, practical, 152 _et seq._
Dietary, the tramp's, 140 _et seq._
Downs, the Sussex, 25 _et seq._
Drama, a natural, 79 _et seq._
E
East, the fascination of the, 19
Emigration, 222
England, byways in, 22 _et seq._;
a spring morning in, 25 _et seq._
Enthusiasts, cautions for, 181 _et seq._
Euripides, quoted, 194
Evening walks, 78 _et seq._
Evil, origin of, 97 _et seq._
F
Fatigue, a fictitious, 148
Fire, the nomad, 137 _et seq._
Food, 140;
importance of, 149 _et seq._; 154 _et seq._;
details concerning, 153 _et seq._
G
Georgian Bay, the, 53
Glacial epoch, the, 138, 139
Goethe, quoted, 194
Golf and walking, 1 _et seq._;
indictments against, _ibid._;
vindication of, 2;
misapprehension concerning, 2, 3
Guérin, Eugénie de, quoted, 211
Guérin, Maurice de, quoted, 186, 187; 225, 226
H
Haig, Dr Alexander, 145
Harte, Bret, quoted, 159, 160
Hassocks, 25
Hearth, the, 137, 139
Hurstpierpoint, 25
I
Ideal, unrealisability of, 132
Impedimenta, 151
India, 17 _et seq._
Infinite, the, 128;
how that all things point to the, 188 _et seq._
Instincts, primitive, 162 _et seq._
J
Jefferies, Richard, 12;
quoted, 184, 185
K
Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 170
Kingston Road, the, 119, 120
Knapsack, contents of, 152 _et seq._
L
Landscape, the beauty of, 159 _et seq._
Life, a process, 37 _et seq._;
omnipresent, 42; 95;
an absolute, 96
Literature, modern, 218, 219
M
Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 12, 13
MacLane, Mary, quoted, 160
Meditations, evening, 78 _et seq._
Memories, cosmic, 162
Memory, idea of time dependent on, 92, 93
Milk, value of, 147
Milky Way, the, 56
Morning air, a steriliser, 210
Morning walk, an early, 205; 208
Morning walks, 72 _et seq._
Mountains, peacefulness of, 173, 174
Müller, Max, 112
Multiplicity, subjective character of, 95
Mystery, the, of nature, 39; 85;
Carlyle on, 196, 197
N
Nature, spirituality of, 34 _et seq._;
a universe of subsistences, 51;
unity of, 91; 93;
beauty of, 164 _et seq._;
man's primæval habitat, 171;
the language of, 193, 194;
companionship of, 213
Neo-Platonists, 90
Nilgiris, the, 17
O
"Oberland Chalet, An," quoted, 143
Ontario, lake, 118, 119
Otonabee, river, 48
P
Pantry, the antiquity of the, 155
Pascal, quoted, 101
Plato, quoted, 165
Plotinus, 89, 90
Poynings, village, 25
R
Reason, inadequacy of, 97;
and moral progress, 101, 102
Religious tenets, criterion of, 102
Responsibility, 96, 97
Rhône, the, 167
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, quoted, 202-204
Ruskin, John, quoted, 161; 220, 221
S
Salève, the Grand, 167 _et seq._
Savoie, Haute, 172
Science, 191
Seclusion, benefits of, 117
Self-consciousness, 217, 218
Sénancour, quoted, 161
Sense, a seventh, 186
Solar system, motion of, 176, 177
"Son of the Marshes, A," 13
Soul, the, 113
Space, subjective character of, 91; 95
Spirit of eternal things, the, 39, 85
Stayner, 53
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 14
Strife, universality of, 176