Time was when no good news made a journey, and no friend came near, but a
welcome was uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling feet of the
wayfarer or the herald. The feet, the feet were beautiful on the
mountains; their toil was the price of all communication, and their
reward the first service and refreshment. They were blessed and bathed;
they suffered, but they were friends with the earth; dews in grass at
morning, shallow rivers at noon, gave them coolness. They must have
grown hard upon their mountain paths, yet never so hard but they needed
and had the first pity and the readiest succour. It was never easy for
the feet of man to travel this earth, shod or unshod, and his feet are
delicate, like his colour.
If they suffered hardship once, they suffer privation now. Yet the feet
should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers,
freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else
about us. It is their calling; and the hands might be glad to be stroked
for a day by grass and struck by buttercups, as the feet are of those who
go barefoot; and the nostrils might be flattered to be, like them, so
long near moss. The face has only now and then, for a resting-while,
their privilege.
If our feet are now so severed from the natural ground, they have
inevitably lost life and strength by the separation. It is only the
entirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch a peasant who never wears
shoes, except for a few unkind hours once a week, and you may see the
play of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic as his
hands. Fresh as the air, brown with the light, and healthy from the
field, not used to darkness, not grown in prison, the foot of the
_contadino_ is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that is prim,
and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions, for it has forgotten
liberty. It is more active now than it lately was--certainly the foot of
woman is more active; but whether on the pedal or in the stirrup, or clad
for a walk, or armed for a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds.
It is, at any rate, inarticulate.
It has no longer a distinct and divided life, or none that is visible and
sensible. Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite
distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it were, with every
nerve, and the fingers are so separate that it was believed of them of
old that each one had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as
possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction: undone,
unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of indiscriminate life. It is as
though a landscape with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely
painted with the blank--blank, not simple--generalities of a vulgar hand.
Or as though one should take the pleasures of a day of happiness in a
wholesale fashion, not "turning the hours to moments," which joy can do
to the full as perfectly as pain.
The foot, with its articulations, is suppressed, and its language
confused. When Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin, and
her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove to deal with, not a
boot. Yet Amarantha's foot is as lovely as her hand. It, too, has a
"tender inward"; no wayfaring would ever make it look anything but
delicate; its arch seems too slight to carry her through a night of
dances; it does, in fact, but balance her. It is fit to cling to the
ground, but rather for springing than for rest.
And, doubtless, for man, woman, and child the tender, irregular,
sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little
surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an
architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing. It is a part of
vital design and has a history; and man does not go erect but at a price
of weariness and pain. How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for
nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked
foot.
Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season
amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is
naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heel
heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow.
The vintager is not heard among the vines, nor the harvester on his
threshing-floor of stone. There is a kind of simple stealth in their
coming and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes in and out of
the rows of harvest when you thought yourself alone. The lack of noise
in their movement sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter
floats.
But we shall not praise the "simple, sweet" and "earth-confiding feet"
enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for the time of song. If
Poetry was first divided by the march, and next varied by the dance, then
to the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought, the instruction,
and the dream that could not speak by prose. Out of that little physical
law, then, grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things we
know; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate test of the
thinker: "Is it accepted of Song?"
The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little trivial rules of
time and exactitude, not to be broken, laws that are made secure against
the restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificant
liberties--trivial laws to restrain from a trivial freedom. And within
the gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world of mystic
virtue. They enclose, they imply, they lock, they answer for it. Lesser
virtues may flower in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; but
infinite virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry,
and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell. It is no wonder that
every poet worthy the name has had a passion for metre, for the very
verse. To him the difficult fetter is the condition of an interior range
immeasurable.