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                            WALKING ESSAYS




                            WALKING ESSAYS

                                  BY

                            A. H. SIDGWICK

                                LONDON
                             EDWARD ARNOLD
                                 1912

                         _All rights reserved_




            _DEDICATION_

            _COMITIBUS_


    _O you who walked the ways with me
      On hill and plain and hollow:
    I ask your pardon, frank and free,
      For all the things that follow.
    Let me at least make one thing clear;
      In these--I know no name for them--
    These dreary talks on futile themes,
    Dim visions from a dullards dreams,
      At least you take no blame for them._

    _You cheered my heart, made short the road,
      And kept me philanthropic;
    I only write this little ode
      Which desecrates the topic.
    You trode with me the mountain ridge
      And clove the cloud wreaths over it;
    I take the web of memories
    We wove beneath the summer skies
      And lo! the ink-spots cover it._

    _How vain my effort, how absurd,
      Considered as a symbol!
    How lame and dull the written word
      To you the swift and nimble!
    How alien to the walkers mind,
      Earth-deep, heaven-high, unfillable,
    These petty snarls and jests ill-laid
    And all the profitless parade
      Of pompous polysyllable!_

    _But yet, I feel, though weak my phrase,
      My rhetoric though rotten,
    At least our tale of Walks and Days
      Should not go unforgotten;
    At least some printed word should mark
      The walker and his wanderings,
    The strides which lay the miles behind
    And lap the contemplative mind
      In calm, unfathomed ponderings._

    _And one rebuke I need not fear
      From those of our profession,
    That Walking Essays should appear
      To be one long digression.
    Let others take the hard high-road
      And earn its gift, callosity:
    For us the path that twists at will
    Through wood and field, and up the hill
      In easy tortuosity._

    _Therefore, companions of the boot,
      Joint-heirs of wind and weather,
    In kindness take this little fruit
      Of all our walks together.
    For aught it has of wit or truth
      I reckon you my creditors;
    Its dulness, errors, want of taste,
    Inconsequence, may all be placed
      To my account, the editor’s._

    _And haply you skim the work
      In skilled eclectic hurry,
    Some word may find the place where lurk
      Your memories of Surrey;
    Or, as you read and doze and droop
      Well on the way to slumberland,
    Before you some dim shapes will float,
    Austere, magnificent, remote,
      Their Majesties of Cumberland._

    _Dream but awhile: and clouds will lift
      To show the peaks at muster,
    The driving shadows shape and shift
      Before the hill-wind’s bluster:
    Below far down the earth lies spread
      With all its care and fretfulness,
    But here the crumpled soul unfolds,
    And every rock-strewn gully holds
      The waters of Forgetfulness._

    _So dream; and through your dreams shall roll
      The rhythm of limbs free-striding,
    Which moulds your being to a whole
      And heals the worlds dividing;
    So dream, and you shall be a man
      Free on the open road again;
    So dream the long night through, and wake
    With better heart to rise and take
      The burden of your load again._




PREFATORY NOTES


1. I have to thank two friends, who read or listened to large portions
of this work, for their sympathy, long-suffering, and good advice, and
to acquit them of all further complicity.

2. I must also thank a fellow-walker, who, on Maundy Thursday of 1910,
as we climbed the road out of Marlborough into Savernake Forest,
suggested to me the magnificent quotation from Cicero which heads the
essay on Walking and Music.

3. I have stolen the substance of one epigram from an _obiter dictum_ in
‘My System for Ladies,’ by J. P. Müller; but it was too good to miss.

4. None of the remarks about beer apply to Munich beer.

A. H. S.

_August 1912._




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

      DEDICATION,                                                      v

   I. WALKING AND CONVERSATION,                                        3

  II. WALKER MILES,                                                   43

 III. WALKING AND MUSIC, WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING,                65

  IV. WALKING, SPORT AND ATHLETICS,                                  109

   V. WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM,                                      147

  VI. WALKING IN LITERATURE,                                         181

 VII. WALKING EQUIPMENT,                                             215

VIII. WALKING ALONE, WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING,            249

      EPILOGUE,                                                      273




I

WALKING AND CONVERSATION


‘The heavenly bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is
philosophy. If there’s a screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s
philosophy; and if there’s a screw loose in an earthly body, that’s
philosophy too; or it may be that sometimes there’s a little metaphysics
in it, but that’s not often. Philosophy’s the chap for me.’




I

WALKING AND CONVERSATION


About the year 1887 there was still in existence a nursery joke:--

    ‘King Charles walked and talked;
     Half an hour after his head was cut off.’

This, pronounced as a consecutive sentence, gave the infant mind its
first experience of paradox. At the time we thought it funny. Later on,
in the last decade of Victorianism, when we were struggling with ‘post,’
‘postquam,’ and ‘postea,’ the joke appeared less funny. But later still,
in Edwardian times, a deep moral meaning began (as was customary in
those times) to appear underlying the joke. Take the two sentences as
they stand above: construe ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in their strict sense:
generalise King Charles: convert the ‘post hoc’ into a ‘propter hoc’;
and you will have a motto to which all good walkers will add ‘ὣς
ἀπόλοιτο....’

I do not mean, of course, that any or all forms of walking and talking
are incompatible. It is possible, simultaneously, to stroll and to
babble, to stroll and to talk, to walk and to babble. Strolling, the
mere reflex action of the legs, is compatible with that sustained and
coherent activity of the mind which alone deserves the name of talking.
Babbling, the corresponding reflex action of the mind, is equally
compatible with that supreme activity of the whole being which men call
walking. But the attempt so often made to combine real walking with real
talking is disastrous. Better the man who babbles and strolls, who
trails his feet across country and his tongue across commonplace, than
the man who tries to ventilate fundamental things while his body is
braced to the conquest of road and hill.

‘A Voice’ at this point says ‘Yes, but we are not all scorchers,’ and
thereby makes manifest a very common delusion. The Voice, and the body
of opinion which it represents, are convinced that the difference
between strolling and walking consists in the merely material point of
speed, and that walkers cannot talk because they are bent solely on
record-breaking, and have one eye ever on the milestones and one on the
stop-watch, and no attention to spare for anything else. This is a gross
and palpable error. Record-breaking is, of course, a possible form of
walking, and most of us have indulged in it at one time or another; it
is interesting, and sometimes even salutary, to abandon all higher
thoughts, and go for a record frankly and whole-heartedly. But to the
true walker this is only an occasional indulgence. Record-breaking is
ultimately a degrading and (literally) a brutalising pursuit. It is the
mere pitting of the brute animal powers against the brute inanimate
conditions of time and space. If we are to be men and not animals,
walking must be something more than a mere swing of the legs, and the
country something more than a colourless aliquantum of miles.
Record-breaking, if it becomes a habit, will be as a blight in the fair
garden of walking, as a sarrusophone in the pedestrian symphony.

A casual observation of true walkers no doubt lends some colour to the
Voice’s delusion. Walkers have generally an air of being intent upon the
business in hand: they do not (as explained below) talk much: and as a
mere matter of fact they generally walk at a good round pace. But their
pace is only accidental and subordinate to their main purpose. The full
swing of the legs, like all physical activities, is a fine thing in
itself, but it is merely physical. The great fact is that such an
activity leads more directly than others to that sense of intimacy with
air and sun and hills and green things, which is the walker’s ideal.
This sense of intimacy is not to be won by strolling; a man must do his
best with his body before the gates are opened to him.

Another Voice may here interject ‘Wordsworth’; but, with all reverence
and respect, I doubt if that great man ever was really an intimate of
his surroundings in the sense which I mean. With him it was a mystical
communion rather than an intimacy. He loved the country with a kind of
austere and detached benevolence; I doubt if he really felt its
idiosyncrasies like a friend. In his altitudes of thought there was
probably little perceptible difference when he climbed Loughrigg after
tea and when he took a whole day over the Langdale Pikes and Serjeant
Man (if he ever did). Like the God of Aristotle, he experienced a single
and continuous pleasure, instead of the infinitely varied and minutely
individualised feelings of the ordinary walker. And the reason, I think,
was simply that he was not, in the true sense, a walker. He records
expeditions, of course, but these were generally made with his wife and
sister, which in the then state of feminine development would give
little chance of walking. There is no evidence that he ever laid his
body at full stretch to the conquest of a mountain; hence they were to
him merely mountains, full of general sublimities, and not individuals,
each with its own idiosyncrasy, full of the variety and interest which
are the staple food of friendship. His higher faculties, in short,
operated abstractedly; he missed that concrete body of feeling to which
even you and I can attain by ministering to the soul through the body.
It is a great thing, no doubt, to be catholic, to feel the same
immensities on Silver Howe as on the Great Gable; but there is something
to be said for the humbler lot of the ordinary walker, who, if he misses
the immensities on Silver Howe, yet gains that sudden jump and uplifting
of his whole being as he approaches Esk Hause from the south-east,
leaving behind the soft outlines and mere prettiness of the south, and
on an instant lifts his head into a world of gods and giants.

The attainment of such a feeling requires a certain receptivity and even
passivity of mind. You cannot grasp the character of country by a
conscious effort of discursive reason; all you can do is to set your
body fairly to its task, and to leave the intimate character of your
surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by
the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk,
the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible
influences of sense. You must lay aside for the time being that formal
and conscious reasoning which (you fondly think) gives you your
distinctiveness and individuality in ordinary life; you must win back to
deeper and commoner things: you must become mere man upon the face of
your mother earth. Only in a state of humility and simplicity, with all
views and arguments and chains of reasoning--all, in fact, that divides
man from man--laid aside and utterly forsworn, can you enter the great
democracy of walkers.

       *       *       *       *       *

Which things being prefaced, the utter incompatibility of walking and
talking needs no further demonstration, but only (what walkers much
prefer) dogmatic reiteration. Talking requires a definite activity of
the mind: walking demands passivity. Talking tends to make men aware of
their differences; walking rests on their identity. Talking may be the
same on a fine day or on a wet day, in spring or autumn, on Snowdon or
Leith Hill; walking varies according to each and every one of these
conditions. In a word, when you can paste a photograph on to the middle
of an Old Master, or set a gramophone going in an orchestra, then, and
not till then, can you walk and talk simultaneously.

Those who try to combine the two usually fail to achieve either.
Sometimes, of course, a talker may be tamed: if securely buttressed by a
large company of walkers, he may be subdued by a judicious mixture of
silence, irrelevance, or frivolity; or he may be carried along at such a
pace that he is reduced to voicelessness, if not to a proper state of
quiescent reverence. But usually a single talker in a walking company
will infect the whole; he will provoke them to argument and disputation;
he will expose the inmost parts of his soul and gradually allure them to
a like indecency. In such a case walking goes by the board; the company
either loiters and trails in clenched controversy, or, what is worse
sacrilege, strides blindly across country like a herd of animals,
recking little of whence they come or whither they are going,
desecrating the face of nature with sophism and inference and authority
and regurgitated Blue Book. At the end of such a day, what have they
profited? Their gross and perishable physical frames may have been
refreshed: their less gross but equally perishable minds may have been
exercised: but what of their immortal being? It has been starved between
the blind swing of the legs below and the fruitless flickering of the
mind above, instead of receiving, through the agency of a quiet mind and
a co-ordinated body, the gentle nutriment which is its due.

If, then, we are to walk, the talker should be eliminated before
starting. But this does not mean that our walk will be a silent one.
There are many forms of utterance besides talking, strictly so called;
and nearly all of these are possible and even desirable concomitants of
walking. Thus, there is the simple and natural babble of the first few
miles, while the body is settling down to work: the intellect,