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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