Chapter II: Part 2

The mention of straight lines suggests one of the most difficult of walking questions, namely the functions and limitations of trespassing. There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘Private,’ in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent. There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights-of-way, of the organised piracy upon the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one little pebble on our own account, if only for old sake’s sake, at the forehead of Goliath. But like other unregenerate impulses, this carries its punishment with it. To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this--like the twin passion for short-cuts as ends in themselves--is disastrous to walking. It may rest on a mere natural love for law-breaking: it may--and often does--rest on higher and deeply considered motives; but in either case it is an alien element in the commonwealth of walking.

Trespassing on high moral grounds has the further disadvantage that it leads to meticulous hair-splitting. I know walkers who think it right to trespass on the grounds of a large landowner, but not on those of a small landowner. They consequently draw a line at five acres or so, and have to consider, whenever trespassing is proposed, on which side of the line the field of action lies. Under conditions of urgency--the only conditions which unquestionably justify trespassing--there is little time for such refinements of casuistry, and as a matter of fact moral considerations usually go by the board in any real crisis. I have myself seen one of the most fervent upholders of the five-acre doctrine open the gate of a blameless householder at Caterham, walk down his ten-foot garden path, climb his back-fence, and so issue on to a private golf-links.

There are practical disadvantages, too, in the way of the hardened trespasser. Sooner or later, at the end of his trespassing, waits Nemesis for him--the keeper, flanked by dogs and fortified by a gun, purple-faced in hate of a wrong not his, ingeminating the awkward question, ‘Did you see the notice-boards or did you not?’ And there follows the mean and abject retreat to the nearest road, with the vision of the landed aristocracy calm and triumphant.

And there are deeper reasons which make trespassing for its own sake a passion unworthy of a walker. The desire to affront the landed aristocracy is just one of those disconnected and abstract impulses which walking should mould and settle into the structure of larger thought. He who walks over English country in a proper and receptive frame of mind must catch something of its spirit, of the age-long order of possession. It is not only the voice of the keeper and landowner that is lifted against the casual trespasser: it is the voice of a long tradition, a settled convention, the voice, in a sense, of the country itself. The force which settled the forms of wood and field and hedgerow, which fixed the very conditions of our walking, is the same force which (dimly comprehended) pulsates in the breast of the indignant keeper and hardens the faces of the ‘Private’ notice-boards against us. In the concrete imagination of the practised walker such a force must have its due place; and, beside it, the vague and abstract love of trespassing is but a shadowy phantom of to-day.

But if we can respect the rights of others, we can also respect our own; and it is here that Walker Miles is at once our prophet and our guide. As ancient as the fields themselves, as securely based upon the ages and sanctified by the use of our fathers, the footpaths and field-tracks stand as the living embodiment of popular rights. Beside the way which the feet of generations have worn to church or inn, the loftiest dwellings and widest parks are mere parvenus. If the trespasser wishes to commit an act of symbolic defiance against the landed aristocracy, he need not climb their fences or jump through their flower-beds: he can tread the right-of-way which existed before they were thought of, which conditioned the laying out of their estates, which often cuts clean through their property with all the contempt of an oak for a mushroom. Some rights-of-way may have been lost to us, in the manner mentioned above; but many yet remain which the Romans trod, and the Saxons trod, and our later ancestors trod; and all the forces of darkness have not prevailed against them.

The preservation of commons and footpaths has now passed into the hands of a great and beneficent society; Pompeius has set sail on the Mediterranean, and the pirates have been subdued. But there is no surer guard for our rights than a steady and regular patrolling of our possessions; and in this Walker Miles is a safe guide. He is a master of all the tricks by which the public is at present cheated, all the last desperate devices of defeated piracy. The locked gate of the farmyard, the ‘Trespassers’ board planted by the stile within a foot of the path, the track which appears to lead up to the doors of a private house--all these figure in his stately prelude, and are exemplified again and again in the course of his works. Following in his steps we need fear no keeper: and if ever a bar or board stand in our way we can disregard it. Beside one of the Oxted paths there lie (or lay) the shattered remains of a notice-board which some usurper had planted in the very centre of the way. I can claim no credit for its destruction, for by the time I came there was in truth very little destroying left to be done; but I like to think of that unknown devotee of Walker Miles, pursuing his placid way, faced suddenly by the intruder, and with one splendid motion laying it low and (as far as could be judged) jumping on it afterwards.

* * * * *

The style of Walker Miles is perhaps an acquired taste. He wrote under peculiar conditions: he had to be at once clear and compendious, that the careless walker might not miss his way nor the weakling stagger under the weight of a large volume. He had thus little use for rhetorical tropes and flourishes; his words had to be cut down to the bare minimum necessary to express his meaning. But, to the initiated, this rigorous conciseness lends his style a peculiar value: every word has its appointed function: we feel that we could not sacrifice a single line; nay, those who have unintentionally done so by skipping a few lines in the middle of the page have regretted it when the subsequent directions became unintelligible. And the fact--also necessitated by his conditions--that most of the verbs are in the imperative mood exercises a singular charm; we feel that the author is in an intimate relation with us, addressing us personally and not merely discoursing from afar.

As a sample of his style, I take a section of the walk from Leith Hill to Felday.

‘Another lane is soon reached. Cross this lane, and take the
opposite path uphill towards the entrance-gate of the approach-road
to Highashes-farm. Pass through this gateway, and upon reaching the
first outhouse, note a wicket gate on the left. Pass through it and
follow the track downhill between banks. Upon coming out upon an
open path through the wood, still keep straight ahead along the
hillside, with a copse overhead on the right, and a grand
larch-wood below on the left. In another quarter-of-a-mile the
SEVENTEENTH MILE point will be reached and then for half-a-mile
further the path still continues easily up and down the picturesque
undulations of the wood.’

Within the compass of six sentences we have traversed perhaps the most wonderful mile in all the author’s works. The uninformed may regard the passage as dull, but to those who know their Walker Miles, and above all to those who know the Highashes Farm bridle-path, there is more meaning in these simple words than in all the laboured enthusiasms of a guide-book or a local-colour novelist. In the whole passage there are but two descriptive epithets, and these of the most temperate kind; but both their rarity and their temperance give to the epithets of Walker Miles a special value: he only uses them when there is something which deserves epithet. As the short and businesslike sentences pass before us in ordered succession, we may fairly recall another author who knew how to gain vividness by sacrificing ornament; we catch again something of the quick, uplifting stringendo of Thucydides.

Works of reference are traditionally the butts for small wit; and it is possible that as Walker Miles becomes more widely known a legend will spring up that his directions are obscure, like the sister legend, fostered by dying or dead humourists, that Bradshaw is unintelligible. The Bradshaw myth has by now got some footing, and it will take a few generations of increasing good sense to kill it; but it may be hoped that all walkers will combine to strangle any embryo Walker Miles legend at birth. If a man knows the four points of the compass, can distinguish between his right hand and his left, and (occasionally) can recognise a holly or an oak, he has all the equipment necessary for understanding Walker Miles. I have followed his directions now for some years, and have only come to grief from my own carelessness, or from actual changes in the country which have made his directions out of date. Now and then the course of a footpath has been altered: for example, the Highashes Farm track now debouches not into the Felday road, but into the cross-road to Abinger, so that one turns to the left instead of the right. Here and there, too, a stile has been removed or a gate has become a gap. But the great bulk of Walker Miles is still accurate, and none but a fool need go astray.

Under which term I include, with the deepest respect, betrothed couples: in the honourable and Shakesperean sense they are fools, being too much occupied with supramundane things to be able to attend properly to the business in hand. It was my good fortune one Whit-Monday to overtake two such couples on a Walker Miles track, both with the master’s work in hand and both somewhat puzzled as to his meaning; but I was able to set both right by precept and example, and I trust that there are now two happy homes where Walker Miles stands in the place of honour in the front-parlour, ousting East Lynne and the other customary household gods. There is also a story about a minister of state, but that has nothing to do with Walker Miles.

Useful, accurate, concise, intelligible--it is no light thing to be able to predicate these qualities without reservation of a man’s work: and I doubt if he himself would have desired further praise. There is no trace of trumpet-blowing in his writings: indeed, he leaves the reader in doubt whether he himself realised the full measure of his achievements. ‘Though the main roads to Leith Hill,’ he says, ‘are perhaps some of the most charming in the country, it is, nevertheless, strange how few except thorough-going ramblers know of any other routes. The five following rambles will, therefore, it is to be hoped, find favour with those who like to get off the “beaten track.” They are all different, both going and returning, and are of varying lengths, as will be seen by reference to page 65.’ In this masterpiece of understatement it is difficult to know whether a smile of Socratic irony is not lurking on the master’s lips, waiting the answering smile of the disciple who understands. Where another would have let loose the big trumpet of the ‘Exegi monumentum’ timbre, he merely states the fact. ‘They are all different, both going and returning.’

He himself has gone to return no more, and only his works remain. But I like to think that somewhere on the Elysian plain, where prophet and hero and poet tread together down the well-worn paths, a single figure quests somewhat aside, writing words of gold upon an ivory tablet as he goes. ‘Continuing on past the Happy Groves take the well-marked track to the right, but at the third clump of asphodel, note a grassy track diverging to the left, and follow this until it leads into an open space covered with amaranth and moly.’

III

WALKING AND MUSIC

WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING

Saltatorem appellat L. Murenam Cato. Maledictum est, si vere obiicitur, vehementis accusatoris; sin falso, maledici conviciatoris. Quare cum ista sis auctoritate, non debes, M. Cato, arripere maledictum ex trivio ... neque temere consulem populi Romani saltatorem vocare; sed conspicere, quibus praeterea vitiis affectum esse necesse sit eum, cui vere istud obiici potest. Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.

CIC. _Pro Mur._ vi. 13.

The waltzer is characterized by great delicacy and stupidity. The death-rate is higher amongst them than amongst ordinary tame mice.... A waltzer cannot escape; it cannot keep up a run in a direct line for long, and soon lapses into spinning.

A. D. DARBISHIRE,
_Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery_, pp. 85-6.

III

WALKING AND MUSIC

WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING

The poet Juvenal in a well-known line remarked that the penniless traveller (or walker) will sing within earshot of a robber. In modern times the picture has rather lost its poignancy, since robbers have deserted our highroads and content themselves with organising bazaars; but the significant conjunction of the words ‘Cantabit’ and ‘viator’ remains. To sing, hum, burble, whistle or generally adumbrate music is at once the distinction and the pride, the duty and the pleasure, of walkers. Under the influence of a fine day and a pleasant country the voiceless and tone-deaf have been known to emit sounds coming well within the orchestral range (interpreted liberally and so as to include the instruments of percussion), while the most moderately and modestly musical of men become on a walk encyclopaedic in their range of melody and Protean in their variety of tone-colour. There is surely some natural kinship between walking and music; the musical terms--andante, movement, accompaniment--are full of suggestive metaphor; and the sacred symbol of both arts is the wooden stick which marks the strides of the walker and pulsates to the heart-beats of the orchestra.

The most obvious ground for this kinship is rhythm. The simple beat of the foot on the ground, with the natural swing of the body above it, suggests inevitably the beat of the musical bar. It is difficult to walk for long under the sway of that regular ‘one, two, one, two’ without fitting a melody to it; it is even more difficult to hear a melody played or sung when walking without dropping instinctively into its rhythm. A London crowd, that most apathetic of masses, begins to march in unison when a barrel-organ strikes up the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ or the Intermezzo of Mascagni or some other item from the repertory of mechanical music; and if ever you wish to deride, contemn, trample on and spiritually triumph over a tune (which happens to all of us sometimes), there is nothing more satisfying than to walk past the band or gramophone from whence it issues at a step cutting clean across its rhythm. Had the Sirens lived on land, Odysseus would have needed no wax in his ears; he could have waited till they began their incantation (in A flat, three-four time, sixty bars to the minute, lusingando), and then walked by at a brisk step, matched to a breezy anapaestic song or to the incomparable rhythm of his own hexameters.

The simple foot-beat is undoubtedly a potent link between walkers and music; I doubt, however, if it is the only or the chief ground of their musical susceptibility. There are other activities besides walking which have a regular and emphatic rhythm, and yet are not markedly associated with music. Some of these will be treated in more detail later; here it will suffice to mention carpet-beating, the treadmill, and bicycling. The cause is no doubt partly physiological; the carpet-beater and the felon operate in awkward positions, while the bicyclist, even if he does not stoop over his handle-bars and so cramp his lungs, has a current of air in his face which parches his throat and impedes the flexibility of his whistle. The same applies even more forcibly to motorists, were it possible to conceive them as in any relation to music or as fit for anything but treasons, stratagems and spoils--the stratagems being conceived, and the spoils exacted, by the police.

A more potent reason, I think, is the actual bodily condition of a walker, that perfect harmony which comes of a frame well occupied. The carpet-beater operates from the waist upwards, his lower half being as irrelevant as that of a stranded mermaid; the bicyclist forswears his birthright by allying himself to a machine. But the walker is an organism, and therefore a fit vehicle for music. And this inner fitness is matched by the merely material conditions of the walker’s physique. His bodily habit is the right one for singing--for the exercise of the vocal mechanism irrespective of the kind of music produced. A good walker means an instrument in good condition, with a wide compass and a ripe quality of tone. That high A after which you strive at other times with tears and sweat comes without effort; you make trees and the mountain tops that freeze bow their heads with notes which at other times would merely make the accompanist blench; your runs sound like a bird soaring into the empyrean and not like a lame man going upstairs; your trill is at last a trill, clearly distinguishable from a yodel. And when the day is done, what singing is there like that of a walker in his bath?

* * * * *

These two facts, the natural beat of the foot and the bodily exhilaration of walking, account for a good many of the ordinary walking songs, the cheerful melodies of simple rhythm, which recall a flagging company to courage and unison. Chief of these is the famous ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.’ Tradition dictates that this must be sung on the principle of cumulative omission--the first verse in full, the second without the word ‘grave,’ the third without ‘his grave’ and so on, the blanks being filled by beats of the foot. Thus in the last verse but one, the first three lines consists only of the word ‘John’ and seven foot-beats, thrice repeated; while in the last verse of all there are twenty-three beats in complete silence, until the whole company comes in on the words, ‘But his soul goes marching on.’ It is a point of honour to count these beats and the pause preceding them exactly right, so as to get a unanimous attack with no false starts. For reviving the attention and good feeling of a tired company, there is nothing like John Brown; and, it may be mentioned, it will carry them over 576 paces if ‘a-mouldering’ is reckoned one word, or 640 if it is reckoned two, as the more orthodox hold.

Walkers may be thought perverse in making a fetish of a song like ‘John Brown’--which is in origin, I suppose, a threnody on the death of an eminent man--when there lies ready to hand such a store of specifically walking tunes. I allude, of course, to that ancient and well-established form of music, the March. There is no age of man which has not had its marches, whether it called them anapaests or war-songs or what not. Further, the feelings which marches express are wide in range and highly impressive in character. Military glory, religious pomp, state ceremonial, weddings and funerals--all these have their appropriate setting in the march rhythm. Or, in other words, when man celebrates his greatest achievements or his highest aspirations, when he makes the big adventure of his life or the greater adventure of his death, the most natural and human expression of feeling is to walk to the strains of music. Marching, in short, is the epic form of walking, and march tunes are the epics of music--the formal embodiments of communal feeling on the great occasions of life.

But communal feeling is not the whole of life, and marching is not the only, nor indeed the best, form of walking. Marching presupposes a disciplined company and a hard road; it reduces all to the measure of the least, resulting in that cramped and debased form of motion known as the military ‘stride’; rhythmically, it over-emphasises the beat of the foot and neglects the other elements in the walking motion. In the same way, marching tunes seem often to win their popularity at the expense of their quality, and to border on dulness, if not triviality. To say that marches express the great moments of life is perhaps inaccurate; strictly they deal not with the feelings of the hero or king or priest or corpse or bridegroom, but with the feelings of the bystanders about these feelings. Now it is a regrettable fact that ordinary men on ceremonial occasions tend to take a slightly superficial view of the proceedings. I doubt if the _Cives Romani_ assembled at a triumph thought about the imperial greatness of Rome so much as the fit of the proconsul’s cloak, the personal appearance of the chained captives, or the chances of a stampede among the elephants. Similarly at a wedding, the linked destinies of two young lives, the eternal vows flung out by the unquenchable courage of man across the unsubstantial hazard of futurity, are not, as a rule, the first and only preoccupation of the guests. Hence it comes that the most popular march tunes have often a suggestion of artificiality or even insincerity. The orthodox Wedding March is deliberately artificial; it was written to represent--and does most exquisitely represent--the wedding of six semi-mythical lovers seen through the glamour of the fairy-haunted forest of midsummer: it is somewhat out of place at a decorous union of citizens. Similarly, of the three popular Funeral Marches, one is tinged with decorative pomposity, and one with Little Nell; only one casts over the hearer the very shadow of death.

However this may be, in actual fact the walker on the hills, alone or with a few companions, has little to do with marches. His rhythm is not a bare ‘one, two, one, two’; it is a long swing from the hips to which the whole body sways, a complex of stresses in which the foot-beats only mark the periods. And his feeling is not that of a crowd at a show: it is something deeper, more contemplative, more individual, a function of many variables, of himself, what he is, what he does, of last week, last month, to-day, the face of the country, the influence of sun and wind. And the music which he craves as his counterpart--nay, the music which he actually hums or sings or whistles--is rarely the music of the march.

What it is may be disputed. At one time or another I have heard nearly every kind of tune sounding to the steps of a walker. Wagner and Purcell, Sullivan and Anon, symphony and opera, tone-poem and folk-song--nothing (with one exception) seems to come amiss to a walking company. And from this very large and variegated body of music one most remarkable fact emerges--namely, that nearly every kind of rhythm can, at some time or other, be accommodated to the walking stride. Regarding man as a biped, naturally inclined to ‘lead’ with one foot rather than the other (generally the left), you would say that even rhythms with two or four beats to the bar would suit him best; and perhaps (in the lowest sense of ‘nature’ as the starting point and not the finishing post) the natural rhythm of walking is the ‘one, two, one, two.’ But man is more than a biped; and if he likes a tune with three or five beats to the bar (or seven or eleven for that matter), he is quite capable of stepping accordingly, and of either ‘leading’ with each foot alternately, or of overlooking altogether the difference between the natural stresses of his feet. Further, as regards the three-time rhythms, many of them go quick, so that only one foot-beat is needed in each bar; and there is the incomparable six-eight, of which more will be said in the sequel.

At this point the scandalised mathematician inquires, What becomes of the tempo? Is not the effect of walking on music purely Procrustean? A walker (let us say) takes two strides to a second; in order to suit his steps, a tune in even time must go at a particular rate, selected from the following schedule, to wit, (_a_) two bars to a second, with one foot-beat in each bar; (_b_) one bar to a second, with two beats in each bar; (_c_) one bar to two seconds, with four beats to each bar; for practical purposes we need not go beyond this point. For the three-times, there is an even more sharply divided scale, viz. (_a_) two bars to a second, one beat to each bar; (_b_) one bar to a second and a half, three beats to each bar; (_c_) one bar to three seconds, six beats to each bar. What, asks the mathematician, happens to the tunes whose proper pace falls, let us say, between (_a_) and (_b_): must they either be drawn out languorously to fit (_b_), or feverishly accelerated to fit (_a_)?

The answer to the mathematician’s question is that in practice no difficulty arises. In the first place, a walker’s rate of stride varies to some extent according as he is going uphill or downhill, on grass, rock, or road. Secondly, a little licence may surely be claimed by a walker in varying the orthodox tempo. After all, even conductors do this sometimes; and if one tune has to go a little quicker than an orchestra takes it, another will have to go a little slower, which is (I understand) only a slight extension of what the musicians call ‘rubato.’ Thirdly, and as a minor point, we may set against any possible disadvantages the peculiarly fine effects which the walker obtains in augmentation, when he whistles a tune with one step to a bar and repeats it with two steps to a bar. Finally, it is only in the three-times, between (_a_) and (_b_), that the matter becomes at all serious, (_b_) being one-third of the rate of (_a_). Now, it is a curious fact, that all the good three-time tunes (to speak broadly) fall quite easily under either (_a_) or (_b_). Cheerful songs and jigs and scherzos and most six-eight tunes go naturally with one step to each group of three notes, the swing of the body marking the weak stresses; more solemn themes, funereal folk-songs, the Unfinished Symphony, the last movement of the ‘Pathétique,’ and the Tristan prelude go naturally with three steps to a group of three notes; the Pilgrims’ March takes six, with complicated cross-accents when the ‘pulse of life’ begins. The intermediate class of three-times, between (_a_) and (_b_), taking about one second or two strides to a bar, and therefore cutting across the walking rhythm, are generally waltz tunes, which no one in his senses wants to sing on a walk.

If the mathematician still persists, we can silence him by remarking that in any case the tempo is not the most vital point in walking tunes. If all that we desired were a measure to suit our steps, ‘John Brown’s body’ and the ‘Dead March’ would be enough. The real thing which matters is not the tempo but the character of a tune. Nothing proves the stuff of a tune so surely as to sing it on a walk; music which can stand this test must have some real substance in it. The walker need go through no conscious process of judging, accepting, refusing; let him merely walk, with his mind ranging at large and a tune sounding on his lips or working unuttered in the inward ear, which is the joy of solitude; without his knowing it the assize will be held and judgment pronounced. The shoddy sentimental phrase, which sounded so alluring at 11.30 p.m. yesterday among the potted palms in the conservatory, turns thin and sour by day on the ruminant palate of the walker. The theme which sounded hard and obscure takes on a new meaning as it pulsates to the rhythm of the stride: obscurity reveals hidden purposes and possibilities of melody; hardness becomes strength; and the whole sinks gradually into the inner parts of the walker’s consciousness where music abides beside the springs of thought and action.

Songs and marches are good, no doubt, and ‘John Brown’s body’ is a strong staff in moments of fatigue; but better than these, and nearer to the spirit of walking, are the great themes, the structural tunes which uphold the fabric of symphony or opera. For the mood of a man as he walks is thematic; there are certain main currents of thought in his head, clear and distinct at first, which have to be developed and interwoven and combined and contrasted and turned upside down before they can be restated with all the added volume of meaning they have acquired in the process, or finally summarised and emphasised in the coda (after tea). His thoughts are not homogeneous, self-contained wholes like those of ordinary life which issue in words and actions; they are shifting and variable, moving continuously, and continuously changing; they dwell in a region apart from the world of action and experience, though related to it and coloured by it. Hence the music to which they naturally adapt themselves is not the definite tune with a beginning, a middle, and an end; it is rather the theme, which has no fixed form, but develops and germinates and changes its colour and shape, and reveals itself only through varied manifestations. So a man may whistle a theme when he starts in the morning, forget all about it as he sinks into the contemplation of walking, and yet find at evening that all the day it has been working in the fabric of his thought; and when next he hears it on an orchestra it will come to him with an added richness of meaning, with a suggestion of the wind in his ears, the shower on his face, and a large contemplation enwrapping him.

It is on the mood which walking induces, rather than on the rhythmical character itself, that the affinity between walking and music mainly rests. There are other bodily activities besides walking which have a rhythm, some a much more marked and interesting rhythm; and yet these are not usually accompanied by music, and do not seem to feel the need of it. Eminent among these are the two very noble rhythms of a hurdler and of a racing crew. In an actual hurdle race there are possibly difficulties in the way of musical accompaniment: the competitors generally move at different speeds (or it would not be a race); and the tune in any case would have to be a short one, lasting about sixteen seconds. But a rowing crew has necessarily a uniform and well-marked rhythm, and can continue its activity for a considerable time: _prima facie_, it would form a fine subject for a descriptive tone-poem in the modern style, the orchestra including rattles, a pistol, a bell, and a bass tuba (the coach), the roar of the crowd and the swish of the aeroplanes forming ‘colour,’ with the steady rowing rhythm proceeding underneath. And yet, as far as I know, this tone-poem has not been written. The nearest approach that has yet been made to the rowing rhythm is the ’cello theme in the Unfinished Symphony; but the rest of the movement is hardly in keeping. The Eton Boating Song, whatever its other merits, is a complete failure as a picture of rowing; it suggests much more forcibly what happens after the race. The fact is, that the rower’s mood is not, like the walker’s, a musical one: it is too practical, too mechanical, too much bound down by time and space; it lacks the large speculative outlook which calls for music as its natural counterpart.

* * * * *

The same criticism applies even more strongly to another form of bodily motion, namely dancing. _Prima facie_, it would appear that in relation to music, dancing is first of the bodily activities and the rest nowhere. Dancing is, in theory, the pure embodiment of music in motion; walking is an activity primarily directed to other ends, and only accidentally associated with music. However much the walker may appreciate music, however thematic the structure of his mood, he has to be getting along; whereas the dancer has no such locomotive limitations,[1] but can stop or stand on one leg, or go round in circles, or do anything else which appears suitable to the character of the music which inspires him. Further, the dancer has his band, or at least his piano or harmonium, tangible and within earshot; the walker nearly always has to produce or imagine his music for himself. Any appreciation, therefore, of music which the walker can achieve by suiting his steps to it, would seem but a pale shadow of the dancer’s rapture, as he flings himself, unhampered by any other thought, into the intoxicating whirl of the waltz.

But this by no means exhausts the superiorities of dancing, considered as a purely artistic form of motion. Dancing contains or admits of artistic elements of which walking knows little or nothing. One of these is figure; whereas the walker is bound to move along a more or less straight line, the dancer can move in circles or squares or ellipses and can thus employ all the resources of decorative art. Second, and more important, is the fact that dancing can be concerted; the individual dancers can move in correlative or supplementary motions forming one rhythmic system. The best rhythmic unity which walkers can hope for is a mere unison of stride and step. But the unity of dancers’ movements can be organic--a harmony, a unity of differing elements, a type of the perfect man or the perfect state. A concrete presentation of the ideal, aided by all the resources of bodily grace, music, and decorative art--such, in short, is the essential character of dancing; and beside it walking cuts a very poor figure.

Imagination boggles at the ultimate possibilities of dancing. Far back in the dim and unenlightened past, the dance on the shield of Achilles seems wonderful enough--the wreathed maidens of costly wooing and the youths in well-woven doublets, their hands on each other’s wrists, speeding in lines and circles, while a divine minstrel (who, I regret to observe from the brackets, is textually under suspicion) made music on his lyre. And this is only Homeric dancing, and the centuries that have elapsed since the lamented death of the author have seen one continual process of development in all the elements involved in dancing, most of all in music. Youths and maidens could dance nowadays in figures subtler than the line and circle, to music other than the simple melody of the lyre. We might have--indeed to some extent we have--recital-dances by a single performer. We might have chamber-music dances--four or five trained and expert athletes mingling and intertwining in figures growing more complicated and with motions less classical as the music grows later in date. We might have concerto-dances with a single supreme performer whose motions are accompanied and enforced by others. We might have symphony-dances--a systematised performance in elaborate figures, with a definite motion by a group of dancers to represent each theme, modified in the development section, repeated in the recapitulation, returning emphasised and strengthened in the coda. Lastly, we might have an intoxicated riot on no particular plan and call it a dream-phantasy. Before such conceptions the walker can only call attention humbly to the rhythmic elements in his own craft, and pass on with bowed and reverent head.

And then, as Xanthias says after Dionysus’ News from the Front, ‘I woke up.’ We look round the actual world for this realisation of the rhythmic ideal, and what do we find? Thirty couples waltzing, in inadequate space, at a late hour, in a vitiated atmosphere, to the tune of the ‘Merry Widow.’[2] Where are the complex and concerted figures? Where are the trained and exquisite movements? Where are the subtleties and varieties of rhythm? The figure is rotatory, roughly elliptical, varied by collisions and pauses for breath. The bulk of the dancers plainly do not know what training is. The rhythm is as varied as that of a clock and much less subtle than that of a motor-omnibus. The dancers are talking instead of attending to business; the atmosphere reminds one of the Thames Valley on a November afternoon; the thermometer is at 72°; the tune makes one ill. Something very serious seems to have happened to that conclusive _prima facie_ argument which we presented so faithfully above.

The hygiene of dancing and the physical conditions of dancers are very interesting subjects, and have, I think, a close connection with dance music; but for the present let us pass them by and take only the essential points. The outstanding fact is the progressive limitation of dancing to one form and one rhythm. Evidence on such a matter is hard to collect, for there is little in the way of printed record; but I can speak with first-hand knowledge of a provincial culture of the late ’nineties, which is probably a fair equivalent of the metropolitan culture of the early ’nineties. In this culture there were several forms of dance, now completely extinct, which, although of a low grade anthropologically, contained at least the rudiments of higher things. There were concerted dances--with a perceptible figure--the Swedish dance, Sir Roger de Coverley, and, relatively a masterpiece of ingenuity, the Lancers. They were not much as dances; their figures were still at the lowest level of geometrical art and could have been executed with a ruler and compasses; their organisation demanded, without overstraining, the intelligence of a normal child of eight. (The Grand Chain in the Lancers perhaps required a little more and formed a beautiful moral analogue, since its success depended not on the most but on the least capable person present, with the result that it often broke down.) Still, with all their futility, these dances contained the elements of organisation and figure. Where are those elements now?

It was the same with rhythm; our culture was low, but had its possibilities. There was a form of motion, somewhere on the confines of dancing and jumping, called the Galop--a series of wild rotatory leaps or shuffles, which would have made a cannibal war-dance appear relatively dignified or even sophisticated, but formed no mean test of wind and limb. There was that daring rhythmic variety, the Polka, which even had dotted notes, with a neat anacrustic jump on the quaver following. There was a further reach of human enterprise into triplets, called the Pas de Quatre, with an inspiriting high kick. And there were various barbarisms from America and elsewhere to remind us that there are depths below depths. I have no wish to champion these relics, still less to advocate their restoration; but over their dishonoured grave it is only fair to remark that they were distinct varieties of rhythm, and pointed the way to further developments. That way is now closed.

* * * * *

For what have we now? My evidence for the present century rests mainly on hearsay, but the witnesses are unanimous. The concerted dance is gone; the dance with a figure is gone; nearly all rhythmic varieties are gone, except one. There are, to be sure, occasional reversions to barbarism, which display some rhythmic variety, but these are ephemeral, relatively rare, and depend more on posture than on rhythm for their interest. If we view the 1902-1912 dance culture as a whole, there is no denying that the single staple form is the waltz--a plain homogeneous three-time rhythm, with no figure and no organisation, taken throughout at a uniform pace which is fixed annually at something approaching a bar to a second by the Congress of Incorporated Dance Musicians.

On its merits as a form of motion opinions are divided. For those who like it, the waltz is the supreme form of bodily motion, enshrining all grace and all rhythm, opening the doors of paradise and lifting the dancer to a rapt ecstasy of sense transcending the bounds of reason, or words to that effect. To those who dislike it, the waltz seems a singularly dull, monotonous and undistinguished form of rhythm, poles asunder from the clean movement of a free man. But whether good or bad, it is alone; there are no other dancing rhythms which need be seriously considered. So we reach this curious result, that while rowing, which has no relation to music, has produced at least three very interesting rhythms (the racing-stroke, the paddle, and the picnic-party), and while walking, which has on the physical side only a secondary relation to music, has produced at least four rhythms (the amble, the uphill, the downhill, the full stretch along the flat); dancing, which _is_ music in bodily form, has shrunk to one rhythm, and that one very simple, perfectly uniform and strictly limited in tempo.

To inquire how this has happened would carry us beyond even the liberal limits of this discussion. It may be another instance of sheer human perversity, or in other words, the instinct of other people to do what we don’t like. The waltz may be a concession to human weakness, figure and organisation and rhythmic variety having been found to overtax the intelligence of the normal dancer. Some would say that the real point is not so much the rhythm as the fact of dancing in couples--the romantic interest, in short. There is no time to examine this theory: I pause only to note its subtle suggestion of Victorian sentiment and even more of Victorian politics. The round dance thus represents society as an aggregation of mutually exclusive monogamic units, taking their independent way and avoiding each other as much as possible; the art of ball-room steering becomes the analogue of Mill on Liberty. The Homeric dance equally typifies a society organic in all its members; but I digress.

Whatever be the cause, the fact is clear, that for practical purposes dancing is reduced to the waltz. If so, what seemed _prima facie_ absurd--to admit walking to a comparison with dancing on artistic grounds--is clearly anything but unreasonable; the balance rather inclines the other way. On the point of rhythm, walking can beat dancing both in subtlety and variety; the other artistic elements, figure and organisation, which might give the superiority to dancing, have been thrown overboard. The unison of walkers is as much and as little a harmony as the unison of waltzers; the figure of a walk is, like the figure of a waltz, a plain line, with the difference that it is shaped not by four walls, a dais, benches, potted plants, and the possibilities of collision, but by the rise and fall of the ground, the accidents of rock and vegetation, the configuration of our mother earth and her waters. Dancing, by surrendering its other possibilities, falls to the level of walking; by concentrating on one rhythm, it sinks below.

Even so, the waltzer will reply, is not the comparison still, in spite of your sophistries, absurd? Does the walker with all his rhythmic variety achieve any real sympathy with music comparable to the rapture of waltzing? Does not the very concentration of dancing on this form mean that it is the one artistic motion, the one bodily movement which can really express music? The walker may be able to fit music to his steps, but it is a mere extrinsic connection; the waltzer moves _in_ music, and his soul is one with that of the waltz composer.

The waltzer has hit the real point. It is of little use to argue in the abstract about the merits of this or that rhythm; we must take rhythm and music together as a whole if we are to form any judgment about them; waltzing ultimately stands or falls by the character of the music it has inspired. What, then, of waltz music considered as a whole? We can at once concede this to the waltzer, that his music is something quite distinct and apart from the rest of music, unique both in rhythm and melody. The rhythm must, for practical reasons, be absolutely uniform--three notes to the bar, sixty odd bars to the minute, a strong accent on the first note of each bar marked either in the melody or the accompaniment, dotted notes being a rare luxury and syncopations and cross-accents even rarer. The character of the music is hard to describe in words, but in practice unmistakable: it is smooth and melodious, appealing strongly and at once to the senses, stimulating or intensifying rather than dilating the imagination; it is built generally on phrases of equal length, which should, if possible, imply or repeat each other so that they can carry the dancer along and ‘run in the head’ (like water), even when he is distracted by the heat, the unwonted exercise, and his partner’s conversation. In short, a waltz is ‘catchy’: and to anybody who has ever heard one, further description is superfluous.

Waltz music, then, as a whole, has a definite character of its own. The question follows: is it a good character? To discuss this necessarily involves offending some one; but to carry all parties along together a little further, let us note two points on which all will agree. The first is that in judging waltz music, dancers use a criterion which is not applied to other music. There are certain waltzes of the great masters in which they attempted to use the form for musical purposes; unfortunately, they most of them strayed into syncopations and irregular phrases, and failed to make their tunes sufficiently catchy; consequently they are rarely heard in the ball-room, and the dancer’s verdict on them is that they are very fine music, no doubt, but not good to waltz to. At the other end of the scale are certain waltzes, in fact quite a large number, which no one would attempt to defend seriously on musical grounds; the dancer’s verdict is that they are possibly not much as music, but are good to waltz to, and he proceeds to wallow in them. Thus waltz music, besides having a special rhythm and a special character, is judged by a special criterion--_i.e._ whether it is good to waltz to, which practically means, whether it has this special rhythm and this special character, a regular three-time unobscured by rhythmic variations, and a strong sensuous appeal undistracted by any demand on the intellect.

The second point is simply another aspect of the same thing; to wit, the fact that in the normal reasonably good concert--taken, in its widest sense, to include orchestral and choral performances, chamber music, and recitals of all kinds--the waltz rhythm is extremely rare and the pure waltz even rarer. The ordinary concert-goer in a year’s experience will have ranged over practically every other kind of rhythm and (under the guidance of his programme) every other field of emotion; he will have quailed at the relentless tap of destiny, in two-four time; he will have bestridden the narrow world like a Colossus or plumbed the depths of grief or passion, in slow three-time; he will have wondered and frolicked and wondered again, in quick three-time; once or twice at least, he will have had his only relief in a fever of tortured imagination, in five-four time. (Note that every one of these is a walking tune.) But where are the medium three-times? Where are the waltz tunes? How often in his year’s experience has he come across the true waltz atmosphere? Perhaps thrice: in Suppé’s ‘Poet and Peasant’ Overture (if he cannot escape in time); in the Hoffmann ‘Barcarolle,’ which, by the way, is used in the opera to accompany a particularly brutal murder; and in the ‘Valse Triste’ of Sibelius, where the rhythm is employed with the very definite (and very gruesome) dramatic purpose of representing the imagination of a dying woman curdled by the stale memories of debauch. The one famous movement that is called a waltz is really much nearer a minuet; it is marked ♩=138, and can be walked to. Take together as a whole what may be called the ordinary mass of good music, and you cannot resist the conclusion that for some reason the musician will have nothing to do with the waltzer or his atmosphere.

The separation is complete. On the one hand we have music, which issues from life and returns upon life, which appeals to something very deep within us, making every kind of thought and feeling its minister--the music which fitly accompanies us as we walk. On the other hand, apart and alone, judged by its own criteria and bounded by its own conditions, we have the waltz music, related not to life but to a very small, narrow, and detached phase of it, appealing only to the senses, and these in a very abnormal state. Faced with this contrast, we can only say to the waltzer that here our ways part, bid him farewell, and proceed to denounce him.

For the state of the waltzer is something frightful to contemplate. The progressive limitation of dancing to the waltz rhythm is but the outward sign of an inner limitation of feeling, by which the waltzer cuts himself off from the rest of humanity and the rest of his own life, placing between himself and them the barriers of a bad art and a bad hygiene, and so fencing off his little paradise, his illuminated interspace of world and world, where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind. At a late hour, in a special costume, under artificial light, in a vitiated atmosphere, stimulated by abnormal food and drink; with every external condition that can unseat the judgment, suspend the continuity of good sense, and cut off the sane feeling of relation to the day that is past and the morrow that is to come--is it any wonder that he needs a special rhythm to move in and a special kind of melody to move to? And so the wheel moves in a vicious circle. The ambitious waltzes of the great masters impose a strain on the intellect; they have little direct sensuous appeal; they are recondite, discontinuous, frigid, tiring; they have no go; away with them to the outer darkness (to the stars and the fresh air). But from the cafés of Vienna arises a very different voice, sensuous, regular of rhythm, rich with the glamour of late hours, the swish of skirts and the slither of feet; however vulgar, however trivial, it is good to waltz to; bring wreaths of laurel to usher the conqueror in!

But to what a paradox are we come! Dancing, the highest of the bodily arts, which should be in the closest alliance with the companion art of music, appears its deadliest foe. The dancer, who should co-operate with and inspire the musician, is merely a burden to him; instead of pointing the way to further developments, he restrains him relentlessly from all rhythmic variety, from all reaches of feeling and character which do not fall within the narrow limits of being good to waltz to. With the shackles of a cast-iron rhythm he cramps his spirit: with the miasma of the waltz atmosphere he pollutes his soul. Is it any wonder that, with this prospect before him, the reputable musician turns his back on the ball-room and shakes the French chalk from off his feet? And when he is gone the charlatan sees his opportunity; and the end of it all is the dance music of to-day, expressing nothing beyond the mere dance atmosphere, indicating no feelings above the level of instincts, pointing the way to no developments, but an isolated system, cut off from all contact with the normal thoughts and feelings of humanity, exotic, expressionless, unfruitful, as only a hothouse hybrid can be.