Chapter IV: Part 4

As against Mrs. Y., X. has overloaded his case by talking about pictures. Document 4 clearly shows that she accused him on moral grounds, and was not thinking about aesthetics, which she probably associates only with Bunthorne. Had he confined himself to the moral question, his case would have been strong. On the one side is a walk, a thing good in itself, and also tending to promote friendly feelings. On the other side we have recognised social forms--tea-parties, calls, dinners, dances--which claim to override walking. What is their moral authority? If the object of social forms is to promote sociability, why are these forms recognised and not walking? Do they promote more sociability or better sociability than walking? If not, what do social duties mean, and what is their sanction?

None of these questions are easy to answer, because the subject has never been investigated. All the ordinary moral apparatus of life, law and custom and _esprit de corps_, and the other forms in which morality embodies itself, have been carefully tabulated and weighed and set forth, so that we know where we are in dealing with them. But no one has ever seriously studied social forms. We know why and how far we should obey the law and conform to common moral customs: we do not know why or how far we should pay calls or go to garden-parties. If every one stopped obeying the law, trouble would ensue; if every one stopped going to garden-parties, it is hard to see how the world would suffer permanent harm. We are not even certain what the authoritative social forms really are: no one has ever made a list of them. We do not even know their history: while everything else, from philosophy to eating and drinking, has its carefully tabulated series of facts from the earliest times to the present day, we have to collect the history of social forms, in so far as it is possible, from novels, oral tradition, and the bound volumes of _Punch_. So, when we are faced with the simple question, Why is not walking a recognised social form? it is very difficult to see the answer.

One reply, which is not so idiotic as it sounds, would be that walking is not a social duty because it is pleasant. The kind of friendliness it promotes involves no effort; if people like a thing, it cannot really be a duty. What is really needed to carry society along, is the effort involved in making the acquaintance of new people; this is necessary and is slightly unpleasant, and therefore has all the marks of a duty. But this assumes two things: first, that we only walk with people we know already; second, that when we go out in the evening, we only talk to people we do not know already. Neither of these assumptions is true: there are plenty of social entertainments every bit as effortless socially as a walk of two familiar friends; on the other hand, there are walks with a complete or partial stranger involving much more effort and a much greater hazard than any party.

Confront A. and B., previously unknown to each other, at a party. What happens? With no common experience behind them, and no common activity between them, except sitting on chairs, they have no talk, to bring their personalities into relation with each other by means of words, both being regarded as failures if the talk stops for an instant. Their surroundings are not sufficiently remote to compel any feeling of intimacy; their food, drink, and dress are not such as to encourage any coherency or continuity of thought; worst of all, their bodies are inactive, and their minds feverishly stimulated. The result is that they try to talk about books and plays, or even pictures and music, and either become insincere or expose their most sacred aesthetic principles to a total stranger: they oscillate between banality and intensity, and are usually driven back, for lack of anything better to say, on sheer verbal brilliancy. In the end A. cannot tell whether B.’s conversation is natural, due to nerves, or a deliberate attempt at intellectual tyranny; while to B., A. is like a nightmare or a hallucination, a discontinuity in ordinary experience. When they meet again, if they ever do, they are at sea: A. cannot be certain whether B. is an intimate friend to whom he once confided his belief that _King Lear_ is a good play, or an enemy on whom he once inflicted an epigram.

But send A. and B. for a walk, and the whole situation is changed. They at once have a common interest and a common activity, and every influence combines to make them simply themselves. They need not talk all the time, and what talk there is will spring naturally from their circumstances, and will not be very brilliant. They will learn the value of pauses, of silence, of ejaculations, even of grunts. The bodies will be fully occupied, and will shake and settle down the contents of their brains into good solid dogmatisms and prejudices purely spontaneous and characteristic of themselves, the stones of which intimacy can be built. Three miles will tell them what twenty parties cannot, whether they are destined to be friends or no. And therefore, while the social possibilities (in the strictest sense) are greater, the risks are greater too: a bigger task may be achieved, or a more complete failure. Is not a walk then, on both sides, a far greater social duty than a party?

When we come to consider social forms seriously, it almost looks as if their conditions were framed so as to discourage intimacy. To begin with, most of them take place at night. Now, the night has many merits: it is the time when men begin slowly to settle down to the period of rest and low vitality; it is a kindly but limited time--excellent for smoking in a chair, or reading an old novel, or thinking in a not very acute way of yesterday, and to-day, and to-morrow; but it is bad for anything continuous, anything energetic, anything needing the whole man. The sun by going down indicates that he does not expect very much of humanity till he reappears. Everything that people do when he is gone is limited in one way or another. They get into houses, forsaking the outside air; they kindle artificial lights, which are a very poor substitute; they sit or dance, instead of walking about. Atmospheres, on the whole, are more vitiated by night than by day; drinking, on the whole, occurs more after sunset than before. If people were content to limit their activities to suit the limitations of nature, it would not matter. But when they try to be active in these conditions, they necessarily become morbid: the lights and the atmosphere and (in some cases) the drink stimulate a feverish and unnatural excitement, which some call the romantic feeling of the evening, in the strongest contrast to the solid and concrete activities of the day. This kind of excitement can never really promote intimacy. It may make people for the moment less grumpy and more accessible than usual, but it is necessarily a transient and unstable feeling: dealing with a man in this state you feel that he is not really representing himself, and is not therefore authorised to give or receive friendship. To be certain of him, you must meet him by day.

It may be held, of course, that night and the conditions which go with it are a necessity, since by day people have no leisure for social forms. But I think it is clear that night is chosen for its own sake, and that the peculiar hygienic conditions of nocturnal gatherings have an appeal of their own. The people who support social forms do not all work, and there would be a large clientèle obtainable for entertainments by day, if they really preferred this. It is clear that they do not--that the night conditions, abnormal and detached from ordinary experience, are felt to be the right conditions for dances and dinner-parties and conversaziones and the rest. Social duty and formality seem to become progressively more rigorous as the sun goes down. Lunch is an informal and casual thing, with no special obligations and code of duty; with tea-parties and calls formality increases; finally, as night draws on, we reach the most authoritative and formal entertainments of all.

There is a second and quite different point about social forms in general, which I approach with some reluctance, but which must be treated if we are to measure the social validity of walking. In contrasting the acquaintance of A. and B. at a party and on a walk, we imagine them the same persons in either case. In actual fact, A. and B. on a walk would probably be of the same sex: A. and B. at a party would pretty certainly not be of the same sex. The principle of sex dualism runs through all the social forms: the more authoritative they become (dances and dinner-parties), the more inflexibly and mathematically is it exercised. This is Mrs. Y.’s real point against X.: it was not that he took a walk, nor (I flatter myself) that he walked with me, but that he walked with a male.

If any one wishes to take this point and fulminate anti-feministically against all dances and dinner-parties as being mere marriage-markets, he can easily do so by reading up the worst parts of _Vanity Fair_. Such a charge would neither be true nor relevant to our purpose; many people, at any rate, go to dances and dinner-parties in a much more broadly human spirit than this view implies, to cultivate far more general and varied relations with other men and women than the very special and particular relation which may exist between A. and B. if they are young, of different sex, and unmarried or widow. But as against the forms themselves, the actual rules by which dances and dinner-parties are regulated, the point is a good one: they seem to be designed primarily with a view to promoting this special relation, and to leave the more general human interests in an inferior place. They are dominated so entirely by the A. and B. principle, that all other possibilities are cheerfully sacrificed to it. We saw elsewhere what a disastrous effect this principle has had in limiting the development of dancing; but the same holds true of dinner-parties. Conversation, which I take to be the art of dinner-parties, may be a somewhat limited and unsatisfactory means of expression, but it ought to have its chance; and this can never be so long as it is cut up, by the law of A. and B., into water-tight compartments of dialogue, rearranged once only at the moment when every one swings round sixty degrees for the second period of water-tight isolation on the other side. Compare the conversation after lunch on a walk--but I need not labour the point.

The whole question is assuming a very instant and practical interest just now, because, as applied to dances, the A. and B. principle is in danger of breaking down. Whether this is due to a protest against the principle itself, or against the artistic or hygienic conditions of dancing, I do not know, but the fact remains--attested by those most keen in support of the principle--that it is increasingly difficult to get enough A.’s to balance the B.’s. Worse than this, the quality of the A.’s, when got, is not satisfactory: finding that the demand for their labour exceeds the supply, they tend to put a higher price on their services, to say that they won’t dance unless they get a dinner first, and to assume airs of complacent virtue. Faced by this shortage, the employers resort to the highways and hedges; in their desperate need of A.’s, they cast overboard all strictly social considerations (_i.e._ considerations of friendship) and will take any presentable A., even if a total stranger, regarding him not as a person but as a mere means for balancing the supply of B.’s. In the last resort they are driven to the operation known as pooling the reserves of casual labour. Hence comes that most interesting of all social phenomena, whose existence is tacitly admitted but publicly denied, the Rota of Unobjectionables. To illustrate this, I may perhaps be allowed to repeat the story of William Featherstone Goodenough and his agent.

William Featherstone Goodenough was a young man of pleasant address and engaging exterior, who liked dancing and received many invitations to dances. In the course of time the claims of his future and the commercial development of the Empire called him to Burma, and he departed leaving an agent with authority to deal with his correspondence. The agent was a youth of humble and reverent mind, who expected that the correspondence would mainly consist of tradesmen’s circulars, charitable appeals (_i.e._ appeals to William to be charitable), expressions of regret and tenders of consolation to the exile, and perhaps an impassioned threnody or two over the departed. The circulars and appeals arrived, and were tactfully dealt with; but the rest of the correspondence consisted almost entirely of invitations to dances. At first the agent, slightly surprised that William’s acquaintance were unfamiliar with his movements, used to answer respectfully in the third person that W. F. G. was absent from the country for some years, and would therefore be unable to accept ----’s kind invitation for the 7th proximo; and he naturally thought that the news would spread, and that the flow of coroneted cards would cease. But as time went on the flow still continued, and more than four years after William’s departure, the agent’s letter-box was still crowded with invitations of the most pressing and intimate kind. At last, in utter perplexity, the agent consulted a cynical friend, well versed in the ways of the world and the organisation of dances. The friend said, ‘Oh, it’s quite clear: William Featherstone has got on to the list and his name is passed round.’ With a feeling that the foundations of his moral world were tottering, the agent inquired his meaning, and learnt with horror and dismay of the existence of a List or Rota of Unobjectionables, compiled by social organisers and used in common amongst them to fill up vacancies in prospective entertainments. He walked home in a nightmare: those splendid and stately cards, he reflected, which had warmed his heart with the vision of a large circle of friends burning for the pleasure of William’s company, were now but the symbols of a system as heartless as electoral registration, as coldly impersonal as assessment under Schedule D. Nay, was not the parallel too favourable? In copying William’s name from a list, the election agent at least called upon him to exercise the highest functions of a man and a citizen; the assessor of income-tax at least expected truth in reply (the penalty for a false return being £20, and treble the duty chargeable); and both alike would take early and careful note of his removal. But the social organiser, more ruthless in purpose and less efficient in method, wished merely to exploit William as a dancing unit, disregarding his personality, his history, everything except his dancing capacity. The agent ranged the cards in order on the table in the silence of his chamber; before him floated memories of his youth and upbringing; and in his dreams a ghostly voice seemed to echo from the lofty turret of Königsberg: ‘Use humanity, in thine own person and that of others, always as an end, never merely as a means.’

Now, it may be said that the A. and B. principle is so important in the public interest that everything else, including Kant’s law, must be sacrificed to it. To put it quite baldly, people must get married; and the safest way of promoting this is to organise society by pairs, to proclaim attendance at social forms so organised as a moral duty, and back this up with the whole weight of custom and constituted authority. But if this be the object of social forms, what a way to set to work! Your aim being to promote intimacy between A. and B., you select the worst time of day and the worst surroundings; you present them to each other under conditions exactly calculated to make them abnormal, unnatural, unlike their ordinary selves; every art is exercised to give them a sense that this is a special occasion, cut off from normal life, a discontinuity in the sane and convincing series of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. In this state you invite them to consider a relation which above all others involves their ordinary selves, which is a function of their normal thinking and acting, and tastes and habits, and has very little to do with their dinner-table conversation, a relation which they will have to construe to the end in terms of yesterday, to-day, to-morrow. Is there no better way?

There is one; and the mere fact that I have had to lead up to it gradually and unobtrusively, instead of blazoning its name on the title-page, shows what a deplorable state the science of social forms is in. There is one social form which no one has ever considered seriously, and is indeed regarded, if at all, as rather a joke. Yet it counts its devotees by tens of thousands, where dinners and dances count their hundreds; it strikes right down into the heart of the people, where white ties and cards and the normal apparatus of social duties never penetrate. It is based on the A. and B. principle, but it maintains this without a Rota and without violating Kant’s law. It gives A. and B. the very best chances of a proper intimacy. It is not only a social form, but also a status of a very important and interesting kind. Above all, it is a branch of walking; you have merely to add one word--Walking Out.

To many people the phrase suggests clerks and shop-girls in the Strand, or nurses and soldiers in Knightsbridge--people who walk out perforce, because they have nowhere else to go. But let the sociologist lay not the flattering unction to his soul that this is the whole of Walking Out. If he ever went himself to Hampstead Heath, or Wimbledon Common, or Box Hill, or Leith Hill, he would speedily realise that Walking Out is a thing taken of choice and not of necessity. There he would see, in hundreds and thousands, his fellow-citizens, who, with ample opportunities for sitting down together indoors at night, prefer to walk together in the open by day. There he would see a social form so widely supported, and so firmly established, that by comparison balls and dinner-parties are the merest irrelevancies. There he would see men conforming to a social law, not reluctantly and under the stimulus of cards, not as the last reserve of casual labour flung into the market by the operation of the Rota, but as free citizens, voluntarily approving and enforcing the law they obey. There he would find, in short, an institution, compact of the clarified wisdom of the past and the glad acceptance of the present, deep-based on instinct, world-wide in its scope, sane, practical, and utterly unnoticed by any sociologist up to date.

In whatever way we regard it, Walking Out is surely a portent. It is one of the notable creations of the English people, unaided by their governing classes or their intellectuals; it is the creation of the classes not assessable for income-tax, or at any rate of those eligible for abatement. While the Assessables recognise no status between ordinary friendship and full engagement, the non-Assessables with the sound instinct of sanity have interposed between the two a provisional status, allowing of intimacy but committing neither party; and the name of the status is Walking Out. While the Assessables still rely on the abnormal stimuli of late hours, lights, and music to promote intimacies, the non-Assessables send their young persons forth to walk upon their feet in the open, and there to thrash out in the cool air the question whether or no. While the romantic memories of the Assessables reach their highest in the thought of some fifth extra after supper, the non-Assessables can remember some stroll beside the Thames, or some climb up the sandy track from Broadmoor among the beeches and the firs to the magical turn where the ground drops suddenly into thirty miles of Weald with the South Downs beyond.

Therefore, when the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, when the violation of hygienic and moral law leads to its just retribution in the collapse of the present social forms, there is a way of escape open for the Assessables. If they still want to give parties on the A. and B. principle, they have merely to organise and regulate the Walking Out system. Instead of a dance, let Mrs. Y. give a walk, naming time and place, and inviting equal numbers of A.’s and B.’s. (X. and I will be delighted to come.) If she wants it to be a real success she had better let them sort themselves; but if she likes to stick to the old system, there might be programmes dividing up the route into appropriate sections. (Question: ‘May I have the pleasure of the Roman Road?’ Answer: ‘I am afraid that I am engaged; but I am free for Deerleap Wood.’) There would not be much function for chaperons; but if it is desired to keep up this institution (now, I understand, something of an archaism), a chaperon might be stationed at the end of each section, to act as a kind of clearing-house, make sure that the couples were properly sorted for the next section, keep a supply of bootlaces and stimulants in case of need, and finally return by motor-car and report to the hostess at what time the last couple started on the ensuing section. The hostess, acting on this information, could (if the company had not advanced to the point of carrying their own food) have lunch ready at an appropriate point in the middle of the walk; but her main function would be to provide accommodation at the end of the walk for changing, ablution, and a large meal. And if, as we may hope, music is still to play a part in social life, a band might be stationed near the end of the last section to play the walkers home to the tune of the Seventh Symphony. I venture to say that this form of entertainment, besides being far cheaper than existing forms, would produce results in the way of intimacy-statistics beyond the wildest dreams of present-day organisers, and everything which Lord Tennyson so beautifully prophesied in that speech at the end of the _Princess_ would be accomplished. It is noteworthy how at the climax the poet turns instinctively to the right metaphor: we will _walk_ this world, yoked in all exercise of noble end, and so thro’ those dark gates across the wild, where good romanticists go when they die.

But I hope that when this consummation is achieved, it will be remembered that there are other social relations besides that of A. and B., and that of all of them social forms should take account. The mistake made at present of isolating the A. and B. relation and sacrificing everything else to it must not be repeated. Walking Out, be it never forgotten, is only a branch of walking; and besides Mrs. Y.’s party of couples I hope there will be other parties of a miscellaneous character, who will not walk out in the strict sense, but will simply walk, to confirm existing intimacies and determine new ones. It is the walk itself, the conditions under which it is carried on and the state of mind it produces, which is the real and ultimate social form: Walking Out is only a special if important variety. Therefore the social obligations of the future must cover parties of all kinds and intimacies between all types--men and women, young, middle-aged, and old. There is no human relation which walking cannot promote: with whomsoever you would be friends, you must first do the things in which walking so conspicuously assists--that is, you must clear the brain of feathers and fireworks, settle the mind well back on itself, and link the present firmly on to the past. For some, maybe, the aged and infirm, the walking days are over; and to these you can only talk. But you will find, if you are fortunate, that you are not debarred from their friendship. It is not only that they may speak to you of the walks of their youth, enlarging the distances and diminishing the times, for the abasement of the present generation, while you sit admiring the kindly law of nature by which memory passes so easily into imagination. Even if they have not been walkers, there is still a kinship between you; for the sixtieth year is like the eighteenth mile--the point at which you settle into your stride for the last stage, and the essence of the preceding miles begins to distil itself in your brain, emerging clear and translucent from the turbid mass of experience. Remember the metaphor which Socrates used to Cephalus. ‘I love,’ he said, ‘talking to the very old; for, it seems to me, we ought to ask them, as men far advanced on a track which we too may have to walk, what it is like, rough and difficult or easy and smooth.’

VI

WALKING IN LITERATURE

Some readers of these imperfect remarks may possibly wish to pursue such investigations farther.

SIR G. GROVE, Preface to _Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies_.

VI

WALKING IN LITERATURE

Walking is one of the many things whose history is not to be found in the historians. Even since they constituted themselves a distinct class of writers and began to see themselves in the part--that is, ever since Herodotus--history has been mainly a catalogue of abstractions, interesting and even thrilling, but (to the walker) mostly irrelevant. It is no doubt a good thing to have the wars and political convulsions and trade movements and Gunpowder Plots and Acts of Parliament and executions of the various periods accurately recorded; it is probably a good thing to have the pots and hair-ornaments and tombs of our distant ancestors excavated and labelled. But the moment we begin to ask about the ordinary man of each period, what he was doing and what he was thinking and whether he liked walking, we are answered only in abstract terms. The archaeologist can only say that he used pots of the Protomycenean period; the historian can only say that about seven thousand of him were killed in battles, and that most of him began about this time to grasp the first principles of commerce, and that all of him was subject to several conflicting economic tendencies not yet completely disentangled. The man himself is still hidden from our gaze.

Literature is our only help. Once a man sits down not to record facts and analyse tendencies in what he conceives to be a scientific historical spirit, but to write about the things which really interest him, to imagine and moralise and sentimentalise, we begin to learn some history. It is not only that he shows us something of the normal man’s habits and ways of life: even better, he shows us his thoughts, his prejudices, his unconscious presuppositions, what he takes for granted and cannot imagine not to be so. History is probably the worst record of the ordinary man, and memoirs the second worst; letters are more trustworthy, because letter-writers do not always confine themselves to facts and frequently become excited; poetry, rhetoric, drama, philosophy, and fiction are best of all, since in these men are really saying what they think. If we want to know what Athens was really like in her decline, we turn not to the scientific and accurate record of Thucydides, but to contemporary comedy, acted to the partly drunk by the completely drunk. If we want to know our great-grandfathers, we turn not to Lecky but to Miss Austen.

Walking, being above all things human and intimate, is naturally neglected by the historians: it cannot be shown to have caused any political convulsions, or to have had any economic effects; it is therefore ruled out. If we want to know whether men walked in the past, and how much they walked, and, above all, in what spirit and with what object they walked, we must turn to literature. If there is any history of walking, it will be there. What follows is a brief and wholly inadequate attempt to review literature from this standpoint--to see what part walking plays in the largely unconscious record of facts and wholly unconscious record of ideas which we find in literature.

It is well at once to prepare for a disappointment. It is fairly clear that in all ages men have walked, more or less: indeed, this could be proved _a priori_ from the anatomical structure of the leg. But it is equally clear that up to very recent times they have done so without the least knowledge of the value and purpose of walking. They have walked in a utilitarian spirit, to get somewhere; they have walked in a medical spirit, to improve their digestions; they have very rarely walked for the sake of walking, to realise themselves in a fine activity. No doubt the men of old were ignorant and unenlightened, and too much must not be expected of them; no doubt the habit of riding on horses (introduced quite early and still existing) diverted men’s attention from the possibilities of walking. But when all allowances are made, the unprejudiced walker, reviewing all the centuries B.C. and at least eighteen of the centuries since, must pronounce them one long disappointment.

The first disappointment comes in classical literature: among all the figures of the Graeco-Roman civilisation we look in vain for a walker. The Homeric heroes occasionally took a walk by the sea, but only from bad temper (ὃν θυμὸν κατέδων) or to interview their divine mothers. Aeneas is a little more promising: the lines--

Cui fidus Achates
It comes et paribus curis vestigia figit--

raise considerable hopes of a proper walk, but the poet proceeds to dash these hopes by the damning admission in the next line--

Multa inter sese vario sermone serebant.

In all classical literature it is hard to find a single instance of a walk undertaken for its own sake, without some base ulterior motive. Worse than this, a great philosopher goes out of his way to insult walking. In illustrating his doctrine of final cause, Aristotle remarks that the final cause of walking is health. For a moment the reader is struck dumb with the thought that once again Aristotle has overleapt the centuries and found out something never again discovered until after 1870. But it is clear that he misunderstands health: he is speaking from a grossly medical standpoint. For he interposes between the two a middle term, consisting of digestion viewed in its most revolting and mechanical aspect: and the reader sinks back with a sigh of regret.

But in justice to Aristotle it must be remembered that he himself went far to wipe out this insult by one of those curious, half-conscious, inspired reaches of divination which make the Greeks so unlike other philosophers. In his analysis of the psychology of action he constructs what is known as the Practical Syllogism--a train of feeling leading to action comparable to the train of thought in the syllogism leading to a conclusion. There is the major premise--things that wake a certain kind of feeling in me are to be sought or avoided; there is the minor premise--this is a thing waking the kind of feeling. A lesser man would have been drawn on by the charms of his own analogy to add a conclusion--this is to be sought or avoided, but Aristotle will allow no theoretical conclusion to the practical syllogism. ‘In this case,’ he says in words which make our hearts leap, ‘the conclusion from the two premises is the act, as when one thinks--Every man ought to walk, I am a man, and at once--he walks.’[3] The major premise with its fine grasp of the meaning and purpose of human life, the minor premise with its simple but splendid assertion of humanity, lead straight to the conclusion--a walk.

The Middle Ages, as far as can be judged, were densely unenlightened on the subject of walking. I have no wish to decry the Canterbury pilgrims, but they were obviously not walkers: they talked too much, and were too much immersed in the bare particulars of actuality. Indeed, the pilgrims as a whole took a low view of walking; not only did they regard it in itself as a penance, but they utilised this penance for a grossly material object--namely, the writing off of some of the heavy list of entries on the wrong side of their moral pass-book, which prejudiced their solvency in the future life. Further, they had no eye for country; the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, after leaving St. Martha’s Church, with the magnificent line of the chalk to the north and the no less magnificent hills to the south, takes the relatively tame valley-way between,[4] presumably because there were more facilities for drink in the valley, and the purgation of the pilgrims’ miserable souls could be shortened by an hour or so. Judged by all the evidence, the pilgrims were men of low motives and obscurated vision, and quite unworthy of a place in the company of walkers.

The Elizabethans seem little better. There is no trace in Shakespeare of a proper regard for the meaning and purpose of walking. In _As You Like It_ both parties of travellers arrive at the Forest of Arden in a state of extreme fatigue, without any apparent appreciation of the charming walk they have had through the county of Warwick. In the same way Lysander and Hermia, though they met in a wood only a league without the town--and that a wood with which they were both familiar--promptly lose their way and ‘faint with wandering in the wood’--a fearful confession of incompetence and weakness. Only Demetrius and Helena, spurred on by the pangs of unrequited love, are able to achieve five miles or so without fainting. Walking is regarded by Portia as one of the most distressing symptoms of Brutus’s condition: she notes with amazement how he suddenly rose and walked about, and how he walks unbraced and sucks up the humours of the dank morning. (Portia’s views on hygiene show the true old spirit.) Polonius in the same way advises Hamlet in the interests of his health to walk out of the air--that is, into the nice comfortable palace where the King had caroused overnight and an embassy had been received that morning; and the chilling reply ‘Into my grave?’ is the first hint we get of modern views on ventilation. If only Hamlet had acted up to his views--if only he had taken one good walk in the air to shake together all those errant spirits that warred in his capacious brain--the philosopher, the gallant, the good fellow, the calf-lover of Ophelia, the true lover of his father--and weld them into a concrete whole! What a man he would have been, and what a play we should have missed!

The eighteenth century, being both the Age of Reason and the Age of Port, was clearly no time for proper walking. None the less, the century is important as producing the literary form in which walking first became self-conscious, namely, the novel. The emergence of walking was a long business: for many years the writers of fiction were preoccupied with duels and elopements and moral crises and sudden deaths--all the things which conspicuously do not happen to walkers. But as the romantic revival drew on, men became more whole and concrete; and at last we begin to find in novels that walking is coming to its own. If we review the fiction of the last hundred and twenty years, among much irrelevancy and many abstractions, we can discover a few real walkers; and the fact that they occur in novels makes them immensely more significant. If a person is recorded in history as walking, it only means that one person walked: if in a novel, it means that walking has a real place in the ideas of the age.

* * * * *

The first true walker is unquestionably Elizabeth Bennet. Relatively to her age, she was even a good walker. Her three-mile tramp across the fields to Netherfield was evidently thought something quite sensational. Her time is not given; she left home after breakfast, and reached Netherfield before the family had finished breakfasting: allowing for the probable difference between Mr. Bennet’s habits and Mr. Hurst’s, we may estimate it at an hour; and three miles an hour is no break-neck pace in the twentieth century. But for the first mile to Meryton she was with Kitty and Lydia, who were obviously bad walkers, so that on the whole her pace was not to be despised. Further, it may be noted that she was the only person in the whole book who ever walked these three miles. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty and Lydia drove; Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy invariably rode; Jane had to ride (owing to the careful dispositions of Mrs. Bennet), and, as might be expected, caught a cold in the rain.

But Elizabeth was something more than a good walker: she was clearly responsive to the spiritual influences of walking and the open air. Her relations with Darcy are a striking illustration of this. She meets him first at a dance, and naturally forms her Prejudice at once: she continues her acquaintance at several evening-parties and at Netherfield, the most important conversation taking place in a room in which Bingley had just spent half an hour in piling up the fire to prevent Jane taking cold: (it would, of course, have been unthinkable to open a window). She is then bamboozled by Wickham in the drawing-room of Uncle Philips, who is himself described as ‘stuffy’; and then, after another dance, the first stage of the acquaintance ends. At Hunsford things improve: there is no more dancing, and Fitzwilliam and Darcy _walk_ the half-mile from Rosings to the Parsonage. But all the important interviews, culminating in the first proposal and general back-talk, take place either at Rosings or in that room at the Parsonage which Charlotte specially selected, because it did not look out on the road and would therefore not attract Mr. Collins. Then, after this climax, the change at once begins. The first thing next morning Elizabeth takes a walk: she meets Darcy, foot to foot at last, and in the open: she reads his letter, walking, and continues her walk for two hours: the first blow at the Prejudice is struck. They meet again, in the grounds of Pemberley: they walk together (Mrs. Gardiner requiring her husband’s support); almost at once the past is wiped out, and truth begins to emerge. Then comes the last phase at Longbourn. Elizabeth engages and slaughters Lady de Bourgh, on her feet, in the prettyish kind of a little wilderness. Darcy arrives, and after a few fruitless skirmishes in parlours and at evening-parties, they take the road together one fine morning, and when once Kitty has gone to pay her call at the Lucases’, there is but one way. The further walk to Oakham Mount (which is too far for Kitty this time) settles the business, and Mrs. Bennet is free to exercise the virtuosity of her imagination on the theme of ten thousand a year.

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The relation of Dickens to walking is somewhat peculiar. There is plenty of good walking in his works, just as there is plenty of eating and drinking and romantic eloquence, and other natural processes; but it is nearly all of an unconscious or even mechanical kind. Most of the big walking is undertaken from reasons of economy--the walk of Nicholas and Smike from Dotheboys Hall to London, and on to Hindhead or wherever it was that Mr. Crummles dawned upon the scene; the walk of Nelly Trent and her grandfather through the industrial districts of England, and on to the village which contained the blameless schoolmaster; the walk of Traddles to Devonshire and back to see Sophy; or David Copperfield’s walk to Dover, when the long-legged young man had stolen his money. None of these would have taken the walk for its own sake, except possibly Traddles, who says generally that he had ‘the most delightful time.’ They seem to have been blind to the beauties of walking, and to have borne it only as a disagreeable necessity. They have not even the purely sensuous appreciation of the beauty of a walk which is found in Mr. Pickwick and his friends, when they walk to the Leather Bottel at Cobham to see if Mr. Tupman is still alive. It is not unfitting that the greatest pronouncement on the Dover road should have been made, not by David Copperfield, who plodded every inch of it, but by that dread Sibyl, Mr. F.’s aunt.

There is only one place in which Dickens rises to a conscious appreciation of the fact of walking itself--in the description of Martin and Tom Pinch walking into Salisbury to dine with John Westlock. Even here the main theme is that walking keeps a man warm on a cold day, and gives him an appetite for dinner--a view which is very little above the grovelling opinions of Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics. The fact that Martin and Tom walked when they might have driven, and actually found it pleasanter, is flaunted in the reader’s face as a novel and startling paradox. Any idea that walking can do something more than keep us warm or make us hungry seems as far from the mind of Dickens the writer as the fact, to which the modern world is awaking, that driving is, with the exception of waltzing and croquet, one of the most despicable of human activities.

But Dickens the writer was not quite the same as Dickens the man. The writer may have taken a low view of walking; the man was first and last a walker. He was a walker of a peculiar kind; in this as in everything else he was a Londoner. But among London walkers he was one of the greatest. Streets and lamps and human beings, the dim glare and muffled din of London by night, were to him what seas and mountains have been to other poets; they were the food, perhaps the stimulants, of his imagination. And his intimacy with them was not merely the feeling of one who had lived among them. It was that of one who had walked among them, at full stretch, with every muscle taut and every nerve astrain, the feverish reality without answering to the feverish fancy within. It was no doubt by an instinct rather than by conscious purpose that he sought his inspiration in the sights and sounds of the city; his pathetic cry from among the glories of Italy that he cannot be happy without streets, shows only the simple and uncomprehended craving of a child. For the same reason, there is not much patent trace in his works of the compelling influence which London had upon him. Only here and there--in the lonely walks of Neville Landless ‘to cross the bridges and tire himself out,’ in the stern chase of David Copperfield and Mr. Peggotty after Martha, or the deadly pursuit of Eugene Wrayburn by Bradley Headstone--do we catch hints of that tremendous vision as revealed to the night-walker, which suffuses every stone of Dickens’s London with the glow of excitement and romance.

There is one walker in Dickens who deserves mention for a special reason. This is Canon Crisparkle, one of the three or four clergymen of the Established Church who figure among the thousand or so characters of Dickens; the blameless athlete who bathes before breakfast on a frosty morning, spars at the looking-glass, and is obviously destined to be rewarded by the hand of Helena. Dickens, conscious perhaps that he had hitherto slighted the Church, and anxious to make amends, intended to be as kind as possible to the Canon; but he builded better than he knew. In those days when Kingsley was yet living, and muscular Christianity only beginning to dawn upon the popular consciousness, Dickens, with the wild divination of genius, adds one little touch to the Canon’s portrait which stamps him indelibly as the forerunner of all that hearty and back-slapping orthodoxy which devastated the ’eighties and ’nineties, and turned to gall the milk of reverence in many a young breast. ‘I have not lived in a walking country, you know,’ says Neville Landless. ‘True,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, ‘get into a little training and we will have a few score miles together. I should leave you nowhere now.’ And thus the author, carried beyond himself by his own creative genius, marks his hero unmistakably as a braggart and a liar.

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When we reach Meredith we are in daylight at last, and walking is comprehended as no mere mechanical process, but a great activity of the whole being of man. Passage after passage, phrase after incomparable phrase, call to the walker with the sound of trumpets. ‘He jumped to his feet ... and attacked the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might be lively at the throne of understanding.’ ‘He was a man of quick pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental fen-mist. He had tried it, and knew that nonsense is to be walked off.’ ‘The taking of rain and sun alike befits men of our climate, and he who would have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the clouds of the south-west with a lover’s blood.’ ‘Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased: not to sit down in sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks; taste danger, sweat, earn rest; learn to discover ungrudgingly that haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest is your uttermost reward.’

It would be a pleasing task to recall in detail all the walkers of Meredith: Richard Feverel in the storm in the forest; Evan Harrington on the road to his father’s funeral; Carinthia and Chillon in the mountains; Gower Woodseer; Arthur Rhodes on the night walk to Epsom and Denbies; Harry Richmond and Temple, made free of romance by the first touch of their feet on German soil, marching inevitably to find the fairy princess. But I must pass them by in order to linger awhile on the greatest of them all, the living embodiment of the best that is in walking, Vernon Whitford.

At the outset the author wins our sympathy for Vernon by a single bold stroke: he comes before us first in ‘the electrical atmosphere of the dancing room’ crossing himself, and crossing his bewildered lady (Lætitia), and ‘extorting shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin Willoughby.’ It was only a square dance, so that Vernon is free from the suspicion of having contaminated himself, even from a sense of duty, with waltzing. The rest of his story is mainly composed of walks. He meets Clara and Crossjay on his way back from a long walk on the evening of Clara’s arrival, when she is wrestling with the repugnance which she thought was ended, but was really only beginning; they walk together, and at once he takes his place somewhere in the back of her head, so that in her reflections she ‘puts another name for Oxford.’ They walk again after she has found him sleeping under the double-blossom wild cherry-tree; they talk of the Alps--clearly the beginning of the end. Then follow two of the only three important interviews between them which take place under cover. First Clara, instructed by Willoughby to sound Vernon on the project of marrying Lætitia, ‘casts aside the silly mission’ and gives him the truth; immediately he goes off for a walk, returning late at night. Then comes the interview in the inn parlour, but this is only after both have had a wild scurry across country in the rain of the south-west. (See Note A below.) All through the crisis of the book Vernon is scouring the country in pursuit of Crossjay, and returns in time to deliver (in the open air) the decisive blow at Willoughby. Then follows the fateful walk with Clara, when he talks of Switzerland, Tyrol, the _Iliad_, Antigone, Political Economy--anything, we may add, to save poor Clara’s face. Last comes the short interview at night, which might have reached the climax, had not both by an instinct reserved it for a more fitting place ‘between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance.’ It is not only they of minds diseased who carry their fever to the Alps.

Vernon makes such a claim upon our sympathy that we are driven to decide in his favour what would be with a lesser man a very doubtful point. When he meets Clara on the occasion of their first walk, he tells her that he has just walked nine-and-a-half hours to get rid of the temper caused by Crossjay. Now breakfast at Patterne on a normal morning (see Note A below) ended at a quarter to ten, and it must have taken some little time for Crossjay to rouse Vernon’s temper to the walking off point. After he meets Clara they walk for some little time before returning to the hall for dinner, for which presumably they dressed. Dinner at that epoch at the very most cannot have been later than half-past seven, or possibly eight. It is thus very difficult to see where Vernon’s nine-and-a-half hours come in. But Vernon was no Canon Crisparkle, and it is hard to think that he lied to Clara at such a time and on such a matter: we therefore shut our eyes and asseverate blindly that he walked exactly nine-and-a-half hours.

Further, he walked at a pace of something over four-and-a-half miles an hour. If any one wishes to contest this statement, he will have to read Note A below.

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After Meredith come professed essayists on the subject of walking--notably Stevenson and Leslie Stephen. I do not propose to treat them at any length, partly because it would be presumptuous and partly because I carefully postponed reading them until seven-eighths of this work were completed. On looking through their essays I am abased, but not disheartened: they say most of what can be said on the subject much better than any one else can say it, but what of that? There is never any harm in repeating a thing, especially when it is important. Stevenson says the essential things about walking once and incomparably; and just for that reason people are apt to overlook them. For example, he says that the traveller ‘becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great strides’; the ordinary Stevensonian exclaims, ‘How charming!’ and promptly forgets all about it. But when later writers make seven or eight incompetent attempts at the same idea, the reader begins to think there is really something there, and to explore the meaning for himself. It is like passing seven or eight inaccurate sign-posts all pointing to the same place; it is hard to resist turning up by one of them, and when the road leads you nowhere you become all the more anxious to find the place, and all the more impressed when you reach it; whereas, if you are planted there suddenly and miraculously, you say, ‘How charming!’ and pass on. The right course is to read these essays first, then go several walks, and then read Stevenson. Therefore no more of him.

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