Chapter V: Part 5

Some interesting but perverse treatment of walking is to be found in Ibsen. His characters walk a good deal, but it never seems to have a proper effect on them; they return from their walks without one string of their nervous temperament loosened, or one facet of their personality rounded. Johannes Rosmer is out for a walk on Kroll’s first visit, and Rebecca remarks that he has stayed out longer than usual. He returns, not dirty, not hungry, not mentally equable and idea-proof, but just the same as when he started out; he begins talking at once, and in ten minutes is arguing about politics, and in twenty is inaugurating a life-long breach with his brother-in-law; finally, at the end of the act, he goes to bed without any supper. He cannot really have been much of a walker. In the third act Rebecca particularly impresses upon him twice that he is to take ‘a good long walk’ to give her time for her interview with Kroll. The good long walk lasts exactly eight pages in the English translation, and he comes back fresh enough to take a lively part in the overwhelming scene which finally brings his house toppling about his ears. Surely Rebecca herself, the incomparable heroine for whose sake we throw over all moral judgments and tear up all commandments, the serene wielder of a concrete purpose, vanquished only by herself, the most attractive murderess who ever drove a rival by lies into a mill-dam--surely she was a better walker than Rosmer.

Hilda Wangel, too--what the plague had she to do with a walking-tour? If she had really walked from her home to the Solness’ house, would there have been much left of her abstract purpose? Would she have come in with her eyes sparkling to demand the redemption of the ten-year pledge? Surely twenty miles of Norwegian country, if properly walked, would have warned her to leave Solness alone, and continue her walk somewhere else. It is the same with Gregers Werle: if he had really gone for a walk with Hialmar, he could not have kept the cutting-edge of his ideal sharp enough to sever all Hialmar’s roots: they would have begun to talk about the weather, and would have had a large tea and returned smoking pipes with their ideals filed for future reference.

Elsewhere in modern literature there are signs, though only a few, that walking is coming to its own. The most cheering example is Mr. Belloc, who not only records walks, but writes in the true walking mood, with plenty of irrelevancy, plenty of dogmatism, and thorough conviction on the matter of eating and drinking. Mr. Wells also sends his young people out for walks occasionally, with the best results. But the best description of walking, or rather Walking Out, in modern literature outside Meredith is in Browning’s ‘Last Ride Together.’ It is true that he wrote it about riding, but I am sure that this was really a mistake. Any one who has ever started on a walk after a hard week’s work can only admit one interpretation to the lines:

My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll,
Freshening and fluttering in the wind.

It may have been simply a printer’s error: by adding two letters we can set the matter right:

What if we still stride on, we two,
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree
The instant made eternity--
And heaven just prove that I and she
Stride, stride together, forever stride.

This at least was what the young gentleman was saying to the young lady that afternoon, when I overtook them just short of Newland’s Corner. It is a grassy track, and it was well that I stepped on a stick.

NOTE A

_On the Rates of Walking of Various Persons in the Egoist, Chapters 25 sqq._

It will be remembered that Clara and Crossjay walked to the station after breakfast, followed first by Vernon and later by De Craye. A close scrutiny of the details given produces some very interesting information.

The first point is the time of the train. Willoughby says that ‘eleven is the hour,’ but as he adds airily that there is ‘a card in the smoking-room,’ we cannot trust this evidence alone. But Vernon, we are told, timed himself to reach the station at ten minutes to eleven, and this before he met Dr. Corney, who drove him part of the way. On getting to the station he tells Clara that she has ‘full fifteen minutes, besides fair chances of delay.’ It seems fairly clear then that the train was due at just about eleven, that Vernon reached the station at 10.44 or so, and Clara some time earlier.

If the train was due at eleven, the distance to the station can be approximately fixed. When Clara starts the drive back, she passes her own train ‘eighteen minutes late by her watch.’[5] She arrives at the Hall just as twelve is striking. The drive consequently took just over forty-two minutes. The roads were wet, and Flitch’s horse probably decrepit: the distance by road may therefore be fixed at about four miles. By taking the footpath, according to Crossjay, ‘you save a mile.’ Crossjay may be trusted on a point like this, and we may thus estimate the field way at three miles.

Now the field way passed through the West Lodge Park Gate. This was clearly not far from the Hall. Clara left the breakfast-room at 9.45. She then had to get her hat and meet Crossjay behind the pheasantry, and, on the lodge-keeper’s wife’s statement to De Craye, they were through the gate before ten. We infer that the distance was at most half a mile, leaving two and a half miles to the station. Clara and Crossjay cannot have been through the gate much before ten, and after meeting the tramp and sending Crossjay back, she was still at the station before Vernon--_i.e._ before 10.44. The inference is that in wet clothes and over bad ground--even Vernon found the footpath slippery--she went nearly four miles an hour. In dry clothes and on a good ground, she had to fall into a special kind of trot to keep up with Vernon, reminding him of the Piedmontese Bersaglieri, and that at the end of a nine-and-a-half-hour day. It is clear, therefore, that Vernon’s pace cannot have been much below five miles an hour.

His own timing on the morning of the flight is not very exactly given. The lodge-keeper’s wife told De Craye that he was through the gate half an hour after Clara. If this is accurate, the time would be about 10.25. He then, after meeting Crossjay, timed himself to be at the station at 10.50--twenty-five minutes for two and a half miles. But he clearly intended to run: and although this shows his running pace to be creditable, we cannot safely infer from it to his walking pace.

One further interesting point emerges, namely, that De Craye’s watch, after setting everybody right at breakfast, went hopelessly wrong in the course of the morning. It was ten minutes past eleven by his watch when he left the Park gate: yet he was at the station in time to meet Clara, and, after some discussion, to drive back with her (11.17 or at most 11.21--see above). It is not stated where he picked up Flitch’s cab, but even Flitch can hardly have driven in from five to ten minutes a distance which, with a short piece added, took him forty-two minutes on the return journey. A frivolous observer might suggest that the author was not very careful in his timing: but, apart from the hideous blasphemy, this would invalidate most of the previous argument. We therefore shut our eyes once more, and affirm that De Craye’s watch went wrong.

VII

WALKING EQUIPMENT

ἀδύνατον γὰρ ἢ οὐ ῥᾴδιον τὰ καλὰ πράττειν ἀχορήγητον ὄντα
AR. _Eth. Nic._ 1. 9.

VII

WALKING EQUIPMENT

Every one is well aware--if not, it is abundantly clear from the rest of this volume--that controversy of any kind is naturally repugnant to the amiable nature of a walker. It is therefore with some trepidation that he approaches the highly controversial subject of equipment. Writers on walking, and Alpine climbers--neither of them necessarily the same thing as walkers--usually dismiss the subject in a brief and breezy chapter on nailed boots and the back-lining of waistcoats, with a few brilliant paragraphs on goggles and brandy, unaware that they are dancing among the ashes of several by no means extinct volcanoes. Indeed, the subject bristles with controversial points. The structure and fortification of boots; the requisite number of pairs of socks; the rival claims of long trousers and short trousers, with the subvariants of short trousers buckling at the knees, short trousers with box-cloth continuations, and short trousers with homogeneous continuations; the configuration of coats; the shape of hats (if any); the functions of waistcoats; the necessity of ties; the moral value of walking-sticks; all these subjects of controversy meet us before we reach the really fundamental questions of food and drink and knapsacks and their contents. But peace was never won by shutting the eyes and pretending that differences do not exist; and so, with whatever reluctance, we enter the lists.

The nature of the controversy may be illustrated by the discussion at present raging around boots. Heavy nailed boots used to be taken as, in every sense, the foundation of walking equipment--as the axiom which could not be gainsaid. But in this age men will gainsay anything; and a formidable school of shoe-walkers has arisen, who deny the axiom of boots, and are ready to construct a new system on their denial. These Lobatschewskis of footwear do not all go to the lengths of one walker whom I knew, whose habit was to patrol grouse-moors in sandshoes; but in his case there was a special need, since the moors were strictly preserved, and his walking mainly consisted of short and exciting handicaps with the walker on the five-yards mark and a keeper at scratch. But the shoemen are ready to proclaim in the face of the orthodox that their equipment is airier and more comfortable than boots; and this is a controversy which, when once raised, must go forward to its issue.

The bootmen in the first exasperation of outraged orthodoxy will probably say that shoes are effeminate, while boots are the mark of a man; at which the shoemen ask, why it should be effeminate to have a soft and slight covering between the feet and reality and manly to have several layers of bull’s hide clamped with armour-plating; and thus, by a neat allegorical turn, they open the whole feminist question. Somewhat sobered, the bootmen then say that boots support the ankles; to which the shoemen reply that their ankles do not need supporting. This innuendo finally makes the bootmen think, and they issue from their meditations with the unanswerable remark that shoes let stones in and boots do not. The shoemen, if they are wise, admit this, merely adding, that if shoes let stones in they can easily be taken off and shaken; and that if boots keep stones out, they also keep air out. The bootmen then take the aggressive: if air is wanted, why walk at all? Why not stand on your head with your feet out of window? To which the shoemen say, Don’t be silly; and the bootmen say, You have no sense of humour; and the relations of years are dissolved.

There is no need to follow this controversy further, either along its main lines or into its side-tracks, on the questions of nails, laces, and unguents. The issues involved are mainly utilitarian. There is little doubt that boots are better for rough ground and bog, and shoes for roads and level tracks; nails are necessary for rocks and steep grass-slopes, but are a burden on the hard highway. Again, shoes probably leave the feet freer, while boots add mechanically an extra inch or two to the stride. The question may be pursued through all its ramifications; and no doubt those who like quantitative thinking could ultimately produce some sort of determination of the footgear most likely to be suitable to the average man in the average country. Where comfort and utility only are concerned, the vulgar processes of comparing, adding and subtracting are quite sufficient to lead to a conclusion.

But quantitative reasoning, though invaluable in politics, is very poor fun. Life would have little flavour without occasional qualitative excursions into the _a priori_. The very bitterness of feeling aroused by discussions on walking equipment shows, I think, that something more is involved in them than the calculable considerations of comfort and utility. After all, it is mainly a man’s own affair whether his feet are comfortable and whether he slips on a grass slope: and were these the only issues, we should have no more concern with his boots than with his breakfast or banking-account. And the same holds true for most of the doubtful points of walking equipment. The relative comfort and healthiness of hats, caps, and nothing can be easily determined by counting heads and adding up (and cancelling out) medical opinions; the practical aspect of walking-sticks could probably be exhibited by a diagram of the body, a few mechanical equations, and a fatigue-curve or two. But what walker worthy of the name would accept such conclusions if they disagreed with his own views, or would even welcome them if they disagreed with other people’s views? Who would suffer himself to be quantitatively coerced into altering the shape of his hat, or giving up walking-sticks, or adopting or forswearing a tie?

Ties furnish perhaps the clearest instance of the break-down of utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body: even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill. No man’s health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable touch of colour; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape? A large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about beauty in ties?

The truth is that dress is a paradox. Any one attempting to apply to it the principles of health, comfort, beauty, or even economy, would become an atheist or a suicide in a fortnight. Modern dress is unhealthy, uncomfortable, ugly, and dear. In spite of the passionate denunciations of stiff shirts and collars by the whole medical profession, we and they continue to wear them. Our necks are chafed, our motions are cramped, our skin is slowly vitiated--but we do not rebel. The fabrics which we choose for our clothing tend on the whole to be the ugliest, the most expensive, and the least durable: yet no one dreams of following the elementary laws of utilitarian economics. Thus in the enlightened twentieth century, with all the wealth of the industrial revolution within our grasp, with doctors ready to prescribe the healthiest clothes and artists to design them most beautifully--when, in a word, at a quarter of the present cost and trouble which it takes to make us eyesores we could become dreams of comfort and colour-harmony--then we, the heirs of all the ages, with open eyes and unclouded vision, refuse.

It is due to fashion, no doubt: but what after all is fashion, and why should we obey it? It is only a human creation: it is no law dictated to the world from outside; it is merely something which some men chose and other men, of their free will, agreed to obey. When a person asks, ‘Why do we follow fashion?’ the only answer is, ‘Do you?’ If he says ‘No,’ he is probably a liar: but we can still ask, ‘Do you not find in yourself some instinct urging you to follow fashion?’ Even the most hardened liar will probably say ‘Yes.’ The answer then is, ‘Multiply that instinct by five million, and then think again.’ There is something hidden in each of us which tends to make us follow fashion, which welcomes, that is to say, a law of uniformity in dress quite regardless of its practical and aesthetic consequences, which craves, indeed, for uniformity first and at any cost, and lets the consequences be what they may.

This craving for uniformity is, I think, the fundamental fact that lies behind the paradox of dress. Changes come in dress as in other things: but they come much more slowly and irrationally, and in no perceptible relation to the ordinary desires and impulses of mankind. When they make for comfort or beauty, like the partial supersession of stiff shirts by soft shirts, we accept them gratefully: but there is no evidence that such changes ever coincided with any definite movement in favour of increased comfort or beauty: they came to us, as it were, from outside, unaccountably. We make no conscious efforts towards a change in dress; rather, we shrink from them, lest the growth of a revolutionary movement should shake our treasured uniformity, and leave us some fine morning with the awful prospect of not being quite certain of looking exactly like our neighbours.

This attitude will no doubt be called cowardly and unenterprising, but it is so universal that its morality seems hardly worth arguing. In case, however, any stern moralists wish to denounce this mean compliance with fashion in the name of liberty, I would commend two points to their notice. First, the followers of fashion can claim that they are literally fulfilling Kant’s law; they are acting upon a principle which they can and do will to be law universal. When I put on my tie in the morning, my first and greatest desire is that every other man should do the same. It is not from any malign wish that others should suffer what I suffer: it is rather from a desire that, apart from any considerations of suffering or happiness, humanity, myself included, may be one upon this matter. The champions of liberty probably reply that they also satisfy the Kantian condition on a higher plane: they are ready to act on a universal principle that all men shall be free to dress in the most convenient and beautiful way. To which we answer, on a still higher plane, are you quite sure that this would be real freedom? In our happy youth we were taught to distinguish between the real freedom which only exists in relation to a positive law of which it is conscious, and the mere negative freedom from restraint, which is empty of content and apt to degenerate into caprice. Is it not at least a possibility that our craving for uniformity is no mere cowardice, but rests upon a deep-seated human instinct, warning us that liberty in dress would prove a merely negative liberty, and in fear of this throwing us back to the other extreme, so that we welcome a positive law, however irrational?

Another possibility has sometimes occurred to me, namely, that uniformity in dress is in the nature of a political allegory. Modern costume is a great equaliser; in outward appearance there is no longer any distinction between the aristocracy and the middle ranks of life. Every one has noticed the unducal appearance of eminent men, emphasised as it so often is nowadays by the curious fall which has taken place in the social status of whiskers. Every one, again, is familiar with the difficulty felt in clubs and at evening parties in distinguishing fellow-guests from waiters. The allegory may be interpreted in two ways: it may be taken as a satirical demonstration of the results of equality, or as indicating a generous instinct that one man’s natural advantages shall not cause him to outshine too brightly his less happy neighbours. But at least it seems possible that the dress paradox veils beneath its apparent perversity some lofty meaning: so that when the libertarians start piling up sublimities against us, we can reply with a few of our own.

In the rarefied atmosphere of these moral altitudes, a good many of the quarrels over walking equipment lose their importance: they are seen to be particular illustrations of a far wider question. Ties and hats and waistcoats and trousers--it is no use to argue about any of them as if they were ordinary human creations made in response to a felt desire and adapted to some practical purpose; they are all costume, symbols of something more inscrutable than practical purposes, and not to be judged by ordinary standards. Those who wear waistcoats or hats may, of course, attempt to defend them on practical grounds: they may even say, with some truth, that waistcoats have convenient pockets, and hats keep the sun off. But this is really an afterthought: it is the old human tendency to rationalise impulses after the event. The points cannot be argued singly and on practical grounds, until the paradox of dress has been faced and overcome.

The preceding argument will, I hope, bring consolation and moral support to that large class of walkers who conform to the conventional requirements of dress while walking, but feel an uneasy sense that they ought not to be doing so. They need have no uneasiness; their position is perfectly sound. Unless and until dress becomes solely and directly adapted to practical purposes, with no ulterior or symbolic meaning, it is superfluous to feel uneasy about compliance with ordinary rules. Even inconsistency (in the low practical sense) is perfectly defensible. If those, for instance, who leave their heads bare when alone in the country, but put on their caps to pass through a village, are accused by the libertarians of inconsistency, they can justly claim that all mankind are inconsistent in this matter: unless the libertarians are prepared to act up to their principles, and walk through Dorking on a Sunday morning in sweaters and short breeches (which is probably the most comfortable walking costume) they have no right to talk about inconsistency.

More than this, it can be shown, I think, that walkers above all men, if they belong to the working classes, and consequently have to do most of their walking on Sundays, ought to be very tender in their dealings with convention in all its forms. For they above all owe a debt to convention--to the agreement and common action of men in general. In the first place, convention has set aside for them one whole, free day in the week, so securely buttressed by immemorial tradition, that the wildest efforts of revolutionaries make but little impression upon it. Next, the same convention, for the very reason which forms its ultimate support, keeps the greater part of mankind at home during this day, so that the country is singularly empty and free. The Sunday walker gains, in fact, from convention a weekly bank holiday, attended by none of the inconveniences which make ordinary bank holidays rather bad for walking; the democracy sets him free, while leaving his aristocratic susceptibilities unruffled, and in its great kindliness and tolerance offers no hindrance to him in utilising the holy day in a way which is probably still repugnant to the greater number of Englishmen. He is thus a privileged law-breaker, with all the advantages of the law unimpaired; and it beseems him to be grateful to those who both make the law and allow him to break it.

This being so, if walkers are allowed to their own great benefit to break one convention, they ought to be all the more respectful to the remainder: they should be careful not to shock conventional susceptibilities further than is necessary. When a Sunday walker meets a church parade (which invariably happens in Westcott to those who take the 10.5 to Leatherhead and go for Leith Hill viâ Polesden Lacey and Ranmore Common) he should not swagger by with a conscious air of superior disreputability; rather, his attitude should be one of humble gratitude, and his costume as modest and conventional as he can make it. For (ultimately) it was church parade that both enabled him to take the 10.5, and has prevented Ranmore Common from being a roaring welter of cocoanut shies. Let him therefore abase his eyes and reflect, as he turns up Logmore Lane, that privilege involves obligations.

Apart from the question of Sunday walking, the cult of disreputability for its own sake seems hardly worthy of a walker. It undoubtedly exists, very largely in conversation, less largely in fact; and it is curious that the more refined relatives of disreputable walkers often find a peculiar pleasure in dwelling on the enormities of dear ----’s walking appearance. But it is hard to see in what studied disreputability is better than studied foppery; while unstudied disreputability is only separated by a very narrow line from slovenliness, and by a slightly broader line from dirt. Probably the cult rests on some kind of a vague sentimental yearning after originality, coupled with the universal passion for an imagined aristocratic detachment from the ideals of the bourgeoisie. But neither feeling is worthy of a walker, and neither ought to survive a few days’ proper walking.

* * * * *

If practical purposes are to be introduced, this is better done in another matter coming within the scope of equipment in the full sense--I mean food and drink. But luckily here the whole inquiry has been thrown in confusion by a wicked joke played by the doctors on the public. As far as a layman can understand the matter, it appears that no one really can demonstrate scientifically the effects of different kinds of food and drink, for the simple reason that a living and digesting body cannot be examined like a dead one; all theories on the subject are therefore purely empirical. But the medical profession, with an instinct for fun not suppressed by a long training and an arduous life, have made an unholy conspiracy with the organic chemists; and the result is a catalogue of proteids, phosphates, nitrogenous substances, etc., with equivalent percentages in powers of bone-forming, flesh-building, and heating, which is dangled cunningly before the eyes of the unsuspecting public. The public rises at once; we like our food, and love dogmatising about it; here is a chance to gain the unshakable support of formulae and diagrams and graphic curves. So we plunge into the troubled sea of proteids; and the end of it, as might be expected, is that there is no form of food which cannot be scientifically advocated, from nettles to human flesh.

How futile is the analytic science of food may be shown by its powerlessness in the face of other dogmatisms. Take, for example, that great traditional food-code associated with the training of oarsmen--a dogmatism so reverently guarded and so profoundly lunatic that a walker must treat it with respect. As late as the fifties it was devoutly believed that rowing men ought to drink very little at meals, but ought to have two glasses of port at three in the afternoon. There is still--or was until recently--a firm conviction that beef was better than mutton for training, while bacon and the flesh of swine generally were altogether taboo. It is not known whether the original prophet who dictated this system was in earnest or no; he may have been a simple soul, genuinely anxious that others should share the benefits of the truth which had been revealed to him; he may, on the other hand, have been a cunning student of men, who knew the power of dogmatism and realised that only thus could he persuade men to eat meals of such a stupefying size that they would be mentally incapable of resenting the monotony of rowing. But, however this may be, the remarkable point is that in a matter where food was really important, and a system of well-known and tried futility was in force, the proteid-experts said never a word; there was never even a voice raised to suggest eating the spare man on the day of the race.

On the question of drink, of course, the dogmatisms are even fiercer; in no other sphere is there such universal intolerance. The abstainers want every one else to abstain, and denounce them if they do not; the heavy drinkers want every one else to drink heavily and despise them if they do not; most bigoted and intolerant of all, the temperate drinkers want every one else to drink temperately and denounce and despise both the other parties. The whole subject is limp with sentimentality--the sentimentality which identifies drink with the devil, and the sentimentality which identifies drink with humanity, Christianity, and all the popular virtues. Every mug of beer and every cup of tea is now become symbolic; every drink is viewed _sub specie aeternitatis_, and it is difficult for the ordinary man as he drinks not to feel that his act is the illustration of some great and universal principle, and to enrol it, so to say, under the banner of one of the conflicting dogmatisms.

With most of these lunacies and sentimentalities, as such, the walker is not concerned. But he has above all men a very direct and practical interest in food and drink, as the fuel of his walking system, and he is bound to search the dogmatisms for any truth which may be latent in them. But when the practical eye is turned upon them, what nonsense they become! Put three men on the hills with a beef-sandwich, an egg-sandwich, and a jam-sandwich: can your proteid analysts tell you which of them will be going strongest at four o’clock? Give one man a whiskey-flask, and one a mountain stream: can you say which will walk the further or sleep the sounder? Above all, if you have come to the conclusion by experiment that certain foods and drinks are best for you, by what right can you try to thrust them down the throats of other men? The fact is that the human body is a very wonderful machine, sharing something of the individuality of the soul: and within certain limits there is no saying what exact form of nourishment will suit it best. A few general truths we can fix, such as that unripe apples and cyanide of potassium are unhealthy, and that more than two lobsters are not a good preparation for violent exercise; but the rest of the matter is one glorious uncertainty, and the only law which we can find is the great and universal empirical principle: ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ or, ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’

If then any one wishes to dogmatise about food and drink, let him do so frankly on the ground that he likes certain things, and expects other people to like them too. Let us have no more of proteids and food-values: above all, let us have no more of the moral aspects of food and drink. It is a man’s business to find out what will suit him best, what will keep his body at its maximum capacity for its various duties. This he can only discover experimentally, and in the process he must not be limited in the range of his experiments by any analytic tables or moral taboos: he must try proteids, sulphides, and oxalates impartially: he must try meat-eating as well as fruitarianism (avoiding crime): he must try beer as well as water, and, even more important, he must try water as well as beer. When he has found his right diet, then let him begin to dogmatise if he will; but let it be the dogmatism of a good citizen, who has found a truth and wants others to share it, not the dogmatism of a tyrant seeking to bind others by his own measure.

The worst foe to freedom is not science or morality but sentiment. There is a sentimental picture, dear to many imaginations, of a walker sitting down (generally in his boots) after a ‘few score’ of miles (to quote Canon Crisparkle) devouring large slices of meat washed down by tankards of beer, the whole subsequently enhaloed in tobacco. So popular is this fancy among the more sentimental part of the population, that when a walker refuses meat (as some do), or beer (as some do), or tobacco (as a very few do), it is thought something almost wrong, something out of the picture, an error of taste; and many walkers, either from cowardice or from courtesy to the weaknesses of others, have done violence to their own canons of diet in order to fit into the popular picture. On what exactly this sentiment rests it is difficult to see: it and the sister sentiment of disreputability seem to be merely aberrant fancies of imaginative people for their unlikes--of the clean for the slovenly, the abstemious for the greedy. In order to satisfy the imagination of the naturally clean and temperate sentimentalist, the naturally clean and temperate walker has to dress badly and overeat.

Most potent and most vicious of all is the sentiment for beer. No article of diet shines brighter in the imagination of those who do not take it: probably none is worse, on the whole, for walkers. Some walkers, of course, in the fulfilment of the great experimental law, take beer and thrive upon it, but for a large number it is a faithless friend or an open foe. Yet, so strong is the sentiment in its favour, that we rarely hear a word spoken against beer on other than purely moral grounds; those who cannot take it are apt to be almost apologetic, as though for a defect in themselves. In the interests of the beer sentiment every other kind of feeling is shamelessly exploited: aesthetically, we are asked to admire its beautiful colour: historically, we are reminded of its long tradition as the national drink of merry England: democratically, we are bidden to drink beer as a symbol of our unity with the heart of the people.

What is wanted is a little sentiment on the other side. It may be thought difficult to raise much sentiment on the subject of water, but at least on the grounds taken by the beer-devotees water need fear no comparison. Aesthetically, perhaps, water does not look as beautiful as beer in a glass; but sight is only one of the senses, and water never causes anything like the aura of a beer-mug the morning after. Historically, beer can simply make no show; it needs an emotional interpretation of history to carry back the tradition of beer even a thousand years; whereas water dates back to the dimmest beginning of things, and in its tradition the praise of Pindar is but as yesterday. Democratically, beer is even more utterly out of it: the constituency of beer consists mainly of men, and does not contain all of them. But the constituency of water is world-wide and heaven-high: it includes women; it includes children; it includes animals: nay, in a sense, it includes earth itself. When I drink beer I may be symbolically sympathising with seven men out of ten in the street; but when I drink water I am symbolically at one with the whole order of creation from the beginning.

Nay, drinker of beer, an thou’lt mouth, I’ll rant as well as thou. What is your drink after all? It is a compound of vegetable substances, whose main function is to ferment--_i.e._ in plain English, to go bad. These substances are sentimentally supposed to be malt and hops: in reality, they include a long and ghastly category of chemical drugs and substitutes known only to the Inland Revenue Department and the troubled consciences of brewers. These substances are mixed by some malodorous processes, with a Government Official standing by in hope of detecting a certain percentage of the fraud involved; and the outcome is put in barrels of not over-clean wood, and stowed in dirty and stuffy cellars until the time arrives for it to be passed through a metal beer-engine into tankards and glasses, which may or may not have been cleaned, and so down the throats of the long-suffering public, who have the consolation of reflecting that the cost price of their liquor is less than half what they pay, and that the rest is passing through the tortuosities of dubious finance into the pockets of the casual investor, that incubus upon the body politic.

But water is not compounded by any human hand: there is no list of authorised substitutes to be used in its composition. It is given to us complete; and our only care is, when our civilisation has contaminated it, to restore it to the form in which it was given to us. What other drink is there that can be taken _in situ_? What cask or beaker so fine as a rocky pool or a grass-tangled spring? What cup so satisfying as the scooping hand? Even when it comes through the medium of waterworks and pipes and jugs, it is still an element; it is taking us in its ordained cycle of mist, and rain, and river, and sea; it is making us one stage in the secular process. Let us drink water, then, if we are to reverence the framework of the creation: let us drink water, if we are to honour our remoter ancestors: let us drink water, if we wish to symbolise the solidarity of the living world.

* * * * *

The difference between proper emotion and sentimentality is like the difference between healthy fresh air and a deadly draught: one is what I like, and the other is what I don’t like. But I think an appeal may be made on something wider than personal grounds for a little less sentimentality in food and drink, and a little more proper emotion in costume and the rest of the walker’s equipment. Food and drink are important things, and must be taken seriously: they have a direct practical purpose, and their consideration must not be influenced by emotion. Every man ought to feel himself free to experiment in the most cold and scientific spirit, undistracted by conflicting sentimentalities, in order to find the diet most suitable to him; and not till this is done should any emotion attach to articles of food or drink. But dress and equipment, as we have seen, involve something more than material considerations; they symbolise something far beyond practical ends and purposes; and it is only fitting that a walker, contemplating the panoply of his craft, should be uplifted above the regions of prose.

When the epic of walking comes to be written, there are at least two moments in which equipment will be charged with the full force of the poetic current. One is at the very beginning of a walk, when everything is fresh and clean, when shirts are cool and unrumpled, and boots are new-greased, and the walking-stick lies cold and hard in the hand, and the knapsack sits on the shoulders like a bird new-poised and still unfamiliar with its perch. At such a moment who can think of practical and material purposes? Reason may whisper that the grease will make our boots pliable, that the stick will prove useful, that the knapsack contains many indispensable things for the ending of the day. But at the moment we have no such thoughts of the practical value of equipment: we feel only that we are equipped, that we are armed for the combat with time and space and wind and weather and mental depression and abstract thinking; and so we fling out our chests and stamp our feet on Mother Earth, and away to the rhythm of the dotted tribrach. ‘And Telemachus girt on his sharp sword and grasped his spear and stood by his seat at his father’s side armed with gleaming bronze.’

The other moment comes later, when we are some days upon our way. Boots have grown limp: clothes have settled into natural skin-like rumples: the stick is warm and smooth to our touch: the map slips easily in and out of the pocket, lucubrated by dog’s-ears: every article in the knapsack has found its natural place, and the whole has settled on to our shoulders as its home. The equipment is no longer an external armour of which we are conscious: it is part of ourselves that has come through the combat with us, and is indissolubly linked with its memories. At the start this coat was a glorious thing to face the world in: now it is merely an outer skin. At the start this stick was mine: now it is myself.

When it is all over the coat will go back to the cupboard and the curved suspensor, and the shirts and stockings will go to the wash, to resume conventional form and texture, and take their place in the humdrum world. But the stick will stand in the corner unchanged, with mellowed memories of the miles we went together, with every dent upon it recalling the austerities of the high hills, and every tear in its bark reminding me of the rocks of the Gable and Bowfell. And in the darkest hours of urban depression I will sometimes take out that dog’s-eared map and dream awhile of more spacious days; and perhaps a dried blade of grass will fall out of it to remind me that once I was a free man on the hills, and sang the Seventh Symphony to the sheep on Wetherlam.

VIII

WALKING ALONE

WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING

‘Lass, O Welt, O lass mich sein.’

VIII

WALKING ALONE

WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING

Walking alone is, of course, on a much lower moral plane than walking in company. It falls under the general ban on individual as opposed to communal pursuits. The solitary walker, like the golfer or sculler, is a selfish and limited being, unlike the rower, footballer, or cricketer, who is a member of a community. The point cannot be seriously argued. Prevaricators may call attention artlessly to certain features of communal pursuits--to cricket scores and lists of averages and interviews with eminent athletes; they may even review our country as a whole, and expatiate on the widely diffused spirit of toleration, mutual good-will, and readiness to co-operate which our national sports have produced. But their gibes are unavailing: it is plainly better to do things in company than alone: and the solitary walker, if he is honest, will at once resign all claim to the halo of patriotism, disinterested devotion, esprit de corps and good citizenship which encircles the brow of the footballer.

I will not even pray in aid the great names of Stevenson and Hazlitt. Their defence of solitary walking rested largely on the mistaken idea that if you walk in company you are bound to talk; they did not realise that even silence can be corporate, nay, that there is a concrete and positive taciturnity of two far more satisfying than the negative voicelessness of one. They did not know how grunts can reveal the man and ejaculations create and foster friendship. The silent contemplation of walking is aided, not hindered, by the presence of another silent contemplator at your side.

Walking alone, then, is a thing only to be justified by special circumstances; it is an abnormal function of life, a subject for pathology rather than physiology. But as life is not yet quite perfect and normal in all departments, there is a place for pathology: as the proper circumstances of walking are not always attainable, there is a place for walking alone. Without elaborating a scheme of casuistry, we can imagine certain conditions under which walking alone is defensible if not laudable; and it is only fair to the solitary walker, pursuing his lonely way under the ban of moral disapproval, to indicate some of these.

I have mentioned above four classes of walkers--six milers, twelve milers, eighteen milers, and twenty-four milers. The figures are not to be taken too literally; but I think walkers, as a whole, fall more or less definitely into four groups, whose average daily maxima are at, or near, these figures. The differences extend to other points--to pace, to length of stride, even, I think, to opinions and disposition, although here the classification becomes less definite. Class A, the twenty-four milers, average about 4½ miles an hour on a good road, and stride 40 inches or over: they tend to be mugwumps, mistrusters of rhetoric, lovers of the classic in art and music and literature, of the distilled and clarified products of human imagination or insight. Class B, the eighteen milers, average 4 miles an hour, and stride 36 inches: they are generally those who might have been in Class A but for a lack of real comprehensive capacity and for a love of talking and disputation: they tend to spasmodic intensities within a limited area instead of the wide and equable appreciation of Class A: they read Meredith, but talk about his philosophy, and have no proper grasp of Dickens. Class C, average 3½ miles an hour and call it ‘about 4,’ and stride 30 inches: they often have Class A capacities, but are physically disabled: they insist on large meals and a good deal of drink, and talk much of ‘scorching.’ Class D, average 2½ miles an hour, and stride 25 inches: they have no illusions about either, and are mainly occupied in catching a train home at the earliest opportunity.

Now it is obvious that if a Class B walker is set down to walk with one from Class D, one of two things must happen: either the D man must rise above his normal maxima, or the B man must sink below them. The usual supposition is that B must give way, on the ground that it is dangerous and distressing for D to exceed his limits. It is not generally recognised in such cases what a sacrifice is imposed on B. He has got to drop his pace from 4 miles to 2½; he has got to shorten his stride from 36 to 25 inches; he will probably not be allowed to talk politics; D has never read Meredith’s poetry, and by the time B is feeling a little warm, D will be beginning to think about the trains home. Now suppose that B has had a hard week’s work, is mentally confused, is contemplating marriage or an investment, is just changing his politics or metaphysics, or is in some other condition when his mind wants cleaning up and straightening out: would he not be to some extent justified in refusing to modify his distance, pace, and stride, and in offering D the alternatives of either complying with the B conditions or going to the D--that is, consorting with other members of his own class?

Those who hold that B would not be justified miss, I think, the distinction between walking and strolling; they consider that B will get some sort of motion through pleasant country, and that this ought to be enough for him, whatever his condition. The instance taken is purposely extreme; normally, it is admitted, a stroll in company is better than a walk alone. But there are times when B must have a proper walk, at whatever cost; when his primary need is for 18 miles at 4 miles an hour; nay, there are times when he is simply not fit for company, and must go walking alone, and recapture something of himself before he can properly consort with his fellows.

This condition of B’s which justifies solitary walking is called by many names in medical works or in the impassioned autobiographies of advertisement--neurasthenia, brain-fag, nervous collapse, or even Weltschmerz. But there is a better and more expressive name, covering a larger range of symptoms, which popular idiom created for us, and a poet then marked for ever as our own. I mean the Hump. The use of this phrase illustrates once more the truth that once we are conscious of a thing we have subdued it. When a man says he has neurasthenia, he understands nothing except a vague sense of discomfort somewhere unlocalised in himself: but when he says he has the Hump, the very word brings a clear vision of something unnatural and extraneous, of a definite deformity which he can attack and cure. The disease is isolated and identified, and is no longer a vague oppression; it is something which is not his real self, but is temporarily connected with him, and may, by an effort, be shaken off. Civilisation has pressed too heavily on one part of him, on his porter’s shoulder-knot; and the forces of his being, which should be employed in varying ways on different tasks, have concentrated themselves unnaturally to resist the pressure: his shoulder has become hypertrophied: in short, he has the Hump. Let him take a walk, let his being resume its natural course: let the forces settle instinctively back into their natural channels: let him realise the world around and about him, calling and answering to each of his separate faculties and not to one only; and lo! the pressure is lightened, the Hump is reduced, and he resumes his natural shape, and is fit for the company of his fellows.

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the garden too,
Have lifted that Hump, that horrible Hump,
The Hump that was black and blue.

The poet, it is true, wrote of the Hump that comes from having too little to do: but his words apply equally to that which comes of too much.

But it is not only abnormal mental conditions, such as the Hump, which justify solitary walking: there are abnormal physical conditions which at times render it necessary. Chief among these are the peculiar conditions of streets, pavements, and aggregated humanity which make up towns. Walking in company in a town is really a mockery. Not only are you hampered by other people, so that your attention is kept perpetually on them and off your companions: but your line is for ever being broken and reuniting, so that there is no chance of developing a communal swing and stride. Worse than that, the atmosphere of a town induces that dangerous combination of physical oppression and mental activity which leads to brilliant conversation: you shout epigrams across the roar of the traffic, and coruscate with wit as you dodge among perambulators. Town-walking in company, in fact, tends to become like an evening party, and the only possible thing in a town is to walk alone.

This being so, it may be asked whether town-walking is worth doing at all. Many people would say that it is not, and as regards the great majority of towns I should agree with them; the only thing to be done with such towns is to walk away from them as quickly as possible, and to achieve this it is pardonable to undergo the degradation of bicycling or even being driven in a vehicle. But there is one exception, and that is London. London walking is a quite distinct and peculiar thing, utterly unlike any other town-walking. It is a unique branch of walking in general and solitary walking in particular: for all the circumstances which make town-walking solitary apply tenthousandfold in London. But if you accept this condition, and walk London alone, you will find a very curious thing, namely that in this biggest and most monstrous of all towns you approach most nearly to pure rusticity. The strictly physical conditions, dirt, noise, smell, constriction of outlook, multiplicity of people, are as bad or worse in London than other towns; but in certain other points, by no means unimportant to a walker, the end of the series is like the beginning, the infinite is like the infinitesimal. What was possible on the South Downs, difficult in Cheltenham, and unthinkable in Liverpool, becomes possible again in London.

It all springs from one simple fact: there are so many people in London that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight. It is physically impossible for him to notice every one he sees; consequently, he gets into the habit of simply overlooking them, and as their _esse_ is _percipi_, they become, for practical purposes, not there. A Londoner walking along a crowded street is really alone in the wilderness: the men are simply as trees walking. The difference between walking along Oxford Street and along the Embankment is only the difference between walking through a copse where there are many trees or on a field track where there are few.