VIWALKING IN LITERATURE

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

Sir G. Grove, Preface toBeethovenand His Nine Symphonies.

Walkingis 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 wasthinking 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, andmemoirs 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 toreview 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 proveda priorifrom 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 centuriesB.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 AchatesIt 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 ofwalking 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 wakingthe 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 thispenance 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. InAs You Like Itbothparties 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 embassyhad 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 becamemore 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. Butfor 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 Darcywalkthe 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. Elizabethengages 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.

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; thewalk 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 factof 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. Butamong 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 DavidCopperfield 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.

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 theirfeet 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.’ Theywalk 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, theIliad, 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 morefitting 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 andon 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.

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 moreand 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.

Some interesting but perverse treatment of walking is to be found in Ibsen. His characters walk a good deal, but it neverseems 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 wethrow 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 soulSmoothed 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 degreeThe instant made eternity—And heaven just prove that I and sheStride, 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.

Itwill 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 throughthe 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 thecourse 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.

ἀδύνατον γὰρ ἢ οὐ ῥᾴδιον τὰ καλὰ πράττειν ἀχορήγητον ὄνταAr.Eth. Nic.1. 9.

Everyone 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; therival 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 ontheir 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 whichthe 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 thehard 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 thea 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 bootsthan 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) froma 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 isunhealthy, 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; itis 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 partialsupersession 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 themorning, 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 usback 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 whenthe 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 ina 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 andgraphic 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 viewedsub 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 isa 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 ofbeer, 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, ofcourse, 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, andwater 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 sentimentallysupposed 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 onlycare 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 takenin 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 arecool 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 intonatural 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 urbandepression 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.

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