III
WALKING AND MUSIC
With a Digression on Dancing
Saltatorem appellat L. Murenam Cato. Maledictum est, si vere obiicitur, vehementis accusatoris; sin falso, maledici conviciatoris. Quare cum ista sis auctoritate, non debes, M. Cato, arripere maledictum ex trivio ... neque temere consulem populi Romani saltatorem vocare; sed conspicere, quibus praeterea vitiis affectum esse necesse sit eum, cui vere istud obiici potest. Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.
Cic. Pro Mur. vi. 13.
The waltzer is characterized by great delicacy and stupidity. The death-rate is higher amongst them than amongst ordinary tame mice.... A waltzer cannot escape; it cannot keep up a run in a direct line for long, and soon lapses into spinning.
A. D. Darbishire,
Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery, pp. 85-6.
III
WALKING AND MUSIC
WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING
The poet Juvenal in a well-known line remarked that the penniless traveller (or walker) will sing within earshot of a robber. In modern times the picture has rather lost its poignancy, since robbers have deserted our highroads and content themselves with organising bazaars; but the significant conjunction of the words ‘Cantabit’ and ‘viator’ remains. To sing, hum, burble, whistle or generally adumbrate music is at once the distinction and the pride, the duty and the pleasure, of walkers. Under the influence of a fine day and a pleasant country the voiceless and tone-deaf have been known to emit sounds coming well within the orchestral range (interpreted liberally and so as to include the instruments of percussion), while the most moderately and modestly musical of men become on a walk encyclopaedic in their range of melody and Protean in their variety of tone-colour. There is surely some natural kinship between walking and music; the musical terms—andante, movement, accompaniment—are full of suggestive metaphor; and the sacred symbol of both arts is the wooden stick which marks the strides of the walker and pulsates to the heart-beats of the orchestra.
The most obvious ground for this kinship is rhythm. The simple beat of the foot on the ground, with the natural swing of the body above it, suggests inevitably the beat of the musical bar. It is difficult to walk for long under the sway of that regular ‘one, two, one, two’ without fitting a melody to it; it is even more difficult to hear a melody played or sung when walking without dropping instinctively into its rhythm. A London crowd, that most apathetic of masses, begins to march in unison when a barrel-organ strikes up the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ or the Intermezzo of Mascagni or some other item from the repertory of mechanical music; and if ever you wish to deride, contemn, trample on and spiritually triumph over a tune (which happens to all of us sometimes), there is nothing more satisfying than to walk past the band or gramophone from whence it issues at a step cutting clean across its rhythm. Had the Sirens lived on land, Odysseus would have needed no wax in his ears; he could have waited till they began their incantation (in A flat, three-four time, sixty bars to the minute, lusingando), and then walked by at a brisk step, matched to a breezy anapaestic song or to the incomparable rhythm of his own hexameters.