The simple foot-beat is undoubtedly a potent link between walkers and music; I doubt, however, if it is the only or the chief ground of their musical susceptibility. There are other activities besides walking which have a regular and emphatic rhythm, and yet are not markedly associated with music. Some of these will be treated in more detail later; here it will suffice to mention carpet-beating, the treadmill, and bicycling. The cause is no doubt partly physiological; the carpet-beater and the felon operate in awkward positions, while the bicyclist, even if he does not stoop over his handle-bars and so cramp his lungs, has a current of air in his face which parches his throat and impedes the flexibility of his whistle. The same applies even more forcibly to motorists, were it possible to conceive them as in any relation to music or as fit for anything but treasons, stratagems and spoils—the stratagems being conceived, and the spoils exacted, by the police.
A more potent reason, I think, is the actual bodily condition of a walker, that perfect harmony which comes of a frame well occupied. The carpet-beater operates from the waist upwards, his lower half being as irrelevant as that of a stranded mermaid; the bicyclist forswears his birthright by allying himself to a machine. But the walker is an organism, and therefore a fit vehicle for music. And this inner fitness is matched by the merely material conditions of the walker’s physique. His bodily habit is the right one for singing—for the exercise of the vocal mechanism irrespective of the kind of music produced. A good walker means an instrument in good condition, with a wide compass and a ripe quality of tone. That high A after which you strive at other times with tears and sweat comes without effort; you make trees and the mountain tops that freeze bow their heads with notes which at other times would merely make the accompanist blench; your runs sound like a bird soaring into the empyrean and not like a lame man going upstairs; your trill is at last a trill, clearly distinguishable from a yodel. And when the day is done, what singing is there like that of a walker in his bath?
These two facts, the natural beat of the foot and the bodily exhilaration of walking, account for a good many of the ordinary walking songs, the cheerful melodies of simple rhythm, which recall a flagging company to courage and unison. Chief of these is the famous ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave.’ Tradition dictates that this must be sung on the principle of cumulative omission—the first verse in full, the second without the word ‘grave,’ the third without ‘his grave’ and so on, the blanks being filled by beats of the foot. Thus in the last verse but one, the first three lines consists only of the word ‘John’ and seven foot-beats, thrice repeated; while in the last verse of all there are twenty-three beats in complete silence, until the whole company comes in on the words, ‘But his soul goes marching on.’ It is a point of honour to count these beats and the pause preceding them exactly right, so as to get a unanimous attack with no false starts. For reviving the attention and good feeling of a tired company, there is nothing like John Brown; and, it may be mentioned, it will carry them over 576 paces if ‘a-mouldering’ is reckoned one word, or 640 if it is reckoned two, as the more orthodox hold.
Walkers may be thought perverse in making a fetish of a song like ‘John Brown’—which is in origin, I suppose, a threnody on the death of an eminent man—when there lies ready to hand such a store of specifically walking tunes. I allude, of course, to that ancient and well-established form of music, the March. There is no age of man which has not had its marches, whether it called them anapaests or war-songs or what not. Further, the feelings which marches express are wide in range and highly impressive in character. Military glory, religious pomp, state ceremonial, weddings and funerals—all these have their appropriate setting in the march rhythm. Or, in other words, when man celebrates his greatest achievements or his highest aspirations, when he makes the big adventure of his life or the greater adventure of his death, the most natural and human expression of feeling is to walk to the strains of music. Marching, in short, is the epic form of walking, and march tunes are the epics of music—the formal embodiments of communal feeling on the great occasions of life.
But communal feeling is not the whole of life, and marching is not the only, nor indeed the best, form of walking. Marching presupposes a disciplined company and a hard road; it reduces all to the measure of the least, resulting in that cramped and debased form of motion known as the military ‘stride’; rhythmically, it over-emphasises the beat of the foot and neglects the other elements in the walking motion. In the same way, marching tunes seem often to win their popularity at the expense of their quality, and to border on dulness, if not triviality. To say that marches express the great moments of life is perhaps inaccurate; strictly they deal not with the feelings of the hero or king or priest or corpse or bridegroom, but with the feelings of the bystanders about these feelings. Now it is a regrettable fact that ordinary men on ceremonial occasions tend to take a slightly superficial view of the proceedings. I doubt if the Cives Romani assembled at a triumph thought about the imperial greatness of Rome so much as the fit of the proconsul’s cloak, the personal appearance of the chained captives, or the chances of a stampede among the elephants. Similarly at a wedding, the linked destinies of two young lives, the eternal vows flung out by the unquenchable courage of man across the unsubstantial hazard of futurity, are not, as a rule, the first and only preoccupation of the guests. Hence it comes that the most popular march tunes have often a suggestion of artificiality or even insincerity. The orthodox Wedding March is deliberately artificial; it was written to represent—and does most exquisitely represent—the wedding of six semi-mythical lovers seen through the glamour of the fairy-haunted forest of midsummer: it is somewhat out of place at a decorous union of citizens. Similarly, of the three popular Funeral Marches, one is tinged with decorative pomposity, and one with Little Nell; only one casts over the hearer the very shadow of death.
However this may be, in actual fact the walker on the hills, alone or with a few companions, has little to do with marches. His rhythm is not a bare ‘one, two, one, two’; it is a long swing from the hips to which the whole body sways, a complex of stresses in which the foot-beats only mark the periods. And his feeling is not that of a crowd at a show: it is something deeper, more contemplative, more individual, a function of many variables, of himself, what he is, what he does, of last week, last month, to-day, the face of the country, the influence of sun and wind. And the music which he craves as his counterpart—nay, the music which he actually hums or sings or whistles—is rarely the music of the march.
What it is may be disputed. At one time or another I have heard nearly every kind of tune sounding to the steps of a walker. Wagner and Purcell, Sullivan and Anon, symphony and opera, tone-poem and folk-song—nothing (with one exception) seems to come amiss to a walking company. And from this very large and variegated body of music one most remarkable fact emerges—namely, that nearly every kind of rhythm can, at some time or other, be accommodated to the walking stride. Regarding man as a biped, naturally inclined to ‘lead’ with one foot rather than the other (generally the left), you would say that even rhythms with two or four beats to the bar would suit him best; and perhaps (in the lowest sense of ‘nature’ as the starting point and not the finishing post) the natural rhythm of walking is the ‘one, two, one, two.’ But man is more than a biped; and if he likes a tune with three or five beats to the bar (or seven or eleven for that matter), he is quite capable of stepping accordingly, and of either ‘leading’ with each foot alternately, or of overlooking altogether the difference between the natural stresses of his feet. Further, as regards the three-time rhythms, many of them go quick, so that only one foot-beat is needed in each bar; and there is the incomparable six-eight, of which more will be said in the sequel.
At this point the scandalised mathematician inquires, What becomes of the tempo? Is not the effect of walking on music purely Procrustean? A walker (let us say) takes two strides to a second; in order to suit his steps, a tune in even time must go at a particular rate, selected from the following schedule, to wit, (a) two bars to a second, with one foot-beat in each bar; (b) one bar to a second, with two beats in each bar; (c) one bar to two seconds, with four beats to each bar; for practical purposes we need not go beyond this point. For the three-times, there is an even more sharply divided scale, viz. (a) two bars to a second, one beat to each bar; (b) one bar to a second and a half, three beats to each bar; (c) one bar to three seconds, six beats to each bar. What, asks the mathematician, happens to the tunes whose proper pace falls, let us say, between (a) and (b): must they either be drawn out languorously to fit (b), or feverishly accelerated to fit (a)?
The answer to the mathematician’s question is that in practice no difficulty arises. In the first place, a walker’s rate of stride varies to some extent according as he is going uphill or downhill, on grass, rock, or road. Secondly, a little licence may surely be claimed by a walker in varying the orthodox tempo. After all, even conductors do this sometimes; and if one tune has to go a little quicker than an orchestra takes it, another will have to go a little slower, which is (I understand) only a slight extension of what the musicians call ‘rubato.’ Thirdly, and as a minor point, we may set against any possible disadvantages the peculiarly fine effects which the walker obtains in augmentation, when he whistles a tune with one step to a bar and repeats it with two steps to a bar. Finally, it is only in the three-times, between (a) and (b), that the matter becomes at all serious, (b) being one-third of the rate of (a). Now, it is a curious fact, that all the good three-time tunes (to speak broadly) fall quite easily under either (a) or (b). Cheerful songs and jigs and scherzos and most six-eight tunes go naturally with one step to each group of three notes, the swing of the body marking the weak stresses; more solemn themes, funereal folk-songs, the Unfinished Symphony, the last movement of the ‘Pathétique,’ and the Tristan prelude go naturally with three steps to a group of three notes; the Pilgrims’ March takes six, with complicated cross-accents when the ‘pulse of life’ begins. The intermediate class of three-times, between (a) and (b), taking about one second or two strides to a bar, and therefore cutting across the walking rhythm, are generally waltz tunes, which no one in his senses wants to sing on a walk.
If the mathematician still persists, we can silence him by remarking that in any case the tempo is not the most vital point in walking tunes. If all that we desired were a measure to suit our steps, ‘John Brown’s body’ and the ‘Dead March’ would be enough. The real thing which matters is not the tempo but the character of a tune. Nothing proves the stuff of a tune so surely as to sing it on a walk; music which can stand this test must have some real substance in it. The walker need go through no conscious process of judging, accepting, refusing; let him merely walk, with his mind ranging at large and a tune sounding on his lips or working unuttered in the inward ear, which is the joy of solitude; without his knowing it the assize will be held and judgment pronounced. The shoddy sentimental phrase, which sounded so alluring at 11.30 p.m. yesterday among the potted palms in the conservatory, turns thin and sour by day on the ruminant palate of the walker. The theme which sounded hard and obscure takes on a new meaning as it pulsates to the rhythm of the stride: obscurity reveals hidden purposes and possibilities of melody; hardness becomes strength; and the whole sinks gradually into the inner parts of the walker’s consciousness where music abides beside the springs of thought and action.