Some readers of these imperfect remarks may possibly wish to pursue such investigations farther.
Sir G. Grove, Preface to Beethoven
and His Nine Symphonies.
VI
WALKING IN LITERATURE
Walking is one of the many things whose history is not to be found in the historians. Even since they constituted themselves a distinct class of writers and began to see themselves in the part—that is, ever since Herodotus—history has been mainly a catalogue of abstractions, interesting and even thrilling, but (to the walker) mostly irrelevant. It is no doubt a good thing to have the wars and political convulsions and trade movements and Gunpowder Plots and Acts of Parliament and executions of the various periods accurately recorded; it is probably a good thing to have the pots and hair-ornaments and tombs of our distant ancestors excavated and labelled. But the moment we begin to ask about the ordinary man of each period, what he was doing and what he was thinking and whether he liked walking, we are answered only in abstract terms. The archaeologist can only say that he used pots of the Protomycenean period; the historian can only say that about seven thousand of him were killed in battles, and that most of him began about this time to grasp the first principles of commerce, and that all of him was subject to several conflicting economic tendencies not yet completely disentangled. The man himself is still hidden from our gaze.
Literature is our only help. Once a man sits down not to record facts and analyse tendencies in what he conceives to be a scientific historical spirit, but to write about the things which really interest him, to imagine and moralise and sentimentalise, we begin to learn some history. It is not only that he shows us something of the normal man’s habits and ways of life: even better, he shows us his thoughts, his prejudices, his unconscious presuppositions, what he takes for granted and cannot imagine not to be so. History is probably the worst record of the ordinary man, and memoirs the second worst; letters are more trustworthy, because letter-writers do not always confine themselves to facts and frequently become excited; poetry, rhetoric, drama, philosophy, and fiction are best of all, since in these men are really saying what they think. If we want to know what Athens was really like in her decline, we turn not to the scientific and accurate record of Thucydides, but to contemporary comedy, acted to the partly drunk by the completely drunk. If we want to know our great-grandfathers, we turn not to Lecky but to Miss Austen.
Walking, being above all things human and intimate, is naturally neglected by the historians: it cannot be shown to have caused any political convulsions, or to have had any economic effects; it is therefore ruled out. If we want to know whether men walked in the past, and how much they walked, and, above all, in what spirit and with what object they walked, we must turn to literature. If there is any history of walking, it will be there. What follows is a brief and wholly inadequate attempt to review literature from this standpoint—to see what part walking plays in the largely unconscious record of facts and wholly unconscious record of ideas which we find in literature.
It is well at once to prepare for a disappointment. It is fairly clear that in all ages men have walked, more or less: indeed, this could be proved a priori from the anatomical structure of the leg. But it is equally clear that up to very recent times they have done so without the least knowledge of the value and purpose of walking. They have walked in a utilitarian spirit, to get somewhere; they have walked in a medical spirit, to improve their digestions; they have very rarely walked for the sake of walking, to realise themselves in a fine activity. No doubt the men of old were ignorant and unenlightened, and too much must not be expected of them; no doubt the habit of riding on horses (introduced quite early and still existing) diverted men’s attention from the possibilities of walking. But when all allowances are made, the unprejudiced walker, reviewing all the centuries B.C. and at least eighteen of the centuries since, must pronounce them one long disappointment.
The first disappointment comes in classical literature: among all the figures of the Graeco-Roman civilisation we look in vain for a walker. The Homeric heroes occasionally took a walk by the sea, but only from bad temper (ὃν θυμὸν κατέδων) or to interview their divine mothers. Aeneas is a little more promising: the lines—
Cui fidus Achates
It comes et paribus curis vestigia figit—
raise considerable hopes of a proper walk, but the poet proceeds to dash these hopes by the damning admission in the next line—