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. But among 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 David Copperfield 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 their feet 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.’ They walk 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, the Iliad, 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 more fitting 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 and on 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 more and 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 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.