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, of course, 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, and water 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 sentimentally supposed 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 only care 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 taken in 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 are cool 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 into natural 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 urban depression 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.