‘The heavenly bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is philosophy. If there’s a screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s philosophy; and if there’s a screw loose in an earthly body, that’s philosophy too; or it may be that sometimes there’s a little metaphysics in it, but that’s not often. Philosophy’s the chap for me.’
I
WALKING AND CONVERSATION
About the year 1887 there was still in existence a nursery joke:—
‘King Charles walked and talked;
Half an hour after his head was cut off.’
This, pronounced as a consecutive sentence, gave the infant mind its first experience of paradox. At the time we thought it funny. Later on, in the last decade of Victorianism, when we were struggling with ‘post,’ ‘postquam,’ and ‘postea,’ the joke appeared less funny. But later still, in Edwardian times, a deep moral meaning began (as was customary in those times) to appear underlying the joke. Take the two sentences as they stand above: construe ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in their strict sense: generalise King Charles: convert the ‘post hoc’ into a ‘propter hoc’; and you will have a motto to which all good walkers will add ‘ὣς ἀπόλοιτο....’
I do not mean, of course, that any or all forms of walking and talking are incompatible. It is possible, simultaneously, to stroll and to babble, to stroll and to talk, to walk and to babble. Strolling, the mere reflex action of the legs, is compatible with that sustained and coherent activity of the mind which alone deserves the name of talking. Babbling, the corresponding reflex action of the mind, is equally compatible with that supreme activity of the whole being which men call walking. But the attempt so often made to combine real walking with real talking is disastrous. Better the man who babbles and strolls, who trails his feet across country and his tongue across commonplace, than the man who tries to ventilate fundamental things while his body is braced to the conquest of road and hill.
‘A Voice’ at this point says ‘Yes, but we are not all scorchers,’ and thereby makes manifest a very common delusion. The Voice, and the body of opinion which it represents, are convinced that the difference between strolling and walking consists in the merely material point of speed, and that walkers cannot talk because they are bent solely on record-breaking, and have one eye ever on the milestones and one on the stop-watch, and no attention to spare for anything else. This is a gross and palpable error. Record-breaking is, of course, a possible form of walking, and most of us have indulged in it at one time or another; it is interesting, and sometimes even salutary, to abandon all higher thoughts, and go for a record frankly and whole-heartedly. But to the true walker this is only an occasional indulgence. Record-breaking is ultimately a degrading and (literally) a brutalising pursuit. It is the mere pitting of the brute animal powers against the brute inanimate conditions of time and space. If we are to be men and not animals, walking must be something more than a mere swing of the legs, and the country something more than a colourless aliquantum of miles. Record-breaking, if it becomes a habit, will be as a blight in the fair garden of walking, as a sarrusophone in the pedestrian symphony.
A casual observation of true walkers no doubt lends some colour to the Voice’s delusion. Walkers have generally an air of being intent upon the business in hand: they do not (as explained below) talk much: and as a mere matter of fact they generally walk at a good round pace. But their pace is only accidental and subordinate to their main purpose. The full swing of the legs, like all physical activities, is a fine thing in itself, but it is merely physical. The great fact is that such an activity leads more directly than others to that sense of intimacy with air and sun and hills and green things, which is the walker’s ideal. This sense of intimacy is not to be won by strolling; a man must do his best with his body before the gates are opened to him.
Another Voice may here interject ‘Wordsworth’; but, with all reverence and respect, I doubt if that great man ever was really an intimate of his surroundings in the sense which I mean. With him it was a mystical communion rather than an intimacy. He loved the country with a kind of austere and detached benevolence; I doubt if he really felt its idiosyncrasies like a friend. In his altitudes of thought there was probably little perceptible difference when he climbed Loughrigg after tea and when he took a whole day over the Langdale Pikes and Serjeant Man (if he ever did). Like the God of Aristotle, he experienced a single and continuous pleasure, instead of the infinitely varied and minutely individualised feelings of the ordinary walker. And the reason, I think, was simply that he was not, in the true sense, a walker. He records expeditions, of course, but these were generally made with his wife and sister, which in the then state of feminine development would give little chance of walking. There is no evidence that he ever laid his body at full stretch to the conquest of a mountain; hence they were to him merely mountains, full of general sublimities, and not individuals, each with its own idiosyncrasy, full of the variety and interest which are the staple food of friendship. His higher faculties, in short, operated abstractedly; he missed that concrete body of feeling to which even you and I can attain by ministering to the soul through the body. It is a great thing, no doubt, to be catholic, to feel the same immensities on Silver Howe as on the Great Gable; but there is something to be said for the humbler lot of the ordinary walker, who, if he misses the immensities on Silver Howe, yet gains that sudden jump and uplifting of his whole being as he approaches Esk Hause from the south-east, leaving behind the soft outlines and mere prettiness of the south, and on an instant lifts his head into a world of gods and giants.
The attainment of such a feeling requires a certain receptivity and even passivity of mind. You cannot grasp the character of country by a conscious effort of discursive reason; all you can do is to set your body fairly to its task, and to leave the intimate character of your surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk, the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible influences of sense. You must lay aside for the time being that formal and conscious reasoning which (you fondly think) gives you your distinctiveness and individuality in ordinary life; you must win back to deeper and commoner things: you must become mere man upon the face of your mother earth. Only in a state of humility and simplicity, with all views and arguments and chains of reasoning—all, in fact, that divides man from man—laid aside and utterly forsworn, can you enter the great democracy of walkers.