The first of these is the weather. For some obscure and probably discreditable reason the weather is regarded as a trivial subject. At most it is permitted in less advanced circles as a mere preliminary conversational flourish, comparable to the stray chords with which a pianist settles himself to his work and his audience to listening or slumber. In the more intense intellectual circles the weather is altogether taboo. If you mention it in Hampstead or Chelsea you are set down as a trifler and not asked again. Now of all those unintelligently transmitted, mystically apprehended, and devotionally guarded traditions which uphold the fabric of current cant, this seems the blindest, the most foolish, the least defensible. There is nothing really so interesting as the weather: nothing so omnipotent in its workings, so far-reaching in its effects, so inscrutable in its variety, so compelling in its fascination. And yet the heathen in his blindness—a fair description of the intellectual in his detachment—is pleased to rule out the weather as a triviality. He plumes himself on the universality of his social and political range, on his familiarity with the forces which lie behind the working of our ordinary life; but what force is so effectual and so omnipresent in every moment of every man’s existence as the weather? A political or financial crisis occurs, and some few of us become excited for some twenty-fourth of our day-to-day life; a drought or a frost or an anticyclone occurs and all of us in all our doings are directly or remotely affected by it. Yet we may talk crisis until our brains reel; we may say nothing of the weather. The intellectual plunges eagerly into the depths of art and literature and the drama, and talks with a glib facility of the clash of cosmic forces; let him open a window and put out his head if he would know what a clash of cosmic forces really is. When kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings, their first act will be to reinstate the weather as a subject of supreme interest and importance; to relegate to a secondary place in the newspapers the present seventeen columns of murders and suicides, the seven columns of politics and the seventy times seven columns of sport, and to print at the head in large and golden letters the really valuable and significant part of the news, namely the weather report. In those days, let us hope, the critic and the politician and the sociologist and the biologist and all other sentimental empiricists will be removed from the popular pulpit: and the most sacred crown of unfading bay will be laid on the head of the meteorologist, the ordained and initiated interpreter of depressions and vortices and anti-cyclones and Atlantic secondaries, the hierophant of the celestial pageant. And at the head of the great Philippic which shall then be uttered to disestablish the tyranny of the intellectuals, there will stand the words Quousque, Chelsea, abutere patientia nostra? How long will you debar us from discussing the weather?
The struggle has already begun, and in the forefront of the fighting line are the walkers. To them even more than other men the weather is a matter of vital and compelling significance. It is not so much that the tangible weather conditions affect them more nearly: no man who plies his craft in the open can be indifferent to sun and wind and wetness and drouth. It is rather that the walker in virtue of his craft is more intimately attuned to the temper of earth and sky; his soul and body are more of a piece, and his nature consequently responds with a subtler sympathy to the influences of weather. When a dry northeaster is stiffening the earth, the walker is a man of dour endurance: he attacks unpalatable tasks—arrears of letter-writing, the sorting of papers, the ordering of clothes—with readiness, almost with gusto. Then the wind dies down and the sky clears and a frost anti-cyclone sets in: forthwith he becomes a Stoic, thinking high and abstract thoughts, determining lofty resolutions, conceiving pure outlines of things. Then comes the herald of the most magical of all shifts, an Atlantic disturbance; there are hints of soft air from the south-west and smells of coming rain. At once the walker’s nature responds: the iron resolutions begin to break down, the pure outlines are blurred; through every sense steals in the charm of detail and colour; he becomes less stoical, more humane, a fitter companion for the spring that is being ushered in without.
The weather, then, is the first of the conversational provinces which walkers have to reclaim from a servile status of alleged triviality. It is their duty, as it is their pleasure, to set up against the so-called Pathetic Fallacy that nature is in sympathy with man, the Joyful Fact that man, if whole, is in sympathy with nature. There are already signs of the coming Restoration: even now, where two or three kindred souls are assembled, the weather begins to take precedence of other subjects. Recently, on a Saturday night, I happened to remark, in company, that as I walked to the house the wind was swinging round to the north, the sky was clear, the streets were dry, and there was promise of a brilliant Sunday. My host, who wished to discuss the merits of Zoroastrianism as a working creed for urban civilisations, became rather restive, and mentally I saw the blue pencil going through my name in his wife’s rota umbrarum; but across the room I observed a man fixing an eager eye on me in total disregard of his neighbours. One look was enough. As soon as I had rebuffed the Zoroastrian with a few firmly enunciated prejudices, I moved across to my man and said, ‘Do you know the track above Pickett’s Hole?’ He answered, ‘Yes, but it’s just been ploughed up and wants marking out again.’ So, as Touchstone says, we swore brothers.
The second topic of conversation, which is especially the property of walkers, is the topic of food and drink. This, like the weather, is generally taboo in polite circles; but through our country as a whole it is a popular and almost universal topic, especially the second half of it. Hence the walker’s function in this case is to introduce not so much a new topic as a new treatment. He has to substitute for the levity with which food and drink are usually treated a proper and befitting gravity.
The word ‘levity’ may seem strange to those who are familiar with a certain type of conversations, not rare among our island race, on the subject of food and drink. It is easy for the moralist to draw a terrible picture of bull-necked financiers dining in clubs or City restaurants—men gorged with high living, to whom the past is a memory of business enlightened by eating and drinking, and the future a dear vision of eating and drinking uninterrupted by business. But the real fault of such men’s conversation is its levity. A glutton is only a tenth of a man. When food and drink have begun to occupy the whole area of mental discourse, the human being becomes only a digestive and ruminative apparatus informed by a rudimentary consciousness. The conversation issuing from such a system is mere animal grunt with little human element intermixed; hence, for all its avoirdupois, it has from the standpoint of eternity a very real levity, a very real lightness in the spiritual scales.
Conversations on food and drink between normal persons are far pleasanter to listen to, and have much more real gravity. They start, as a rule, with bald statements of likes and dislikes, which, as dogmas incapable of proof or argumentation, are excellent props to the framework of discourse. But as the general topic of Things I Like begins to particularise itself under the heading of Meals I Have Eaten, the conversation takes a wider range. The great meals of the past are necessarily associated in memory with their surroundings—the walk, the bathe, the scenery, the fine day. Viewed in isolation, a meal is not much; viewed in its relation to the day and the day’s work, it is an interesting, important, even essential element. What walker is there who does not treasure in his inmost heart the memory of some chocolate consumed on a mountain top, some stream drunk dry among the eternal hills, some sandwich eaten in a palpitating shadow-land of shifting mist? Such memories are indeed part of his being: and when they issue forth in conversation they come with no glutton’s levity, but with the gravity of the whole nature of man.
‘All very fine,’ says A Voice at this point; ‘but are walkers the only men who treat the subject of eating and drinking with gravity? What about those French fellows—gourmets, aren’t they called? And, in your beastly antiquity, were there not Epicureans?’ My dear Voice, Epicurus was a simple-hearted old man who lived in a garden on cabbages, was notably kind to children, and disestablished existing systems of religion out of pure conscientiousness and in the interests of geniality and good feeling; his most famous Roman disciple talks of eating and drinking and other things of sense in a way which makes an article in the Medical Encyclopædia seem relatively warm and passionate; and his nearest modern equivalent is Bernard Shaw. No doubt subsequent gluttons called themselves Epicureans: but they have thereby no more claim to philosophic gravity than any half-baked philanderer who talks of Platonic Love. As to gourmets, I dare say they exist, and I am still hoping to meet one, in order to discover what in spite of all the talk on the subject seems very doubtful—that is, whether there can be a real art of eating and drinking in the least worthy of the name, whether the sense of taste is capable of an aesthetic experience even remotely comparable to those of sight and sound.
In the interim, I hold that the last word on the subject was uttered by the gentleman in Punch:—‘Oh, what a ’eavenly dinner we’ve ’ad!’—‘Enough to make yer wish yer was born ’oller.’ The gourmet’s art, in short, operates, if at all, only during the actual process of the deglutition of food; it has no concern with what happens afterwards. (I hope it is unnecessary to apologise for this vulgar but vital distinction.) Food and drink are regarded merely as ticklers of the palate, and not as builders and preservers of the body. Now surely this is once more an error of abstraction. Properly regarded, the sandwich does not cease when it is swallowed; it gives shape and colour to the subsequent pipe: it braces the heart for the afternoon walk; its swan song calls us to tea; last of all, its spirit is linked and welded into the imperishable memories of the day. Can the gourmet say the same of his lobster salad? Is it not, when once its brief domination of the palate is over, at best a fruitless and dissociated memory, at worst a torment and a foe? Once again, the walker by adhering to the concrete view gains sanity and width of vision: the abstract specialist is left with a half-discerned and therefore disordered world.
There is one further cause which tends to set apart the walker’s food and his conversation about it, from that of other men; he usually carries it, at least for the midday meal or meals, on his person. It is thus far more intimately associated with him than the food which issues at stated intervals from the mysterious economy of the home. There is no formal process of sanctification so real and so significant: the gilding of the horns of the sacrificial victim, the solemn procession and the prayer, the incense and meal and sacred fire—these are but vain symbols, compared with the sublimation and even transubstantiation which ensues from carrying food in the pocket. Better a simple marmalade sandwich which has climbed a hill with you firmly stuck to your pouch and your ordnance map, than all the flesh-pots of Egypt, if connected with you only by the extrinsic relation of eating.
To sum up, then, or rather to reiterate, food and drink are to the walker a very vital and central part of his being, of the concrete world without and the concrete man within. Hence, they form very nearly the most intimate and essential part of his conversation. It is sometimes thought that a test of friendship is the ease and frequency of conversation upon lofty and abstract themes. For myself, I set little store by the friendship of two men or women who talk largely of life and death and the beginnings of things: such talk, especially about death, is better kept for one’s enemies. But when two men talk freely about food and drink, then you may be sure that a real intimacy has begun; and when a youth and a maiden talk thus, their feet are on the high road to the great adventure. Recently I overheard Mr. Jones say to Miss Robinson, ‘Hard-boiled eggs are all very well for a family party, but not much good if you mean real business’; to which she answered, ‘I only like them on mountains in the winter.’ Finding that my friends—a deplorable and indeed indefensible practice—were offering seven to two against the engagement, I caused some astonishment by taking the odds. I have not yet been paid, but I saw young Jones in Kensington Gardens the other day beating his sister with a hazel switch.