But if we can respect the rights of others, we can also respect our own; and it is here that Walker Miles is at once our prophet and our guide. As ancient as the fields themselves, as securely based upon the ages and sanctified by the use of our fathers, the footpaths and field-tracks stand as the living embodiment of popular rights. Beside the way which the feet of generations have worn to church or inn, the loftiest dwellings and widest parks are mere parvenus. If the trespasser wishes to commit an act of symbolic defiance against the landed aristocracy, he need not climb their fences or jump through their flower-beds: he can tread the right-of-way which existed before they were thought of, which conditioned the laying out of their estates, which often cuts clean through their property with all the contempt of an oak for a mushroom. Some rights-of-way may have been lost to us, in the manner mentioned above; but many yet remain which the Romans trod, and the Saxons trod, and our later ancestors trod; and all the forces of darkness have not prevailed against them.
The preservation of commons and footpaths has now passed into the hands of a great and beneficent society; Pompeius has set sail on the Mediterranean, and the pirates have been subdued. But there is no surer guard for our rights than a steady and regular patrolling of our possessions; and in this Walker Miles is a safe guide. He is a master of all the tricks by which the public is at present cheated, all the last desperate devices of defeated piracy. The locked gate of the farmyard, the ‘Trespassers’ board planted by the stile within a foot of the path, the track which appears to lead up to the doors of a private house—all these figure in his stately prelude, and are exemplified again and again in the course of his works. Following in his steps we need fear no keeper: and if ever a bar or board stand in our way we can disregard it. Beside one of the Oxted paths there lie (or lay) the shattered remains of a notice-board which some usurper had planted in the very centre of the way. I can claim no credit for its destruction, for by the time I came there was in truth very little destroying left to be done; but I like to think of that unknown devotee of Walker Miles, pursuing his placid way, faced suddenly by the intruder, and with one splendid motion laying it low and (as far as could be judged) jumping on it afterwards.
The style of Walker Miles is perhaps an acquired taste. He wrote under peculiar conditions: he had to be at once clear and compendious, that the careless walker might not miss his way nor the weakling stagger under the weight of a large volume. He had thus little use for rhetorical tropes and flourishes; his words had to be cut down to the bare minimum necessary to express his meaning. But, to the initiated, this rigorous conciseness lends his style a peculiar value: every word has its appointed function: we feel that we could not sacrifice a single line; nay, those who have unintentionally done so by skipping a few lines in the middle of the page have regretted it when the subsequent directions became unintelligible. And the fact—also necessitated by his conditions—that most of the verbs are in the imperative mood exercises a singular charm; we feel that the author is in an intimate relation with us, addressing us personally and not merely discoursing from afar.
As a sample of his style, I take a section of the walk from Leith Hill to Felday.
‘Another lane is soon reached. Cross this lane, and take the opposite path uphill towards the entrance-gate of the approach-road to Highashes-farm. Pass through this gateway, and upon reaching the first outhouse, note a wicket gate on the left. Pass through it and follow the track downhill between banks. Upon coming out upon an open path through the wood, still keep straight ahead along the hillside, with a copse overhead on the right, and a grand larch-wood below on the left. In another quarter-of-a-mile the SEVENTEENTH MILE point will be reached and then for half-a-mile further the path still continues easily up and down the picturesque undulations of the wood.’
Within the compass of six sentences we have traversed perhaps the most wonderful mile in all the author’s works. The uninformed may regard the passage as dull, but to those who know their Walker Miles, and above all to those who know the Highashes Farm bridle-path, there is more meaning in these simple words than in all the laboured enthusiasms of a guide-book or a local-colour novelist. In the whole passage there are but two descriptive epithets, and these of the most temperate kind; but both their rarity and their temperance give to the epithets of Walker Miles a special value: he only uses them when there is something which deserves epithet. As the short and businesslike sentences pass before us in ordered succession, we may fairly recall another author who knew how to gain vividness by sacrificing ornament; we catch again something of the quick, uplifting stringendo of Thucydides.
Works of reference are traditionally the butts for small wit; and it is possible that as Walker Miles becomes more widely known a legend will spring up that his directions are obscure, like the sister legend, fostered by dying or dead humourists, that Bradshaw is unintelligible. The Bradshaw myth has by now got some footing, and it will take a few generations of increasing good sense to kill it; but it may be hoped that all walkers will combine to strangle any embryo Walker Miles legend at birth. If a man knows the four points of the compass, can distinguish between his right hand and his left, and (occasionally) can recognise a holly or an oak, he has all the equipment necessary for understanding Walker Miles. I have followed his directions now for some years, and have only come to grief from my own carelessness, or from actual changes in the country which have made his directions out of date. Now and then the course of a footpath has been altered: for example, the Highashes Farm track now debouches not into the Felday road, but into the cross-road to Abinger, so that one turns to the left instead of the right. Here and there, too, a stile has been removed or a gate has become a gap. But the great bulk of Walker Miles is still accurate, and none but a fool need go astray.
Under which term I include, with the deepest respect, betrothed couples: in the honourable and Shakesperean sense they are fools, being too much occupied with supramundane things to be able to attend properly to the business in hand. It was my good fortune one Whit-Monday to overtake two such couples on a Walker Miles track, both with the master’s work in hand and both somewhat puzzled as to his meaning; but I was able to set both right by precept and example, and I trust that there are now two happy homes where Walker Miles stands in the place of honour in the front-parlour, ousting East Lynne and the other customary household gods. There is also a story about a minister of state, but that has nothing to do with Walker Miles.
Useful, accurate, concise, intelligible—it is no light thing to be able to predicate these qualities without reservation of a man’s work: and I doubt if he himself would have desired further praise. There is no trace of trumpet-blowing in his writings: indeed, he leaves the reader in doubt whether he himself realised the full measure of his achievements. ‘Though the main roads to Leith Hill,’ he says, ‘are perhaps some of the most charming in the country, it is, nevertheless, strange how few except thorough-going ramblers know of any other routes. The five following rambles will, therefore, it is to be hoped, find favour with those who like to get off the “beaten track.” They are all different, both going and returning, and are of varying lengths, as will be seen by reference to page 65.’ In this masterpiece of understatement it is difficult to know whether a smile of Socratic irony is not lurking on the master’s lips, waiting the answering smile of the disciple who understands. Where another would have let loose the big trumpet of the ‘Exegi monumentum’ timbre, he merely states the fact. ‘They are all different, both going and returning.’
He himself has gone to return no more, and only his works remain. But I like to think that somewhere on the Elysian plain, where prophet and hero and poet tread together down the well-worn paths, a single figure quests somewhat aside, writing words of gold upon an ivory tablet as he goes. ‘Continuing on past the Happy Groves take the well-marked track to the right, but at the third clump of asphodel, note a grassy track diverging to the left, and follow this until it leads into an open space covered with amaranth and moly.’