And grey dawns know his camp-fire in the rain.
An ideal book to carry on a tramping expedition is undoubtedly an anthology of your own compiling, a notebook filled with your favorite verses.
Other books which I think of as the tramp grows in goodness and in grace are Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” or “Brand,” preferably “Peer Gynt,” there is much more in it. “Peer Gynt” is a very remarkable book; you can read it ten times and still fail to exhaust its poetry, its thought. It is a great book about life. It is moreover a true tramping book. Peer is a vagabond wandering about in the world, and it is never the world which is in question, but the state of his soul. “Brand” is not so much of a poem as the other, and is not so memorable. But it raises some of the eternal questions in a powerful way. If you are “sick of towns and men” “Brand” will rather indulge your mood, for it speaks Ibsen’s impatience with the petty ways and lives of average men and women.
Socrates’ Dialogues go well in the inner pocket, and so do Horace’s Odes, if you are of a Horatian turn of mind and can read them. There are many, especially in Scotland, who like to take a Homer, and fancy themselves on the hills of Greece. For a classical scholar there are many books of profound and lasting interest; a Plotinus will last you a long while. For you have not merely to read it, but to resurrect a being who lived centuries ago in a different civilization. The human heart was the same, but almost everything else had a difference.
If the mind is just attracted to ancient philosophy, I know few books to compare with Pater’s Plato and Platonism, for inner worth. I do not, however, think his Marius a good tramping book. Nature rebels against its cold chaste beauty. It needs, I think, a more artificial setting for its enjoyment.
Few novels are good tramping books. One gets through the story so quickly, and if there is no more than story there, the book is finished with. Still, there are a few knapsack companions worth having, such as The Cloister and the Hearth, John Inglesant, Wilhelm Meister, Dostoieffsky’s The Brothers Karamazoff. All rather bulky, I am afraid, for ideas, though they keep other books thin, do swell the volume of a novel. A few ideas stated in conversation and baited with picturesque descriptions take three times the space they need in the essay. It is sometimes easier to understand them, but the expression is diffuse.
Plays, however, come near to being ideal. They take up little space. The dramatist has to censor his own work vigorously with a view to cutting down the excess of verbiage which his ideas naturally claim. He is forced into paradox and epigram. His work is full of hints and suggestions which are undeveloped. It is for you to develop them. As Ibsen said, “I ask the questions; it is for you to answer them.”
A Shakespeare play is a delightful library. I nearly always take one. A drama like Richard III or Othello can be read over and over again. As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are the great open-air plays. You learn more about them with the birds and the stars to teach you than with the aid of the most genial producer or inspired professor. You make your camp in a natural theater among the trees, or in an arena among the rocks. There is an audience not altogether invisible. It waits, it has its programs, you have the book of the words and the brain full of moving figures. Sun and moon are working the limelight from the wings. Your camp fire is the footlights. Enter Man. Enter Hamlet. Enter Julius Cæsar, the gods, the ghosts. The tramp becomes an ancient type, a magician, a mystagogue—with a Shakespeare in his hand, in the midst of the worlds.
If modern drama rouses the fancy, you can take a Pirandello or a Shaw, and thresh it out—get a real opinion about it. It is worth while when you have to orientate your mind to certain writers of repute to make yourself intimate with at least one of their works.
I suppose some may prefer to read a book on the country through which they are tramping, and in that case a librarian’s aid may be sought. There are now scores of volumes on almost every country in the world. It is as well to look over several of them before making a choice—many prove to be slapdash, ill-informed compositions.