Of Walks and Walking Tours: an Attempt to Find a Philosophy and a Creed

Part 1

OF WALKS AND WALKING TOURS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

#GOLDWIN SMITH#

#His Life and Opinions#

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OF WALKS AND WALKING TOURS

An Attempt to find a Philosophy and a Creed

BY ARNOLD HAULTAIN

Author of "Hints for Lovers" "The Mystery of Golf" "Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions" Etc.

LONDON T. WERNER LAURIE LTD. 8 ESSEX STREET, STRAND 1914

"De naturâ Rationis est res sub quâdam aeternitatis specie percipere."

--Spinoza, Ethics, Part II., Proposition xliv., Corollary ii.

PREFACE

The writing of this little book has given me a great deal of pleasure. That is why I hope that, here and there, it may give pleasure to others.

And yet it was not an easy task. Nature's lessons are hard to learn. Harder still is it to translate Nature's lessons to others. Besides, the appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things (save in the hands of a great Poet) by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion. Is not even the Poet driven to link words to music? And always le mot juste, the exact word, is so difficult to find! Yet found it must be if the appeal is to avail.

* * * * *

If, in these pages, there are scattered speculations semi-mystical, semi-intelligible, perhaps even transcending the boundaries of rigid logic, I must simply aver that I put in writing that only which was given me to say. How or whence it came, I do not know.--And this, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, in a way, corroborative of) my own belief that no thought is autogenous, but has parents and a pedigree.

I have tried, quite humbly, to follow, as motto, the sentence chosen from Spinoza. Yet, with that sentence always should be read this other, taken from Pascal: "La dernière démarche de la raison, c'est de reconnaître qu'il y a une infinité de choses qui la surpassent."--Always emotion, imagination, feeling, faith, try to soar above reason; and always they feel the inadequacy of words.

I have incorporated in this book some parts of my "Two Country Walks in Canada"--now long out of print (itself comprising an article from The Nineteenth Century and another from Blackwood's); also (with the permission of the editor) an article in The Atlantic Monthly Magazine; and Sections 22 and 23 first appeared in The Canadian Magazine.

Geneva, 1914.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

Part 2

I. Golf and Walking 1

II. The Essence of a Walk 5

III. Notable Walkers 9

IV. My Earliest Walks 15

V. India 17

VI. English Byways 21

VII. A Spring Morning in England 25

VIII. Autumn Reveries 29

IX. Spirituality of Nature 34

X. Practical Transcendentalism 40

XI. Spring in Canada 45

XII. Autumn in Canada 53

XIII. Winter in Canada 59

XIV. The Mood for Walking 72

XV. Evening Meditations 78

XVI. The Unity of Nature 91

XVII. The Instinct for Walking 103

XVIII. A Woeful Walk 105

XIX. Autumn in Canada again 107

XX. The Walking Tour 133

XXI. The Tramp's Dietary 140

XXII. Practical Details 152

XXIII. The Beauty of Landscape 159

XXIV. Warnings to the Over-Zealous 180

XXV. How that all points to the Infinite 188

XXVI. The Pleasures of Walking 198

XXVII. Is Walking Selfish? 216

XXVIII. The Pæan of Being 223

Part 3

Index 227

OF WALKS AND WALKING TOURS

Golf and Walking

§ 1

Many are the indictments which are brought against Golf: that it is a deplorable waster of time; that it depletes the purse; that it divorces husband and wife; that it delays the dinner-hour, freckles fair feminine faces, upsets domestic arrangements, and unhinges generally the mental balance of its devotees. Yet perhaps to each of such charges Golf can enter a plea. It repays expenditure of time and money with interest in the form of health and good spirits. If it acts the part of co-respondent it is always open to the petitioner to espouse the game. If it keeps men and women away from work and home, at least it keeps them out on the breezy links and dispels for a time the cares of the office or the kitchen. If it tans--well, it tans, and a tanned face needs no paint, and is, moreover, beautiful to look upon. Nevertheless, one indictment there is against which it is not in the power of Golf to enter a plea. It has killed the country walk. "A country walk!" exclaimed a fellow-golfer to me the other day. "I have not taken a country walk since I began to play."

There are, I know, who affect to believe that Golf consists of country walks, diversified and embellished by pauses made for the purpose of impelling little round balls into little round holes; that mind and eye are occupied chiefly with the beauties of Nature, and that the impulsion of the insignificant sphere into the insignificant void is, as it were, but a sop to Cerberus, or a cock sacrificed to the Æsculapius of this sporting age. "How greatly," said to me once a fair and innocent stranger to my links--"how greatly this beautiful landscape must enhance the pleasure of your game!" O sancta simplicitas! Far be it from me to explain that as a rule the horrid golfer only drank in the beauties of that landscape when the game was over, and he was, perchance, occupied in performing a similar operation upon the contents of a tumbler at his elbow as he reclined in an arm-chair on the verandah.--And yet, and yet, our links are beautiful, and one and all of us their frequenters know and appreciate to the full their beauty; but not, I think, at the moment of "addressing the ball."--No; Golf is Golf; a country walk is quite another thing; and the one, I maintain, has killed the other.

The Essence of a Walk

§ 2

For, mark you, the essence of a country walk is that you shall have no object or aim whatsoever. The frame of mind in which one ought to set out upon a rural peregrination should be one of absolute mental vacuity. Almost one ought to rid oneself, if so be that were possible, even of the categories of time and place: for to start with a determination to cover a certain distance within a specified time is to take, not a walk, but a "constitutional"; and of all abortions or monstrosities of country walks, commend me to the constitutional. The proper frame of mind is that of absolute and secure passivity; an openness to impressions; a giving-up of ourselves to the great and guiding influences of benignant Nature; a humble receptivity of soul; a wondering and childlike eagerness--not a restless and too inquisitive eagerness--to learn all that great Nature may like to teach, and to learn it in the way that great Nature would have us learn.

Yet, true, though we take with us a vacuous mind, it must be a plenable mind (if I may coin the word), a serenely responsive mind; otherwise we shall not reap the harvest of a quiet eye.

"How bountiful is Nature! he shall find Who seeks not; and to him who hath not asked Large measure shall be dealt,"

sings Wordsworth; and of Nature and of Nature's ways no one had a greater right to sing. Wordsworth must have been an ideal country walker. "The Excursion" is the harvest of innumerable walks, and when Wordsworth depicts the Wanderer he depicts himself:

"In the woods A lone Enthusiast, and among the fields, Itinerant in this labour, he had passed The better portion of his time; and there Spontaneously had his affections thriven Amid the bounties of the year, the peace And liberty of Nature; there he kept, In solitude and solitary thought, His mind in a just equipoise of love."

Only, "the w . . . w . . . worst of W . . . W . . . Wordsworth is," as a stammering friend of mine once remarked, "is, he is so d . . . d . . . d . . . desperate p . . . pensive." (I was expecting a past participle, not an ungrammatical adverb for the "d.")--He is; and like, yet unlike, Falstaff, he is not only pensive in himself, but he is the cause of pensiveness in other things--to wit, his "stars," his "citadels," and what not; and certainly his diary of "A Tour in Scotland" makes the driest reading I know.--Nevertheless, Wordsworth must have been an ideal country walker. He was

"A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth";

and if we would understand him, we ourselves must

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