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

"Let the moon Shine on us in our solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against us."

III

Notable Walkers

§ 3

All great souls, I venture to think, were at some period of their lives walkers in the country. Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days in the wilderness, and the three years of his mission were, we know, spent in unceasing wandering. And whose heart does not burn within him as he reads the moving narrative of that seven-mile country walk which he took with two of his disciples to the village called Emmaus? It was after a forty days' solitary sojourn on Mount Sinai, too, so we are told, that Moses came down armed with the Decalogue; and was it not after a similar Ramadan retreat that Mohammed returned with the novel doctrine that there was no God but God? Enoch, we know, walked with God; and it is a childish fancy of mine which I am loath to relinquish that God took him, and that he was not, for because he was so delectable a companion. Of a surety the Sweet Singer of Israel must have wandered much in the green pastures and by the still waters; he who kept his father's sheep; who slew both the lion and the bear; who sang the high hills, a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for the conies.--Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much literature owes to the country walk! It was to that long walk outside the wall of Athens, and to the long talk that Socrates held with Phædrus under the plane-tree by the banks of the Ilissus, that we owe one of the most beautiful of the Dialogues of Plato. There had been no Georgics had not Virgil loved the country. Horace must as often have circumambulated his Sabine farm as he perambulated the Via Sacra. Chaucer must sometimes have pilgrimed afoot, and Spenser, trod as well as pricked o'er the plain. Shakespeare's poaching episode gives us a glimpse into his youthful pursuits. Milton "oft the woods among wooed Philomel to hear her evensong"; and even after his blindness "not the more ceased he to wander where the Muses haunt clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill." "The Traveller" of Goldsmith was the outcome of a walking tour; so was Robert Louis Stevenson's "Travels in the Cévennes with a Donkey". To how many minds walks about the green flat meads of Oxford have been a quiet stimulant we may get a hint from more than one of Matthew Arnold's poems. Was it to Newman that Jowett, meeting him alone and afoot, put the query: "Nunquam minus solus quam quum solus?" Of Jowett's walks many a tale is told. Of De Quincey, who spent his youth in wanderings; of William Cowper, the gentle singer of the "Winter Walk"; of Thoreau; of Mr John Burroughs; of Richard Jefferies; of Mr Hamilton Wright Mabie, the discoverer of the Forest of Arden; of Mr Henry Van Dyke who would be, I warrant me, an incomparable companion for a walk, and whose books make the pent-up sigh for the open; of "A Son of the Marshes"; of Dr Charles C. Abbott, that indefatigable Wasteland Wanderer; of Mr Charles Goodrich Whiting, the Saunterer; of that prince of walkers, of whom The Spectator said it was "half a pity that such a man could not go walking about for ever, for the benefit of people who are not gifted with legs so stout and eyes so discerning," I mean that erudite nomad, George Borrow; of Senancour, who in his journeys afoot experienced illusions imposantes; of Sir Leslie Stephen--of these and many another lover of outdoor Nature it is needless to speak.

My Earliest Walks

§ 4

The earliest walks which my own memory recalls were rather curious ones. We were in Burma, a country in which, in the dry season, exercise must be taken about daybreak or sundown, or not at all. We walked--and before breakfast; and always we were accompanied by a pet cat, a sharp-nosed "toddy-cat" (so they called him), indigenous to the country, and not unlike the American raccoon, very affectionate and very cleanly. But the cat was not our only companion, for just overhead, screaming threateningly, were always also, and all the way, a flock of kites--the mortal enemies, so I must suppose, of Hokey-Pokey (thus was named our 'coon-cat pet).--Now I come to think of it, it must have been a funny sight: a family afoot; in the rear an impudent cat with tail erect; overhead irate and clamorous kites.

India

§ 5

My next walks were on the Nilgiris, the Blue Mountains of India. Ah, they were beautiful! The seven or eight thousand feet of altitude tempered the tropical sun, the mornings were fresh and invigorating--your cold bath was really cold, and spring seemed perennial. Hedges of cluster-roses bloomed the whole year round; on the orange-trees were leaf, bud, bloom and ripening fruit, also the whole year round. Heliotrope grew in gigantic bushes that were pruned with garden clippers. Through the grounds about the house flowed a babbling brook, widening here and there into quiet ponds, from the sedgy edges of which green-stemmed arums raised their graceful cups. In the deep valleys grew the tree-fern; here and there a playful waterfall gushed from the hill; and everything was green.--No; two things were not green: the one, the hot and hazy plains, shimmering in yellow dust as seen from the shoulder of a hill; the other, the gigantic Droog, a mighty mountain mass rearing its head, sombre and silent, on the other side of a deep ravine. The Droog was purple: not with the pellucid purple of a petal, but with the misty blue-black purple of the bloom of a plum.--Ah, it was all very good. Never shall I forget the convolvulus that decorated the northern verandah before the heat of day shrivelled the delicate corollas. There were rich bass purples that stirred one like the tones of an organ. There were soprano pinks so exquisite that a pianissimo trill on a violin seemed crude in comparison. Their beauty was all but audible: it penetrated the senses and reached in to some inner subtile psychic centre, there to move emotions which must remain unsaid.--This was in India.--There is something perfervid in the fascination of the East. The West may clutch the thrilled heart with a steely clasp; the East holds the soul in a passionate embrace.--Ah, India, beloved India, my first nurse and I trust my last; "not were that submarine, gem-lighted city mine" would I relinquish hope of seeing thee again, adored India: old majestic land; land of ancient castes and alien creeds; land of custom, myth, and magic; land of pungent odours, stinging tastes, and colours dazzling as the sun; land of mystery, of pageant, and of pain! Ah, subtile, thralling, luring India!--India is like Samson's lion: it has been conquered by the young and lusty Occident, and in its old carcass its conqueror finds both meat and sweetness;--and it serves for a riddle to others. To complete the analogy, there are those who are trying to plough with Samson's heifer.

English Byways