The Joys of Walking

Essays by Hilaire Belloc, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, and Others

Edwin Valentine Mitchell

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486273624
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

`In wildness is the preservation of the world,` noted Henry David Thoreau, whose famous epigram arose in `Walking,` his meditation on the relationship between civilization and nature. The great American poet and philosopher's essay appears in this footloose compilation, a celebration of the freedom to roam, stroll, strut, and wander.
These reflections by distinguished writers range far and wide, from the hills and valleys of Thoreau's native New England to the shadowy streets and bridges of Charles Dickens’s nighttime London. In `Traveling Afoot,` John Finley reminisces about memorable walks across the Scottish moors, around the riverbanks of Manhattan, and through the French countryside on the eve of the First World War. Max Beerbohm, in `Going Out for a Walk,` laments being coaxed away from his comfortable armchair, and Christopher Morley confesses his passion for people-watching in `Sauntering.` Other contributors include William Hazlitt, George Gissing, Hilaire Belloc, and Leslie Stephen. Charming woodcut illustrations complement the text.

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THE PLEASURES OF WALKING

THE EDITOR: Introductory Note

JOHN FINLEY: Traveling Afoot

LESLIE STEPHEN: In Praise of Walking

MAX BEERBOHM: Going Out for a Walk

CHARLES DICKENS: Night Walks

GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN: Walking

J. BROOKS ATKINSON: A Note on Walking

WILLIAM HAZLITT: On Going a Journey

CHARLES DICKENS: Tramps:

GEORGE GISSING: Walking Experiences

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY: Sauntering

HILAIRE BELLOC: The Brienzer Grat

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: Walking

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INTRODUCTORY NOTE

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WHEN I REMARKED TO A friend that I was engaged in compiling an anthology on the subject of walking, he said, “I suppose the depressed state of the world has made walkers of a great many people who a few years ago were almost in danger of losing the use of their legs. It’s odd, when you stop to think of it, that because of the harshness of the times and the fact that shoe leather is cheaper than gasoline a lot of people have been driven to the discovery that walking is among the most rewarding pleasures of life.”

This commentary gave me the hint that perhaps I should include in this collection something by or concerning those who have been walkers through sheer necessity rather than by choice. It accounts, in fact, for the presence among these reprints of George Gissing’s reminiscences of walks in London and also for Charles Dickens’ observations of those wayside tatterdemalions whom every walker meets, because such characters are always to be found slog-footing it along the roads of every land.

One kind of walking which I do not recall seeing mentioned anywhere in the literature of the subject is imaginary walking. When I asked Mr. John Finley if I might use his essay, “Traveling Afoot,” which originally appeared a number of years ago in the old Outlook, he said in his letter granting me leave to do so, “You may be interested to know that I have a little game that I play alone: namely, that of walking in some other part of the world as many miles as I actually walk here day by day, with the result that I have walked nearly 20,000 miles here in the last six years, which means that I have covered the land part of the earth in a circuit of the globe. I finished last night 2,000 miles since the first of January 1934 and in doing so reached Vancouver from the north. My first year’s walk was across the United States and I then started on the west coast of France. I will not bother you now with the rest of the itinerary but tell you only that I crossed Europe, southern Asia and then up through China and parts farther north to Bering Strait and from Alaska down to Vancouver.”

To those who may look in these pages for practical advice concerning the paraphernalia of walking, such as footgear, rucksacks, and clothing, all I can say is that I interviewed a veteran walker with a view to the possibility of getting something of the sort for the book, but about the only advice of any kind he was willing to impart was this: “Ladies should not walk alone in Corsica.”

The foregoing was written nearly a decade and a half ago, with the exception of one paragraph which has been deleted. The original choice of material also remains the same, but to this is now added the long essay on walking by Henry D. Thoreau, which I have regretted leaving out of the earlier edition, originally published in 1934 under the title The Art of Walking.

E. V. M.

JOHN FINLEY:
TRAVELING AFOOT

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“TRAVELING AFOOT” — THE very words start the imagination out upon the road! One’s nomad ancestors cry within one across centuries and invite to the open spaces. Many to whom this cry comes are impelled to seek the mountain paths, the forest trails, the solitudes or wildernesses coursed only by the feet of wild animals. But to me the black or dun roads, the people’s highways, are the more appealing — those strips or ribbons of land which is still held in common, the paths wide enough for the carriages of the rich and the carts of the poor to pass each other, the roads over which they all bear their creaking burdens or run on errands of mercy or need, but preferably roads that do not also invite the flying automobiles, whose occupants so often make the pedestrian feel that even these strips have ceased to be democratic.

My traveling afoot, for many years, has been chiefly in busy city streets or in the country roads into which they run — not far from the day’s work or from the thoroughfares of the world’s concerns.

Of such journeys on foot which I recall with greatest pleasure are some that I have made in the encircling of cities. More than once I have walked around Manhattan Island (an afternoon’s or a day’s adventure within the reach of thousands), keeping as close as possible to the water’s edge all the way round. One not only passes through physical conditions illustrating the various stages of municipal development from the wild forest at one end of the island to the most thickly populated spots of the earth at the other, but one also passes through diverse cities and civilizations. Another journey of this sort was one that I made around Paris, taking the line of the old fortifications, which are still maintained, with a zone following the fortifications most of the way just outside, inhabited only by squatters, some of whose houses were on wheels ready for “mobilization” at an hour’s notice. (It was near the end of that circumvallating journey, about sunset, on the last day of an old year, that I saw my first airplane rising like a great golden bird in the aviation field, and a few minutes later my first elongated dirigible — precursors of the air armies.)

I have read that the Scots once had a custom of making a yearly pilgrimage or excursion around their boroughs or cities — “beating the bounds,” they called it, following the boundaries that they might know what they had to defend. It is a custom that might profitably be revived. We should then know better the cities in which we live. We should be stronger, healthier, for such expeditions, and the better able and the more willing to defend our boundaries.

But these are the exceptional foot expeditions. For most urbanites there is the opportunity for the daily walk to and from work, if only they were not tempted by the wheel of the street car or motor. During the subway strike in New York not long ago I saw able-bodied men riding in improvised barges or buses going at a slower-than-walking pace, because, I suppose, though still possessed of legs, these cliff dwellers had become enslaved by wheels, just like the old mythical Ixion who was tied to one.

I once walked late one afternoon with a man who did not know that he could walk, from the Custom-House, down near the Battery, to the City College gymnaisum, 138th Street, and what we did (at the rate of a mile in about twelve minutes) thousands are as able to do, though not perhaps at this pace when the streets are full.

And what a “preparedness” measure it would be if thousands of the young city men would march uptown every day after hours, in companies! The swinging stride of a companionless avenue walk, on the other hand, gives often much of the adventure that one has in carrying the ball in a football game.

Many times when I could not get out of the city for a vacation I have walked up Fifth Avenue at the end of the day and have half closed my eyes in order to see men and women as the blind man saw them when his eyes were first touched by the Master — see them as “trees walking.”

But the longing of all at times, whether it be an atavistic or a cultivated longing, is for the real trees and all that goes with them. Immediately there open valleys with “pitcher” elms, so graceful that one thinks of the famous line from the Odyssey in which Ulysses says that once he saw a tree as beautiful as the most beautiful woman — valleys with elms, hill-tops with far-signaling poplars, mountains with pines, or prairies with their groves and orchards. About every city lies an environing charm, even if it have no trees, as, for example, Cheyenne, Wyoming, where, stopping for a few hours not long ago, I spent most of the time walking out to the encircling mesas that give view of both mountains and city, I have never found a city without its walkers’ rewards. New York has its Palisade paths, its Westchester hills and hollows, its “south shore” and “north shore,” and its Staten Island (which I have often thought of as Atlantis, for once on a holiday I took Plato with me to spend an afternoon on its littoral, away from the noise of the city, and on my way home found that my Plato had stayed behind, and he never reappeared, though I searched car and boat). Chicago has its miles of lake shore walks; Albany, its Helderbergs; and San Francisco, its Golden Gate Road. And I recall with a pleasure which the war cannot take away a number of suburban European walks. One was across the Campagna from Frascati to Rome, when I saw an Easter week sun go down behind the Eternal City. Another was out to Fiesole from Florence and back again; another, out and up from where the Saône joins the Rhône at Lyons; another, from Montesquieu’s château to Bordeaux; another, from Edinburgh out to Arthur’s Seat and beyond; another, from Lausanne to Geneva, past Paderewski’s villa, along the glistening lake with its background of Alps; and still another, from Eton (where I spent the night in a cubicle looking out on Windsor Castle) to London, starting at dawn. One cannot know the intimate charm of the urban penumbra who makes only shuttle journeys by motor or street cars.

These are near journeys, but there are times when they do not satisfy, when one must set out on a far journey, test one’s will and endurance of body, or get away from the usual. Sometimes the long walk is the only medicine. Once when suffering from one of the few colds of my life (incurred in California) I walked from the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado down to the river and back (a distance of fourteen miles, with a descent of five thousand feet and a like ascent), and found myself entirely cured of the malady which had clung to me for days. My first fifty-mile walk years ago was begun in despair over a slow recovery from the sequelæ of diphtheria.

But most of these far walks have been taken just for the joy of walking in the free air. Among these have been journeys over Porto Rico (of two hundred miles), around Yellowstone Park (of about one hundred and fifty miles, making the same stations as the coaches), over portages along the waterways following the French explorers from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and in country roads visiting one-room schools in the State of New York and over the boundless prairie fields long ago.

But the walks which I most enjoy, in retrospect at any rate, are those taken at night. Then one makes one’s own landscape with only the help of the moon or stars or the distant lights of a city, or with one’s unaided imagination if the sky is filled with cloud.

The next better thing to the democracy of a road by day is the monarchy of a road by night, when one has one’s own terrestrial way under guidance of a Providence that is nearer. It was in the “cool of the day” that the Almighty is pictured as walking in the garden, but I have most often met him on the road by night.

Several times I have walked down Staten Island and across New Jersey to Princeton “after dark,” the destination being a particularly attractive feature of this walk. But I enjoy also the journeys that are made in strange places where one knows neither the way nor the destination, except from a map or the advice of signboard or kilometer posts (which one reads by the flame of a match, or, where that is wanting, sometimes by following the letters and figures on a post with one’s fingers), or the information, usually inaccurate, of some other wayfarer. Most of these journeys have been made of a necessity that has prevented my making them by day, but I have in every case been grateful afterward for the necessity. In this country they have been usually among the mountains—the Green Mountains or the White Mountains or the Catskills. But of all my night faring, a night on the moors of Scotland is the most impressive and memorable, though without incident. No mountain landscape is to me more awesome than the moorlands by night, or more alluring than the moorlands by day when the heather is in bloom. Perhaps this is only the ancestors speaking again.

But something besides ancestry must account for the others. Indeed, in spite of it, I was drawn one night to Assisi, where St. Francis had lived. Late in the evening I started on to Foligno in order to take a train in to Rome for Easter morning. I followed a white road that wound around the hills, through silent clusters of cottages tightly shut up with only a slit of light visible now and then, meeting not a human being along the way save three somber figures accompanying an ox cart, a man at the head of the oxen and a man and woman at the tail of the cart — a theme for Millet. (I asked in broken Italian how far it was to Foligno, and the answer was, “Una hora” — distance in time and not in miles.) Off in the night I could see the lights of Perugia, and some time after midnight I began to see the lights of Foligno — of Perugia and Foligno, where Raphael had wandered and painted. The adventure of it all was that when I reached Foligno I found that it was a walled town, that the gate was shut, and that I had neither passport nor intelligible speech. There is an interesting walking sequel to this journey. I carried that night a wooden water-bottle, such as the Italian soldiers used to carry, filling it from the fountain at the gate of Assisi before starting. Just a month later, under the same full moon, I was walking between midnight and morning in New Hampshire. I had the same water-bottle and stopped at a spring to fill it. When I turned the bottle upside down, a few drops of water from the fountain of Assisi fell into the New England spring, which for me, at any rate, has been forever sweetened by this association.

All my long night walks seem to me now as but preparation for one which I was obliged to make at the outbreak of the war in Europe. I had crossed the Channel from England to France, on the day that war was declared by England, to get a boy of ten years out of the war zone. I got as far by rail as a town between Arras and Amiens, where I expected to take a train on a branch road toward Dieppe; but late in the afternoon I was informed that the scheduled train had been canceled and that there might not be another for twenty-four hours, if then. Automobiles were not to be had even if I had been able to pay for one. So I set out at dusk on foot toward Dieppe, which was forty miles or more distant. The experiences of that night would in themselves make one willing to practice walking for years in order to be able to walk through such a night in whose dawn all Europe waked to war. There was the quiet, serious gathering of the soldiers at the place of rendezvous; there were the all-night preparations of the peasants along the way to meet the new conditions; there was the pelting storm from which I sought shelter in the niches for statues in the walls of an abandoned château; there was the clatter of the hurrying feet of soldiers or gendarmes who properly arrested the wanderer, searched him, took him to a guardhouse, and detained him until certain that he was an American citizen and a friend of France, when he was let go on his way with a “Bon voyage”; there was the never-to-be-forgotten dawn upon the harvest fields in which only old men, women, and children were at work; there was the gathering of the peasants with commandeered horses and carts in the beautiful park on the water-front at Dieppe; and there was much besides; but they were experiences for the most part which only one on foot could have had.

And the moral of my whole story is that walking is not only a joy in itself, but that it gives an intimacy with the sacred things and the primal things of earth that are not revealed to those who rush by on wheels.

I have wished to organize just one more club — the “Holy Earth” club, with the purposes that Liberty Bailey has set forth in his book of the same title (The Holy Earth), but I should admit to membership in it (except for special reasons) only those who love to walk upon the earth.

Traveling afoot! This is the best posture in which to worship the God of the Out-of-Doors!

LESLIE STEPHEN:
IN PRAISE OF WALKING

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THE DAY ON WHICH I WAS fully initiated into the mysteries is marked by a white stone. It was when I put on a knapsack and started from Heidelberg for a march through the Odenwald. Then I first knew the delightful sensation of independence and detachment enjoyed during a walking tour. Free from all bothers of railway timetables and extraneous machinery, you trust to your own legs, stop when you please, diverge into any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon some quaint variety of human life at every inn where you put up for the night. You share for the time the mood in which Borrow settled down in the dingle after escaping from his bondage in the publishers’ London slums. You have no dignity to support, and the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped into oblivion, like the bundle from Christian’s shoulders. You are in the world of Lavengro, and would be prepared to take tea with Miss Isopel Berners or with the Welsh preacher who thought that he had committed the unpardonable sin. Borrow, of course, took the life more seriously than the literary gentleman who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave from the prison-house of respectability, and is quite unequal to a personal conflict with “blazing-Bosville” — the flaming tinman. He is only dipping in the element where his model was thoroughly at home. I remember, indeed, one figure in that first walk which I associate with Benedict Moll, the strange treasure-seeker whom Borrow encountered in his Spanish rambles. My acquaintance was a mild German innkeeper, who sat beside me on a bench while I was trying to assimilate certain pancakes, the only dinner he could provide, still fearful in memory, but just attackable after a thirty-mile tramp. He confided to me that, poor as he was, he had discovered the secret of perpetual motion. He kept his machine upstairs, where it discharged the humble duty of supplying the place of a shoeblack; but he ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Pleasures of Walking
• Back Cover