Wanderlust: A History of Walking (18 page)

Coleridge, on the other hand, had a decade of avid walking—1794–1804—which is reflected in his poetry from that time. Even before he met Wordsworth, he set out on a walking tour to Wales with a friend named Joseph Hucks and then another tour in Somerset in southern England with his fellow poet and future brother-in-law Robert Southey. In 1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth began their extraordinary collaborative years, with walks in the same parts of southern England; on one of these tours, when Dorothy joined them, Coleridge composed his most famous poem, the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (which is, like his friend's work of the time, a poem about wandering and exile). He and the Wordsworths walked together many more times: there was the epochal walking tour in the Lake District with William Wordsworth and his younger brother John, during which Wordsworth decided to return to this scene of his childhood, and there were many shorter walks after Coleridge and Southey moved to Keswick in the north of that district, as well as one final, blighted tour of Scotland with William, Dorothy, and a donkey cart. The two men got on each other's nerves, split up, and never quite resumed their great friendship. During the course of a solitary and athletic tour of the Lakes, Coleridge also became the first recorded person to reach the summit of Scafell Peak, though he lost some of the glory he might have achieved with this difficult climb by getting stuck on his descent and then tumbling down the mountain. After 1804, Coleridge went on no more long walks. Although the links between walking and writing are neither so explicit nor so profuse in his work as in his friend's, the critic Robin Jarvis does point out that Coleridge ceased to write blank verse when he ceased to walk.

These walking tours on the part of poets who would not walk much later suggest that there was indeed an emerging fashion for traveling on foot. Certainly the very unpoetic literature of the guidebook began to address itself to walkers at this point, and the very notion of a walking tour suggests that the parameters of how to walk and what it meant were beginning to be established. Like the garden stroll, the long walk was acquiring conventions of both meaning and doing. This is easily seen in John Keats's one great experiment with walking. In 1818 the young Keats set out on a walking tour for the sake of poetry, suggesting that such an excursion was a familiar rite of passage as well as a refinement of sensibility. “I purpose within a month to put my knapsack at my back and make a pedestrian tour through the north of England, and part of Scotland—to make a sort of prologue to the life I intend to pursue—that is to write, to study and to see all Europe at the lowest expense. I will clamber through the clouds and exist,” he wrote, and soon afterward wrote to another friend, “I should not have consented to myself these four Months tramping in the Highlands but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more Prejudice, use [me] to more hardship, identifying finer scenes, load me with grander Mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among Books even though I should read Homer.” In other words, roughing it and growing acquainted with mountains was poetic training. Yet like the walkers who came after him, he wanted only so much hardship and experience. He turned back from Ireland appalled by the harsh poverty on that oppressed island, and in reading of this rejection of experience one thinks of a key moment in
The Prelude
and evidently in Wordsworth's life. He was walking in France with the revolutionary soldier Michel Beaupuy; they encountered a “hunger-bitten girl. . . who crept along” a lane, and Beaupuy explained that she was the reason they were fighting. Wordsworth had connected walking to both pleasure and suffering, to politics and scenery. He had taken the walk out of the garden, with its refined and restricted possibilities, but most of his successors wanted the world in which they walked to be nothing but a larger garden.

A T
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ONVENTIONAL
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The Literature of Walking

Other kinds of walk survived, and early in Thomas Hardy's novel
Tess of the D'Urbervilles,
one of them collides with the traditions drawn from romanticism. Tess and her fellow peasant girls are celebrating May Day by going “club-walking,” a pre-Christian spring ceremony in which they walk in procession across the countryside. Dressed all in white, the young women and a few older ones go in “a processional march of two and two round the parish” and in the designated meadow begin to dance. Looking on “were three young men of a superior class, carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders and stout sticks in their hands. The three brethren told casual acquaintances that they were spending their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale. . . .” Two of these three sons of a devout clergyman are themselves ministers; the third, who is less sure of the order of the world and his own place in it, chooses to leave the road and dance with the celebrants. The peasant women on their procession and the young gentlemen on their walking tour are both engaged in nature rituals, in very
different ways. The men, with their costumes of knapsack and staff, are being artificially natural, for their version of how to connect to nature involves leisure, informality, and travel. The women, with their highly structured rite handed down from an unremembered past, are being naturally artificial. Their acts speak of the two things specifically excluded from the walking tour, work and sex, since it is a kind of crop fertility rite they are engaged in and since the local young men will come to dance with them when their day's work is done. Nature, after all, is not where they take their vacations but where they lead their lives, and work, sex, and the fertility of the land are part of that life. But pagan survivals and peasant rites are not the dominant cult of nature.

Nature, which had been an aesthetic cult in the eighteenth century and become a radical cult at the end of that century, was by the middle of the next century an established religion for the middle classes and, in England far more than the United States, for much of the working classes as well. Sadly, it had become as pious, sexless, and moral a religion as the Christianity it propped up or supplanted. Going out into “nature” was a devout act for those English, American, and Central European heirs of romanticism and transcendentalism. In a cheerfully malicious essay entitled “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” Aldous Huxley asserted, “In the neighborhood of latitude fifty north, and for the last hundred years or thereabouts, it has been an axiom that Nature is divine and morally uplifting. For good Wordsworthians—and most serious-minded people are now Wordsworthians—either by direct inspiration or at second hand—a walk in the country is the equivalent of going to church, a tour through Westmoreland is as good as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

The first essay specifically on walking is William Hazlitt's 1821 “On Going a Journey,” and it establishes the parameters for walking “in nature” and for the literature of walking that would follow. “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself,” it opens. Hazlitt declares that solitude is better on a walk because “you cannot read the book of nature, without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others” and because “I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy.” Much of his essay is about the relationship between walking and thinking. But his solitude with the book of nature is very questionable, since in the course of the short piece he manages to quote from other books by Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden,
Gray, Cowper, Sterne, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, along with the Book of Revelation. He describes a day of walking through Wales launched by reading Rousseau's
Nouvelle Heloise
the night before and quoting Coleridge's landscape poetry as he goes. Clearly, the books set forth the kind of experience of walking in nature he should have—pleasant, mingling thoughts, quotations, and scenery—and Hazlitt manages to have it. If nature is a religion and walking its principal rite, then these are its scriptures being organized into a canon.

Hazlitt's essay became the foundation of a genre. It appears in each of the three anthologies of walking essays—an English one from 1920 and two American ones from 1934 and 1967—that I own, and many of the later essayists cite it. The walking essay and the kind of walking described in it have much in common: however much they meander, they must come home at the end essentially unchanged. Both walk and essay are meant to be pleasant, even charming, and so no one ever gets lost and lives on grubs and rainwater in a trackless forest, has sex in a graveyard with a stranger, stumbles into a battle, or sees visions of another world. The walking tour was much associated with parsons and other Protestant clergymen, and the walking essay has something of their primness. Most of the classic essays cannot resist telling us how to walk. Individually, some of these are very fine pieces of writing. Leslie Stephen, who in his “In Praise of Walking” takes up Hazlitt's theme of the musings of the mind, writes, “The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.” Which is very interesting in its way, and Stephen, who distinguished himself as a scholar, an early Alpine climber, and an athletic walker, is himself interesting until he goes on to tell us that Shakespeare walked and so did Ben Johnson and many others, on up to, inevitably, Wordsworth. And then moralizing sneaks in; he says of Byron that his “lameness was too severe to admit of walking, and therefore all the unwholesome humours which would have been walked off in a good cross-country march accumulated in his brain and caused the defects, the morbid affectation and perverse misanthropy, which half ruined the achievement of the most masculine intellect of his time.” Stephen goes on to announce, after throwing in a few dozen more English authors, “Walking is the best of panaceas for the morbid tendencies of authors.” And then come the instructional shoulds, the shoulds that
none of these essayists seems able to resist. He writes that monuments and landmarks “should not be the avowed goal but the accidental addition to the interest of a walk.”

It doesn't take Robert Louis Stevenson nearly as long to get to that fateful word. Two or three pages after he has begun his celebrated 1876 essay “Walking Tours,” he declares, “A walking tour should be gone on alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.” He goes on to praise and criticize Hazlitt: “Notice how learned he is in the theory of walking tours. . . . Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping and running.” On his own long walking tour in France's Cévennes mountain range, described in
Travels with a Donkey,
Stevenson carried a pistol but described only picturesque and lightly comic situations. Few of the canonical essayists can resist telling us that we should walk because it is good for us, nor from providing directions on how to walk. In 1913 the historian G. M. Trevelyan begins his “Walking” with “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches the melancholy from the other) I know that I shall have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again. . . . My thoughts start out with me like blood-stained mutineers debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy scouts at play.”

The possibility that some of us would prefer that happy little boy scouts keep their distance doesn't occur to him, but it must have to one writer, who blasphemed against the cult in 1918. In his “Going Out on a Walk,” the Anglo-German satirist Max Beerbohm exploded, “Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say, ‘Come out for a walk!' in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connection. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.” Beerbohm's heresy goes further; he claims that walking is not at all conducive to thinking because though “the body is going out because the mere fact of its doing so is a sure indication of nobility, probity, and rugged grandeur,” the mind
refuses to accompany it. He was, however, a voice crying out in a densely populated but otherwise convinced wilderness.

On the other side of the Atlantic, one essay on walking had lurched toward greatness, but even Henry David Thoreau could not resist preaching. “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,” he famously begins his 1851 essay “Walking,” for like all the other essayists he connects walking in the organic world with freedom—but like all the others, he instructs us on how to be free. “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” A page later, “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return. . . . If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” His are the most daring, wildest instructions, but they are still instructions. Soon afterward comes the other word,
must:
“You must be born into the family of Walkers.” And then, “You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' ”

Although the walking essay was officially a celebration of bodily and mental freedom, it was not actually opening up the world for that celebration—that revolution had already taken place. It was instead domesticating the revolution by describing the allowable scope of that freedom. And the sermonizing never let up. In 1970, a century and a half after Hazlitt, Bruce Chatwin wrote an essay that set out to be about nomads but detoured to include Stevenson's
Travels with a Donkey.
Chatwin wrote divinely, but he always declined to distinguish nomadism—a persistent travel by any means, seldom primarily by foot—from walking, which may or may not be travel. Blurring those distinctions by conflating nomadism and his own British walking-tour heritage made nomads Romantics, or at least romantic, and allowed him to fancy himself something of a nomad. Soon after Chatwin cites Stevenson, he falls into step with the tradition: “The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in ‘the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way.' For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were
biologically true. None of our revolutionary heroes is worth a thing until he has been on a good walk. Che Guevera spoke of the ‘nomadic phase' of the Cuban Revolution. Look what the Long March did for Mao Tse-Tung, or Exodus for Moses. Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
) understood.”

A hundred and fifty years of moralizing! A century and a half of gentlemanly exhortation! Doctors have asserted many times over the centuries that walking is very good for you, but medical advice has never been one of the chief attractions of literature. Besides, only a walk that is guaranteed to exclude certain things—assailants, avalanches—is truly wholesome, and only such walking is advocated by these sermonizing gentlemen who seem not to see the boundaries they have put around the act (one of the delights of urban walking is how unwholesome it is). Gentlemen, I say, because all the writers on walking seem to be members of the same club—not one of the real walking clubs, but a kind of implicit club of shared background. They are generally privileged—most of the English ones write as though everyone else also went to Oxford or Cambridge, and even Thoreau went to Harvard—and of a vaguely clerical bent, and they are always male—neither dancing peasant lasses nor mincing girls, with wives rather than husbands to leave, as the above passages make clear. Thoreau considerately adds, “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know.” Many women after Dorothy Wordsworth went on long solitary walks, and Sarah Hazlitt, Hazlitt's estranged wife, even went on a walking tour alone and kept a journal of it, which like most of these documents of female walking went unpublished in its time. Flora Thompson's account of her journeys on foot across rural Oxfordshire to deliver mail in all seasons and weather is one of the most enchanting descriptions of country walks, but it is not part of the canon because it is by a poor woman, about work (and sex, in that a gamekeeper whose grounds she regularly crosses courts her, unsuccessfully), and buried in a book about many other things. Like the great women travelers of the nineteenth century—Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet, Isabelle Eberhardt in North Africa, Isabella Bird in the Rockies—they are anomalies, these walking women (the reasons why will be dealt with at length later, in chapter 14).