During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge and, like Christian on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it soon acquires a property of easiness.It becomes magnetic;the spirit of the journey enters into it.And no sooner have you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into your stride.And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the best.Of course, if he WILL keep thinking of his anxieties, if he WILL open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with the hag - why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy.And so much the more shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the first few miles upon the road.This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind;he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to words.This one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies;he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough upon the complacent kine.And here comes another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself.His face changes from time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead.He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most impassioned interviews, by the way.A little farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing.And well for him, supposing him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown.A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by.I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as he went like a child.And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they sang - and sang very ill - and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from round a corner.And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay ON GOING A JOURNEY, which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it:-"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.Ilaugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."
Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person? But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish as our neighbours.It was not so with Hazlitt.And notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the theory of walking tours.He is none of your athletic men in purple stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his ideal.And then he must have a winding road, the epicure!
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.
Both of these hurry the respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air confusion; and they both break the pace.Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind.Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from thinking earnestly of anything else.Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind.We can think of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning dose; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his own private thought!
In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood.From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great.As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme towards the other.He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream.The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful.A man does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still content.