The peddler Wordsworth might have been is the principal narrator of his first long narrative poem, “The Ruined Cottage.” It is typical of his early poetry in that in it a fortunate young man encounters, while walking, someone who tells him the tale that makes up the body of the poem, so that the young man and his saunters make a kind of frame around the sad picture, serving as frames do both to underscore the value and to isolate the work within. This time around, the Wordsworth figure arrives at a ruined cottage where the Pedlar tells him the pathos-drenched tale of the last residents of the place: a family torn apart into wanderers and lingerers by economic hardship. Everyone in the story is in some kind of pedestrian motion: the strolling narrator, the nomadic Pedlar, the husband enlisted and gone to a distant land, the heartbroken wife wearing a path into the grass by pacing back and forth, watching the road for his return.
The walkers in the garden had been anxious to distinguish their walking for pleasure from that of those who walked for necessity, which is why it was important to stay within the garden’s bounds and not to walk as travel—but Wordsworth sought out meetings with those who represented this other kind of walking (or, frequently, borrowed those characters as met and vividly described by Dorothy in her journals, from which he gathered much). For all its meaty radical politics, The Prelude is a thirteen-book sandwich whose bread is landscape. The poem ends with a visionary experience atop Mount Snowdon in Wales that leads into another long soliloquy—but no further geographical details. A shepherd—shepherds were among the first mountain guides in Europe—leads him and an unnamed friend up during the night so they can see the sunrise from the peak. Because the young men are so fit, they arrive early at their destination. The narrative leaves Wordsworth atop the mountain in a sudden flood of moonlight, scenery, and revelation. Climbing a mountain has become a way to understand self, world, and art. It is no longer a sortie from but an act of culture.
But walking wasn’t only a subject for Wordsworth. It was his means of composition. Most of his poems seem to have been composed while he walked and spoke aloud, to a companion or to himself. The results were often comic; the Grasmere locals found him spooky, and one remarked, “He won’t a man as said a deal to common fwoak, but he talked a deal to hiseen. I oftenn seead his lips a ganin,” while another recalled, “He would set his head a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start a bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum bum, reet down till t’other end; and then he’d set down and git a bit o’paper and write a bit.” In The Prelude he describes a dog he used to walk with who would, when a stranger drew near, cue him to shut up and avoid being taken for a lunatic. He possessed a remarkable memory that allowed him to recollect with visual detail and emotional vividness scenes long past, to quote long passages of the poets he admired, and to compose afoot and write the result down later. Most modern writers are deskbound, indoor creatures when they write, and nothing more than outline and ideas can be achieved elsewhere; Wordsworth’s method seemed a throwback to oral traditions and explains why the best of his work has the musicality of songs and the casualness of conversation. His steps seem to have beat out a steady rhythm for the poetry, like the metronome of a composer.
One of his best-known poems—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour,” to give it its full title—was composed on foot during a walking tour in Wales with Dorothy in 1798. Upon arriving back in Bristol, he jotted the whole thing down and tacked it unrevised onto the Lyrical Ballads, where it appears as the last and one of the best poems in his book, his work, and perhaps the English language. Very much a walking poem, “Tintern Abbey” captures that state of musing, of shifting about in time from recollection to experience to hope while exploring a place. And like much of his blank verse, it is written in language so close to actual speech that it reads with conversational ease, but speaking it aloud revives the strong rhythms of those walks two hundred years ago.
In 1804 Dorothy wrote to a friend, “At present he is walking and has been out of doors these two hours though it has rained heavily all the morning. In wet weather he takes out an umbrella; chuses the most sheltered spot, and there walks backwards and forwards and though the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls. He generally composes his verses out of doors and while he is so engaged he seldom knows how the time slips by or hardly whether it is rain or fair.” There is a path at the top of the small garden at Dove Cottage, where he could see over the house to the lake and most of the ranges rising around it, and it was there he most often paced, composing. Many thousand of the “175 to 180,000 English miles” De Quincey estimated he had walked were walked here, on this terrace about twelve paces long, and on the similar terrace of the larger home he moved to in 1813. Seamus Heaney, writing about the “almost physiological relation of a poet composing and the music of the poem,” says of Wordsworth’s pacing back and forth that it “does not forward a journey but habituates the body to a kind of dreamy rhythm.” It also makes composing poetry into physical labor, pacing back and forth like a ploughman turning his furrows up or wandering across the heights like a shepherd in search of a sheep. Perhaps because he was producing beauty out of arduous physical toil, he shamelessly identified himself with the working and walking poor. Though he was basically a rugged and athletic man, the stress of composing gave him headaches and a recurrent pain in the side, so fiercely did he drive himself in this act of poetry as bodily labor. Heaney concludes, “Wordsworth at his best, no less than his worst, is a pedestrian poet.”
Had Wordsworth been a perfect Romantic poet, he would have died in his late thirties, still pacing back and forth at humble Dove Cottage, leaving us the first, best version of The Prelude, all his early ballads and narratives about the poor, his odes and lyrics of childhood, and his image as a radical intact. Unfortunately for his reputation, though happily enough for self and family, he lingered in Grasmere and then in the large house in neighboring Rydal to the age of eighty, becoming increasingly conservative and decreasingly inspired. One might say that he went from being a great Romantic to a great Victorian, and the transition required much renouncement. Though he did not keep faith with his early politics, he kept faith with his walking. And oddly, it is his legacy not as a writer but as a walker that carries on the joyful insurrection of his early years.
One of his own last twinges of democracy came in 1836, when he was sixty-six. He had taken Coleridge’s nephew walking on a private estate when, as one biographer recounts it, “the lord who owned the ground came up and told them they were trespassing. Much to his companion’s embarrassment, William argued that the public had always walked this way and that it was wrong of the lord to close it off.” The nephew recalled that “Wordsworth made his point with somewhat more warmth than I either liked or could well account for. He had evidently a pleasure in vindicating these rights, and seemed to think it a duty.” Another version situates the confrontation at Lowther Castle, where Wordsworth, Coleridge’s nephew, and the lord in question were dining. The latter declared that his wall had been broken down and he would have horsewhipped the man who did it. “The grave old bard at the end of the table heard the words, the fire flashed into his face and rising to his feet, he answered: ‘I broke your wall down, Sir John, it was obstructing an ancient right of way, and I will do it again. I am a Tory, but scratch me on the back deep enough and you will find the Whig in me yet.’ ”
Of all the other Romantics, only De Quincey seems to have had a lifelong passion for walking comparable to Wordsworth’s, and though it is impossible to measure pleasure, it is possible to say something about effects: walking was neither a subject nor a compositional method for the younger writer in the way it had been for the older. His innovations were elsewhere—Morris Marples credits him with being the first to go on a walking tour with a tent, which he slept in during an early sojourn in Wales to save m
oney (the beginnings of the outdoor equipment industry show up here, in the special coats Wordsworth and Robert Jones had a tailor make them for their continental tour, in Coleridge’s walking sticks, in De Quincey’s tent, in Keats’s odd travel outfit). De Quincey’s best writing about walking was about prowling the streets of London as a destitute youth, a very different kind of walking—and writing. His fellow essayist William Hazlitt wrote the first essay on walking, but it began another genre of walking literature rather than extending the tradition Wordsworth took up, and it depicts walking as a pastime rather than an avocation. Shelley was too aristocratic an anarchist and Byron too lame an aristocrat to have much to do with walking; they sailed and rode instead.
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.
Chapter 8
A THOUSAND MILES OF CONVENTIONAL SENTIMENT:
The Literature of Walking
I. THE PURE
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.”
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 16
