The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/Walking Tours

The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one's maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.

The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds--a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope's rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father's garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds' nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else's dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith's River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.

The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians'. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.