Walking alone is, of course, on a much lower moral plane than walking in company. It falls under the general ban on individual as opposed to communal pursuits. The solitary walker, like the golfer or sculler, is a selfish and limited being, unlike the rower, footballer, or cricketer, who is a member of a community. The point cannot be seriously argued. Prevaricators may call attention artlessly to certain features of communal pursuits—to cricket scores and lists of averages and interviews with eminent athletes; they may even review our country as a whole, and expatiate on the widely diffused spirit of toleration, mutual good-will, and readiness to co-operate which our national sports have produced. But their gibes are unavailing: it is plainly better to do things in company than alone: and the solitary walker, if he is honest, will at once resign all claim to the halo of patriotism, disinterested devotion, esprit de corps and good citizenship which encircles the brow of the footballer.

I will not even pray in aid the great names of Stevenson and Hazlitt. Their defence of solitary walking rested largely on the mistaken idea that if you walk in company you are bound to talk; they did not realise that even silence can be corporate, nay, that there is a concrete and positive taciturnity of two far more satisfying than the negative voicelessness of one. They did not know how grunts can reveal the man and ejaculations create and foster friendship. The silent contemplation of walking is aided, not hindered, by the presence of another silent contemplator at your side.

Walking alone, then, is a thing only to be justified by special circumstances; it is an abnormal function of life, a subject for pathology rather than physiology. But as life is not yet quite perfect and normal in all departments, there is a place for pathology: as the proper circumstances of walking are not always attainable, there is a place for walking alone. Without elaborating a scheme of casuistry, we can imagine certain conditions under which walking alone is defensible if not laudable; and it is only fair to the solitary walker, pursuing his lonely way under the ban of moral disapproval, to indicate some of these.

I have mentioned above four classes of walkers—six milers, twelve milers, eighteen milers, and twenty-four milers. The figures are not to be taken too literally; but I think walkers, as a whole, fall more or less definitely into four groups, whose average daily maxima are at, or near, these figures. The differences extend to other points—to pace, to length of stride, even, I think, to opinions and disposition, although here the classification becomes less definite. Class A, the twenty-four milers, average about 4½ miles an hour on a good road, and stride 40 inches or over: they tend to be mugwumps, mistrusters of rhetoric, lovers of the classic in art and music and literature, of the distilled and clarified products of human imagination or insight. Class B, the eighteen milers, average 4 miles an hour, and stride 36 inches: they are generally those who might have been in Class A but for a lack of real comprehensive capacity and for a love of talking and disputation: they tend to spasmodic intensities within a limited area instead of the wide and equable appreciation of Class A: they read Meredith, but talk about his philosophy, and have no proper grasp of Dickens. Class C, average 3½ miles an hour and call it ‘about 4,’ and stride 30 inches: they often have Class A capacities, but are physically disabled: they insist on large meals and a good deal of drink, and talk much of ‘scorching.’ Class D, average 2½ miles an hour, and stride 25 inches: they have no illusions about either, and are mainly occupied in catching a train home at the earliest opportunity.

Now it is obvious that if a Class B walker is set down to walk with one from Class D, one of two things must happen: either the D man must rise above his normal maxima, or the B man must sink below them. The usual supposition is that B must give way, on the ground that it is dangerous and distressing for D to exceed his limits. It is not generally recognised in such cases what a sacrifice is imposed on B. He has got to drop his pace from 4 miles to 2½; he has got to shorten his stride from 36 to 25 inches; he will probably not be allowed to talk politics; D has never read Meredith’s poetry, and by the time B is feeling a little warm, D will be beginning to think about the trains home. Now suppose that B has had a hard week’s work, is mentally confused, is contemplating marriage or an investment, is just changing his politics or metaphysics, or is in some other condition when his mind wants cleaning up and straightening out: would he not be to some extent justified in refusing to modify his distance, pace, and stride, and in offering D the alternatives of either complying with the B conditions or going to the D—that is, consorting with other members of his own class?

Those who hold that B would not be justified miss, I think, the distinction between walking and strolling; they consider that B will get some sort of motion through pleasant country, and that this ought to be enough for him, whatever his condition. The instance taken is purposely extreme; normally, it is admitted, a stroll in company is better than a walk alone. But there are times when B must have a proper walk, at whatever cost; when his primary need is for 18 miles at 4 miles an hour; nay, there are times when he is simply not fit for company, and must go walking alone, and recapture something of himself before he can properly consort with his fellows.

This condition of B’s which justifies solitary walking is called by many names in medical works or in the impassioned autobiographies of advertisement—neurasthenia, brain-fag, nervous collapse, or even Weltschmerz. But there is a better and more expressive name, covering a larger range of symptoms, which popular idiom created for us, and a poet then marked for ever as our own. I mean the Hump. The use of this phrase illustrates once more the truth that once we are conscious of a thing we have subdued it. When a man says he has neurasthenia, he understands nothing except a vague sense of discomfort somewhere unlocalised in himself: but when he says he has the Hump, the very word brings a clear vision of something unnatural and extraneous, of a definite deformity which he can attack and cure. The disease is isolated and identified, and is no longer a vague oppression; it is something which is not his real self, but is temporarily connected with him, and may, by an effort, be shaken off. Civilisation has pressed too heavily on one part of him, on his porter’s shoulder-knot; and the forces of his being, which should be employed in varying ways on different tasks, have concentrated themselves unnaturally to resist the pressure: his shoulder has become hypertrophied: in short, he has the Hump. Let him take a walk, let his being resume its natural course: let the forces settle instinctively back into their natural channels: let him realise the world around and about him, calling and answering to each of his separate faculties and not to one only; and lo! the pressure is lightened, the Hump is reduced, and he resumes his natural shape, and is fit for the company of his fellows.

The poet, it is true, wrote of the Hump that comes from having too little to do: but his words apply equally to that which comes of too much.

But it is not only abnormal mental conditions, such as the Hump, which justify solitary walking: there are abnormal physical conditions which at times render it necessary. Chief among these are the peculiar conditions of streets, pavements, and aggregated humanity which make up towns. Walking in company in a town is really a mockery. Not only are you hampered by other people, so that your attention is kept perpetually on them and off your companions: but your line is for ever being broken and reuniting, so that there is no chance of developing a communal swing and stride. Worse than that, the atmosphere of a town induces that dangerous combination of physical oppression and mental activity which leads to brilliant conversation: you shout epigrams across the roar of the traffic, and coruscate with wit as you dodge among perambulators. Town-walking in company, in fact, tends to become like an evening party, and the only possible thing in a town is to walk alone.

This being so, it may be asked whether town-walking is worth doing at all. Many people would say that it is not, and as regards the great majority of towns I should agree with them; the only thing to be done with such towns is to walk away from them as quickly as possible, and to achieve this it is pardonable to undergo the degradation of bicycling or even being driven in a vehicle. But there is one exception, and that is London. London walking is a quite distinct and peculiar thing, utterly unlike any other town-walking. It is a unique branch of walking in general and solitary walking in particular: for all the circumstances which make town-walking solitary apply tenthousandfold in London. But if you accept this condition, and walk London alone, you will find a very curious thing, namely that in this biggest and most monstrous of all towns you approach most nearly to pure rusticity. The strictly physical conditions, dirt, noise, smell, constriction of outlook, multiplicity of people, are as bad or worse in London than other towns; but in certain other points, by no means unimportant to a walker, the end of the series is like the beginning, the infinite is like the infinitesimal. What was possible on the South Downs, difficult in Cheltenham, and unthinkable in Liverpool, becomes possible again in London.

It all springs from one simple fact: there are so many people in London that they do not notice each other. If the Londoner paid the slightest attention to his neighbour he would go mad in a fortnight. It is physically impossible for him to notice every one he sees; consequently, he gets into the habit of simply overlooking them, and as their esse is percipi, they become, for practical purposes, not there. A Londoner walking along a crowded street is really alone in the wilderness: the men are simply as trees walking. The difference between walking along Oxford Street and along the Embankment is only the difference between walking through a copse where there are many trees or on a field track where there are few.

From this two important consequences follow; first, that in London you can wear what you please. No one will notice or criticise, and even if they did there are always a hundred people worse dressed than you, with dirtier boots, with more nÉgligÉ hats, with baggier trousers. You may, of course, meet some one you know; but here again the abnormal size of London comes to your aid. If it is 5 to 1 on meeting a friend in Cheltenham, it is 50 to 1 against in London. Second, and even more important, is the fact that in London you can sing in the streets. The roar of the traffic will drown all but the strongest passages in the highest register: and even if this lulls for a moment nobody will notice. You can even conduct with your stick if the beat of your foot is not enough. Difficult orchestral passages with variations of colour can be safely attempted in London streets: even the difference between a trumpet and a horn (which involves making faces if it is done properly) can be represented without any one heeding you.

Traversing thus the London streets, singing and in comfortable clothes, unheeding and unheeded by other people, the solitary walker can come near to, if he cannot attain, the proper mood of walking. It is true that a crowd may disturb his repose at times, and dodging the people and the traffic may break the rhythm of his stride: but the sixth sense which Londoners develop enables him to avoid most obstructions without thinking, and it is surprising, as a matter of fact, how rarely one’s stride is broken in a London street. The rhythm of street walking can never be quite the same as the rhythm of country walking: there is always something hard and metallic in the contact of foot and paved surface. None the less, there is a rhythm, and it can do something towards pacifying the body, enlarging the mind, and beating the disordered discourse of intellect into the smooth series of contemplation. Here again the mere size of London comes to the solitary walker’s aid. It is large enough to give him the feeling of direction, to feed his innate craving for big lines. True, in London as in other towns you have frequently to make a sharp turn, giving a violent wrench to your internal organ of orientation. But if your main line be a sufficiently big one, as it can be in London, it is possible to regard these turns as temporary irregularities, and merge them in a larger whole. For example, as you go from Charing Cross to Chelsea, you start with a piece of the Strand, turn a little to cut across the lower end of Trafalgar Square and out into the Mall, and then swing round to the left, to the right, again to the right and again to the left, before you resume the big line of the King’s Road.[6] But if you envisage the whole in a sufficiently large spirit, the little irregularity of Trafalgar Square and the four turns necessitated by the intrusion of Buckingham Palace need not trouble you; they are mere modern excrescences on a line which must have existed before Buckingham Palace was built or Trafalgar fought, the line by which the citizens of London went to Chelsea to eat buns.

By walking in this way along big lines it is possible to gain some real idea of London, the relations of its parts, and the characteristic of each. The bus or cab-rider cannot really understand London: by allowing himself to be carried he loses all grip of actuality. The underground traveller is even more benighted: to him London is an unintelligible congeries of districts linked by memories of the under world. He conceives Hampstead Heath as something near Hampstead station—an awful perversion. But the walker realises Hampstead Heath in its relation to London; he has approached it through the drab monochrome vistas of Camden Town (with the sudden leap into modernity, red brick, and green blinds at the lower end of the heath) or along the pompous and innocently self-satisfied High Street, or up the interminable sameness of Fitz John’s Avenue. He knows Parliament Hill as the end of an hour’s hard walk, from which he looks back over the way that he has come: he knows the cattle-trough as the first landmark in Alf Holliday’s famous walk out of London to St. Albans, which drops him over the Spaniard’s Road into a new world, with a high ridge between him and London, twists him deftly through Temple Fortune, takes him into Hendon the back way by the recreation ground, and speeds him from the foot of the hill across the thirteen fields traversed by the river Silk, where a man can stretch his legs and forget all urban things awhile until confronted by the imposing structure of the Hendon Union workhouse.

But the greatest and most inspiring thing in London is the river. On the purely physical side, it ventilates the town as nothing else can do; on the most stifling days, when stone and brick have been so heated overnight that they have killed the freshness of dawn and brought the new day to birth already old, when the feet are as lead and every breath is an oppression, when the most congenial music is a symphony of Tschaikowsky—there is still some freshness beside the river. On the aesthetic side, who shall fitly sing the praises of the river, with the morning sun catching it as one drops on to the embankment from the north, the silver mornings when the air is clear, the gold mornings with a slight fog, and the copper mornings with a thicker fog? Or the November view up river at sunset from one of the Chelsea bridges? But the best gift of the river to London is simply itself, the long curving line on which the whole town is based, which links Fulham to Westminster and Battersea to the Docks, which shapes as nothing else can shape the walker’s conception of London. Give me the man that knows his bridges and has walked the whole range of all the embankments, from Blackfriars to the uttermost parts of Chelsea beneath the shadow of the four chimneys; he alone is the true Londoner.

It is clear then that at least in London there is something to be said for solitary walking; the London walker can come near to the mood of true walking. If he is debarred from real country he can yet gain something of the country conditions; though a townsman, he approaches in many ways to rusticity. A curious confirmation of this view may be found in the Local Government system of this country. While every other town has its Borough Council, London has a County Council; on the South Downs you are in a county, in Liverpool you are in a borough, but in London you are in a county again. In the eye of the Local Government Board, we Londoners are mere chawbacons; we are tending sheep, and sowing corn, and abiding the verdict of the seasons; we dwell beneath our own vine-trees, and wait for a chance traveller to come by and tell us whether Ladysmith is relieved. There is much humanity in Acts of Parliament.

But however much we may make of London walking, let it never be considered as anything but a pis aller. The first principle of all walkers who live in London is to get away, if possible. If you must remain in London, walk there by all means, and trump up whatever defence of it looks most plausible. But as soon as it becomes possible to get away, do not dream for an instant of remaining; beside a real country walk, the biggest London line, the finest view from the Embankment, the most transcendental conception of Hampstead are as dust in the balance. Have done with all such flummery; take your stick and your Walker Miles and go. And, unless you have the hump, do not go alone. Walking from London (as opposed to walking in London) is one of the finest forms of communal walking; as an education in citizenship it need fear no comparison, whether with cricket, football, or any other organised game.

Consider for a moment the qualities needed by one who has undertaken the organisation of a party of walkers—if a mixed party, so much the better. To perform his functions successfully he must be a combination of Cook’s agent, weather-prophet, geographical specialist, Bradshaw expert, commissariat officer, guide, nurse, hostess, and chaperon. First he must arrange the day and time, and train, so as to suit everybody, which involves a hail of postcards, telephone conversations, and personal interviews. Then he must provide a fine day—by far his easiest task. Then he must arrange the route, his choice being limited only by the fact that each member of the party has his own views about pace, distance, time for lunch, and character of country, agreeing only that there must be no undue hurrying or waiting for the train home at the end of the walk. Then his functions as guide begin: he must necessarily lead the party, while keeping an eye behind to see that no one is straggling; he must never show even a momentary hesitation as to the route; he must receive with gratitude and attention the suggestions of his companions, who don’t care about the map, but are sure they came that way with their uncle some years ago, and are quite certain the guide is wrong; he must watch the time all through, making painful mental calculations of rates and distances; he must be sure, if the route passes any ancient churches, public-houses, or registry offices, that no members of the party whose tastes incline thereto linger too long with irretrievable results; and unless and until the party have reached a proper taciturnity, he must originate and stimulate interesting conversation. If the walk continues into the late afternoon—as it will if the leader has an ounce of sporting instinct—he must find a suitable place for tea at exactly the right time, and finally march his party down to their train with not more than five minutes to wait.

Many walkers when guiding a party prefer to stick to familiar routes, and so lessen some of the difficulties; but, if this plan is safer, it misses some of the most exciting moments of walking in company. There is nothing in life quite like guiding a company against time across unknown or dimly remembered country. With a map it is stimulating enough; but it is perhaps even more fun with Walker Miles. For the leader feels that not only himself but also Walker Miles is on his trial; he has to justify to the company not only his own intelligence, but also that of his master. And he knows that tracks may have been changed or landmarks moved, and that a passage is just coming in the text which requires careful attention to make certain of the master’s meaning. He turns the critical corner at the dividing of the ways, and has to decide instantly and without hesitation on the right route. He chooses one, and looks ahead to the next point in the text which marks a decisive point—a fork in the road, or a stile in the hedge. Time passes and the track continues, every yard more fatal if the last turn was wrong. And then in a sudden glory the track forks or the stile appears; the master is justified; and with something of the feeling of Wellington when Blucher appeared, or Euclid when the forty-seventh proposition worked out, he brushes the doubt and anxiety of the past from his mind, and hurls himself joyously on the next problem.

It would be untruthful and ungrateful to close an account of walking in company on a note of criticism or discontent. Really, the difficulties can easily be exaggerated: the disasters are mostly might-have-beens, which as a matter of fact were not. Only at certain points, and those mostly in the earlier stages, is it really anxious work. As the day wears on doubts and difficulties diminish: the party instinctively settles down to unanimity and good fellowship: the amateur geographer becomes less dogmatic, the conversationalist less brilliant: differences wear off, and the company is linked together by the influences of motion and their surroundings. When they started they were discrepant units of humanity, with every element that could divide and distract them hypertrophied by civilisation: now they have won their way back to the simpler and commoner things that unite. They have eaten in common the sacramental sandwich: they have trodden together twenty miles of their mother earth: and the gorse of Ranmore Common, or the autumn beechwoods of Buckinghamshire shall burn in their memory as a token of good fellowship.

Wherefore, O companions, that I may close as I began, let me with my last words put it on record that I bear no malice. There may have been little difficulties at times: when one of you was guiding, I may have offered irritating suggestions and comments: when I was guiding, I may have been inaccurate, heedless, impatient of criticism. But I do not think that these difficulties play much part in our joint stock of memories. What we remember is not the quarrels by the way, but the way itself—that steep run down Muckish and homeward tramp to the strain of John Brown, that April evening on the Longmynd, that wonderful chequered day of sun and cloud on the Gable, that hot afternoon pull over Watendlath, that moment on Moel Hebog when Snowdon burst into view (and the wall into which we crashed at the bottom), the ridge from the White Horse down to Lambourn, where we talked biology, those Whitsun walks along the back of the world, called the South Downs, those damp lunches on Bookham Common, that clear winter day in Buckinghamshire, and at all seasons and under every sky Leith Hill. Times and places and persons—they are linked together by an imperishable bond: and my last memories are not of bickerings and failures, but of toleration, good-will, and sympathy which lightened the way and sent the miles spinning backward beneath the tread of our feet.

But why use the past tense only? We are not yet old or decrepit, the earth is still firm under us, the wind yet blows, and there is a sun (we are told) still shining in the sky. In part for amusement, but in part as a tribute to our common memories of walking, I have twined these inadequate words. But there is a better thing we can do; let us put on our boots and take our sticks and go forth upon the road once more. There are several new tracks which I am anxious to show you.