Personal Pleasures (22 page)

But it seems to have been always recognised that relating one's rambles viva voce is a somewhat chancy business; the wisest aunt telling the saddest tale is not always listened to; hence travellers have usually committed their trips to paper, knowing that the printed
word breaks resistance down where the human voice does but strengthen it. Thus, it has always been the custom for returned travellers to write travel books, whether in the form of fictional narrative, or of true; and it is said that this form of literature is the greatest in bulk of any in the world. So, if you can prevail on none to give ear to your saga, or eye to your postcards and your photographs, take a pen and write your heart out, as did the lusty voyagers of all time. Join that great romantic company of enlarging travellers who have held it more commendable to publish unto the world what they have seen and done abroad than to permit it to fester perilously in their bosoms. Tell the world how the ice-bergs crashed around your bark, how fishes flew for you and whales spouted, how you spied a ruined city in a jungle and a phoenix in a date-tree, a gila monster up a barrel cactus, a chaparral cock fighting a rattlesnake in the mesquite, a golden eagle carrying a lamb, anthropophagi making a meal of a missionary; a unicorn with his head on a virgin's knee; and any other of the strange relations of authors that you think good. Do not fear to expand: you are in admirable company; the best company, many hold, in the world. It is a fine bold thing you have done, this going abroad, and you deserve that people shall hear about it. Telling them, you will relive your happy journeyings. … Ah, me, how Delos, dropped from heaven, swung moorless on a violet sea. …

Let me show you my postcards; indeed no, it is no trouble at all. …

They lie close-locked, arms entwined, face on face, oblivious, loving, and dumb, strewn like chrysalises about the littered, burnt-up August sward. No speech passes; they bill, but do not coo; it is better so. John Donne has described their state.

And whilst our souls negotiate there
,

We like sepulchral statues lay:

All day the same our postures were
,

And we said nothing, all the day
.

Another poet, a century later, mentions a young woman less wise than these:

Sabina has a thousand charms

To captivate my heart;

Her lovely eyes are Cupid's arms
,

And every look a dart:

But when the beauteous idiot speaks
,

She cures me of my pain;

Her tongue the servile fetters breaks

And frees her slave again
.

Had Nature to Sabina lent

Beauty with reason crowned. …

But Nature is seldom thus lavish, and Sabina and her swain are happier dumb. So dumb they lie, turtling it in the turtle-haunted parks, thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, while the night dews gather on the grass, and the Park exhales the warm stale breath of the long summer's day, and policemen, simply and plainly clad, pace among their flock, their firm expressions saying, “Thus far and no farther,” and the keepers blow their whistles for time up. To bed, to bed, kind turtles now!

Delightful it is to see Cupid thus busy, to see lovers thus emparadised in this park of pleasure. But how we stumble over them as we walk! Impossible to help it, since there are so many billing pairs, so little space between each pair and the next. Not all our stumbling can break that subliminal peace in which they lie intranced; but, through the pillowing clouds of love on which they rest, does some faint jar from the lower world ever so faintly shake them, as one passer-by after another trips over them, kicking their entwined forms? Love gives courage; loves gives oblivion; they do not appear to notice. It is we who trip and fall.

Yes, sweet turtles, to bed! It is really time you removed yourselves out of our way.

What is there in this so primitive, so outmoded motion of legs and body that gives so fine a lusty pleasure to some of those who practise it? One leg before the other, feet planted swiftly on the ground in turn, lifted, planted again, carrying the whole person, slowly, indeed, (as traffic travels to-day) but surely, (until intelligence revolts and the motion ceases) along: wherein lies the charm of this animal pastime? I suppose in the fact that we are, in fact, animals, and the mere exercise of the body pleases. “The race of wild pedestrian animals,” says Timæus, “came from those who had no philosophy in any of their thoughts, and never considered at all about the nature of the heavens, because they had ceased to use the courses of the head, and followed the guidance of those parts of the soul which surround the breast.” Very true; and so we stride along, walking vegetables, one with the earth we traverse, empty of thought, lazily gluttonous of eye and ear and nose, scrambling up hill, pushing through holt and hanger, emerging on to thorn-grown, wind-swept, close-cropped down, below which spreads a far, hazy glitter of sea, plunging down the hill's steep shoulder into green bottoms where cressy brooks wind, following ancient footpaths where they run on ancient maps, paths sometimes long lost and
forgotten, leading over broken stiles and blocked hedge-gaps, across foot-bridges long vanished, over fields long ploughed, through copses and thickets which have run riot and made impenetrable with their jungly growth what was once the way through the woods. The path broadens; it becomes for a space a deep dark lane, alder- and hazel-hidden, sunk in mud. It is called on the map, for half a mile, Cockshut Lane. It comes to Standfast Barn, plunges through a gap into Cuckoo Copse, becomes again a footpath, tilts up across two steep fields towards the beech-hangered ridge of Farewell Hill. And so on and along, and it will lead you round by the Oakhangers to Cheese-combe Farm, and home by the moors.

What is there to it? You walk, you look, you hear, you smell; life arranges itself easily into a sensuous dream, a feast of sound, sight, scent, and always that light, swinging motion carrying you along, without effort, without thought. So doubtless, do the other animals feel, padding the earth, with their soft, quick feet, nose to ground, ears pricked, eyes bright. Yet they have an effect of following something; they seem ever on the chase, questing and nosing after some dream they have. Here I have the advantage of them; I follow nothing, beyond sometimes a path. I walk for walking's sake; do they also engage in this pastime, that some consider so odd? In America, I am told, it is not practised; if you walk, it is because you have no means to drive or ride.

Some walkers, such as Socrates, seem to walk only
to talk, or to think about something, and even so they prefer to stroll about cities. Socrates enjoyed the green bank of Ilissus when he was taken there, since it offered a charming spot wherein to rest and bathe his feet while he was read to; but (said Phædrus to him), when you are in the country you are like a stranger being led about by a guide. I think you never venture even outside the gates. Very true, my good friend (said Socrates), and I hope you will excuse me when you hear the reason, which is that I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. But (added he), you have found a spell with which to draw me into the country, as hungry cows are led by waving before them a bough or a fruit. For only hold up in like manner a book before me, and you may lead me all round Attica and over the wide world. And now, having arrived, I intend to lie down, and do you choose any posture in which you can read best. Begin.

A hopeless walker, you see; the kind of walker who would read a book as he walked, or argue about the absolute, or want to sit down and rest after a hundred yards; a walker only suited to pacing meditatively about cloister or peristyle, or strolling about the agora, hailing friends and hearing news. Walking for pleasure should not be an intelligent, discursive, gossiping or bookish pastime; it should be solitary and dumb, placid and vacant of mind, an unimpeded, undistracted
error over earth's face, leg after leg, corporeal frame and urgent soul to timeless motion set.

So on we go and on, in delicious rhythm, until we tire. And the worst of that is that, when we tire, we are so many miles from home, and have to walk as many again to reach it, so that by the time we arrive there, we are fatigued indeed. A little forethought, you say, will prevent this? Very true; but walkers are not intelligent, and do not think ahead; they walk themselves weary, and develop all manner of ailments in the process. A good walk, you say, is worth them all? Again, very true.

Of all the animals, man appears to be the only one who enjoys this peculiar pleasure of writing. This is unfortunate, as it would be interesting to read the written works of the dog, the cat, the fox, the hog, the hippopotamus, and others, did they commit any. Besides, it would keep them quiet. Or would it not? Now that I come to think of it, I do not know that the human beings who write most are the quietest. Still, for the time being, the occupation of writing does prevent those engaged on it from making much noise, beyond that emitted by the typewriter or the pen. Parents find this, and all intelligent parents instruct their children early in the part, provide them with pencils and paper, and leave them to it. I myself was early thus instructed and, though I am told that for some time my only form of literary activity was to write in block capitals on every available space the boast “I CAN WRITE,” still, this I assiduously did. Step by step, graduated to higher forms of the art; very early I collaborated in the fictional efforts of my elder sister, and a little later commenced poet. By the age of seven, I was a confirmed addict. Ever since, the pile of my written works has grown and grown;
it has always been to me, if a rather shame-making, yet an insidious amusement.

Wherein lies its charm? Mainly, I believe, in arranging words in patterns, as if they were bricks, or flowers, or lumps of paint. That is, to me. Heaven never, I think, destined me for a story-teller, and stories are the form of literary activity which give me the least pleasure. I am one of the world's least efficient novelists; I cannot invent good stories, or care what becomes of the people of whom I write. I have heard novelists complain that their characters run away with their books and do what they like with them. This must be somewhat disconcerting, like driving an omnibus whose steering-wheel, accelerator and brake are liable to be seized by the. passengers. My passengers know their places, and that they are there to afford me the art and pleasure of driving. Are there not, for that matter, already enough people in the world, without these beings intruded from my imagination? Shall they puff themselves up because they are allowed on paper? I have heard of novelists who say that, while they are creating a novel, the people in it are ever with them, accompanying them on walks, for all I know on drives (though this must be distracting in traffic) to the bath, to bed itself. This must be a terrible experience; rather than allow the people in my novels to worry me like that, I should give up writing novels altogether. No; my people are retiring, elusive, and apt not to come even when I require them. I do not blame them. They no
doubt wish that they were the slaves of a more ardent novelist, who would permit them to live with her. To be regarded as of less importance than the etymology and development of the meanest word in the dictionary, must be galling.

And so we come to words, those precious gems of queer shapes and gay colours, sharp angles and soft contours, shades of meaning laid one over the other down history, so that for those far back one must delve among the lost and lovely litter that strews the centuries. Such delving has rewards as rich, as stirring to the word-haunted fancy, as the delving into the deeps of human motive and emotion has to the novelist of psychology, or the weaving of intricate plot and counterplot to the story-teller, or the laying down of subtle clues to the detective problemist. Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind, to the exclusion, doubtless, of much else that should be there. How charmingly they flit before me, heavy laden with their honey like bees, yet light on the wing; slipping shadowy out from dusty corners, hiding once more, eluding my reach, pirouetting in the air above me, now too light, too quick, to be caught in my net, now floating down, like feathers, like snowflakes, to my hands. They arrange themselves in the most elegant odd patterns; they sound the strangest sweet euphonious notes; they flute and sing and taber, and disappear, like apparitions, with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang. Or
they abide my question; they offer their pedigrees for my inspection; I trace back their ancestry, noting their diverse uses, modes, offspring, kin, transformations, transplantations, somersaults, spellings, dignities, degradations, lines and phrases which have en-ambered them for ever, phrases and lines which they have themselves immortally enkindled. To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing. England, the pirate, has ransacked the countries of Europe for her speech: Greece, Rome, France, Germany, Scandinavia, have poured in tribute to her treasury, which shines and jingles with the most confused rich coinage in the world. To play with these mixed coins, to arrange them in juxtaposition, to entertain oneself with curious tropes, with meiosis, litotes, hyperbole, pleonasms, pedanticisms, to measure the words fitly to the thought, to be by turns bombastic, magniloquent, terse, flamboyant, minishing, to use Latinisms, Gallicisms, Hellenisms, Saxonisms, every ism in turn, to scatter our native riches like a spendthrift tossing gold—this is the pleasure of writing. It is this, rather than concern with relating of human beings, which can hold me thralled through a night, until, in the long street outside my high windows, the pale morning creeps, and the scavengers arrive with little carts to remove the last day's dust. It is dalliance with this pleasure that I promise myself when I think of work;
it is, alas, dalliance with it that too often abets me in my day-long and easily accomplished business of keeping work at arm's length. For to hunt language, to swim lazily in those enchanted seas, peering at “whatsoever time, or the heedless hand of blind chance, hath drawn from of old to this present in her huge drag-net, whether fish or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen,” may well fill a day with such pleasure that to put pen to paper in the way of business, of getting on with some task in hand, seems too rude an interruption. Rather let me set down lines of verse, phrases of prose, experiments in rhythm and sound, images and pleasing devices, as they come into my mind, without relation to any larger work to be accomplished. Let me be an amateur of verse and prose, dealing in fragments only.