And Even Now
to come out for a walk. London’s very drawbacks--its endless noise and
hustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in it--assured
this one immunity. Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew
that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might
suddenly say ‘Come out for a walk!’ in that sharp imperative tone which
he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think
there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for
a walk. Any one thus desirous feels that he has a right to impose his
will on whomever he sees comfortably settled in an arm-chair, reading.
It is easy to say simply ‘No’ to an old friend. In the case of a mere
acquaintance one wants some excuse. ‘I wish I could, but’--nothing ever
occurs to me except ‘I have some letters to write.’ This formula is
unsatisfactory in three ways. (1) It isn’t believed. (2) It compels you
to rise from your chair, go to the writing-table, and sit improvising
a letter to somebody until the walkmonger (just not daring to call you
liar and hypocrite) shall have lumbered out of the room. (3) It won’t
operate on Sunday mornings. ‘There’s no post out till this evening’
clinches the matter; and you may as well go quietly.
Walking for walking’s sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a
thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to
it is that it stops the brain. Many a man has professed to me that his
brain never works so well as when he is swinging along the high road or
over hill and dale. This boast is not confirmed by my memory of anybody
who on a Sunday morning has forced me to partake of his adventure.
Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have of power
to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting on a chair, or standing on
a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The
ideas that came so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they
now? where that encyclopiedic knowledge which he bore so lightly? where
the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning over any topic that
was started? The man’s face that was so mobile is set now; gone is the
light from his fine eyes. He says that A. (our host) is a thoroughly
good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds that A. is one of the best
fellows he has ever met. We tramp another furlong or so, and he says
that Mrs. A. is a charming woman. Presently he adds that she is one
of the most charming women he has ever known. We pass an inn. He
reads vapidly aloud to me: ‘The King’s Arms. Licensed to sell Ales and
Spirits.’ I foresee that during the rest of the walk he will read aloud
any inscription that occurs. We pass a milestone. He points at it with
his stick, and says ‘Uxminster. 11 Miles.’ We turn a sharp corner at the
foot of a hill. He points at the wall, and says ‘Drive Slowly.’ I see
far ahead, on the other side of the hedge bordering the high road, a
small notice-board. He sees it too. He keeps his eye on it. And in due
course ‘Trespassers,’ he says, ‘Will Be Prosecuted.’ Poor man!--mentally
a wreck.
Luncheon at the A’s, however, salves him and floats him in full sail.
Behold him once more the life and soul of the party. Surely he will
never, after the bitter lesson of this morning, go out for another walk.
An hour later, I see him striding forth, with a new companion. I watch
him out of sight. I know what he is saying. He is saying that I am
rather a dull man to go a walk with. He will presently add that I am one
of the dullest men he ever went a walk with. Then he will devote himself
to reading out the inscriptions.
How comes it, this immediate deterioration in those who go walking for
walking’s sake? Just what happens? I take it that not by his reasoning
faculties is a man urged to this enterprise. He is urged, evidently, by
something in him that transcends reason; by his soul, I presume. Yes, it
must be the soul that raps out the ‘Quick march!’ to the body.--‘Halt!
Stand at ease!’ interposes the brain, and ‘To what destination,’
it suavely asks the soul, ‘and on what errand, are you sending the
body?’--‘On no errand whatsoever,’ the soul makes answer, ‘and to no
destination at all. It is just like you to be always on the look-out for
some subtle ulterior motive. The body is going out because the mere fact
of its doing so is a sure indication of nobility, probity, and rugged
grandeur of character.’--‘Very well, Vagula, have your own wayula! But
I,’ says the brain, ‘flatly refuse to be mixed up in this tomfoolery.
I shall go to sleep till it is over.’ The brain then wraps itself up
in its own convolutions, and falls into a dreamless slumber from which
nothing can rouse it till the body has been safely deposited indoors
again.
Even if you go to some definite place, for some definite purpose, the
brain would rather you took a vehicle; but it does not make a point of
this; it will serve you well enough unless you are going for a walk. It
won’t, while your legs are vying with each other, do any deep thinking
for you, nor even any close thinking; but it will do any number of small
odd jobs for you willingly--provided that your legs, also, are making
themselves useful, not merely bandying you about to gratify the pride
of the soul. Such as it is, this essay was composed in the course of
a walk, this morning. I am not one of those extremists who must have a
vehicle to every destination. I never go out of my way, as it were, to
avoid exercise. I take it as it comes, and take it in good part. That
valetudinarians are always chattering about it, and indulging in it to
excess, is no reason for despising it. I am inclined to think that in
moderation it is rather good for one, physically. But, pending a time
when no people wish me to go and see them, and I have no wish to go
and see any one, and there is nothing whatever for me to do off my own
premises, I never will go out for a walk.
QUIA IMPERFECTUM 1918.
I have often wondered that no one has set himself to collect unfinished
works of art. There is a peculiar charm for all of us in that which was
still in the making when its maker died, or in that which he laid aside
because he was tired of it, or didn’t see his way to the end of it, or
wanted to go on to something else. Mr. Pickwick and the Ancient Mariner
are valued friends of ours, but they do not preoccupy us like Edwin
Drood or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair at Gad’s Hill become
empty but a few weeks later than it actually did, or had Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in the act of setting down his dream about the Eastern
potentate not been interrupted by ‘a person on business from Porlock’
and so lost the thread of the thing for ever, from two what delightful
glades for roaming in would our fancy be excluded! The very globe we
live on is a far more fascinating sphere than it can have been when men
supposed that men like themselves would be on it to the end of time. It
is only since we heard what Darwin had to say, only since we have had
to accept as improvisible what lies far ahead, that the Book of Life
has taken so strong a hold on us and ‘once taken up, cannot,’ as the
reviewers say, ‘readily be laid down.’ The work doesn’t strike us as a
masterpiece yet, certainly; but who knows that it isn’t--that it won’t
be, judged as a whole?
For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher repute
than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But what if
Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those years he
spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius’ tomb, and
again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare pedestals for
his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we to regret them
quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to think him an
impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there may have been
a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere lovable fault of
temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a thing off, the
result was not always more than magnificent. His David is magnificent,
but it isn’t David. One is duly awed, but, to see the master at
his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak
Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind’s eye, just
that very best.
It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel of
the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum of
incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my own
account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with such
a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my
treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in
the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in
excellent preservation, Penelope’s web and the original designs for the
Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of
Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a
proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall
be the MS. of that fragmentary ‘Iphige’nie’ which Racine laid aside so
meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Treves--‘quoque cela fut de mon
mieux’; and there an early score of that one unfinished Symphony of
Beethoven’s--I forget the number of it, but anyhow it is my favourite.
Among the pictures, Rossetti’s oil-painting of ‘Found’ must be ruled
out, because we know by more than one drawing just what it would have
been, and how much less good than those drawings. But Leonardo’s St.
Sebastian (even if it isn’t Leonardo’s) shall be there, and Whistler’s
Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous other pictures that I would mention
if my mind were not so full of one picture to which, if I can find it
and acquire it, a special place of honour shall be given: a certain huge
picture in which a life-sized gentleman, draped in a white mantle,
sits on a fallen obelisk and surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna
Romana.
The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading
Goethe’s ‘Travels in Italy.’ I have. Or rather, I have just been reading
a translation of it, published in 1885 by George Bell & Sons. I daresay
it isn’t a very good translation (for one has always understood that
Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well--an accomplishment which
this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And I daresay the painting
I so want to see and have isn’t a very good painting. Wilhelm Tischbein
is hardly a name to conjure with, though in his day, as a practitioner
in the ‘historical’ style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome,
Tischbein did great things; big things, at any rate. He did crowds of
heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on clouds; he did centaurs
leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of Troy. And he did this portrait
of Goethe. At least he began it. Why didn’t he finish it? That is a
problem as to which one can but hazard guesses, reading between
the lines of Goethe’s letters. The great point is that it never was
finished. By that point, as you read between those lines, you will be
amused if you are unkind, and worried if you are humane.
Worried, yet also pleased. Goethe has more than once been described as
‘the perfect man.’ He was assuredly a personage on the great scale, in
the grand manner, gloriously balanced, rounded. And it is a fact that he
was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of flesh
and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as he
went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn’t sublime.
Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a moderately
successful career, and glory itself we will wink at if it befall some
thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was glorious without