Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.

The Person From Porlock

On the second day of my walk along England's South West Coast Path I passed through Porlock and down to Porlock Weir (see photo). The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to live not very far away - in the village of Nether Stowey between Minehead and Bridgwater to be exact - and he and his friends William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, and the poet and essayist Thomas de Quincey, used to take frequent long walks in the surrounding hills of Exmoor and the Quantocks. What lively, literary conversations they must have had! Or do you think they must have just grumbled about the weather and the state of their feet, like most walkers? (Though actually we know both from Wordsworth and from William Hazlitt that Coleridge was a brilliant conversationalist.)

Of course, the name of 'Porlock' resounds in the literary imagination because of Coleridge's famous story about being interrupted by a 'Person from Porlock' while feverishly writing his visionary poem Kubla Khan. Whether Coleridge was struggling to finish it, or whether his juices were in full creative flow, we will never know. Whether the 'Person from Porlock' really existed, or whether this was a fiction invented by Coleridge to excuse the fragmentary nature of his poem, we will also never know. But what is certain is that only fifty four lines were ever completed - out of a projected two to three hundred. And what is also highly probable is that the poem was composed in an opium-induced trance. For Coleridge was addicted to laudanum (an easily obtained, readily prescribed pain-killing drug at the time) - as were many of his friends and contemporaries, including Thomas de Quincey (whose book Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater I strongly recommend; it makes wonderful reading.) Indeed, some scholars believe that the actual 'Person from Porlock' was Coleridge's physician, Dr P Aaron Potter - who had called unexpectedly on that day in 1797 to supply Coleridge with his fix, thus diverting him from one of his wildest visions. Anyhow, the term 'Person from Porlock' has been alluded to by many poets and novelists ever since to mean any unwelcome visitor or unwanted intruder.

On a wider note, all this got me thinking about 'unfinished' art in general. Creative works may be 'unfinished' for many reasons: the death of the artist, the deliberate wish of the artist, the interruption of the artist. Consider the great 'unfinished' masterpieces: Jane Austen's Sanditon, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Does the fact that they're 'unfinished' really matter all that much? Personally I feel it matters not one jot. Indeed, for me, some works of art are all the better for being 'unfinished'. Perhaps this is why I like so much some of the suggestive, seemingly unpolished drawings and sketches by artists like Constable, Van Gogh and many others. Perhaps this is why I like so much the fragmentary nature of a poem such as Kubla Khan, with its half-fulfilled desires and half-complete visions. Sometimes the 'unfinished' work of art reflects more truly the life we really live. We can fill in any gaps and omissions and endings in our own imaginations.

Back at Porlock Weir, this family's having a good time crabbing and messing about by the boats ...

But this couple's striding off rather purposefully towards ... what ..? I leave this unfinished, as I don't know the answer myself ...

(If anyone is interested in the relationship between opium and English Romanticism, try reading Alethea Hayter's terrific book Opium And The Romantic Imagination, a book I read and enjoyed many years ago.)