Leslie Stephen, “In Praise of Walking”

—Portrait of Sir Leslie Stephen by George Frederic Watts, 1878

Sir Leslie Stephen’s essay “In Praise of Walking” was published in his four-volume collection of essays, Studies of a Biographer, which first appeared between 1898 and 1902. I found it on the Internet; I would rather have read a print edition, but the university library is closed because of the ongoing pandemic. This essay is the work of an elderly man looking back on his life and, more specifically, his pedestrian adventures; it begins with the idea that, as we grow older, we “may find consolation for increasing infirmities in looking back upon a well-spent life.” For Stephens, walking is one of the innocent pleasures he can look back on:

Walking is among recreations what ploughing and fishing are among industrial labours: it is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and no extraneous excitement. It is fit even for poets and philosophers, and he who can thoroughly enjoy it must have at least some capacity for worshipping the “cherub Contemplation.”

Walking isn’t about athletic excellence, although Stephens notes that he retains his youthful admiration for rowers and cricketers, and he acknowledges the abilities of cyclists and golfers. Even though there are professional pedestrians “making records and seeking the applause of the mob,” he writes, 

The true walker is one to whom the pursuit is in itself delightful; who is not indeed priggish enough to be above a certain complacency in the physical prowess required for his pursuit, but to whom the muscular effort of the legs is subsidiary to the “celebration” stimulated by the effort; to the quiet musings and imaginings which arise most spontaneously as he walks, and generate the intellectual harmony which is the natural accompaniment to the monotonous tramp of his feet.

The “celebration” generated by walking consists of “the quiet musings and imaginings” which “arise most spontaneously” as we walk, and for Stephen, there is an ironic harmony between the monotony of walking and the variety of those musings and imaginings.

Those “quiet musings and imaginings” produced by walking are perhaps the reason Stephen is so drawn to it. “[T]he true pedestrian loves walking because, so far from distracting his mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation,” he writes. He compares memories of walking to other memories of “‘well-spent’ moments”: most memories “coalesce into wholes,” and become general impressions (of friends or experiences); however, he continues,

The memories of walks . . . are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung. As I look back, a long series of little vignettes presents itself, each representing a definite stage of my earthly pilgrimage summed up and embodied in a walk.

Writing books is one form of memory which tends to “coalesce into wholes”: “The labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me.” For Stephen, walking is a relief from writing, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) being a source of inspiration.

Indeed, Stephen suggests that his “pedestrian enthusiasm” ties his days together. “The day on which I was fully initiated into the mysteries is marked by a white stone,” he writes, describing a hike Heidelberg through the Odenwald:

Then I first knew the delightful sensation of independence and detachment enjoyed during a walking tour. Free from all bothers of railway time-tables and extraneous machinery, you trust to your own legs, stop when you please, diverge into any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon some quaint variety of human life at every inn where you put up for the night. . . . You have no dignity to support, and the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped into oblivion.

He recalls George Borrows’s walks with Roma people in England as a model of the kind of social freedom he found in his walks, and that social freedom must have been revolutionary for a Victorian English gentleman. Stephen remembers all of the details of such journeys: “I kept no journal, but I could still give the narrative day by day—the sights which I dutifully admired and the very stage of my bootlaces. Walking tours thus rescue a bit of one’s life from oblivion.” “The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories,” he continues, “and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes, according to the requirements of Aristotle; and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.”

“Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season,” Stephen contends. He claims that “[a]ll great men of letters” have “been enthusiastic walkers,” including Shakespeare, Jonson, Coryate, Bishop Hooker, Swift, John Wesley, Fielding, Samuel Johnson, De Quincey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Hobbes, Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin. “The great men, it is true, have not always acknowledged their debt to the genius, whoever he may be, who presides over pedestrian exercise,” he continues. “Indeed, they have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse. Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.” Walking, not nature, is the true source of writerly inspiration, Stephen suggests, and I like his emphasis on the grounded nature of walking. For example, he fell in love with the Alps because of Ruskin’s Modern Painters. “I hoped to share Ruskin’s ecstasies in a reverent worship of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn,” he writes, but instead “[i]t stimulated a passion for climbing which absorbed my energies and distracted me from the prophet’s loftier teaching.” Stephen’s “passion for the mountains had something earthly in its composition”:

It is associated with memories of eating and drinking. It meant delightful comradeship with some of the best of friends; but our end, I admit, was not always of the most exalted or aesthetic strain. A certain difficulty results. I feel an uncomfortable diffidence. I hold that Alpine walks are the poetry of the pursuit; I could try to justify the opinion by relating some of the emotions suggested by the great scenic effects: the sunrise on the snow fields; the storm-clouds gathering under the great peaks; the high pasturages knee-deep in flowers; the torrents plunging through the “cloven ravines,” and so forth. But the thing has been done before, better than I could hope to do it; and when I look back at those old passages in Modern Painters, and think of the enthusiasm which prompted to exuberant sentences of three or four hundred words, I am not only abashed by the thought of their unapproachable eloquence, but feel as though they conveyed a tacit reproach. You, they seem to say, are, after all, a poor prosaic creature, affecting a love of sublime scenery as a cloak for more grovelling motives. I could protest against this judgment, but it is better at present to omit the topic, even though it would give the strongest groundwork for my argument.

The conflict between sublime spaces and grounded walking leads Stephen to suggest that it may be better “to trust the case for walking to where the external stimulus of splendours and sublimities is not so overpowering.” He refers to the division in aesthetics between the sublime and the beautiful—“A philosophic historian divides the world into the regions where man is stronger than nature and the regions where nature is stronger than man”—and suggests that “[t]he true charm of walking is most unequivocally shown when it is obviously dependent upon the walker himself.”

For that reason, he turns away from his memories of hiking in the Alps to walks in England:

Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English country tolerable but seems to make the charm inexhaustible. I know only two or three districts minutely, but the more familiar I have become with any one of them the more I have wished to return, to invent some new combination of old strolls or to inspect some hitherto unexplored nook.

He tells us that likes walking in the Fens as much as he likes walking in the Lake District: “In a steady march along one of the great dykes by the monotonous canal with the exuberant vegetation dozing in its stagnant waters, we were imbibing the spirit of the scenery.” He also enjoys walking by the sea, but not because the sea suggests, to him, sublimity:

Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal to more general sympathy. The voice of the sea, we know, is as powerful as the voice of the mountains; and, to my taste, it is difficult to say whether the Land’s End is not in itself a more impressive station than the top of Mont Blanc. The solitude of the frozen peaks suggests tombstones and death. The sea is always alive and at work. The hovering gulls and plunging gannets and the rollicking porpoises are animating symbols of a gallant struggle with wind and wave.

The scenery of various places on the English coast is always delightful, but walking makes it moreso: 

When you have made an early start, followed the coast-guard track on the slopes above the cliffs, struggled through the gold and purple carpeting of gorse and heather on the moors, dipped down into quaint little coves with a primitive fishing village, followed the blinding whiteness of the sands round a lonely bay, and at last emerged upon a headland where you can settle into a nook of the rocks, look down upon the glorious blue of the Atlantic waves breaking into foam on the granite, and see the distant sea-levels glimmering away till they blend imperceptibly into cloudland; then you can consume your modest sandwiches, light you pipe, and feel more virtuous and thoroughly at peace with the universe than it is easy even to conceive yourself elsewhere. I have fancied myself on such occasions to be a felicitous blend of poet and saint—which is an agreeable sensation. 

Note that Stephen isn’t suggesting that he became either a poet or a saint by walking; rather, he imagined himself to be a blend of both. That “agreeable sensation,” however imaginary, is one of the benefits of walking for Stephen.

That “agreeable sensation” is produced by walking on paths or through fields, rather than by walking on roads, and it is “confined to the walker”:

I respect the cyclist, as I have said; but he is enslaved by his machine: he has to follow the highroad, and can only come upon  what points of view open to the commonplace tourist. He can see nothing of the retired scenery which may be close to him, and cannot have his mind brought into due harmony by the solitude and by the long succession of lovely bits of scenery which stand so coyly aside from public notice.

In sentences that echo my friend Matthew Anderson’s work on walking trespassing laws, Stephen boasts that he pays no attention to laws against trespassing: 

To me it was a reminder of the many delicious bits of walking which, even in the neighbourhood of London, await the man who has no superstitious reverence for legal rights. It is indeed surprising how many charming walks can be contrived by a judicious combination of a little trespassing with the rights of way happily preserved over so many commons and footpaths.

Of course, without a tradition of commons or footpaths, and with punitive trespassing legislation, walkers in this province are unfortunately confined to roads.

Stephen provides an account of a recent walk with a companion near London. He is surprised to find rural spaces so close to the metropolis, but he also finds that walking with others stimulates conversation: “Nowhere, at least, have I found talk flow so freely and pleasantly as in a march through pleasant country. And yet there is also a peculiar charm in the solitary expedition when your interlocutor must be yourself.” From here, he shifts to thinking about walking in the city itself, and the effect of the noise and activity of the city on a walker’s thinking. For Stephen, the city’s distractions “become so multitudinous that they neutralise each other. The whirl of conflicting impulses becomes a continuous current because it is so chaotic and determines a mood of sentiment if not a particular vein of reflection.” “[W]hat I please to call my ‘mind’ seems to work more continuously and coherently in a street walk than elsewhere,” he writes. “I do not defend my insensibility nor argue that London walks are the best. I only maintain that even in London, walking has a peculiar fascination.” Perhaps because he is so influenced by Victorian Romanticism, Stephen feels it necessary to apologize for his interest in urban walking:

I can often find occasions in the heart of London for recalling old memories, without any definable pretext; little pictures of scenery, sometimes assignable to no definable place, start up invested with a faint aroma of old friendly walks and solitary meditations and strenuous exercise, and I feel convinced that, if I am not a thorough scoundrel, I owe that relative excellence to the harmless monomania which so often took me, to appropriate Bunyan’s phrase, from the amusements of Vanity Fair to the Delectable Mountains of pedestrianism.

That is where Stephen’s essay ends, with the apparent moral improvement that walking, including urban walking, has had on his character. The word “monomania” suggests an unhealthy obsession with walking, even though he suggests that obsession is “harmless.” I think we would have to know something about Victorian cities—the dirt and smoke and noise of them—and the degree to which Stephen’s intellectual world was suffused by Romanticism (represented, perhaps, by Ruskin’s Modern Painters) in order to understand how odd Stephen’s defence of urban walking actually was. I find myself wondering what Stephen would make of walking along grid roads in Saskatchewan. Would he see parallels between rural Saskatchewan and Victorian London? Rural Saskatchewan is quiet and anything but chaotic, but it is thoroughly shaped by industrial activity in a way that would have been hidden by the beauty of the rural English spaces in which he walked. And yet, the scale of the open landscape, the size of the fields of wheat and canola, the immense sky overhead—all these suggest a form of the sublime. These comparisons point towards the disconnection between English writing on walking, and attempting to walk in this space: the experiences are very different, because of the scale, the colours, the flatness, the lack of footpaths. And yet, I find Stephen’s defence of walking in ordinary places reassuring. He’s a Romantic, but he’s in the process of becoming something else. That something else might be connected to the spaces in which I walk. That’s not to claim Stephen as a precursor to contemporary practices of psychogeography or mythogeography—that would be silly—but at the same time, I don’t think we can simply reject Stephen’s walking as mere Romanticism.

Works Cited

Stephen, Sir Leslie. “In Praise of Walking. Studies of a Biographer, vol. 3, Duckworth, 1902. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Studies_of_a_Biographer/In_Praise_of_Walking.