Hazlitt and Edward Thomas on Walking

Edward Thomas never wrote an essay on walking-sticks, though he might well have done, in the style of the Romantic familiar essayists he loved; it is a favourite topic of his. 'That two men possess walking-sticks of the same kind is not nearly so important as that one twirls and flourishes it, while the other regularly swings it once every four steps' he writes, in Walter Pater – adding, with a characteristic touch of Elian facetiousness, 'unless, of course, the observer is a manufacturer, or retailer, or connoisseur, of walking-sticks'.¹ For the full literary implications of his remark, he trusts to the reader's memory of the looping signature left by Corporal Trim's walking-stick on a famous page in Tristram Shandy, more eloquent than 'a thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms'.²

Pausing in his pilgrimage along the Icknield Way to grumble about a stick which has grown uncomfortable in his hand, Thomas weighs up the merits and defects of this six-year-long companion. Despite its having no handle to speak of, Thomas decides that he will put up with its faults, because it is 'so nicely balanced and being oak so likely to last a lifetime'. On the whole, its plainness and strength make it preferable to other, grander alternatives:

perhaps a really long staff grasped some way from its upper end would be right. But there is something too majestic, patriarchal even, about such a staff. A man would have to build up his life round about it if it had been deliberately adopted. And gradually he would become a celebrity.³

Walking and style are inseparable in Thomas's writing, because he saw the world as a walker sees it. When he comments on prose style, he uses metaphors drawn from his lifelong experience as a walker. Richard Jefferies's style 'grew to his use like the handle of a walking-stick', he says, and this brief simile expands in our minds like a poem.⁴ We think of the steady, companionable relationship which builds between a walker and his stick; the smoothing of the handle to the hand; the one-way dependency, which begins to seem like a mutual relationship, as time passes and the stick takes the hand's mould. In The South Country, the simile reappears when Thomas is discussing the importance of habit and exercise in the gradual evolution of an authentic style – one which, however flawed, fits the writer:

In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression, hopelessly inadequate, as we plainly see when looking at the methods of great poets, of beautiful women, of athletes, of politicians, but still gradually fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our strength, of our blindness as of our vision – the man himself, the poor man it may be.⁵

Thomas collected many anecdotes about the ways in which previous writers travelled. These served for him as poetic notation, making visible and concrete their distinctive view of the world. Lord Bacon, he recalls, 'used to say sweet herbs and flowers refreshed his memory, and on an April day would ride out to enjoy the rain which he considered wholesome "because of the nitre in the air and the universal spirit of the world"'.⁶ The description brings this writer physically onto the page, all his actions embodying his empirical philosophy: enjoying the sensation of riding on horseback in the spring rain; feeling his own health; knowing that there is nitre (saltpetre) 'in the air' because he is a scientist; believing that the world has a 'universal spirit' because he can feel it.

Often, these anecdotes are left to speak for themselves; at other times, Thomas will offer a gloss. His account of George Borrow's long hike from Norwich to London serves as evidence of the writer's ability to be 'impressive and mysterious without effort':

As he was at Norwich, the distance was a hundred and twelve miles, and as...