on it is the concrete verdict of your whole being. And such a verdict is invincible, disdaining argument and scouting refutation. What chance have the merely logical beliefs of the ordinary diner-out against the ingrown and seasoned prejudices of the walker? The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis we pedestrians know.
The first great merit, then, of a walker in ordinary society is a power of authoritative and Delphic utterance on subjects which other men approach humbly with reasoning, aggregated evidence, and formal disputation. It may be urged that this has the effect of killing the subject. That is true: but the real fact is that such subjects ought to be killed once the first opinions are spoken. General topics have really no permanent place in civilised conversation; they are useful only as guides to enable people to adjust themselves easily to each other’s mental and spiritual conformation. When this has been effected, generalities can be cast aside; and the particularities of persons and things and times and places, which form the staple food of conversation, can begin. The walker by a single bold utterance of a prejudice deeply felt at once defines the position. Ex pede Herculem; the conversation can then proceed comfortably.
The second great point in a walker’s conversation is that his ‘shop’ is less shoppy and more interesting than that of other men. The minutiae of his own craft are homely and human things—boots and coats and knapsacks and hobnails and ordnance maps. The golfer’s talk of Dreadnought Drivers and eclectic scores and the fathomless iniquities of caddies has only a limited interest; the motorist is little better with his accelerators and carburettors and police traps and organised perjury. Few people really care to hear how a matchless car was bought in Long Acre (where the bow drawn was also long), went from Land’s End to John o’ Groats in ninety-five minutes (or hours), paid for a new county asylum in fines, killed four chickens, a human being, and a chauffeur, and finally exploded and fell into the Devil’s Punchbowl. (I summarise from vague memories the folklore of motorists.) But all turn round with a pleased smile when a friend of mine begins the life history of his famous boots; how they were originally bought as football boots and scored twenty-seven goals in two seasons; how they were then resoled and nailed by a Swiss cobbler and went up Mont Blanc; how they subsequently covered nine hundred miles in the Home Counties; how they lost all their nails and became ordinary boots and went to a garden party; how they split on a critical occasion and were under-girded (like St. Paul’s ship) with string, bootlaces, and a Government strap; how, finally, when they were past their work, they were offered to (and only refused after a struggle by) the Pitt-Rivers anthropological collection in the Oxford Museum; and how they now repose in a glass case inscribed with the words Bene Merentibus.
It is thus clear (if it is not, I decline to argue) that as regards conversation under ordinary conditions, so far from being at a disadvantage, the walker is better qualified than most men to speak with his enemies in the gate—that is with his acquaintances in the drawing-room or dining room. In the structural part of conversation, dogmatism, his touch is firmer and more impressive; in its constituent material he can on his own subject display a pleasing virtuosity. Over the rest of the ordinary range of conversation I make no extravagant claims for the walker: it is enough to say that he is at no disadvantage as regards persons and events and anecdotes and gossip and generally What Has Happened and What They Are Saying About It. He is, in virtue of his craft, above all things, sane and concrete, and has therefore little difficulty in observing the ordinary conversational traditions. But he is no blind acceptor of conventional limitations. On the contrary, he ever seeks to extend the limits of the conversational range, adding new topics of interest. And there are in particular a few topics which (like the souls of the young ladies in the song) the blind world despises, and has therefore excluded from the realm of proper conversation. These it is the walker’s business to reclaim and invest with a due sense of their real importance.
The first of these is the weather. For some obscure and probably discreditable reason the weather is regarded as a trivial subject. At most it is permitted in less advanced circles as a mere preliminary conversational flourish, comparable to the stray chords with which a pianist settles himself to his work and his audience to listening or slumber. In the more intense intellectual circles the weather is altogether taboo. If you mention it in Hampstead or Chelsea you are set down as a trifler and not asked again. Now of all those unintelligently transmitted, mystically apprehended, and devotionally guarded traditions which uphold the fabric of current cant, this seems the blindest, the most foolish, the least defensible. There is nothing really so interesting as the weather: nothing so omnipotent in its workings, so far-reaching in its effects, so inscrutable in its variety, so compelling in its fascination. And yet the heathen in his blindness—a fair description of the intellectual in his detachment—is pleased to rule out the weather as a triviality. He plumes himself on the universality of his social and political range, on his familiarity with the forces which lie behind the working of our ordinary life; but what force is so effectual and so omnipresent in every moment of every man’s existence as the weather? A political or financial crisis occurs, and some few of us become excited for some twenty-fourth of our day-to-day life; a drought or a frost or an anticyclone occurs and all of us in all our doings are directly or remotely affected by it. Yet we may talk crisis until our brains reel; we may say nothing of the weather. The intellectual plunges eagerly into the depths of art and literature and the drama, and talks with a glib facility of the clash of cosmic forces; let him open a window and put out his head if he would know what a clash of cosmic forces really is. When kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings, their first act will be to reinstate the weather as a subject of supreme interest and importance; to relegate to a secondary place in the newspapers the present seventeen columns of murders and suicides, the seven columns of politics and the seventy times seven columns of sport, and to print at the head in large and golden letters the really valuable and significant part of the news, namely the weather report. In those days, let us hope, the critic and the politician and the sociologist and the biologist and all other sentimental empiricists will be removed from the popular pulpit: and the most sacred crown of unfading bay will be laid on the head of the meteorologist, the ordained and initiated interpreter of depressions and vortices and anti-cyclones and Atlantic secondaries, the hierophant of the celestial pageant. And at the head of the great Philippic which shall then be uttered to disestablish the tyranny of the intellectuals, there will stand the words Quousque, Chelsea, abutere patientia nostra? How long will you debar us from discussing the weather?
The struggle has already begun, and in the forefront of the fighting line are the walkers. To them even more than other men the weather is a matter of vital and compelling significance. It is not so much that the tangible weather conditions affect them more nearly: no man who plies his craft in the open can be indifferent to sun and wind and wetness and drouth. It is rather that the walker in virtue of his craft is more intimately attuned to the temper of earth and sky; his soul and body are more of a piece, and his nature consequently responds with a subtler sympathy to the influences of weather. When a dry northeaster is stiffening the earth, the walker is a man of dour endurance: he attacks unpalatable tasks—arrears of letter-writing, the sorting of papers, the ordering of clothes—with readiness, almost with gusto. Then the wind dies down and the sky clears and a frost anti-cyclone sets in: forthwith he becomes a Stoic, thinking high and abstract thoughts, determining lofty resolutions, conceiving pure outlines of things. Then comes the herald of the most magical of all shifts, an Atlantic disturbance; there are hints of soft air from the south-west and smells of coming rain. At once the walker’s nature responds: the iron resolutions begin to break down, the pure outlines are blurred; through every sense steals in the charm of detail and colour; he becomes less stoical, more humane, a fitter companion for the spring that is being ushered in without.
The weather, then, is the first of the conversational provinces which walkers have to reclaim from a servile status of alleged triviality. It is their duty, as it is their pleasure, to set up against the so-called Pathetic Fallacy that nature is in sympathy with man, the Joyful Fact that man, if whole, is in sympathy with nature. There are already signs of the coming Restoration: even now, where two or three kindred souls are assembled, the weather begins to take precedence of other subjects. Recently, on a Saturday night, I happened to remark, in company, that as I walked to the house the wind was swinging round to the north, the sky was clear, the streets were dry, and there was promise of a brilliant Sunday. My host, who wished to discuss the merits of Zoroastrianism