i6 
LAND & WATER 
November 8, 1917 
By J. C. Squire 
On the Road 
JUST before the war there was a large output of books 
about travel in England, particularly travel on the 
open road. The authors usually had quotations from 
Stevenson on the fly-leaves, of Borrow 's obser\'ation 
about the wind on the iieath, or sojne contemporary poet's 
table of affinities with the various elements and heavenly 
bodies. Publishers commissioned these books with what 
seemed to tiiem sufficient reason. Larengro was in many 
■iieap editions ; Hazlett's On Going a Journey was the most 
)opular of his essays ; people who had enjoyed Stevenson's 
'ravels with a Donkey and An Inland Voyage, must surely 
fsant more of the same sort ; and this above all ages was 
a self-consciously open-air age. Rucksacks had a steady sale, 
every country inn know the walking tourist, and optimists had 
even started mag.izines for tiie amateur tramp. Nevertheless, 
one doubts whether there was much demand for most of the 
tramping Ixwks. In the first place, the publishers showed 
an inadequate powei of discriminating between travels With a 
Donke\- and travels By a Donkey. In tlje second place, men, 
even intelligent men,' usually do this sort of thing badly. 
it if if * * 
The ordinary author of a pedestrian— or, indeed of any 
■ — travel book, is weighed down by tradition. He has several 
famc^s books behind him, and he is dominated by them. 
This man gave facts in a businesslike way ; so he will give 
some. This min was delightful with digressions and anec- 
dotes ; so he will be the same. This third man, when over- 
come by the beauty of nature and the exhilaration of freedom 
and movement, wTote pages of beautiful, iridescent prose, 
which are well known in all the best families, so it is obviously, 
the game to do this. The result is a most unsatisfactory com- 
])ost. full of every sort of tift'ectation and posing. It was impos- 
sible to discover what these travellers' interests really were, 
and what really moved them, for they were wearing other 
people's hearts upon their sleeves all the time, and they felt 
under a compulsion to prove that they knew how worthy 
their England was of Great Prose. 
* * * » i|c 
These memories were stirred by Mr. J. J. Hissey's The 
Road and the Inn (Macmillan^ los. net), which I have just been 
reading. It is the first book of English travel I have encoun- 
tered since the war. Pedestrianism, I should imagine, is, for 
the time being, off. F"or one thing, most of the hearty walkers 
are otherwise engaged. For another, walkirfg through 
England must have been stripped of most of its charms, 
when at every inn you have to fill up forms about the colour 
of your wife's hair, and e\'ery policeman is liable to demand 
the production of a variety of tickets ; and the wayfarer 
runs the major risk of straying on to forbidden ground and 
getting a sentry's bayonet brandished in his face, and the 
minor one of having a crowd of children shouting " Bolo " 
after him whenever his knapsack and soft hat appear in a 
village street. Mr. H issey avoided most of these discomforts 
by being over age and travelling in a motor car. " A sudden 
attack of wander-fever had taken hold of me," he says, and 
without a moment's delay he got out the Rolls-Royce or the 
Eord (he doesn't bother to say which), and off he went. 
It sounds like rush, but it is not. " I am " he says, " a 
contemplative motorist, given to loitering in pleasant places." 
The suggestion is that he crawled about as though every road 
were lined with Schools on both sides ; and he certainly 
seems to have seen a great deal, and talked to everyone he 
met. He records many amusing things ; and gives many 
illustrations. Some of them are drawings made by him- 
self ; the lonely haunted grange, Tudor and timbered, being 
liis favourite, subject. They are not masterpieces, but they 
are better than most of us could do. And his excuse and ex- 
planation may be found in Th& Path to^Rome, the best book of 
this kind of our time : 
In old times a man that drew ill drew not at all. He did well. 
'I'hen either there were no pictures in his book, or (if there were 
any) they were done by some other man that loved him not a 
groat and would not have walked half-a-mile to see him hanged. 
But now it is so easy {or a man to scratch down what he sees 
^nd put it in Iiis book that any fool may do it and be none 
the worse — many others shall follow. This is the first. Before 
you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man 
march through Europe dragging an artist on a cord ? God 
forbid ! Shall an artist write a book ? Why, no, the remedy 
is worse than the disease. 
But having made it, I hope, clear that there is more enter- 
tainment in Mr. Hissey's book than in most (he records 
conversations amusingly, and has an evident passion for old 
buildings), I would suggest that it exhibits strikingly the 
flagrant defects of all this class of literature. 
He thinks it his duty to be enthusiastic about everything 
old that he sees ; he digresses into unoriginal reflections, to 
the detriment of his story ; he continually buttresses his 
descriptions of Storied Fane and Castled Keep, and what not, 
with quotations from the world's worst poets ; and, above all, 
he will insist, whenthe occasion seems to demand it, upon 
being, literary. He slaps on purple patcnes with a lavishness 
only made tolerable by its naivete, and he will drag in the 
names of authors. Take, for instance, the sprawling progress 
and grotesque anticlimax of this : 
From the tangle of lanes T got on to a fair road that led m^ 
in a few miles to castle-crbwned Lewes, then , passing through 
that ancient town of many memories, I came to Offham, 
from whicli village, high up on the inside of the hills, the land 
dips suddenly down, affo^rding a wide view over the wooded 
\\'eald, glorious in its green and golden breadth seen in the 
soft sunshine. A world of woods and fields stretching away 
to a far off, misty distance, dotted with here a grey church 
tower and there a rambling old farmstead, the green expanse 
being enlivened by the silvery Ouse, near at hand, winding its 
slothful Course snake-like through the plain as though wishful 
•to linger rather than to hasten on its way to the all-absorbing 
sea, for at times Nature almost .seems to be a living presence 
— at least to Wordsworth she so appeared. 
A still stranger example of the ill-advised introduction of 
great names occurs when -the author, proving that the world 
can show " rot ling so eminently peace-bestowing, so bene- 
volent as the quiet pastoral English landscape : " 
.even that rugged philospher Carlyle, once, when in rare 
bending mood, and not discoursing of great affairs, declared 
his delight in the simple sight of green fields. Byron, also, 
averred they possessed a charm that makes one forget all 
about show scenery in the shape of volcanoes, snowclad peaks, 
precipices, vines, oranges and glaciers. 
It is, perhaps, a little unjust to Mr. Hissey to pillory him 
at his worst, for he is not, in a general way, pretentious, and 
his gusto is very charming. But the defects of lus method arc 
typical of all sorts of travellers. 
There are several ways of writing good books about England. 
\ man may s,;t out with the deliberate object of finding out 
or forming theories about, or describing a certain class of 
things in which he is particufarly interested, as did.Cobbett. 
To do this well he will have to have an interest, as well as 
common-sense, knowledge and a simple straightforward 
manner of expressing himself. He may write a guide-book 
in which he gives succinctly an account of " everything 
worthy of note." If he sees things through his own eyes 
and describes them naturally, he will make a good book ; for 
as Defoe said in his own fine Travels in England, " I find so 
much left to speak of, and so many things to say in every 
part of England that my journey cannot be barred of intelli- 
gence, which way soever I turn ; no, though I were to oblige 
myself to say nothing of anything that had been spoken of 
before." And the third kind is the subjective, fantastic, 
poetic, kind. That kind, the rarest and most 'difficult, 
should be put clean out of mind by the ordinary traveller. 
Fascinating digressions can only be written by the man 
who cannot help digressing. The worst way of writing is 
to sit down before something commonly admitted to be noble 
or beautiful, and determine to rise to the occasion. And a 
man's emotional experiences are not worth his talking about 
upless he knows precisely what they are, is primarily interested 
in relating them, and has the unusual gift of candour. Most 
people are quite capable of noticing what happens to them- 
selves ; we do not want to hear what they think they would 
have felt had they been some great author ; and, if it is not 
natural to them to write resounding and picturesque English, 
for Heaven's sake let them write tlieir books in the prose they 
employ when writing to their friends. And above all, let 
them not be continually quoting or reminding us what Shakes- 
peare or Charlotte Bronte said about something. Tennyson, 
complaining of modern critics, said that it was impossible for 
a poet to say " the sea roars" without being accused of having 
cribbed it from Homer. That is no worse than taking one 
by the arm when one is looking at a field, and telling one that 
Carlyle, in a rare moment, of rela.xation, noticed that thegrass 
was green. 
