Time was when no good news made a
journey, and no friend came near, but a welcome was
uttered, or at least thought, for the travelling feet
of the wayfarer or the herald. The feet, the
feet were beautiful on the mountains; their toil was
the price of all communication, and their reward the
first service and refreshment. They were blessed
and bathed; they suffered, but they were friends with
the earth; dews in grass at morning, shallow rivers
at noon, gave them coolness. They must have
grown hard upon their mountain paths, yet never so
hard but they needed and had the first pity and the
readiest succour. It was never easy for the
feet of man to travel this earth, shod or unshod, and
his feet are delicate, like his colour.
If they suffered hardship once, they
suffer privation now. Yet the feet should have
more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of
flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt
sand than does anything else about us. It is
their calling; and the hands might be glad to be stroked
for a day by grass and struck by buttercups, as the
feet are of those who go barefoot; and the nostrils
might be flattered to be, like them, so long near
moss. The face has only now and then, for a resting-while,
their privilege.
If our feet are now so severed from
the natural ground, they have inevitably lost life
and strength by the separation. It is only the
entirely unshod that have lively feet. Watch
a peasant who never wears shoes, except for a few
unkind hours once a week, and you may see the play
of his talk in his mobile feet; they become as dramatic
as his hands. Fresh as the air, brown with the
light, and healthy from the field, not used to darkness,
not grown in prison, the foot of the contadino
is not abashed. It is the foot of high life that
is prim, and never lifts a heel against its dull conditions,
for it has forgotten liberty. It is more active
now than it lately was — certainly the foot
of woman is more active; but whether on the pedal
or in the stirrup, or clad for a walk, or armed for
a game, or decked for the waltz, it is in bonds.
It is, at any rate, inarticulate.
It has no longer a distinct and divided
life, or none that is visible and sensible.
Whereas the whole living body has naturally such infinite
distinctness that the sense of touch differs, as it
were, with every nerve, and the fingers are so separate
that it was believed of them of old that each one
had its angel, yet the modern foot is, as much as
possible, deprived of all that delicate distinction:
undone, unspecialized, sent back to lower forms of
indiscriminate life. It is as though a landscape
with separate sweetness in every tree should be rudely
painted with the blank — blank, not simple — generalities
of a vulgar hand. Or as though one should take
the pleasures of a day of happiness in a wholesale
fashion, not “turning the hours to moments,”
which joy can do to the full as perfectly as pain.
The foot, with its articulations,
is suppressed, and its language confused. When
Lovelace likens the hand of Amarantha to a violin,
and her glove to the case, he has at any rate a glove
to deal with, not a boot. Yet Amarantha’s
foot is as lovely as her hand. It, too, has a
“tender inward”; no wayfaring would ever
make it look anything but delicate; its arch seems
too slight to carry her through a night of dances;
it does, in fact, but balance her. It is fit
to cling to the ground, but rather for springing than
for rest.
And, doubtless, for man, woman, and
child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot,
which does not even stand with all its little surface
on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an
architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.
It is a part of vital design and has a history; and
man does not go erect but at a price of weariness
and pain. How weak it is may be seen from a footprint:
for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical
sign than does a naked foot.
Tender, too, is the silence of human
feet. You have but to pass a season amongst
the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so
much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman,
who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also
goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as
snow. The vintager is not heard among the vines,
nor the harvester on his threshing-floor of stone.
There is a kind of simple stealth in their coming
and going, and they show sudden smiles and dark eyes
in and out of the rows of harvest when you thought
yourself alone. The lack of noise in their movement
sets free the sound of their voices, and their laughter
floats.
But we shall not praise the “simple,
sweet” and “earth-confiding feet”
enough without thanks for the rule of verse and for
the time of song. If Poetry was first divided
by the march, and next varied by the dance, then to
the rule of the foot are to be ascribed the thought,
the instruction, and the dream that could not speak
by prose. Out of that little physical law, then,
grew a spiritual law which is one of the greatest things
we know; and from the test of the foot came the ultimate
test of the thinker: “Is it accepted of
Song?”
The monastery, in like manner, holds
its sons to little trivial rules of time and exactitude,
not to be broken, laws that are made secure against
the restlessness of the heart fretting for insignificant
liberties — trivial laws to restrain from
a trivial freedom. And within the gate of these
laws which seem so small, lies the world of mystic
virtue. They enclose, they imply, they lock,
they answer for it. Lesser virtues may flower
in daily liberty and may flourish in prose; but infinite
virtues and greatness are compelled to the measure
of poetry, and obey the constraint of an hourly convent
bell. It is no wonder that every poet worthy
the name has had a passion for metre, for the very
verse. To him the difficult fetter is the condition
of an interior range immeasurable.