The making of such roads seems one of the most natural operations of man, one in which he least conflicts with nature and the animals. If he makes roads outright and rapidly, for a definite purpose, they may perish as rapidly, like the new roads of modern Japanese enterprise, and their ancient predecessors live on to smile at their ambition. These are the winding ways preferred by your connoisseur to-day. “Give me,” says Hazlitt, “the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three-hours’ march to dinner--and then to thinking!” These windings are created by the undulating of the land, and by obstacles like those of a river--curves such as those in the High Street of Oxford, which Wordsworth called “the stream-like windings of that glorious street.” The least obstacle might bring about a loop, if nothing more, and as even a Roman road curled round Silbury Hill, so the path of the Australian savage is to be seen twisting round bush after bush as if it enjoyed the interruption, though it cannot purl like the river at a bend. Probably these twists, besides being unconsciously adapted to the lie of the land, were, as they are still, easeful and pleasant to the rover who had some natural love of journeying. Why go straight? There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it, though there would be no travel did men believe it. The straight road, except over level and open country, can only be made by those in whom extreme haste and forethought have destroyed the power of joy, either at the end or at any part of its course. Why, then, go straight? The connoisseur had something of the savage in him when he demanded a winding road.
It is not, however, to a man walking for pleasure that we shall go for a sense of roads, but to one like Bunyan. _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is full of the sense of roads. See Christian going to Mr. Legality’s house. It is a mountain road, and the hill overhangs it so much that he is afraid to venture further “lest the hill should fall on his head.” When Goodwill points out the narrow way, he says it was “cast up by the patriarchs, prophets, Christ, and his Apostles,” i.e. made into a raised track bounded by ditches from which the earth was cast up to form the embankment. When Christian comes to the Hill Difficulty you see the primitive man deciding to go straight uphill, turning not to the left by the way called Danger into a great wood, nor to the right to Destruction and the “wide field full of dark mountains.” How full of plain English country wayfaring is the passage where Hopeful and Christian take a road by a river-side, and then when it turns away from the water they see a stile leading into a path which keeps on, as a path would do, along the bank through By-path Meadow: only, as it happens, the river is in flood and they must turn back again towards the stile. This man knew roads, and one of his temptations after conversion was to try his faith by bidding the puddles on the road between his own village and Bedford to be dry. Cervantes had the sense of roads. He begins, indeed, by making Don Quixote sally forth “upon the plain” like any knight of chivalry “pricking o’er the plain” and taking the way chosen by his horse because thus would adventures best be compassed; but it is upon a road that he and most of his knights, ladies, and enchanters travel. Malory’s book would have less vitality in its marvel if it were not for the roads: the three highways, for example, where Sir Marhaus and Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine were to separate for their adventures each with his damosel; and the wild ways of Sir Launcelot when he “rode many wild ways, throughout marches and many wild ways,” until he came to a valley and a knight therein with a naked sword chasing a lady. _Cymbeline_ again, and some of the historical plays of Shakespeare, give a grand impression of wide tracts of country traversed by roads of great purpose and destiny.