levelled against walkers of being unsociable. This was easy to do; for
the charge can only be sustained by making mere conversation, mere
verbal output per hour, the measure of sociability. Apart from this
fallacy, no one can seriously hold that walkers are not sociable beings,
capable of intimacy, responsive to good fellowship, adjustable to the
conformation of each other’s personality, sensitive to the fundamental
unities and unaffected by the superficial diversities of men. Both the
process of walking and its environment tend to sociability. The process
is a good activity, shared by two or more concrete beings who are doing
their best and are at their best; it lays a foundation of mutual respect
more quickly and more surely than any specialised activity of the half
or quarter man. The environment of a walk is exactly right; it is
familiar enough to create a sense of ease, and yet strange enough to
throw the walkers back on themselves with the instinct of human
solidarity--that instinct which unites a rowing crew on a long journey
and makes English visitors civil to each other in Swiss pensions. The
scenery changes fast enough to be interesting, and not too fast to give
a feeling of continuity and permanency. Finally, sun and wind and rain
and lunch, and the consultation of maps and divination of the way, all
combine to surround the walkers with an atmosphere of sociability.
Those who call walkers unsociable will probably reply that this is not
quite what they mean. Friendliness and good fellowship are all very
well, but they do not necessarily imply a strict execution of social
duties. The real charge against walkers is not that they are unfriendly
to each other, but that they fail in their duties to other people. They
go walks, especially on Sunday, when they ought to be paying calls;
they smoke in chairs when they ought to be in evening dress; they are in
bed--and sometimes even out of bed again--when they ought to be dancing.
In short, they do not take their fair share in maintaining the existing
social forms; hence they are rightly called unsociable.
Before a jury this general accusation could be rolled back in confusion:
there are plenty of walkers who are punctilious in social observances,
and plenty of social recalcitrants who are not walkers. But in that
heart of hearts which lies beyond the reach of juries, we cannot escape
an uneasy feeling that there is something in the accusation. Most
walkers at some time or another must have been conscious of the tug of
conflicting duties, must have felt that there was a choice between going
a walk and paying a call, between going out at night and being in good
condition next day, and that while fulfilling a need of their natures in
walking they were neglecting something else which either was or was
thought to be a duty.
To illustrate this point, perhaps I may tell a perfectly true story. I
use fictitious names, for the sake of politeness, but documents can be
produced, if necessary, to prove the facts. I had arranged with my
friend X. to take a walk on 26th March. (Document 1--postcard from X. to
me accepting, postmark 22nd March). Subsequently Mrs. Y. asked him to
tea on 26th March (Document 2--Mrs. Y.’s letter, dated 23rd March, with
‘Refd.’ docketed on the corner in the handwriting of X.). X. refused on
the ground of a previous engagement (letter not preserved) and came for
a walk with me, and we found a new way up Leith Hill, combining the
Walker Miles route by Pickett’s Hole to Ranmore Common (read backwards),
with the diversion from the way down Leith Hill through Deerleap Wood
(also read backwards), which makes a pleasing variation from the normal
ways by Logmore Lane or the Rookeries. (Document 3--certified copies of
my notes on pages 51 and 96 of Walker Miles--dated 26th March).
Continuing westward over Holmbury Hill and then down to the road under
Pitch Hill, we found Z. sitting in a motor-car and pretending to enjoy
the scenery, while ‘Enry investigated whatever had gone wrong
underneath. We exchanged a few courtesies (documents not preserved) and
went our ways. ‘Enry subsequently won his fight and took Z. back to town
in time for the Y.’s tea-party, where he told Mrs. Y. all about us
several times over, being a sensitive man. Mrs. Y., thus learning what
X.’s previous engagement was, became incensed, rebuked him (Document
4--date 26th March), cut him out of her visiting list, disparaged his
character, knocked him off the Rota (see below), induced her friends to
suspend his acquaintance (Document 5--comparative return of X.’s
invitations for the three months preceding and succeeding 26th March),
and finally drove him into solitude and the contemplative life, with the
result that he wrote a book about philosophy without using the term
‘values’ (Document 6--‘Adumbrations of Twilight.’ By X. Price 7s. 6d.).
The point of this story is in Documents 2 and 4. X. held that the walk
constituted a previous engagement warranting a refusal of the tea-party;
Mrs. Y. held that it did not (to put it mildly). In other words, X. held
that the walk involved social obligations comparable with those involved
by the tea-party; Mrs. Y. held that the tea-party was a social duty and
the walk merely a pleasure, and that duty ought to have overridden
pleasure. The tea-party was a recognised social form, and the walk was
not. This is the essential point, and to appreciate it, we must abstract
from all the particular and personal considerations in the case--the
question (not disputed) whether Mrs. Y. is nicer than I, the fact that
X. wished to try the Deerleap Wood route, the especially fine day in the
rear of a cyclone and so forth.
X. himself, in ‘Adumbrations of Twilight,’ appears to have been thinking
over this question. In one of the more cheerful and impulsive passages
of that work he says (p. 247 of the popular edition): ‘It may, perhaps,
be doubted whether within the area of political and moral good which we
can hardly deny to be co-extensive with the life of a normal civilised
being, there do not lie areas dominated by a principle, or set of
principles, whose relation to the ultimate good, while we must
necessarily postulate it as existent, is yet not, or not completely,
demonstrable, and often appears indeed to be a relation only of conflict
or incompatibility. He would be a confident thinker who would posit the
actual or even the realisable compatibility of aesthetic and moral ends:
but short of the aesthetic, in the actual life of men wherein the moral
autonomy is most generally asserted, it seems at least tenable that
there may well be realms of apparent if not ultimately irreconcilable
heteronomy. Especially it has seemed to me in the social forms and
customs of civilised men and women, that there may well lurk a homiletic
principle, if I may so call it, distinct from and even in apparent
conflict with moral and political principle, whose conformability to
ultimate purpose is as yet undemonstrated, whose phenomenology is as yet
indeterminate, whose operation is as distinct from the operation of
moral principle as that of the comedic form, which is its aesthetic
counterpart, from the epic or tragic. Such speculations, of course, can
at best be tentative and provisional: but at least the point must not be
altogether overlooked.’ This is X.’s only published reply to Document 4,
and very temperate and gentlemanly in tone it is.
What he means I take to be this: when we say that burglary is bad, or
murder, or sitting up late, we know what we mean and can prove our
words; the bad things do not fit in with other things or each other, and
if developed on a large scale will cause trouble; and if any one says
they are good, we either neglect him or hit him on the head. Similarly,
when we say that a picture or symphony is bad, we know what we mean: it
does not fit in with our general ideas (in the strictest sense of either
word), and if any one says it is good, we decline to argue with him and
send him to the theatre. Further, the badness of the picture, although
not the same as the badness of burglary, is yet something like it. But
if any one says that it is bad to go a walk instead of attending a
tea-party, we are not quite certain what he means. On the burglary line
of thought, if every one went for walks and no one went to tea-parties,
it would cause no trouble; indeed, it would make for peace and harmony.
On the picture line of thought, a walk is far more like a work of art
than a tea-party. Therefore, if it is bad, it is a new kind of badness
quite unlike the other kinds, and it seems a pity to use the same word
for it.
As against Mrs. Y., X. has overloaded his case by talking about
pictures. Document 4 clearly shows that she accused him on moral
grounds, and was not thinking about aesthetics, which she probably
associates only with Bunthorne. Had he confined himself to the moral
question, his case would have been strong. On the one side is a walk, a
thing good in itself, and also tending to promote friendly feelings. On
the other side we have recognised social forms--tea-parties, calls,
dinners, dances--which claim to override walking. What is their moral
authority? If the object of social forms is to promote sociability, why
are these forms recognised and not walking? Do they promote more
sociability or better sociability than walking? If not, what do social
duties mean, and what is their sanction?
None of these questions are easy to answer, because the subject has
never been investigated. All the ordinary moral apparatus of life, law
and custom and _esprit de corps_, and the other forms in which morality
embodies itself, have been carefully tabulated and weighed and set
forth, so that we know where we are in dealing with them. But no one has
ever seriously studied social forms. We know why and how far we should
obey the law and conform to common moral customs: we do not know why or
how far we should pay calls or go to garden-parties. If every one
stopped obeying the law, trouble would ensue; if every one stopped going
to garden-parties, it is hard to see how the world would suffer
permanent harm. We are not even certain what the authoritative social
forms really are: no one has ever made a list of them. We do not even
know their history: while everything else, from philosophy to eating and
drinking, has its carefully tabulated series of facts from the earliest
times to the present day, we have to collect the history of social
forms, in so far as it is possible, from novels, oral tradition, and the
bound volumes of _Punch_. So, when we are faced with the simple
question, Why is not walking a recognised social form? it is very
difficult to see the answer.
One reply, which is not so idiotic as it sounds, would be that walking
is not a social duty because it is pleasant. The kind of friendliness it
promotes involves no effort; if people like a thing, it cannot really be
a duty. What is really needed to carry society along, is the effort
involved in making the acquaintance of new people; this is necessary and
is slightly unpleasant, and therefore has all the marks of a duty. But
this assumes two things: first, that we only walk with people we know
already; second, that when we go out in the evening, we only talk to
people we do not know already. Neither of these assumptions is true:
there are plenty of social entertainments every bit as effortless
socially as a walk of two familiar friends; on the other hand, there are
walks with a complete or partial stranger involving much more effort and
a much greater hazard than any party.
Confront A. and B., previously unknown to each other, at a party. What
happens? With no common experience behind them, and no common activity
between them, except sitting on chairs, they have no talk, to bring
their personalities into relation with each other by means of words,
both being regarded as failures if the talk stops for an instant. Their
surroundings are not sufficiently remote to compel any feeling of
intimacy; their food, drink, and dress are not such as to encourage any
coherency or continuity of thought; worst of all, their bodies are
inactive, and their minds feverishly stimulated. The result is that they
try to talk about books and plays, or even pictures and music, and
either become insincere or expose their most sacred aesthetic
principles to a total stranger: they oscillate between banality and
intensity, and are usually driven back, for lack of anything better to
say, on sheer verbal brilliancy. In the end A. cannot tell whether B.’s
conversation is natural, due to nerves, or a deliberate attempt at
intellectual tyranny; while to B., A. is like a nightmare or a
hallucination, a discontinuity in ordinary experience. When they meet
again, if they ever do, they are at sea: A. cannot be certain whether B.
is an intimate friend to whom he once confided his belief that _King
Lear_ is a good play, or an enemy on whom he once inflicted an epigram.
But send A. and B. for a walk, and the whole situation is changed. They
at once have a common interest and a common activity, and every
influence combines to make them simply themselves. They need not talk
all the time, and what talk there is will spring naturally from their
circumstances, and will not be very brilliant. They will learn the value
of pauses, of silence, of ejaculations, even of grunts. The bodies will
be fully occupied, and will shake and settle down the contents of their
brains into good solid dogmatisms and prejudices purely spontaneous and
characteristic of themselves, the stones of which intimacy can be built.
Three miles will tell them what twenty parties cannot, whether they are
destined to be friends or no. And therefore, while the social
possibilities (in the strictest sense) are greater, the risks are
greater too: a bigger task may be achieved, or a more complete failure.
Is not a walk then, on both sides, a far greater social duty than a
party?
When we come to consider social forms seriously, it almost looks as if
their conditions were framed so as to discourage intimacy. To begin
with, most of them take place at night. Now, the night has many merits:
it is the time when men begin slowly to settle down to the period of
rest and low vitality; it is a kindly but limited time--excellent for
smoking in a chair, or reading an old novel, or thinking in a not very
acute way of yesterday, and to-day, and to-morrow; but it is bad for
anything continuous, anything energetic, anything needing the whole
man. The sun by going down indicates that he does not expect very much
of humanity till he reappears. Everything that people do when he is gone
is limited in one way or another. They get into houses, forsaking the
outside air; they kindle artificial lights, which are a very poor
substitute; they sit or dance, instead of walking about. Atmospheres, on
the whole, are more vitiated by night than by day; drinking, on the
whole, occurs more after sunset than before. If people were content to
limit their activities to suit the limitations of nature, it would not
matter. But when they try to be active in these conditions, they
necessarily become morbid: the lights and the atmosphere and (in some
cases) the drink stimulate a feverish and unnatural excitement, which
some call the romantic feeling of the evening, in the strongest contrast
to the solid and concrete activities of the day. This kind of excitement
can never really promote intimacy. It may make people for the moment
less grumpy and more accessible than usual, but it is necessarily a
transient and unstable feeling: dealing with a man in this state you
feel that he is not really representing himself, and is not therefore
authorised to give or receive friendship. To be certain of him, you must
meet him by day.
It may be held, of course, that night and the conditions which go with
it are a necessity, since by day people have no leisure for social
forms. But I think it is clear that night is chosen for its own sake,
and that the peculiar hygienic conditions of nocturnal gatherings have
an appeal of their own. The people who support social forms do not all
work, and there would be a large clientèle obtainable for entertainments
by day, if they really preferred this. It is clear that they do
not--that the night conditions, abnormal and detached from ordinary
experience, are felt to be the right conditions for dances and
dinner-parties and conversaziones and the rest. Social duty and
formality seem to become progressively more rigorous as the sun goes
down. Lunch is an informal and casual thing, with no special obligations
and code of duty; with tea-parties and calls formality increases;
finally, as night draws on, we reach the most authoritative and formal
entertainments of all.
There is a second and quite different point about social forms in
general, which I approach with some reluctance, but which must be
treated if we are to measure the social validity of walking. In
contrasting the acquaintance of A. and B. at a party and on a walk, we
imagine them the same persons in either case. In actual fact, A. and B.
on a walk would probably be of the same sex: A. and B. at a party would
pretty certainly not be of the same sex. The principle of sex dualism
runs through all the social forms: the more authoritative they become
(dances and dinner-parties), the more inflexibly and mathematically is
it exercised. This is Mrs. Y.’s real point against X.: it was not that
he took a walk, nor (I flatter myself) that he walked with me, but that
he walked with a male.
If any one wishes to take this point and fulminate anti-feministically
against all dances and dinner-parties as being mere marriage-markets, he
can easily do so by reading up the worst parts of _Vanity Fair_. Such a
charge would neither be true nor relevant to our purpose; many people,
at any rate, go to dances and dinner-parties in a much more broadly
human spirit than this view implies, to cultivate far more general and
varied relations with other men and women than the very special and
particular relation which may exist between A. and B. if they are young,
of different sex, and unmarried or widow. But as against the forms
themselves, the actual rules by which dances and dinner-parties are
regulated, the point is a good one: they seem to be designed primarily
with a view to promoting this special relation, and to leave the more
general human interests in an inferior place. They are dominated so
entirely by the A. and B. principle, that all other possibilities are
cheerfully sacrificed to it. We saw elsewhere what a disastrous effect
this principle has had in limiting the development of dancing; but the
same holds true of dinner-parties. Conversation, which I take to be the
art of dinner-parties, may be a somewhat limited and unsatisfactory
means of expression, but it ought to have its chance; and this can
never be so long as it is cut up, by the law of A. and B., into
water-tight compartments of dialogue, rearranged once only at the moment
when every one swings round sixty degrees for the second period of
water-tight isolation on the other side. Compare the conversation after
lunch on a walk--but I need not labour the point.
The whole question is assuming a very instant and practical interest
just now, because, as applied to dances, the A. and B. principle is in
danger of breaking down. Whether this is due to a protest against the
principle itself, or against the artistic or hygienic conditions of
dancing, I do not know, but the fact remains--attested by those most
keen in support of the principle--that it is increasingly difficult to
get enough A.’s to balance the B.’s. Worse than this, the quality of the
A.’s, when got, is not satisfactory: finding that the demand for their
labour exceeds the supply, they tend to put a higher price on their
services, to say that they won’t dance unless they get a dinner first,
and to assume airs of complacent virtue. Faced by this shortage, the
employers resort to the highways and hedges; in their desperate need of
A.’s, they cast overboard all strictly social considerations (_i.e._
considerations of friendship) and will take any presentable A., even if
a total stranger, regarding him not as a person but as a mere means for
balancing the supply of B.’s. In the last resort they are driven to the
operation known as pooling the reserves of casual labour. Hence comes
that most interesting of all social phenomena, whose existence is
tacitly admitted but publicly denied, the Rota of Unobjectionables. To
illustrate this, I may perhaps be allowed to repeat the story of William
Featherstone Goodenough and his agent.
William Featherstone Goodenough was a young man of pleasant address and
engaging exterior, who liked dancing and received many invitations to
dances. In the course of time the claims of his future and the
commercial development of the Empire called him to Burma, and he
departed leaving an agent with authority to deal with his
correspondence. The agent was a youth of humble and reverent mind, who
expected that the correspondence would mainly consist of tradesmen’s
circulars, charitable appeals (_i.e._ appeals to William to be
charitable), expressions of regret and tenders of consolation to the
exile, and perhaps an impassioned threnody or two over the departed. The
circulars and appeals arrived, and were tactfully dealt with; but the
rest of the correspondence consisted almost entirely of invitations to
dances. At first the agent, slightly surprised that William’s
acquaintance were unfamiliar with his movements, used to answer
respectfully in the third person that W. F. G. was absent from the
country for some years, and would therefore be unable to accept ----’s
kind invitation for the 7th proximo; and he naturally thought that the
news would spread, and that the flow of coroneted cards would cease. But
as time went on the flow still continued, and more than four years after
William’s departure, the agent’s letter-box was still crowded with
invitations of the most pressing and intimate kind. At last, in utter
perplexity, the agent consulted a cynical friend, well versed in the
ways of the world and the organisation of dances. The friend said, ‘Oh,
it’s quite clear: William Featherstone has got on to the list and his
name is passed round.’ With a feeling that the foundations of his moral
world were tottering, the agent inquired his meaning, and learnt with
horror and dismay of the existence of a List or Rota of
Unobjectionables, compiled by social organisers and used in common
amongst them to fill up vacancies in prospective entertainments. He
walked home in a nightmare: those splendid and stately cards, he
reflected, which had warmed his heart with the vision of a large circle
of friends burning for the pleasure of William’s company, were now but
the symbols of a system as heartless as electoral registration, as
coldly impersonal as assessment under Schedule D. Nay, was not the
parallel too favourable? In copying William’s name from a list, the
election agent at least called upon him to exercise the highest
functions of a man and a citizen; the assessor of income-tax at least
expected truth in reply (the penalty for a false return being £20, and
treble the duty chargeable); and both alike would take early and careful
note of his removal. But the social organiser, more ruthless in purpose
and less efficient in method, wished merely to exploit William as a
dancing unit, disregarding his personality, his history, everything
except his dancing capacity. The agent ranged the cards in order on the
table in the silence of his chamber; before him floated memories of his
youth and upbringing; and in his dreams a ghostly voice seemed to echo
from the lofty turret of Königsberg: ‘Use humanity, in thine own person
and that of others, always as an end, never merely as a means.’