public interest that everything else, including Kant’s law, must be
sacrificed to it. To put it quite baldly, people must get married; and
the safest way of promoting this is to organise society by pairs, to
proclaim attendance at social forms so organised as a moral duty, and
back this up with the whole weight of custom and constituted authority.
But if this be the object of social forms, what a way to set to work!
Your aim being to promote intimacy between A. and B., you select the
worst time of day and the worst surroundings; you present them to each
other under conditions exactly calculated to make them abnormal,
unnatural, unlike their ordinary selves; every art is exercised to give
them a sense that this is a special occasion, cut off from normal life,
a discontinuity in the sane and convincing series of yesterday, to-day,
and to-morrow. In this state you invite them to consider a relation
which above all others involves their ordinary selves, which is a
function of their normal thinking and acting, and tastes and habits, and
has very little to do with their dinner-table conversation, a relation
which they will have to construe to the end in terms of yesterday,
to-day, to-morrow. Is there no better way?
There is one; and the mere fact that I have had to lead up to it
gradually and unobtrusively, instead of blazoning its name on the
title-page, shows what a deplorable state the science of social forms is
in. There is one social form which no one has ever considered seriously,
and is indeed regarded, if at all, as rather a joke. Yet it counts its
devotees by tens of thousands, where dinners and dances count their
hundreds; it strikes right down into the heart of the people, where
white ties and cards and the normal apparatus of social duties never
penetrate. It is based on the A. and B. principle, but it maintains this
without a Rota and without violating Kant’s law. It gives A. and B. the
very best chances of a proper intimacy. It is not only a social form,
but also a status of a very important and interesting kind. Above all,
it is a branch of walking; you have merely to add one word--Walking Out.
To many people the phrase suggests clerks and shop-girls in the Strand,
or nurses and soldiers in Knightsbridge--people who walk out perforce,
because they have nowhere else to go. But let the sociologist lay not
the flattering unction to his soul that this is the whole of Walking
Out. If he ever went himself to Hampstead Heath, or Wimbledon Common, or
Box Hill, or Leith Hill, he would speedily realise that Walking Out is a
thing taken of choice and not of necessity. There he would see, in
hundreds and thousands, his fellow-citizens, who, with ample
opportunities for sitting down together indoors at night, prefer to walk
together in the open by day. There he would see a social form so widely
supported, and so firmly established, that by comparison balls and
dinner-parties are the merest irrelevancies. There he would see men
conforming to a social law, not reluctantly and under the stimulus of
cards, not as the last reserve of casual labour flung into the market by
the operation of the Rota, but as free citizens, voluntarily approving
and enforcing the law they obey. There he would find, in short, an
institution, compact of the clarified wisdom of the past and the glad
acceptance of the present, deep-based on instinct, world-wide in its
scope, sane, practical, and utterly unnoticed by any sociologist up to
date.
In whatever way we regard it, Walking Out is surely a portent. It is one
of the notable creations of the English people, unaided by their
governing classes or their intellectuals; it is the creation of the
classes not assessable for income-tax, or at any rate of those eligible
for abatement. While the Assessables recognise no status between
ordinary friendship and full engagement, the non-Assessables with the
sound instinct of sanity have interposed between the two a provisional
status, allowing of intimacy but committing neither party; and the name
of the status is Walking Out. While the Assessables still rely on the
abnormal stimuli of late hours, lights, and music to promote intimacies,
the non-Assessables send their young persons forth to walk upon their
feet in the open, and there to thrash out in the cool air the question
whether or no. While the romantic memories of the Assessables reach
their highest in the thought of some fifth extra after supper, the
non-Assessables can remember some stroll beside the Thames, or some
climb up the sandy track from Broadmoor among the beeches and the firs
to the magical turn where the ground drops suddenly into thirty miles of
Weald with the South Downs beyond.
Therefore, when the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, when the
violation of hygienic and moral law leads to its just retribution in the
collapse of the present social forms, there is a way of escape open for
the Assessables. If they still want to give parties on the A. and B.
principle, they have merely to organise and regulate the Walking Out
system. Instead of a dance, let Mrs. Y. give a walk, naming time and
place, and inviting equal numbers of A.’s and B.’s. (X. and I will be
delighted to come.) If she wants it to be a real success she had better
let them sort themselves; but if she likes to stick to the old system,
there might be programmes dividing up the route into appropriate
sections. (Question: ‘May I have the pleasure of the Roman Road?’
Answer: ‘I am afraid that I am engaged; but I am free for Deerleap
Wood.’) There would not be much function for chaperons; but if it is
desired to keep up this institution (now, I understand, something of an
archaism), a chaperon might be stationed at the end of each section, to
act as a kind of clearing-house, make sure that the couples were
properly sorted for the next section, keep a supply of bootlaces and
stimulants in case of need, and finally return by motor-car and report
to the hostess at what time the last couple started on the ensuing
section. The hostess, acting on this information, could (if the company
had not advanced to the point of carrying their own food) have lunch
ready at an appropriate point in the middle of the walk; but her main
function would be to provide accommodation at the end of the walk for
changing, ablution, and a large meal. And if, as we may hope, music is
still to play a part in social life, a band might be stationed near the
end of the last section to play the walkers home to the tune of the
Seventh Symphony. I venture to say that this form of entertainment,
besides being far cheaper than existing forms, would produce results in
the way of intimacy-statistics beyond the wildest dreams of present-day
organisers, and everything which Lord Tennyson so beautifully
prophesied in that speech at the end of the _Princess_ would be
accomplished. It is noteworthy how at the climax the poet turns
instinctively to the right metaphor: we will _walk_ this world, yoked in
all exercise of noble end, and so thro’ those dark gates across the
wild, where good romanticists go when they die.
But I hope that when this consummation is achieved, it will be
remembered that there are other social relations besides that of A. and
B., and that of all of them social forms should take account. The
mistake made at present of isolating the A. and B. relation and
sacrificing everything else to it must not be repeated. Walking Out, be
it never forgotten, is only a branch of walking; and besides Mrs. Y.’s
party of couples I hope there will be other parties of a miscellaneous
character, who will not walk out in the strict sense, but will simply
walk, to confirm existing intimacies and determine new ones. It is the
walk itself, the conditions under which it is carried on and the state
of mind it produces, which is the real and ultimate social form:
Walking Out is only a special if important variety. Therefore the social
obligations of the future must cover parties of all kinds and intimacies
between all types--men and women, young, middle-aged, and old. There is
no human relation which walking cannot promote: with whomsoever you
would be friends, you must first do the things in which walking so
conspicuously assists--that is, you must clear the brain of feathers and
fireworks, settle the mind well back on itself, and link the present
firmly on to the past. For some, maybe, the aged and infirm, the walking
days are over; and to these you can only talk. But you will find, if you
are fortunate, that you are not debarred from their friendship. It is
not only that they may speak to you of the walks of their youth,
enlarging the distances and diminishing the times, for the abasement of
the present generation, while you sit admiring the kindly law of nature
by which memory passes so easily into imagination. Even if they have not
been walkers, there is still a kinship between you; for the sixtieth
year is like the eighteenth mile--the point at which you settle into
your stride for the last stage, and the essence of the preceding miles
begins to distil itself in your brain, emerging clear and translucent
from the turbid mass of experience. Remember the metaphor which Socrates
used to Cephalus. ‘I love,’ he said, ‘talking to the very old; for, it
seems to me, we ought to ask them, as men far advanced on a track which
we too may have to walk, what it is like, rough and difficult or easy
and smooth.’
VI
WALKING IN LITERATURE
Some readers of these imperfect remarks may possibly wish to pursue such
investigations farther.
SIR G. GROVE, Preface to _Beethoven
and His Nine Symphonies_.
VI
WALKING IN LITERATURE
Walking is one of the many things whose history is not to be found in
the historians. Even since they constituted themselves a distinct class
of writers and began to see themselves in the part--that is, ever since
Herodotus--history has been mainly a catalogue of abstractions,
interesting and even thrilling, but (to the walker) mostly irrelevant.
It is no doubt a good thing to have the wars and political convulsions
and trade movements and Gunpowder Plots and Acts of Parliament and
executions of the various periods accurately recorded; it is probably a
good thing to have the pots and hair-ornaments and tombs of our distant
ancestors excavated and labelled. But the moment we begin to ask about
the ordinary man of each period, what he was doing and what he was
thinking and whether he liked walking, we are answered only in abstract
terms. The archaeologist can only say that he used pots of the
Protomycenean period; the historian can only say that about seven
thousand of him were killed in battles, and that most of him began about
this time to grasp the first principles of commerce, and that all of him
was subject to several conflicting economic tendencies not yet
completely disentangled. The man himself is still hidden from our gaze.
Literature is our only help. Once a man sits down not to record facts
and analyse tendencies in what he conceives to be a scientific
historical spirit, but to write about the things which really interest
him, to imagine and moralise and sentimentalise, we begin to learn some
history. It is not only that he shows us something of the normal man’s
habits and ways of life: even better, he shows us his thoughts, his
prejudices, his unconscious presuppositions, what he takes for granted
and cannot imagine not to be so. History is probably the worst record of
the ordinary man, and memoirs the second worst; letters are more
trustworthy, because letter-writers do not always confine themselves to
facts and frequently become excited; poetry, rhetoric, drama,
philosophy, and fiction are best of all, since in these men are really
saying what they think. If we want to know what Athens was really like
in her decline, we turn not to the scientific and accurate record of
Thucydides, but to contemporary comedy, acted to the partly drunk by the
completely drunk. If we want to know our great-grandfathers, we turn not
to Lecky but to Miss Austen.
Walking, being above all things human and intimate, is naturally
neglected by the historians: it cannot be shown to have caused any
political convulsions, or to have had any economic effects; it is
therefore ruled out. If we want to know whether men walked in the past,
and how much they walked, and, above all, in what spirit and with what
object they walked, we must turn to literature. If there is any history
of walking, it will be there. What follows is a brief and wholly
inadequate attempt to review literature from this standpoint--to see
what part walking plays in the largely unconscious record of facts and
wholly unconscious record of ideas which we find in literature.
It is well at once to prepare for a disappointment. It is fairly clear
that in all ages men have walked, more or less: indeed, this could be
proved _a priori_ from the anatomical structure of the leg. But it is
equally clear that up to very recent times they have done so without the
least knowledge of the value and purpose of walking. They have walked in
a utilitarian spirit, to get somewhere; they have walked in a medical
spirit, to improve their digestions; they have very rarely walked for
the sake of walking, to realise themselves in a fine activity. No doubt
the men of old were ignorant and unenlightened, and too much must not be
expected of them; no doubt the habit of riding on horses (introduced
quite early and still existing) diverted men’s attention from the
possibilities of walking. But when all allowances are made, the
unprejudiced walker, reviewing all the centuries B.C. and at least
eighteen of the centuries since, must pronounce them one long
disappointment.
The first disappointment comes in classical literature: among all the
figures of the Graeco-Roman civilisation we look in vain for a walker.
The Homeric heroes occasionally took a walk by the sea, but only from
bad temper (ὃν θυμὸν κατέδων) or to interview their divine mothers.
Aeneas is a little more promising: the lines--
Cui fidus Achates
It comes et paribus curis vestigia figit--
raise considerable hopes of a proper walk, but the poet proceeds to dash
these hopes by the damning admission in the next line--
Multa inter sese vario sermone serebant.
In all classical literature it is hard to find a single instance of a
walk undertaken for its own sake, without some base ulterior motive.
Worse than this, a great philosopher goes out of his way to insult
walking. In illustrating his doctrine of final cause, Aristotle remarks
that the final cause of walking is health. For a moment the reader is
struck dumb with the thought that once again Aristotle has overleapt the
centuries and found out something never again discovered until after
1870. But it is clear that he misunderstands health: he is speaking from
a grossly medical standpoint. For he interposes between the two a middle
term, consisting of digestion viewed in its most revolting and
mechanical aspect: and the reader sinks back with a sigh of regret.
But in justice to Aristotle it must be remembered that he himself went
far to wipe out this insult by one of those curious, half-conscious,
inspired reaches of divination which make the Greeks so unlike other
philosophers. In his analysis of the psychology of action he constructs
what is known as the Practical Syllogism--a train of feeling leading to
action comparable to the train of thought in the syllogism leading to a
conclusion. There is the major premise--things that wake a certain kind
of feeling in me are to be sought or avoided; there is the minor
premise--this is a thing waking the kind of feeling. A lesser man would
have been drawn on by the charms of his own analogy to add a
conclusion--this is to be sought or avoided, but Aristotle will allow no
theoretical conclusion to the practical syllogism. ‘In this case,’ he
says in words which make our hearts leap, ‘the conclusion from the two
premises is the act, as when one thinks--Every man ought to walk, I am a
man, and at once--he walks.’[3] The major premise with its fine grasp of
the meaning and purpose of human life, the minor premise with its simple
but splendid assertion of humanity, lead straight to the conclusion--a
walk.
The Middle Ages, as far as can be judged, were densely unenlightened on
the subject of walking. I have no wish to decry the Canterbury pilgrims,
but they were obviously not walkers: they talked too much, and were too
much immersed in the bare particulars of actuality. Indeed, the pilgrims
as a whole took a low view of walking; not only did they regard it in
itself as a penance, but they utilised this penance for a grossly
material object--namely, the writing off of some of the heavy list of
entries on the wrong side of their moral pass-book, which prejudiced
their solvency in the future life. Further, they had no eye for country;
the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury, after leaving St.
Martha’s Church, with the magnificent line of the chalk to the north and
the no less magnificent hills to the south, takes the relatively tame
valley-way between,[4] presumably because there were more facilities for
drink in the valley, and the purgation of the pilgrims’ miserable souls
could be shortened by an hour or so. Judged by all the evidence, the
pilgrims were men of low motives and obscurated vision, and quite
unworthy of a place in the company of walkers.
The Elizabethans seem little better. There is no trace in Shakespeare of
a proper regard for the meaning and purpose of walking. In _As You Like
It_ both parties of travellers arrive at the Forest of Arden in a state
of extreme fatigue, without any apparent appreciation of the charming
walk they have had through the county of Warwick. In the same way
Lysander and Hermia, though they met in a wood only a league without the
town--and that a wood with which they were both familiar--promptly lose
their way and ‘faint with wandering in the wood’--a fearful confession
of incompetence and weakness. Only Demetrius and Helena, spurred on by
the pangs of unrequited love, are able to achieve five miles or so
without fainting. Walking is regarded by Portia as one of the most
distressing symptoms of Brutus’s condition: she notes with amazement how
he suddenly rose and walked about, and how he walks unbraced and sucks
up the humours of the dank morning. (Portia’s views on hygiene show the
true old spirit.) Polonius in the same way advises Hamlet in the
interests of his health to walk out of the air--that is, into the nice
comfortable palace where the King had caroused overnight and an embassy
had been received that morning; and the chilling reply ‘Into my grave?’
is the first hint we get of modern views on ventilation. If only Hamlet
had acted up to his views--if only he had taken one good walk in the air
to shake together all those errant spirits that warred in his capacious
brain--the philosopher, the gallant, the good fellow, the calf-lover of
Ophelia, the true lover of his father--and weld them into a concrete
whole! What a man he would have been, and what a play we should have
missed!
The eighteenth century, being both the Age of Reason and the Age of
Port, was clearly no time for proper walking. None the less, the century
is important as producing the literary form in which walking first
became self-conscious, namely, the novel. The emergence of walking was a
long business: for many years the writers of fiction were preoccupied
with duels and elopements and moral crises and sudden deaths--all the
things which conspicuously do not happen to walkers. But as the romantic
revival drew on, men became more whole and concrete; and at last we
begin to find in novels that walking is coming to its own. If we review
the fiction of the last hundred and twenty years, among much irrelevancy
and many abstractions, we can discover a few real walkers; and the fact
that they occur in novels makes them immensely more significant. If a
person is recorded in history as walking, it only means that one person
walked: if in a novel, it means that walking has a real place in the
ideas of the age.
* * * * *
The first true walker is unquestionably Elizabeth Bennet. Relatively to
her age, she was even a good walker. Her three-mile tramp across the
fields to Netherfield was evidently thought something quite sensational.
Her time is not given; she left home after breakfast, and reached
Netherfield before the family had finished breakfasting: allowing for
the probable difference between Mr. Bennet’s habits and Mr. Hurst’s, we
may estimate it at an hour; and three miles an hour is no break-neck
pace in the twentieth century. But for the first mile to Meryton she
was with Kitty and Lydia, who were obviously bad walkers, so that on the
whole her pace was not to be despised. Further, it may be noted that she
was the only person in the whole book who ever walked these three miles.
Mrs. Bennet and Kitty and Lydia drove; Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy
invariably rode; Jane had to ride (owing to the careful dispositions of
Mrs. Bennet), and, as might be expected, caught a cold in the rain.
But Elizabeth was something more than a good walker: she was clearly
responsive to the spiritual influences of walking and the open air. Her
relations with Darcy are a striking illustration of this. She meets him
first at a dance, and naturally forms her Prejudice at once: she
continues her acquaintance at several evening-parties and at
Netherfield, the most important conversation taking place in a room in
which Bingley had just spent half an hour in piling up the fire to
prevent Jane taking cold: (it would, of course, have been unthinkable to
open a window). She is then bamboozled by Wickham in the drawing-room
of Uncle Philips, who is himself described as ‘stuffy’; and then, after
another dance, the first stage of the acquaintance ends. At Hunsford
things improve: there is no more dancing, and Fitzwilliam and Darcy
_walk_ the half-mile from Rosings to the Parsonage. But all the
important interviews, culminating in the first proposal and general
back-talk, take place either at Rosings or in that room at the Parsonage
which Charlotte specially selected, because it did not look out on the
road and would therefore not attract Mr. Collins. Then, after this
climax, the change at once begins. The first thing next morning
Elizabeth takes a walk: she meets Darcy, foot to foot at last, and in
the open: she reads his letter, walking, and continues her walk for two
hours: the first blow at the Prejudice is struck. They meet again, in
the grounds of Pemberley: they walk together (Mrs. Gardiner requiring
her husband’s support); almost at once the past is wiped out, and truth
begins to emerge. Then comes the last phase at Longbourn. Elizabeth
engages and slaughters Lady de Bourgh, on her feet, in the prettyish
kind of a little wilderness. Darcy arrives, and after a few fruitless
skirmishes in parlours and at evening-parties, they take the road
together one fine morning, and when once Kitty has gone to pay her call
at the Lucases’, there is but one way. The further walk to Oakham Mount
(which is too far for Kitty this time) settles the business, and Mrs.
Bennet is free to exercise the virtuosity of her imagination on the
theme of ten thousand a year.
* * * * *
The relation of Dickens to walking is somewhat peculiar. There is plenty
of good walking in his works, just as there is plenty of eating and
drinking and romantic eloquence, and other natural processes; but it is
nearly all of an unconscious or even mechanical kind. Most of the big
walking is undertaken from reasons of economy--the walk of Nicholas and
Smike from Dotheboys Hall to London, and on to Hindhead or wherever it
was that Mr. Crummles dawned upon the scene; the walk of Nelly Trent
and her grandfather through the industrial districts of England, and on
to the village which contained the blameless schoolmaster; the walk of
Traddles to Devonshire and back to see Sophy; or David Copperfield’s
walk to Dover, when the long-legged young man had stolen his money. None
of these would have taken the walk for its own sake, except possibly
Traddles, who says generally that he had ‘the most delightful time.’
They seem to have been blind to the beauties of walking, and to have
borne it only as a disagreeable necessity. They have not even the purely
sensuous appreciation of the beauty of a walk which is found in Mr.
Pickwick and his friends, when they walk to the Leather Bottel at Cobham
to see if Mr. Tupman is still alive. It is not unfitting that the
greatest pronouncement on the Dover road should have been made, not by
David Copperfield, who plodded every inch of it, but by that dread
Sibyl, Mr. F.’s aunt.