utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are
long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body:
even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a
single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the
chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill.
No man’s health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest
degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take
the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very
much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable
touch of colour; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for
a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape? A
large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted
in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small
of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one
with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute
triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about
beauty in ties?
The truth is that dress is a paradox. Any one attempting to apply to it
the principles of health, comfort, beauty, or even economy, would become
an atheist or a suicide in a fortnight. Modern dress is unhealthy,
uncomfortable, ugly, and dear. In spite of the passionate denunciations
of stiff shirts and collars by the whole medical profession, we and they
continue to wear them. Our necks are chafed, our motions are cramped,
our skin is slowly vitiated--but we do not rebel. The fabrics which we
choose for our clothing tend on the whole to be the ugliest, the most
expensive, and the least durable: yet no one dreams of following the
elementary laws of utilitarian economics. Thus in the enlightened
twentieth century, with all the wealth of the industrial revolution
within our grasp, with doctors ready to prescribe the healthiest clothes
and artists to design them most beautifully--when, in a word, at a
quarter of the present cost and trouble which it takes to make us
eyesores we could become dreams of comfort and colour-harmony--then we,
the heirs of all the ages, with open eyes and unclouded vision, refuse.
It is due to fashion, no doubt: but what after all is fashion, and why
should we obey it? It is only a human creation: it is no law dictated to
the world from outside; it is merely something which some men chose and
other men, of their free will, agreed to obey. When a person asks, ‘Why
do we follow fashion?’ the only answer is, ‘Do you?’ If he says ‘No,’ he
is probably a liar: but we can still ask, ‘Do you not find in yourself
some instinct urging you to follow fashion?’ Even the most hardened liar
will probably say ‘Yes.’ The answer then is, ‘Multiply that instinct by
five million, and then think again.’ There is something hidden in each
of us which tends to make us follow fashion, which welcomes, that is to
say, a law of uniformity in dress quite regardless of its practical and
aesthetic consequences, which craves, indeed, for uniformity first and
at any cost, and lets the consequences be what they may.
This craving for uniformity is, I think, the fundamental fact that lies
behind the paradox of dress. Changes come in dress as in other things:
but they come much more slowly and irrationally, and in no perceptible
relation to the ordinary desires and impulses of mankind. When they make
for comfort or beauty, like the partial supersession of stiff shirts by
soft shirts, we accept them gratefully: but there is no evidence that
such changes ever coincided with any definite movement in favour of
increased comfort or beauty: they came to us, as it were, from outside,
unaccountably. We make no conscious efforts towards a change in dress;
rather, we shrink from them, lest the growth of a revolutionary movement
should shake our treasured uniformity, and leave us some fine morning
with the awful prospect of not being quite certain of looking exactly
like our neighbours.
This attitude will no doubt be called cowardly and unenterprising, but
it is so universal that its morality seems hardly worth arguing. In
case, however, any stern moralists wish to denounce this mean compliance
with fashion in the name of liberty, I would commend two points to their
notice. First, the followers of fashion can claim that they are
literally fulfilling Kant’s law; they are acting upon a principle which
they can and do will to be law universal. When I put on my tie in the
morning, my first and greatest desire is that every other man should do
the same. It is not from any malign wish that others should suffer what
I suffer: it is rather from a desire that, apart from any considerations
of suffering or happiness, humanity, myself included, may be one upon
this matter. The champions of liberty probably reply that they also
satisfy the Kantian condition on a higher plane: they are ready to act
on a universal principle that all men shall be free to dress in the most
convenient and beautiful way. To which we answer, on a still higher
plane, are you quite sure that this would be real freedom? In our happy
youth we were taught to distinguish between the real freedom which only
exists in relation to a positive law of which it is conscious, and the
mere negative freedom from restraint, which is empty of content and apt
to degenerate into caprice. Is it not at least a possibility that our
craving for uniformity is no mere cowardice, but rests upon a
deep-seated human instinct, warning us that liberty in dress would prove
a merely negative liberty, and in fear of this throwing us back to the
other extreme, so that we welcome a positive law, however irrational?
Another possibility has sometimes occurred to me, namely, that
uniformity in dress is in the nature of a political allegory. Modern
costume is a great equaliser; in outward appearance there is no longer
any distinction between the aristocracy and the middle ranks of life.
Every one has noticed the unducal appearance of eminent men, emphasised
as it so often is nowadays by the curious fall which has taken place in
the social status of whiskers. Every one, again, is familiar with the
difficulty felt in clubs and at evening parties in distinguishing
fellow-guests from waiters. The allegory may be interpreted in two ways:
it may be taken as a satirical demonstration of the results of equality,
or as indicating a generous instinct that one man’s natural advantages
shall not cause him to outshine too brightly his less happy neighbours.
But at least it seems possible that the dress paradox veils beneath its
apparent perversity some lofty meaning: so that when the libertarians
start piling up sublimities against us, we can reply with a few of our
own.
In the rarefied atmosphere of these moral altitudes, a good many of the
quarrels over walking equipment lose their importance: they are seen to
be particular illustrations of a far wider question. Ties and hats and
waistcoats and trousers--it is no use to argue about any of them as if
they were ordinary human creations made in response to a felt desire and
adapted to some practical purpose; they are all costume, symbols of
something more inscrutable than practical purposes, and not to be judged
by ordinary standards. Those who wear waistcoats or hats may, of course,
attempt to defend them on practical grounds: they may even say, with
some truth, that waistcoats have convenient pockets, and hats keep the
sun off. But this is really an afterthought: it is the old human
tendency to rationalise impulses after the event. The points cannot be
argued singly and on practical grounds, until the paradox of dress has
been faced and overcome.
The preceding argument will, I hope, bring consolation and moral support
to that large class of walkers who conform to the conventional
requirements of dress while walking, but feel an uneasy sense that they
ought not to be doing so. They need have no uneasiness; their position
is perfectly sound. Unless and until dress becomes solely and directly
adapted to practical purposes, with no ulterior or symbolic meaning, it
is superfluous to feel uneasy about compliance with ordinary rules. Even
inconsistency (in the low practical sense) is perfectly defensible. If
those, for instance, who leave their heads bare when alone in the
country, but put on their caps to pass through a village, are accused by
the libertarians of inconsistency, they can justly claim that all
mankind are inconsistent in this matter: unless the libertarians are
prepared to act up to their principles, and walk through Dorking on a
Sunday morning in sweaters and short breeches (which is probably the
most comfortable walking costume) they have no right to talk about
inconsistency.
More than this, it can be shown, I think, that walkers above all men, if
they belong to the working classes, and consequently have to do most of
their walking on Sundays, ought to be very tender in their dealings with
convention in all its forms. For they above all owe a debt to
convention--to the agreement and common action of men in general. In the
first place, convention has set aside for them one whole, free day in
the week, so securely buttressed by immemorial tradition, that the
wildest efforts of revolutionaries make but little impression upon it.
Next, the same convention, for the very reason which forms its ultimate
support, keeps the greater part of mankind at home during this day, so
that the country is singularly empty and free. The Sunday walker gains,
in fact, from convention a weekly bank holiday, attended by none of the
inconveniences which make ordinary bank holidays rather bad for walking;
the democracy sets him free, while leaving his aristocratic
susceptibilities unruffled, and in its great kindliness and tolerance
offers no hindrance to him in utilising the holy day in a way which is
probably still repugnant to the greater number of Englishmen. He is thus
a privileged law-breaker, with all the advantages of the law unimpaired;
and it beseems him to be grateful to those who both make the law and
allow him to break it.
This being so, if walkers are allowed to their own great benefit to
break one convention, they ought to be all the more respectful to the
remainder: they should be careful not to shock conventional
susceptibilities further than is necessary. When a Sunday walker meets a
church parade (which invariably happens in Westcott to those who take
the 10.5 to Leatherhead and go for Leith Hill viâ Polesden Lacey and
Ranmore Common) he should not swagger by with a conscious air of
superior disreputability; rather, his attitude should be one of humble
gratitude, and his costume as modest and conventional as he can make it.
For (ultimately) it was church parade that both enabled him to take the
10.5, and has prevented Ranmore Common from being a roaring welter of
cocoanut shies. Let him therefore abase his eyes and reflect, as he
turns up Logmore Lane, that privilege involves obligations.
Apart from the question of Sunday walking, the cult of disreputability
for its own sake seems hardly worthy of a walker. It undoubtedly exists,
very largely in conversation, less largely in fact; and it is curious
that the more refined relatives of disreputable walkers often find a
peculiar pleasure in dwelling on the enormities of dear ----’s walking
appearance. But it is hard to see in what studied disreputability is
better than studied foppery; while unstudied disreputability is only
separated by a very narrow line from slovenliness, and by a slightly
broader line from dirt. Probably the cult rests on some kind of a vague
sentimental yearning after originality, coupled with the universal
passion for an imagined aristocratic detachment from the ideals of the
bourgeoisie. But neither feeling is worthy of a walker, and neither
ought to survive a few days’ proper walking.
* * * * *
If practical purposes are to be introduced, this is better done in
another matter coming within the scope of equipment in the full sense--I
mean food and drink. But luckily here the whole inquiry has been thrown
in confusion by a wicked joke played by the doctors on the public. As
far as a layman can understand the matter, it appears that no one really
can demonstrate scientifically the effects of different kinds of food
and drink, for the simple reason that a living and digesting body cannot
be examined like a dead one; all theories on the subject are therefore
purely empirical. But the medical profession, with an instinct for fun
not suppressed by a long training and an arduous life, have made an
unholy conspiracy with the organic chemists; and the result is a
catalogue of proteids, phosphates, nitrogenous substances, etc., with
equivalent percentages in powers of bone-forming, flesh-building, and
heating, which is dangled cunningly before the eyes of the unsuspecting
public. The public rises at once; we like our food, and love dogmatising
about it; here is a chance to gain the unshakable support of formulae
and diagrams and graphic curves. So we plunge into the troubled sea of
proteids; and the end of it, as might be expected, is that there is no
form of food which cannot be scientifically advocated, from nettles to
human flesh.
How futile is the analytic science of food may be shown by its
powerlessness in the face of other dogmatisms. Take, for example, that
great traditional food-code associated with the training of oarsmen--a
dogmatism so reverently guarded and so profoundly lunatic that a walker
must treat it with respect. As late as the fifties it was devoutly
believed that rowing men ought to drink very little at meals, but ought
to have two glasses of port at three in the afternoon. There is
still--or was until recently--a firm conviction that beef was better
than mutton for training, while bacon and the flesh of swine generally
were altogether taboo. It is not known whether the original prophet who
dictated this system was in earnest or no; he may have been a simple
soul, genuinely anxious that others should share the benefits of the
truth which had been revealed to him; he may, on the other hand, have
been a cunning student of men, who knew the power of dogmatism and
realised that only thus could he persuade men to eat meals of such a
stupefying size that they would be mentally incapable of resenting the
monotony of rowing. But, however this may be, the remarkable point is
that in a matter where food was really important, and a system of
well-known and tried futility was in force, the proteid-experts said
never a word; there was never even a voice raised to suggest eating the
spare man on the day of the race.
On the question of drink, of course, the dogmatisms are even fiercer; in
no other sphere is there such universal intolerance. The abstainers want
every one else to abstain, and denounce them if they do not; the heavy
drinkers want every one else to drink heavily and despise them if they
do not; most bigoted and intolerant of all, the temperate drinkers want
every one else to drink temperately and denounce and despise both the
other parties. The whole subject is limp with sentimentality--the
sentimentality which identifies drink with the devil, and the
sentimentality which identifies drink with humanity, Christianity, and
all the popular virtues. Every mug of beer and every cup of tea is now
become symbolic; every drink is viewed _sub specie aeternitatis_, and it
is difficult for the ordinary man as he drinks not to feel that his act
is the illustration of some great and universal principle, and to enrol
it, so to say, under the banner of one of the conflicting dogmatisms.
With most of these lunacies and sentimentalities, as such, the walker is
not concerned. But he has above all men a very direct and practical
interest in food and drink, as the fuel of his walking system, and he is
bound to search the dogmatisms for any truth which may be latent in
them. But when the practical eye is turned upon them, what nonsense they
become! Put three men on the hills with a beef-sandwich, an
egg-sandwich, and a jam-sandwich: can your proteid analysts tell you
which of them will be going strongest at four o’clock? Give one man a
whiskey-flask, and one a mountain stream: can you say which will walk
the further or sleep the sounder? Above all, if you have come to the
conclusion by experiment that certain foods and drinks are best for you,
by what right can you try to thrust them down the throats of other men?
The fact is that the human body is a very wonderful machine, sharing
something of the individuality of the soul: and within certain limits
there is no saying what exact form of nourishment will suit it best. A
few general truths we can fix, such as that unripe apples and cyanide of
potassium are unhealthy, and that more than two lobsters are not a good
preparation for violent exercise; but the rest of the matter is one
glorious uncertainty, and the only law which we can find is the great
and universal empirical principle: ‘One man’s meat is another man’s
poison,’ or, ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’
If then any one wishes to dogmatise about food and drink, let him do so
frankly on the ground that he likes certain things, and expects other
people to like them too. Let us have no more of proteids and
food-values: above all, let us have no more of the moral aspects of food
and drink. It is a man’s business to find out what will suit him best,
what will keep his body at its maximum capacity for its various duties.
This he can only discover experimentally, and in the process he must not
be limited in the range of his experiments by any analytic tables or
moral taboos: he must try proteids, sulphides, and oxalates impartially:
he must try meat-eating as well as fruitarianism (avoiding crime): he
must try beer as well as water, and, even more important, he must try
water as well as beer. When he has found his right diet, then let him
begin to dogmatise if he will; but let it be the dogmatism of a good
citizen, who has found a truth and wants others to share it, not the
dogmatism of a tyrant seeking to bind others by his own measure.
The worst foe to freedom is not science or morality but sentiment. There
is a sentimental picture, dear to many imaginations, of a walker sitting
down (generally in his boots) after a ‘few score’ of miles (to quote
Canon Crisparkle) devouring large slices of meat washed down by tankards
of beer, the whole subsequently enhaloed in tobacco. So popular is this
fancy among the more sentimental part of the population, that when a
walker refuses meat (as some do), or beer (as some do), or tobacco (as a
very few do), it is thought something almost wrong, something out of the
picture, an error of taste; and many walkers, either from cowardice or
from courtesy to the weaknesses of others, have done violence to their
own canons of diet in order to fit into the popular picture. On what
exactly this sentiment rests it is difficult to see: it and the sister
sentiment of disreputability seem to be merely aberrant fancies of
imaginative people for their unlikes--of the clean for the slovenly, the
abstemious for the greedy. In order to satisfy the imagination of the
naturally clean and temperate sentimentalist, the naturally clean and
temperate walker has to dress badly and overeat.
Most potent and most vicious of all is the sentiment for beer. No
article of diet shines brighter in the imagination of those who do not
take it: probably none is worse, on the whole, for walkers. Some
walkers, of course, in the fulfilment of the great experimental law,
take beer and thrive upon it, but for a large number it is a faithless
friend or an open foe. Yet, so strong is the sentiment in its favour,
that we rarely hear a word spoken against beer on other than purely
moral grounds; those who cannot take it are apt to be almost apologetic,
as though for a defect in themselves. In the interests of the beer
sentiment every other kind of feeling is shamelessly exploited:
aesthetically, we are asked to admire its beautiful colour:
historically, we are reminded of its long tradition as the national
drink of merry England: democratically, we are bidden to drink beer as a
symbol of our unity with the heart of the people.
What is wanted is a little sentiment on the other side. It may be
thought difficult to raise much sentiment on the subject of water, but
at least on the grounds taken by the beer-devotees water need fear no
comparison. Aesthetically, perhaps, water does not look as beautiful as
beer in a glass; but sight is only one of the senses, and water never
causes anything like the aura of a beer-mug the morning after.
Historically, beer can simply make no show; it needs an emotional
interpretation of history to carry back the tradition of beer even a
thousand years; whereas water dates back to the dimmest beginning of
things, and in its tradition the praise of Pindar is but as yesterday.
Democratically, beer is even more utterly out of it: the constituency of
beer consists mainly of men, and does not contain all of them. But the
constituency of water is world-wide and heaven-high: it includes women;
it includes children; it includes animals: nay, in a sense, it includes
earth itself. When I drink beer I may be symbolically sympathising with
seven men out of ten in the street; but when I drink water I am
symbolically at one with the whole order of creation from the beginning.
Nay, drinker of beer, an thou’lt mouth, I’ll rant as well as thou. What
is your drink after all? It is a compound of vegetable substances, whose
main function is to ferment--_i.e._ in plain English, to go bad. These
substances are sentimentally supposed to be malt and hops: in reality,
they include a long and ghastly category of chemical drugs and
substitutes known only to the Inland Revenue Department and the troubled
consciences of brewers. These substances are mixed by some malodorous
processes, with a Government Official standing by in hope of detecting a
certain percentage of the fraud involved; and the outcome is put in
barrels of not over-clean wood, and stowed in dirty and stuffy cellars
until the time arrives for it to be passed through a metal beer-engine
into tankards and glasses, which may or may not have been cleaned, and
so down the throats of the long-suffering public, who have the
consolation of reflecting that the cost price of their liquor is less
than half what they pay, and that the rest is passing through the
tortuosities of dubious finance into the pockets of the casual investor,
that incubus upon the body politic.
But water is not compounded by any human hand: there is no list of
authorised substitutes to be used in its composition. It is given to us
complete; and our only care is, when our civilisation has contaminated
it, to restore it to the form in which it was given to us. What other
drink is there that can be taken _in situ_? What cask or beaker so fine
as a rocky pool or a grass-tangled spring? What cup so satisfying as the
scooping hand? Even when it comes through the medium of waterworks and
pipes and jugs, it is still an element; it is taking us in its ordained
cycle of mist, and rain, and river, and sea; it is making us one stage
in the secular process. Let us drink water, then, if we are to reverence
the framework of the creation: let us drink water, if we are to honour
our remoter ancestors: let us drink water, if we wish to symbolise the
solidarity of the living world.
* * * * *
The difference between proper emotion and sentimentality is like the
difference between healthy fresh air and a deadly draught: one is what I
like, and the other is what I don’t like. But I think an appeal may be
made on something wider than personal grounds for a little less
sentimentality in food and drink, and a little more proper emotion in
costume and the rest of the walker’s equipment. Food and drink are
important things, and must be taken seriously: they have a direct
practical purpose, and their consideration must not be influenced by
emotion. Every man ought to feel himself free to experiment in the most
cold and scientific spirit, undistracted by conflicting
sentimentalities, in order to find the diet most suitable to him; and
not till this is done should any emotion attach to articles of food or
drink. But dress and equipment, as we have seen, involve something more
than material considerations; they symbolise something far beyond
practical ends and purposes; and it is only fitting that a walker,
contemplating the panoply of his craft, should be uplifted above the
regions of prose.