Part 7

Once admit the primacy of health in this wide sense, which is the same as the primacy of the bodily idea, and the rest of the tangle is easily cleared up. We regulate food, drink and sleep, not because this is medically good for our organs, still less because discipline is good in itself, but simply because this enables the body to do its best. We open our windows, not in order to make our atmosphere approximate in chemical composition most nearly to what doctors think the best, but because the body naturally craves for fresh air as its environment. We promote sanitation and public health, not in order to reduce the number of bacilli per cubic inch, but because smells and dirt and darkness are nasty things, instinctively condemned by a clean body. And, finally, we walk because it is good, and run and jump and perform athletics because they are good, and not because they enable us to work harder or earn more, or win the next battle of Waterloo.

But the surest test of the validity of this view is the extreme case of physical training, the absurdum to which the health argument is reduced. The philosophers would say that we must either take the health position, in which case physical training is clearly the best form of exercise; or, when this is laughed out of court, we must abandon it altogether, and admit that the only good activities must be the spontaneous ones. But on the idealist view no such absolute opposition is necessary: there is a place for physical training in the kingdom of bodily ends. Let it be admitted at once that the proper athletic activities are best, and that if we had these to the full, any system of physical training would be superfluous and unthinkable. But the hypothesis is a large one: it assumes perfect physical conditions for every one, full leisure and opportunities for every kind of exercise. Such conditions are not often realised at present: we live largely in towns, within doors, seated, clothed, avoiding sunlight, shirking rain and wind. This being so, is it unthinkable that we should try in our scant leisure to remedy the defect as best we can, to concentrate into a few moments something of the bodily experience which we lack? The point has been often obscured by the particularism of certain systems of physical training. To move a dumb-bell up and down in order to expand and harden the biceps muscle is--or rather was--an absurdity deserving every hard name which philosophers can invent; it was as silly as smiling on purpose in order to cultivate a habit of cheerfulness. Indian clubs were a little better, since they brought the whole of the upper part of the body into play; there was occasionally in the motion something reminiscent of a golf swing or a tennis drive or the whirl of a stick in a walker’s hand. The modern systems still sometimes talk about muscles, but this is only their fun: what they are really concerned with is the body as a whole, and they twist it and stretch it and strain it and rub it with the primary object of giving it the most varied and exciting experience possible within a limited time. At the end of your daily quotum you can, of course, if you wish, go through a list of your muscles and note how each has been exercised; but to say that this is the aim of physical training is simply to mistake the trees for the wood. What has really happened is that you have experienced, in a concentrated form and on a small scale, the feeling of a well-exercised body: you have swung, as when you rowed; you have bent the leg, as when you climbed; you have twisted, as in the most crucial moment of the scrum. And the feel of your skin when the daily exercises are over may perhaps recall to you those times when you ran down a mountain, bathed in a stream, and lay prone in the sun thereafter.

Let there be peace, therefore, and co-operation, between all who are interested in and use the body, athletes, walkers, hygienists, physical trainers: their interests are so largely the same, and the apathy they have to face is so overwhelming, that they cannot afford to quarrel. Let each pursue his own calling whole-heartedly, and he will find later or sooner that he needs the others to fight against the common foe. If any philosophers give trouble, refer them to the primacy of the bodily idea and see how they like that; if any doctors give trouble, refer them to the other doctors who have said the opposite thing. For the rest, let there be peace; and as time goes on, windows will begin to open and sunlight and water and exercise will begin to become popular; and at last people will realise that the body is not a joke or a plaything, a catalogue of organs or an arena of moral combats, but a trust for which each man is responsible, to make or mar.

Poor, ill-used, neglected, misunderstood body! Our ancestors soddened you with port: our grandfathers overlooked you while they muddled with the soul and mind which are bound up with you: ascetics starved you and hedonists cultivated you in patches: doctors analysed you till there was nothing left but a catalogue of inanimate fragments: economic forces penned you in dens and prisons: fashion clothed you in impossible garments, and kept you up at hours and in atmospheres which outraged your most sacred instincts. And now I make you sit here writing--writing! For heaven’s sake, come out for a walk.

V

WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM

Sociati incedunto. WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM.

On the subject of walking and driving there is but little to be said, for the simple reason that the time thus passed in the open air is usually passed by persons in the company of members of their own families. The usual fashionable hour for walking, both in the metropolis and at watering-places or seaside towns, is from twelve to two o’clock.

_Manners and Tone of Good Society, by a Member of the Aristocracy._ Chapter xiv. (4th edition; n.d.)

V

WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM

In an earlier essay an attempt was made to rebut the charge sometimes 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.