Part 8
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.’
Now, it may be said that the A. and B. principle is so important in the 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.