Our bodies are gardens; to the which our wills are gardeners, so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop or weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry; why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.
Othello, i. 3.
Nothingarouses keener feelings than the idea of sport. No one knows exactly what it means; every one feels very intensely that it is something truly intimate and national, unintelligible except to those who have been rightly bred, a touchstone of proper disposition, indefinable but unmistakable. To be called a ‘sportsman’ is the most gratifying compliment which an Englishman can receive; actions otherwise indefensible and risks otherwise unthinkable are undertaken gaily if once established as ‘sporting’; and any pursuit which can be brought under the title of ‘sport’ is thereby relieved of all further need for justification and becomes irradiated with the ethical light which the idea bestows. And the most awful moment of the walker’s life iswhen he suddenly faces himself with the question—Is walking a sport?
His horror deepens as he realises that most men, himself included, would instinctively answer, No. Walking is allowed a place in the Badminton series, but this is partly out of kindness and partly because it connects easily with rock-climbing and the more dangerous kinds of mountaineering, which are generally admitted to be sport. Besides, dancing is included in the Badminton series. If we collect the commonly accepted views, cricket is a sport, and hockey is a sport, and billiards is a sport, and grouse-shooting is a sport, and fox-hunting is a sport, and bull-fighting is a sport, only not proper, and cock-fighting was a sport in the good old days, and dog-fighting is still a sport north of the Trent, and boxing is a sport if homochromatic; but the one thing which never, nowhere, and under no conditions is, was, or could be a sport, is walking.
An exception might be made for walking of the racing type—the kind of thing which begins on Westminster Bridge at 6 a.m., continues through Crawley (3 h. 56 min.23 s.) shepherded by cyclists carrying raisins, brandy, and plasmon, and ends about two in the afternoon at the Brighton Aquarium. But no ordinary walker will be inclined to press the exception. The walking race is indeed a wonderful thing, a standing testimony to the exuberance of human invention. Naturally, if a man wants to go fast, he runs; if he wants to go at a steady pace for a long distance, he walks. Only in the higher stages of civilisation, when his mind gets really to work, does he invent a mode of progression which combines all the possible disadvantages, being more exhausting than a walk, slower than a run, physically uncomfortable and aesthetically only to be described in the idiom of Aristophanes. No one who has seen the gait of a walking racer can ever forget it; it is a sport in more senses than one. Therefore, as our business is with walking in the ordinary sense, as we are physiologists rather than pathologists, we cannot press the exception. Consequently we are left with the blank and brutal fact, supported by general opinion, that walking is not a sport.
If we go on to ask why this is so, the question is naturally resented, since every decent man understands what is sport and what is not without being told or wanting to argue about it. Sportsmanship, like sense of humour, is one of the ultimate things; if you possess it, you do not need to define it; if you lack it, no process of reasoning can ever bring you anywhere near it. None the less, if we are not allowed to be sportsmen, we may at least be allowed to examine the limits of our own deficiency. After all, an eminent Frenchman has just written a book entirely about the sense of humour. Taking heart of grace from this we venture to proceed with the question.
The first and most obvious reason why walking is not a sport is that it does not arouse or gratify the sporting instinct. This may seem like arguing in a circle, but in fact it brings us to a clear definition. For there is no doubt what the sporting instinct is. It is the instinct which delights in a struggle on equal terms, which aims at a victory by sheer merit under conditionscarefully adjusted so as to eliminate as far as possible all determinants except merit. The essential point in the sporting instinct is the paradox that you wish to win but at the same time wish your adversary to have every possible chance of winning; you desire victory, but you desire it after the closest possible struggle conducted with the greatest possible amount of difficulty. Your ideal is to win, figuratively speaking, by a hundred and one goals to a hundred, your last goal being obtained just before the call of time and leaving you in a state of complete exhaustion, relieved only by the fervid hope that your adversary may be able to put up an equally good or better struggle against you next week.
To dwell upon the great ethical beauty of this instinct—its chivalry, consideration for others, generous waiving of all advantages except that of merit, and so forth—is hardly a task for a layman. But we may be allowed to point out, with pardonable pride, that in England the sporting instinct extends far beyond sports, even in the catholic interpretation of the Badmintonseries. It—or something like it—may be found in nearly every department of life—in law, in religion, in politics, both domestic and foreign, in thought and philosophy. One reason for the popularity of the Darwinian theories, as generally understood, was that they represented the secular process as a glorified Cup Tie competition, with the mammoth and the ichthyosaurus disappearing in the qualifying rounds, and man emerging triumphantly from the final—in contrast with the unsportsmanlike theories of creation, in which man got his post by a job. In law and politics the sporting instinct is so fundamental that perhaps we ought really to call it the legal and political instinct, and regard sport, in the Badminton sense, as one of its secondary manifestations. In law, we do not concentrate the wisdom of bench, bar, and the detective service to decide whether something did or did not happen; we organise a fair struggle, and employ time, money, and all the resources of trained forensic skill to prove to an impartial jury in the first place that it did, and in thesecond place that it did not, happen. In politics, we do not unite all our wisest and most experienced men to determine the best policy; we propound to the electorate (with expenditure of time, money, and resources as before) at least two conflicting policies, which cannot both be the best. In religion, the brightest jewel in the British crown is a fair field and no favour for any creed not involving human sacrifice or Suttee. Captious critics may point out that there can only be one truth in law, politics, or religion, and that it seems a waste of energy to bolster up any number of alternative truths; and they suggest that in each department a panel of wise and experienced men (including themselves) should be authorised to decide for the community. To which the vulgar answer is that the same panel might as well decide the County Championship and the University Boat Race.
It is painful, then, to admit that this primary British instinct has no part in walking. We may, if we please, fondly imagine that walking involves a fair strugglewith time and space, with rocks and hills, but this is a mere playing with words. The true sporting relation can only exist between man and man, never between man and things; your adversary must be something which you treat as an end, never something which you treat as a means. In walking, you do not wait until weather and ground are at their worst in order to give them a chance of defeating you; you take the most favourable opportunities, you steal advantages, you employ all the cunning of the organism to overcome the inorganic. A walker needs many qualities for the pursuit of his craft—endurance, equability, resource, a good conscience, both moral and physical; but the one thing which, as walker, he never needs is the sporting instinct.
But if this be so, he is not alone. If we have defined the sporting instinct rightly, there are numbers of other people masquerading as sportsmen who have no proper claim to the title. Chief among these are all hunters and shooters of any kind whatsoever. There can be no true sportingrelation between a man and a beast, except possibly in the cases of Achilles and the tortoise and the boxing kangaroo. The hunter or shooter wants to kill his prey, and the prey merely wants to escape from or—in the case of big game—to eat his adversary; neither party at the end of a contest wishes his antagonist well or hopes that he will return to renew the struggle. Indeed, there is much more sportsmanship in war than in hunting; for the victorious nation, while glad to have won, always feels a chivalrous regret that in so doing they have, accidentally, killed a number of their gallant foes. The hunter is far from such a feeling; the furthest he will go is to bar out certain obvious ways of killing, such as shooting foxes or netting salmon; but this is not entirely out of consideration for the feelings of the fox or salmon.
The conception of sport, even in its narrowest sense of a fair struggle, cannot be applied to the hunting activities except by a series of violent strains. In the case of fox-hunting, the only struggle is between the speed and sagacity of the hounds andthe natural cunning of the fox, and the sole connection which hunters have with this very unsportsmanlike struggle is that they are able to sit on horses, which go as fast as the hounds, which areex hypothesihaving a fair struggle with the fox, who, under the fortieth article of the orthodox rural faith, really enjoys it. Otter-hunting and beagling are perhaps one degree less remote from sportsmanship, since the combatants rely on their own legs without the interposition of a horse. But when we come to grouse-shooting the strain becomes almost unbearable, since in this case we are asked to believe that the grouse is blithely dodging the shots with a keen appreciation of the sporting interest involved. The plain fact is that all these activities arise simply from the hunting instinct—the natural impulse to kill or capture something which tries to escape. It is a fundamental and, no doubt, a valuable instinct; but it has nothing to do with the sporting instinct, and does not in itself entitle a man to be called a sportsman.
I need hardly add that in making theseremarks I do not in the least wish to disparage the morality of hunting and shooting. I only wish to point out that whatever moral character they have must be derived from other, and no doubt nobler, attributes than sportsmanship. What these attributes are, this is no place to inquire; but arguments on the subject are full of interest. It is pointed out, for example, that without hunting and shooting, the well-to-do would cease to reside in the country, with disastrous economic and social results; that foxes have to be destroyed anyhow, for the sake of the poultry, and that this being so, any fox worthy of the name much prefers an exhilarating run across country with the chance of getting away to the certainty of being shot; that without fox-hunting there would be nothing for fox-hounds to do; and so forth. This only shows us what we lose by the present loose use of the term ‘sport’ to cover both hunting and football. People who object to hunting are thereby prejudiced against football; while fox-hunters are saved from the necessity of justifying themselves, and so of working out indetail the fascinating speculations in rural economy, teleology, and the psychology of foxes indicated above.
We are left, then, with the conclusion that on a strict construction of the term ‘sport,’ walking, hunting, and shooting are outside the pale of sportsmanship. The natural resentment of walkers, hunters, and shooters is by no means assuaged when they consider who are inside the pale—not only cricketers and golfers and footballers and lacrosse-players, but billiard-players and chess-players and draught-players, and even lawyers and politicians, all of whom love a fair struggle with a human opponent. The outcasts may well ask how it is that a term which covers all these activities, and covers them equally, as ‘sport’ appears to do, can really have a complimentary meaning. Is it much of a compliment to be compared to a draught-player? Need a man gnash his teeth if he is denied kinship with a ludo champion? Must there not be something else in the conception of sport beside the pure sporting idea? For an answer we haveonly to turn to the so-called sporting columns of the press. The place of honour is still given to horse-racing, but this is more for economic than for purely sporting reasons. The backbone of the sporting columns, the things which people really admire, the main themes on which the reporters exercise their amazing virtuosity, are the great staple forms of athletics, cricket, football, rowing, lawn-tennis, golf, running and the rest.
These are so much the commonplaces of existence that few people realise what a stupendous growth they represent. Games of various kinds have always flourished in this country, but the growth of athletics since 1870 or so is something too huge, both in bulk and variety, to be ascribed to any normal development. Since that time cricket must have increased at least tenfold; football has developed into three colossal and quite distinct branches, not to mention Colonial and American variations and the historic cults of English schools; golf has grown from the recreation of a few Scots to the business of ten thousand Britons;lawn-tennis, purged of its garden-party birthstain, has become a game of the first rank; hockey has lived down the derision of its youth and commands its thousands of devotees; cross-country running holds its head high; lacrosse has become a bond of Empire;quid plura? I have not even mentioned women’s athletics. If Lord Macaulay were to return to earth to-morrow, he would be surprised at many things—at our style of drawing-room furniture, at the respect paid to Plato, at the universal prevalence of pipe-smoking, not to speak of Marconigrams and promenade concerts; but his biggest shock would come if he stood at a London terminus at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and watched the youth of the nation—and its middle-age, too—speeding forth in their thousands on athletic pursuits, to toil and labour and sweat, and even to spend money, for an idea.
This enormous growth in the staple forms of sport cannot be attributed only to the sporting instinct. There must be some other element in them which commands generalsupport and admiration, whether or no a strictly sporting struggle is involved. Now, what is the common character of these activities? Three points are clear at once: they all take place in the open air; they all involve some physical expertness; they all involve, what is quite a different thing, hard physical exercise. Or, to put it negatively, they can none of them be undertaken in a house, by an incompetent, without bodily labour. These three things, far more than the pure sporting instinct, are the fundamental characters of the athletic movement; it is these which really evoke popular admiration. And because most of the sporting activities and some of the hunting activities share in these characters, all sporting activities and all hunting activities are lumped together in the popular mind as ‘sport,’ and this term, thus endowed with favourable associations of fresh air, physical expertness and exercise, is then applied alike to billiards, grouse-shooting, and betting on horse-races.
Even so, the claims of walking to a place among the staple forms of athletics seemdubious. Every one would agree that it takes place in the open air, not many that it is hard exercise, fewer still that it involves physical expertness. It may be admitted at once that there are certain physical states to which the walker can never attain. He never knows what it is to concentrate all his energies, like the runner or rower or footballer, within five minutes or twenty minutes or seventy minutes, reaching at the end that complete and satisfying state of exhaustion, that sense of having come to the end of the tether, which uplifts the soul like death or exile or any other finality. His fatigue is a slower and less inspiring sensation, a thing of muscle rather than wind. Nor, again, has he ever the feeling of having done something really clever and unusual with his body, like the three-quarter when he swerves or the rower when he gets his hands away. The walker’s motions are things, apparently, which any one can do.
None the less, walking at its best comes very near the greater athletics. A full day’s walk at a good pace is not a thing to be despised; the worst that can be said is thatit does not need that superfine concert pitch of physical competency, that little extra cleanness of wind and limb above the normal, to which rowers and runners attain for about ten days in each year. Granted this, still walking is no activity for the grossly untrained or incapable. There are moments in it which test the body as keenly as any football or hockey; there is the peculiar and special demon of inertia always waiting for you at the eighth mile, and again about the eighteenth, ready to seize on the slightest weakness, a demon only to be exorcised by a genuine effort. If you can conquer him, you may at least claim a leaf from the athlete’s crown. Even in the matter of physical expertness, where walkers contrast most strongly with other athletes, they are not altogether beneath consideration. A proper stride is not a mere gift of the gods; it can be cultivated, increased in ease and length, made a more useful servant. There is no little difference at the end of the day between the walker who can move his feet lithely and delicately, making a rhythmic bar of each stride, andthe walker who hoists them up anyhow and lets them fall with a bang, like instruments of percussion. The adjustment of gait to slopes and to varying kinds of ground is also a matter of some expertness. And, above all, there is the very subtle art, when you are coming down a steepening hill, of knowing the moment at which to abandon care, swing out and run.
Running on a walk is a subject strictly outside the ambit of this work, but I cannot pass it by unpraised. It is quite unlike ordinary running; it generally takes place down a violent slope and could not possibly be managed in spiked shoes and bare legs. It is of many kinds, all of them good. Running down a hard grass hill is good, on the flat of the foot, with short strides, each step sending a jerk from the extreme toe to the topmost hair; then, as the slope flattens near the bottom, you swing out, stride enormously and fly. (Thus do, descending from Scarf Gap to Buttermere, and turn to the left at the foot beyond the stream, to the pool with the grassy promontory which washes you clean of mortal ills.) Screerunning is good, when you have clambered gingerly down the crags, and find them issuing below in fine slopes of shale; here forget your toes, trust only to your heels, and look out for rocks. But best of all is the grassy head of a valley, soft with moss and hidden bog; here you must rush at full stride, watching your leader (if there is one) for bog-holes; if not, trusting in Providence. If your foot fall on good ground, it is well; if there be a sudden yielding beneath it, leap but the more wildly off the other, and it will rise from the bog with a sound like a giant’s kiss, and a tingle of cold water within your boot. Thus come wise men from Esk Hause to Borrodale by Grain Gill, forsaking the path of the foolish by Styhead Pass; and at the bottom there is a pool for them only less worthy than that of Buttermere, and thereafter they move down Borrodale in the dusk among silent sheep-folds, ennobled and perfected men, the long memories of the day rounded with the rapture of their run.
This, however, is by the way: the fact that some walkers run on a walk does notmake walking a form of athletics any more than the fact that some company promoters write poetry in the evenings makes stockbroking a branch of poetry. Of the legitimate claims of walking in itself and by itself to be considered a form of athletics, the athletes will probably remain unconvinced. They will continue to regard it as a thing any one can do, and to rate walkers on a level with grouse-shooters and beaglers, and only a little higher than rabbit-shooters. Let it be so; if a little exclusiveness is needed to maintain the aristocracy of physique, no walker will grudge it. But when this has been fully granted, and the primacy of athletics proper firmly established, let the athletes remember that they themselves make use of walking. I do not mean only that they walk down the street when they cannot afford a cab; I mean that often in the utmost rigour of their training they use walking as one of the most effective means to that training. This is notably the case with boxers, who of all athletes need to be the most carefully and scientifically trained. There must surelythen be something in walking akin to, if not identical with, the highest capacities of the body; when a man is reaching his physical maximum, he does not grouse-shoot or beagle or dance or play billiards, but he does walk.
The reason of this can be understood, and the tone of this discussion raised, by the help of a moral analogue. Consider some athlete of action—a statesman, a general, a bishop, or a merchant-prince; when he is preparing for some supreme feat—a bill, a battle, a wholesale conversion, or a corner in nitrates—he does not keep his energies entirely on the lofty plane which such feats demand; he busies himself, if wise, with a number of minor affairs requiring only his ordinary capacity and not the special effort of the feat. In other words, he exercises his normal powers to the full, and so prepares himself for an abnormal strain. It is the same with the athlete; when he is getting ready for the abnormal strain of a race or a cup-tie, he needs to keep his normal physical powers in good condition; hence, as the mostnormal and central of all bodily activities, he walks. I do not in the least mean by this that he needs special muscles for his main feat and resorts to walking because this uses other muscles; this would be untrue, would spoil the analogue, and, worst of all, would be quite out of date. The physiology which divided a man’s bodily activities by muscles, is like the old psychology which divided his mental activities by ‘faculties’; nobody now believes such things, except possibly some physiologists or psychologists. The man, whether mentally or physically, is a whole: he has a normal mental self and a normal bodily self, and the two are closely allied. In either case, he must keep the normal self in full swing by means of its most congenial activities when he is preparing for an abnormal effort.
Consider the analogue further, and a second profound truth emerges. Not only will the normal activities of the statesman, general, bishop, or merchant-prince conduce to great feats, but also the high condition they are in will react on the performanceof their normal activities. The week before the great feat takes place, the statesman will deal with questions and estimates in a particularly masterly way; the general’s regulation of camp routine will be a marvel; the bishop’s diocese will be a Utopia; and the merchant-prince will forecast the fluctuations of stock with deadly accuracy. Each of them will feel that he is taking ordinary affairs (note this metaphor) in his stride, and with a peculiar sensation of completeness, confidence, and well-being he will march to meet the event of the week following. And whenever, in the course of years, he resumes and maintains this high condition of training, there will be the same superb feeling of mastery, the consciousness of a fine faculty fully exercised, the recollection of the great moments of the feat.
Need I point the parallel? Every foot-pound which the athlete adds to his physical capacity is felt in his walking. There is nothing you can do in your physical life which will not affect you for better or for worse as you walk. Walking is the bookof the recording angel of the body, who never forgets or forgives. If you have sat up late, or eaten and drunk unwisely, or breathed foul air, or listened to or participated in waltzes, or done all these things simultaneously, which is quite easy—you will know it at the eighth mile next day. But if you have trained your body, and given it its due of food and drink and sun and air, then you will walk with a peculiar exaltation; you will swing your legs to the full rhythm of your physical being; you will feel yourself one with all the greatest moments of your bodily past—that last sprint up the straight, when your legs felt like somebody else’s; those forty-five frenzied seconds in the wash of the boat in front, until your nose grated on her stern; that wild gallop down the left wing with the half-back in pursuit and that sweeping centre which the inside right did (or did not) put through.
Once this is understood, further argument about the relative merits of walking and athletics becomes futile and absurd. The two are simply different but relatedmodes of expressing one idea, the idea, that is, of realising the body’s capacity as a thing good in itself. This common interest outweighs any differences of expression. Walkers and athletes are working to the same end, and are closely allied. Indeed, it is no matter for argument; for the idea, like other ideas, can never be completely proved. We only know, instinctively, that athletics are good, that in training and exercising ourselves to the full we feel a natural satisfaction, and that walking at its best shares in this feeling. The idea works itself out in the usual way of idealism; in the beginning it calls to us dogmatically to exercise our bodies, and only as we continue in the process do we begin to realise its meaning; we can never completely justify it in argument, since it is an idea, and therefore demands faith as well as reason. But this at least can be said, that any other explanation breaks down. If we try to explain athletics and walking by reference to any standard outside themselves—to anything other than the pure bodily idea—utter confusion ensues.
There is one particularly insidious line of argument which starts from the conception of Health, and exhibits walking and athletics and most other things as part of a general Health Movement. It looks extremely attractive—the single cause exhibiting itself in a numerous and varied selection of phenomena, sanitation laws, food reform, fresh air, physical training, the simple life, hygiene, health-conscience,mens sana in corpore sanoand the rest. On this view, we walk and undertake athletics for the same reason which makes us open our windows and keep regular hours and observe moderation in food and drink—namely, to preserve health. It is all very impressive and scientific, until we begin to apply it in detail, and consider various forms of athletics from the health standpoint. Disturbing questions then arise. Is it not the fact that running is apt to strain the heart? Does not rowing need to be supplemented by something a little more jerky to keep the liver in order? Does not football lead to an abnormal and ill-distributed development of the frame, so that the professional footballer is neither hygienically nor artistically a model? Is not walking, as a mild and equable form of exercise, really healthier than any other form of athletics, operating more beneficially upon the heart, liver, lungs, digestion, motor-centres, blood-corpuscles, opsonin index, and the rest of the catalogue of modern psychology? Finally, is not the best exercise, from the health standpoint, a carefully graduated system of physical culture, nicely adapted by an expert to each individual’s needs, and performed in correct clothing in a sterilised atmosphere of 57° Fahrenheit?
This argument is dangerous in many ways. It goes near the truth and just manages to miss it completely. It holds out a bait to walkers to desert the cause of athletics that their own craft may be exalted. It encourages people who dislike athletics, but can walk in a fashion, to distinguish between walking and sport and say that all sport is unhealthy as well as demoralising. It sets a gulf between athletics and physicaltraining, so that the man who pursues both is in an equivocal position. It encourages doctors to talk about health, which they misunderstand, being preoccupied with illness. Finally, it lets in philosophers, who begin to say that a healthy activity must be spontaneous, that all health movements, including athletics, are fads, and that the only sound rule is to do what you like and eat what you like and drink what you like—particularly this last. So in the end walkers, athletes, doctors, hygienists, physical trainers and philosophers are set by the ears and the intellectual Riot Act is read.
The whole trouble arises from treating ‘health’ as something that can be analysed and defined. Really, it is one of the ultimate terms, like happiness or virtue or poetry. Doctors can, of course, define health in a limited and negative way as the absence of specific disease; and so far it may be possible to analyse the body into a catalogue of organs, to enter against each item the effects of the different kinds of exercise, and then to add up the entries andpronounce a result. Granted that this is a genuine scientific process, and not gross empiricism got up so as to impress the statistically susceptible, it still does not carry us very far. Health in the true sense is a single and positive thing: it is the active well-being of the body. To prove a man healthy, it is not enough to go through the items in his catalogue and give each a satisfactory mark; it is not enough even to group his items and show that A. B. C. prove that he can breathe properly, and D. E. F. that he can digest food, and X. Y. Z. that he can sleep. Health is not, any more than morality, the capacity to do things: it is the actual doing of them. It is good for a man to jump and run and walk and breathe and eat and sleep—not medically good in the sense that vaseline is good for chapped hands, but fundamentally and categorically and inexplicably good: it is what the body was made for, the realisation of its idea. Whether these activities are also good in the medical sense, whether, that is, they keep A. B. C. and the other items in good condition, is ofquite secondary importance. As a matter of fact, if we disregard medical evidence for and against, it is pretty clear that they are good in this sense: the things which the body naturally finds good also tend to preserve and strengthen it. This, after all, is only what we should expect, assuming the body not to have been invented as a bad joke. But the medical consequences are secondary: the primary thing is the activity itself.
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 toreduce 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 wouldbe 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 astick 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 mindwhich 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.
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.)
Inan 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 quicklyand 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 onSunday, 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 thendown 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 Documents2 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 whichwe 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 theoperation 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 yetsomething 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 istheir 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 andesprit 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 socialforms 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 ofPunch. 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 sacredaesthetic 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 thatKing Learis 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 willshake 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 unstablefeeling: 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 drawson, we reach the most authoritative and formal entertainments of all.
There is a second and quite different point about social forms in general, which I approach with some reluctance, but which must be treated if we are to measure the social validity of walking. In contrasting the acquaintance of A. and B. at a party and on a walk, we imagine them the same persons in either case. In actual fact, A. and B. on a walk would probably be of the same sex: A. and B. at a party would pretty certainly not be of the same sex. The principle of sex dualism runs through all the social forms: the more authoritative they become (dances and dinner-parties), the more inflexibly and mathematically is it exercised. This is Mrs. Y.’s real point against X.: it was not that he took a walk, nor (I flatter myself) that he walked with me, but that he walked with a male.
If any one wishes to take this point and fulminate anti-feministically against all dances and dinner-parties as being mere marriage-markets, he can easily do so by reading up the worst parts ofVanity 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 tohave 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 assumeairs 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 hiscorrespondence. 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. Atlast, 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 leastexpected 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 thewhole 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 nameon 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 WalkingOut. 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 thebeeches 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 upthis 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 thePrincesswould be accomplished. It is noteworthy how at the climax the poet turns instinctively to the right metaphor: we willwalkthis 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 isthe 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 betweenyou; 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.’