Sociati incedunto.
William of Wykeham.
On the subject of walking and driving there is but little to be said, for the simple reason that the time thus passed in the open air is usually passed by persons in the company of members of their own families. The usual fashionable hour for walking, both in the metropolis and at watering-places or seaside towns, is from twelve to two o’clock.
Manners and Tone of Good Society,
by a Member of the Aristocracy.
Chapter xiv. (4th edition; n.d.)
V
WALKING AS A SOCIAL FORM
In an earlier essay an attempt was made to rebut the charge sometimes levelled against walkers of being unsociable. This was easy to do; for the charge can only be sustained by making mere conversation, mere verbal output per hour, the measure of sociability. Apart from this fallacy, no one can seriously hold that walkers are not sociable beings, capable of intimacy, responsive to good fellowship, adjustable to the conformation of each other’s personality, sensitive to the fundamental unities and unaffected by the superficial diversities of men. Both the process of walking and its environment tend to sociability. The process is a good activity, shared by two or more concrete beings who are doing their best and are at their best; it lays a foundation of mutual respect more quickly and more surely than any specialised activity of the half or quarter man. The environment of a walk is exactly right; it is familiar enough to create a sense of ease, and yet strange enough to throw the walkers back on themselves with the instinct of human solidarity—that instinct which unites a rowing crew on a long journey and makes English visitors civil to each other in Swiss pensions. The scenery changes fast enough to be interesting, and not too fast to give a feeling of continuity and permanency. Finally, sun and wind and rain and lunch, and the consultation of maps and divination of the way, all combine to surround the walkers with an atmosphere of sociability.
Those who call walkers unsociable will probably reply that this is not quite what they mean. Friendliness and good fellowship are all very well, but they do not necessarily imply a strict execution of social duties. The real charge against walkers is not that they are unfriendly to each other, but that they fail in their duties to other people. They go walks, especially on Sunday, when they ought to be paying calls; they smoke in chairs when they ought to be in evening dress; they are in bed—and sometimes even out of bed again—when they ought to be dancing. In short, they do not take their fair share in maintaining the existing social forms; hence they are rightly called unsociable.
Before a jury this general accusation could be rolled back in confusion: there are plenty of walkers who are punctilious in social observances, and plenty of social recalcitrants who are not walkers. But in that heart of hearts which lies beyond the reach of juries, we cannot escape an uneasy feeling that there is something in the accusation. Most walkers at some time or another must have been conscious of the tug of conflicting duties, must have felt that there was a choice between going a walk and paying a call, between going out at night and being in good condition next day, and that while fulfilling a need of their natures in walking they were neglecting something else which either was or was thought to be a duty.
To illustrate this point, perhaps I may tell a perfectly true story. I use fictitious names, for the sake of politeness, but documents can be produced, if necessary, to prove the facts. I had arranged with my friend X. to take a walk on 26th March. (Document 1—postcard from X. to me accepting, postmark 22nd March). Subsequently Mrs. Y. asked him to tea on 26th March (Document 2—Mrs. Y.’s letter, dated 23rd March, with ‘Refd.’ docketed on the corner in the handwriting of X.). X. refused on the ground of a previous engagement (letter not preserved) and came for a walk with me, and we found a new way up Leith Hill, combining the Walker Miles route by Pickett’s Hole to Ranmore Common (read backwards), with the diversion from the way down Leith Hill through Deerleap Wood (also read backwards), which makes a pleasing variation from the normal ways by Logmore Lane or the Rookeries. (Document 3—certified copies of my notes on pages 51 and 96 of Walker Miles—dated 26th March). Continuing westward over Holmbury Hill and then down to the road under Pitch Hill, we found Z. sitting in a motor-car and pretending to enjoy the scenery, while ‘Enry investigated whatever had gone wrong underneath. We exchanged a few courtesies (documents not preserved) and went our ways. ‘Enry subsequently won his fight and took Z. back to town in time for the Y.’s tea-party, where he told Mrs. Y. all about us several times over, being a sensitive man. Mrs. Y., thus learning what X.’s previous engagement was, became incensed, rebuked him (Document 4—date 26th March), cut him out of her visiting list, disparaged his character, knocked him off the Rota (see below), induced her friends to suspend his acquaintance (Document 5—comparative return of X.’s invitations for the three months preceding and succeeding 26th March), and finally drove him into solitude and the contemplative life, with the result that he wrote a book about philosophy without using the term ‘values’ (Document 6—‘Adumbrations of Twilight.’ By X. Price 7s. 6d.).
The point of this story is in Documents 2 and 4. X. held that the walk constituted a previous engagement warranting a refusal of the tea-party; Mrs. Y. held that it did not (to put it mildly). In other words, X. held that the walk involved social obligations comparable with those involved by the tea-party; Mrs. Y. held that the tea-party was a social duty and the walk merely a pleasure, and that duty ought to have overridden pleasure. The tea-party was a recognised social form, and the walk was not. This is the essential point, and to appreciate it, we must abstract from all the particular and personal considerations in the case—the question (not disputed) whether Mrs. Y. is nicer than I, the fact that X. wished to try the Deerleap Wood route, the especially fine day in the rear of a cyclone and so forth.
X. himself, in ‘Adumbrations of Twilight,’ appears to have been thinking over this question. In one of the more cheerful and impulsive passages of that work he says (p. 247 of the popular edition): ‘It may, perhaps, be doubted whether within the area of political and moral good which we can hardly deny to be co-extensive with the life of a normal civilised being, there do not lie areas dominated by a principle, or set of principles, whose relation to the ultimate good, while we must necessarily postulate it as existent, is yet not, or not completely, demonstrable, and often appears indeed to be a relation only of conflict or incompatibility. He would be a confident thinker who would posit the actual or even the realisable compatibility of aesthetic and moral ends: but short of the aesthetic, in the actual life of men wherein the moral autonomy is most generally asserted, it seems at least tenable that there may well be realms of apparent if not ultimately irreconcilable heteronomy. Especially it has seemed to me in the social forms and customs of civilised men and women, that there may well lurk a homiletic principle, if I may so call it, distinct from and even in apparent conflict with moral and political principle, whose conformability to ultimate purpose is as yet undemonstrated, whose phenomenology is as yet indeterminate, whose operation is as distinct from the operation of moral principle as that of the comedic form, which is its aesthetic counterpart, from the epic or tragic. Such speculations, of course, can at best be tentative and provisional: but at least the point must not be altogether overlooked.’ This is X.’s only published reply to Document 4, and very temperate and gentlemanly in tone it is.