What he means I take to be this: when we say that burglary is bad, or murder, or sitting up late, we know what we mean and can prove our words; the bad things do not fit in with other things or each other, and if developed on a large scale will cause trouble; and if any one says they are good, we either neglect him or hit him on the head. Similarly, when we say that a picture or symphony is bad, we know what we mean: it does not fit in with our general ideas (in the strictest sense of either word), and if any one says it is good, we decline to argue with him and send him to the theatre. Further, the badness of the picture, although not the same as the badness of burglary, is yet something like it. But if any one says that it is bad to go a walk instead of attending a tea-party, we are not quite certain what he means. On the burglary line of thought, if every one went for walks and no one went to tea-parties, it would cause no trouble; indeed, it would make for peace and harmony. On the picture line of thought, a walk is far more like a work of art than a tea-party. Therefore, if it is bad, it is a new kind of badness quite unlike the other kinds, and it seems a pity to use the same word for it.
As against Mrs. Y., X. has overloaded his case by talking about pictures. Document 4 clearly shows that she accused him on moral grounds, and was not thinking about aesthetics, which she probably associates only with Bunthorne. Had he confined himself to the moral question, his case would have been strong. On the one side is a walk, a thing good in itself, and also tending to promote friendly feelings. On the other side we have recognised social forms—tea-parties, calls, dinners, dances—which claim to override walking. What is their moral authority? If the object of social forms is to promote sociability, why are these forms recognised and not walking? Do they promote more sociability or better sociability than walking? If not, what do social duties mean, and what is their sanction?
None of these questions are easy to answer, because the subject has never been investigated. All the ordinary moral apparatus of life, law and custom and esprit de corps, and the other forms in which morality embodies itself, have been carefully tabulated and weighed and set forth, so that we know where we are in dealing with them. But no one has ever seriously studied social forms. We know why and how far we should obey the law and conform to common moral customs: we do not know why or how far we should pay calls or go to garden-parties. If every one stopped obeying the law, trouble would ensue; if every one stopped going to garden-parties, it is hard to see how the world would suffer permanent harm. We are not even certain what the authoritative social forms really are: no one has ever made a list of them. We do not even know their history: while everything else, from philosophy to eating and drinking, has its carefully tabulated series of facts from the earliest times to the present day, we have to collect the history of social forms, in so far as it is possible, from novels, oral tradition, and the bound volumes of Punch. So, when we are faced with the simple question, Why is not walking a recognised social form? it is very difficult to see the answer.
One reply, which is not so idiotic as it sounds, would be that walking is not a social duty because it is pleasant. The kind of friendliness it promotes involves no effort; if people like a thing, it cannot really be a duty. What is really needed to carry society along, is the effort involved in making the acquaintance of new people; this is necessary and is slightly unpleasant, and therefore has all the marks of a duty. But this assumes two things: first, that we only walk with people we know already; second, that when we go out in the evening, we only talk to people we do not know already. Neither of these assumptions is true: there are plenty of social entertainments every bit as effortless socially as a walk of two familiar friends; on the other hand, there are walks with a complete or partial stranger involving much more effort and a much greater hazard than any party.
Confront A. and B., previously unknown to each other, at a party. What happens? With no common experience behind them, and no common activity between them, except sitting on chairs, they have no talk, to bring their personalities into relation with each other by means of words, both being regarded as failures if the talk stops for an instant. Their surroundings are not sufficiently remote to compel any feeling of intimacy; their food, drink, and dress are not such as to encourage any coherency or continuity of thought; worst of all, their bodies are inactive, and their minds feverishly stimulated. The result is that they try to talk about books and plays, or even pictures and music, and either become insincere or expose their most sacred aesthetic principles to a total stranger: they oscillate between banality and intensity, and are usually driven back, for lack of anything better to say, on sheer verbal brilliancy. In the end A. cannot tell whether B.’s conversation is natural, due to nerves, or a deliberate attempt at intellectual tyranny; while to B., A. is like a nightmare or a hallucination, a discontinuity in ordinary experience. When they meet again, if they ever do, they are at sea: A. cannot be certain whether B. is an intimate friend to whom he once confided his belief that King Lear is a good play, or an enemy on whom he once inflicted an epigram.
But send A. and B. for a walk, and the whole situation is changed. They at once have a common interest and a common activity, and every influence combines to make them simply themselves. They need not talk all the time, and what talk there is will spring naturally from their circumstances, and will not be very brilliant. They will learn the value of pauses, of silence, of ejaculations, even of grunts. The bodies will be fully occupied, and will shake and settle down the contents of their brains into good solid dogmatisms and prejudices purely spontaneous and characteristic of themselves, the stones of which intimacy can be built. Three miles will tell them what twenty parties cannot, whether they are destined to be friends or no. And therefore, while the social possibilities (in the strictest sense) are greater, the risks are greater too: a bigger task may be achieved, or a more complete failure. Is not a walk then, on both sides, a far greater social duty than a party?
When we come to consider social forms seriously, it almost looks as if their conditions were framed so as to discourage intimacy. To begin with, most of them take place at night. Now, the night has many merits: it is the time when men begin slowly to settle down to the period of rest and low vitality; it is a kindly but limited time—excellent for smoking in a chair, or reading an old novel, or thinking in a not very acute way of yesterday, and to-day, and to-morrow; but it is bad for anything continuous, anything energetic, anything needing the whole man. The sun by going down indicates that he does not expect very much of humanity till he reappears. Everything that people do when he is gone is limited in one way or another. They get into houses, forsaking the outside air; they kindle artificial lights, which are a very poor substitute; they sit or dance, instead of walking about. Atmospheres, on the whole, are more vitiated by night than by day; drinking, on the whole, occurs more after sunset than before. If people were content to limit their activities to suit the limitations of nature, it would not matter. But when they try to be active in these conditions, they necessarily become morbid: the lights and the atmosphere and (in some cases) the drink stimulate a feverish and unnatural excitement, which some call the romantic feeling of the evening, in the strongest contrast to the solid and concrete activities of the day. This kind of excitement can never really promote intimacy. It may make people for the moment less grumpy and more accessible than usual, but it is necessarily a transient and unstable feeling: dealing with a man in this state you feel that he is not really representing himself, and is not therefore authorised to give or receive friendship. To be certain of him, you must meet him by day.
It may be held, of course, that night and the conditions which go with it are a necessity, since by day people have no leisure for social forms. But I think it is clear that night is chosen for its own sake, and that the peculiar hygienic conditions of nocturnal gatherings have an appeal of their own. The people who support social forms do not all work, and there would be a large clientèle obtainable for entertainments by day, if they really preferred this. It is clear that they do not—that the night conditions, abnormal and detached from ordinary experience, are felt to be the right conditions for dances and dinner-parties and conversaziones and the rest. Social duty and formality seem to become progressively more rigorous as the sun goes down. Lunch is an informal and casual thing, with no special obligations and code of duty; with tea-parties and calls formality increases; finally, as night draws on, we reach the most authoritative and formal entertainments of all.
There is a second and quite different point about social forms in general, which I approach with some reluctance, but which must be treated if we are to measure the social validity of walking. In contrasting the acquaintance of A. and B. at a party and on a walk, we imagine them the same persons in either case. In actual fact, A. and B. on a walk would probably be of the same sex: A. and B. at a party would pretty certainly not be of the same sex. The principle of sex dualism runs through all the social forms: the more authoritative they become (dances and dinner-parties), the more inflexibly and mathematically is it exercised. This is Mrs. Y.’s real point against X.: it was not that he took a walk, nor (I flatter myself) that he walked with me, but that he walked with a male.
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.