The bootmen in the first exasperation of outraged orthodoxy will probably say that shoes are effeminate, while boots are the mark of a man; at which the shoemen ask, why it should be effeminate to have a soft and slight covering between the feet and reality and manly to have several layers of bull’s hide clamped with armour-plating; and thus, by a neat allegorical turn, they open the whole feminist question. Somewhat sobered, the bootmen then say that boots support the ankles; to which the shoemen reply that their ankles do not need supporting. This innuendo finally makes the bootmen think, and they issue from their meditations with the unanswerable remark that shoes let stones in and boots do not. The shoemen, if they are wise, admit this, merely adding, that if shoes let stones in they can easily be taken off and shaken; and that if boots keep stones out, they also keep air out. The bootmen then take the aggressive: if air is wanted, why walk at all? Why not stand on your head with your feet out of window? To which the shoemen say, Don’t be silly; and the bootmen say, You have no sense of humour; and the relations of years are dissolved.
There is no need to follow this controversy further, either along its main lines or into its side-tracks, on the questions of nails, laces, and unguents. The issues involved are mainly utilitarian. There is little doubt that boots are better for rough ground and bog, and shoes for roads and level tracks; nails are necessary for rocks and steep grass-slopes, but are a burden on the hard highway. Again, shoes probably leave the feet freer, while boots add mechanically an extra inch or two to the stride. The question may be pursued through all its ramifications; and no doubt those who like quantitative thinking could ultimately produce some sort of determination of the footgear most likely to be suitable to the average man in the average country. Where comfort and utility only are concerned, the vulgar processes of comparing, adding and subtracting are quite sufficient to lead to a conclusion.
But quantitative reasoning, though invaluable in politics, is very poor fun. Life would have little flavour without occasional qualitative excursions into the a priori. The very bitterness of feeling aroused by discussions on walking equipment shows, I think, that something more is involved in them than the calculable considerations of comfort and utility. After all, it is mainly a man’s own affair whether his feet are comfortable and whether he slips on a grass slope: and were these the only issues, we should have no more concern with his boots than with his breakfast or banking-account. And the same holds true for most of the doubtful points of walking equipment. The relative comfort and healthiness of hats, caps, and nothing can be easily determined by counting heads and adding up (and cancelling out) medical opinions; the practical aspect of walking-sticks could probably be exhibited by a diagram of the body, a few mechanical equations, and a fatigue-curve or two. But what walker worthy of the name would accept such conclusions if they disagreed with his own views, or would even welcome them if they disagreed with other people’s views? Who would suffer himself to be quantitatively coerced into altering the shape of his hat, or giving up walking-sticks, or adopting or forswearing a tie?
Ties furnish perhaps the clearest instance of the break-down of utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body: even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill. No man’s health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable touch of colour; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape? A large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about beauty in ties?
The truth is that dress is a paradox. Any one attempting to apply to it the principles of health, comfort, beauty, or even economy, would become an atheist or a suicide in a fortnight. Modern dress is unhealthy, uncomfortable, ugly, and dear. In spite of the passionate denunciations of stiff shirts and collars by the whole medical profession, we and they continue to wear them. Our necks are chafed, our motions are cramped, our skin is slowly vitiated—but we do not rebel. The fabrics which we choose for our clothing tend on the whole to be the ugliest, the most expensive, and the least durable: yet no one dreams of following the elementary laws of utilitarian economics. Thus in the enlightened twentieth century, with all the wealth of the industrial revolution within our grasp, with doctors ready to prescribe the healthiest clothes and artists to design them most beautifully—when, in a word, at a quarter of the present cost and trouble which it takes to make us eyesores we could become dreams of comfort and colour-harmony—then we, the heirs of all the ages, with open eyes and unclouded vision, refuse.
It is due to fashion, no doubt: but what after all is fashion, and why should we obey it? It is only a human creation: it is no law dictated to the world from outside; it is merely something which some men chose and other men, of their free will, agreed to obey. When a person asks, ‘Why do we follow fashion?’ the only answer is, ‘Do you?’ If he says ‘No,’ he is probably a liar: but we can still ask, ‘Do you not find in yourself some instinct urging you to follow fashion?’ Even the most hardened liar will probably say ‘Yes.’ The answer then is, ‘Multiply that instinct by five million, and then think again.’ There is something hidden in each of us which tends to make us follow fashion, which welcomes, that is to say, a law of uniformity in dress quite regardless of its practical and aesthetic consequences, which craves, indeed, for uniformity first and at any cost, and lets the consequences be what they may.
This craving for uniformity is, I think, the fundamental fact that lies behind the paradox of dress. Changes come in dress as in other things: but they come much more slowly and irrationally, and in no perceptible relation to the ordinary desires and impulses of mankind. When they make for comfort or beauty, like the partial supersession of stiff shirts by soft shirts, we accept them gratefully: but there is no evidence that such changes ever coincided with any definite movement in favour of increased comfort or beauty: they came to us, as it were, from outside, unaccountably. We make no conscious efforts towards a change in dress; rather, we shrink from them, lest the growth of a revolutionary movement should shake our treasured uniformity, and leave us some fine morning with the awful prospect of not being quite certain of looking exactly like our neighbours.
This attitude will no doubt be called cowardly and unenterprising, but it is so universal that its morality seems hardly worth arguing. In case, however, any stern moralists wish to denounce this mean compliance with fashion in the name of liberty, I would commend two points to their notice. First, the followers of fashion can claim that they are literally fulfilling Kant’s law; they are acting upon a principle which they can and do will to be law universal. When I put on my tie in the morning, my first and greatest desire is that every other man should do the same. It is not from any malign wish that others should suffer what I suffer: it is rather from a desire that, apart from any considerations of suffering or happiness, humanity, myself included, may be one upon this matter. The champions of liberty probably reply that they also satisfy the Kantian condition on a higher plane: they are ready to act on a universal principle that all men shall be free to dress in the most convenient and beautiful way. To which we answer, on a still higher plane, are you quite sure that this would be real freedom? In our happy youth we were taught to distinguish between the real freedom which only exists in relation to a positive law of which it is conscious, and the mere negative freedom from restraint, which is empty of content and apt to degenerate into caprice. Is it not at least a possibility that our craving for uniformity is no mere cowardice, but rests upon a deep-seated human instinct, warning us that liberty in dress would prove a merely negative liberty, and in fear of this throwing us back to the other extreme, so that we welcome a positive law, however irrational?
Another possibility has sometimes occurred to me, namely, that uniformity in dress is in the nature of a political allegory. Modern costume is a great equaliser; in outward appearance there is no longer any distinction between the aristocracy and the middle ranks of life. Every one has noticed the unducal appearance of eminent men, emphasised as it so often is nowadays by the curious fall which has taken place in the social status of whiskers. Every one, again, is familiar with the difficulty felt in clubs and at evening parties in distinguishing fellow-guests from waiters. The allegory may be interpreted in two ways: it may be taken as a satirical demonstration of the results of equality, or as indicating a generous instinct that one man’s natural advantages shall not cause him to outshine too brightly his less happy neighbours. But at least it seems possible that the dress paradox veils beneath its apparent perversity some lofty meaning: so that when the libertarians start piling up sublimities against us, we can reply with a few of our own.
In the rarefied atmosphere of these moral altitudes, a good many of the quarrels over walking equipment lose their importance: they are seen to be particular illustrations of a far wider question. Ties and hats and waistcoats and trousers—it is no use to argue about any of them as if they were ordinary human creations made in response to a felt desire and adapted to some practical purpose; they are all costume, symbols of something more inscrutable than practical purposes, and not to be judged by ordinary standards. Those who wear waistcoats or hats may, of course, attempt to defend them on practical grounds: they may even say, with some truth, that waistcoats have convenient pockets, and hats keep the sun off. But this is really an afterthought: it is the old human tendency to rationalise impulses after the event. The points cannot be argued singly and on practical grounds, until the paradox of dress has been faced and overcome.