Read Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) Online
Authors: Ford Madox Ford
But when Swinburne died — to our lasting shame — we did not even bury him in Westminster Abbey. To our lasting shame I say — for Swinburne was, without exception, the best-known Englishman in the world. I do not think that it was the trial of Wilde that alone brought this about. Two other factors conduced.
In the glorious ‘nineties Mr. John Lane and Mr. Elkin Mathews founded a romantic and wonderful publishing business. This was called the Bodley Head. It attracted all the young poets of the nest of singing birds that England then was. There never was such an excitement.
Little volumes of poems were published in limited editions, and forty, fifty or sixty pounds would be paid at auction for a single copy. There appeared to be no end to it, and then the end came. I do not know why Mr. Lane and Mr. Mathews parted: I do not know why the Bodley Head died down. No doubt the fate of Wilde had a great deal to do with it. Probably the public, with its singular and muddle-headed perspicacity, inseparably connected in its mind the idea of poetry with ideas of vice. I do not know. At any rate, all these glories died away as utterly as the radiance is said to vanish from the dying flying-fish.
And then came the Boer War which appears to me like a chasm separating the new world from the old. Since that period the whole tone of England appears to me to have entirely changed, principles having died out of politics, even as the spirit of artistry has died out amongst the practitioners of the arts.
As it is in the political world, so in the artistic. I do not mean to say that the Pre-Raphaelites were any very great shakes. But they eared intensely about their work; they talked about it and about little else. They regarded themselves, indeed, as priests. And without some such beliefs, how can an artist be hardened to do good work? There is no being so solitary, there is no being with so little power of gauging where he stands in the estimation of the world.
I — and when I write “I” I mean every writer who ever used a hyphen — am told sometimes that I am the finest — or let us say the most precious — stylist now employing the English language. That may be so or it may not. What means have I of knowing? For the very paper which says that such and such a work of mine is the finest of the sort that was ever written, will say to-morrow that a book by Miss — is a work almost inconceivably fine — the finest thing since Shakespeare; and this is constantly happening to me.
A weekly paper last year wrote of one of my books: “This is undoubtedly the finest historical novel that has appeared since the days of Scott.” Next week in the same column, written by the same hand, there appeared the review of a novel by a female connection of the critic. “This,” he said, “is undoubtedly the finest historical novel that has appeared since the days of Scott.” Where, then, do I stand, or to whom shall I go to find out? Is it to my sales? They are satisfactory, but they might be larger. Is it to my publisher? He will inevitably tell me — and every writer who ever used a hyphen — that he loses money over my books.
It is twenty years since I published my first novel, and every year or so since then the publisher of that early work has written to tell me that he lost one hundred pounds by that book, and why will I not give him another? And I ask myself why, if this gentleman once lost so largely over me — why does he wish to publish me again? Or why should any one wish to publish my work? Yet I have never written a line that has not been published.
This, of course, is only the fortune of war; but what strikes me as remarkable was that my grandfather was as anxious to embark me upon an artistic career as most parents are to prevent their children from entering into a life that as a rule is so precarious.
My father’s last words to me were: “Fordie, whatever you do, never write a book.” Indeed, so little idea had I of meddling with the arts that, although to me a writer was a very wonderful person, I prepared myself very strenuously for the Indian Civil Service. This was a real grief to my grandfather, and I think he was exceedingly overjoyed when the doctors refused to pass me for that service on the ground that I had an enlarged liver. And when then I seriously proposed to go into an office, his wrath became tempestuous.
Tearing off his nightcap — for he happened at the time to be in bed with a bad attack of gout — he flung it to the other end of the room.
“God damn and blast my soul!” he exclaimed.
“Isn’t it enough that you escaped providentially from being one kind of a cursed clerk, but you want to go and be another? I tell you, I will turn you straight out of my house if you go in for any kind of commercial life.” So that my fate was settled for me.
POETS AND PRESSES
I THINK that there is no crime — literary or connected with literature — that nowadays an average, fairly honest English writer will not commit for the sake of a little money. He will lengthen his book to suit one publisher, he will cut it down to suit another. Nay, men otherwise honourable and trustworthy will, for the matter of that, perjure themselves in the most incredible manner as to financial arrangements thay may have come to, or in the most cold-blooded style will break contracts and ignore obligations. I suppose that never before was the financial struggle amongst the literary classes so embittered and so ignoble. The actual circumstances of literary life may have been more humiliating in the days when Johnson waited upon the patron that he never found. Hazlitt and the English essayists who seem to have existed in an atmosphere of tallow candles and porter, and to have passed their days in low pot-houses, may have been actually worse off than writers of their rank would be to-day. Hood starved, Douglas Jerrold, Hannay or Angus B. Riach led existences of extreme squalor with spirits of the most high. And indeed, disagreeable as Bohemianism seems to me, the somewhafsqualid lives of writers and artists of the ‘forties and ‘fifties had about them something much more manly and even a little more romantic than is to be found in the literary life of to-day. I do not know that the artist of the ‘forties troubled himself much about social position? Cruikshank was violently angry when Maclise, in his wonderful series of pen-and-ink portraits in
Fraser’s Magazine
, gave to the world a likeness of the immortalizer of Pickwick sitting upon a barrel in a boosing-ken, his sketch block held before him, whilst his keen and restless eyes surveyed what the commentator in the text calls
this scene of tumult and crime.
Mr. Cruikshank wrote indignantly to declare that it was shameful to pillorize him for ever as sitting in such low haunts. He wished to say that he was as good a gentleman as the Duke of Wellington, and passed his days as a gentleman should. And, indeed, I dimly remember being taken to call at Cruikshank’s home in Mornington Crescent — though Cruikshank himself must have been long dead — and seeing there such Nottingham lace curtains, pieces of brain-coral, daguerreotypes, silhouettes and engravings after Cruikshank, as would have been found in any middle-class home of early and mid Victorian days. One of the principal of these engravings was the immense caricature that Cruikshank made for the Good Templars. This represented upon one hand the prosperous and whiskered satisfaction that falls to a man who has led a teetotal existence and, in many terrible forms, what would happen to you if you indulged in any kind of alcoholic beverage.
Dickens avowed quite frankly and creditably his desire to have footmen in purple velvet small clothes to hang behind his carriage, and Thackeray was never quite easy as to his social position. But on the other hand there was as a general rule very little thought about these matters. You earned very little, so you sat in a pot-house because you could not afford a club. And you got through life somehow without much troubling to make yourself of importance by meddling in politics. Thus, for instance, there was my grandfather’s cousin Tristram Madox, who, being along with Douglas Hannay, a midshipman, was along with him cashiered and turned out of the Service for breaking leave and going ashore at Malta, and “violently assaulting Mr. Peter Parker, Tobacconist.” Tristram Madox ran through several subsequent fortunes, and ended by living on ten shillings a week that were regularly sent him by Madox Brown. This allowance was continued for many years — twenty or thirty, I should think. One day it occurred to Madox Brown that he would like some news of his poor relation. I was accordingly sent down to the squalid cottage in a suburb of Ramsgate, to which for so many years the weekly postal orders had been addressed. Upon my mentioning the name of Madox, consternation fell upon a pale-faced household. Tristram Madox had been dead ten years; in the interval the cottage had changed hands twice, but the incoming tenants had always accepted gratefully the weekly ten shillings that fell upon them from they knew not where.
Hannay on the other hand — presumably because he had no fortunes to run through — adopted the life of a man of letters. He wrote one sufficiently bad novel, called
Eustace Conyers
, and lived that life which always seemed to lie beneath the shadow of the King’s Bench prison. I never heard my grandfather say much that was particularly illuminating about this group of men; though his cousin took him frequently into their society. Their humour seems to have been brutal and personal, but only a bludgeon would suppress it. Thus, when Tristram Madox was talking about one of his distinguished ancestors of the tenth century, Douglas Jerrold shut him up by saying: “I know! The man who was hanged for sheep-stealing.” Or, again, when Douglas Jerrold was uttering a flood of brilliant witticisms a very drunken woman, who had been asleep with her head upon the table opposite Jerrold, shut
him
up by raising a bleared face and exclaiming: “You’re a bloody fool.”
Nothing else would have shut Jerrold up. But I never heard my grandfather say that it was reprehensible or remarkable that they should sit in low pot-houses, or even that he should go there to meet them. They could not afford anything better; so they took what they could get. As for the social revolution, they never talked about it, and although Dickens wrote
Oliver Twist
and
Bleak House
it was done with a warm-hearted enthusiasm, and the last thing that he would have considered himself was a theoretic social reformer. Between this insouciance and the uneasy social self-consciousness of the present day literary man, there arose for a short time the priestly pride, as you might call it, of the Pre-Raphaelites.
These people undoubtedly regarded themselves as a close aristocracy. They produced works of art of one kind or another, and no one who did not produce works of art counted. The laity in fact might not have existed at all. Indeed, even the learned and professional classes were not excluded from the general contempt. An Oxford Don was regarded as a foolish, useless, and academic person, and my grandfather would say for instance, of a doctor: “Oh, those fellows have nothing better to do than to wash their hands twelve times a day.” It never, I think, entered his head to inquire why a doctor so frequently washed his hands. He regarded it as a kind of foppishness. And I can well remember that I entirely shared his point of view. So that to speak to any one who made money by commercial pursuits was almost not to speak to a man at all. It was as if one were communicating with one of the lower animals endowed with power of speech.
And to a certain extent the public of those days acquiesced. From the earliest mediæval times until towards the end of the nineteenth century there has always been vaguely in the public mind the idea that the man of letters was a sort of necromancer — as it were a black priest. In the dark ages almost the only poet that was known to man was the author of the
Æneid.
I do not suppose that many men had read this epic, but all men had heard of its author. Was not his fame worldwide? Was he not Duke Virgil of Mantua? Did he not build the city of Venice upon an egg? Yes, surely, he indeed was the greatest of all magicians. He left behind him his books of magic. If you took a pin and stuck it into one of these books the line that it hit upon predicted infallibly what would be the outcome of any enterprise upon which you were engaged. These were the
Sortes Virgilianae
. Similarly, any one who could write or was engaged with books was regarded as a necromancer. Did he not have strange knowledges? Thus you had Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, or Dr. Faustus. The writer remained thus for centuries something mysterious, some one possessing those strange knowledges. For various classes, by the time of Johnson his mystery has gradually been whittled down. The aristocracy, in the shape of patrons, came to regard him as a miserable creature, something between a parasite and a pimp. To his personal tradesman he was also a miserable creature who did not pay his bills and starved in a garret. By the nineteenth century the idea that he was a sort of rogue and vagabond had spread pretty well throughout the land. A middle class father was horrified when his daughter proposed to marry an artist or a writer. These people were notorious for marital infidelities and for the precariousness of their sources of livelihood. Nevertheless, a sort of mysterious sanctity attached to their produce. There can hardly have been a single middle-class household that did not have upon its drawing-room table one or two copies of books by Mr. Ruskin. I remember very well being consulted by a prosperous city merchant as to what books he should take with him upon a sea voyage. I gave him my views, to which he paid no attention. He took with him,
Sesame and Lilies
,
Notes upon Sheep Folds
, Carlyle’s
Life of Frederic the Great
, Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
, and Swinburne’s
Atalanta.
With this singular library my portly friend set sail. He had not the slightest idea of what any of these books might be about, but he said: “Ah! they’ll do me a great deal of good.” As if, in his cabin, these volumes would act as a spiritual lifebuoy and float him, supposing the ship should founder, if not to land, at least to Heaven. That was the trace of the old necromantic idea that something mysterious attached to the mere possession of books. But the same gentleman would introduce a writer to his friends with a sort of apologetic cough, rather as if he had been found in the company of a prostitute, and when revelations of Carlyle’s domestic misfortunes were published he manifested a calm satisfaction. He had always suspected that there must be something wrong because Carlyle was an author. But he still expected that his soul was saved because he possessed the
Life of Frederic the Great.
Thus in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties things were at a very satisfactory pass. Artists regarded themselves as an aristocracy set apart and walled off. The rest of the world regarded them as dangerous beings producing mysterious but, upon the whole, salutary works. There was no mixing and there was no desire to mix. As far as the arts were concerned, there was in those days a state of affairs very much such as has subsisted in France since the time of the French Revolution. It is true that in France somewhat more social importance attaches to the man of letters. That is largely because of the existence of the French Academy. At the time when there is a vacancy in the ranks of the immortal Forty you may observe a real stir in what is known as All Paris. Duchesses get out their carriages and drive candidates round to pay their calls upon the electors; nay, duchesses themselves canvass energetically in favour of the particular master whose claims they favour, and the inaugural speech of an elected Academician is a social function more eagerly desired than were the drawing-rooms of Her late Majesty Victoria. But otherwise the worlds of letters and of arts mix comparatively little with commercial society in France.
And this has always seemed to me to be a comparatively desirable frame of mind for the practitioner of the arts to adopt. For, unless he do consider himself — rightly or wrongly — as something apart he must rapidly lose all sense of the dignity of his avocation. He will find himself universally regarded, no longer, perhaps, as anything so important as a dangerous rogue and vagabond, but as something socially negligible. And all respect for literature as literature he will find to have died out utterly and for ever.
Flaubert was obsessed by the idea that literature was a thing hated by the “bourgeoisie”; that was the dominant idea of his life. And in his day I think he was right. That is to say, that the common man hated violently any new literary form that was vital, unusual and original. Thus Flaubert came to sit upon the criminal’s bench after the publication of
Madame Bovary
. But nowadays, and in England, we have a singular and chilling indifference to all literature. Shakespeare, Homer and Dante might all put out their works to-day — for all I know writers as great may actually be amongst us — and the actual effects of their publishing would be practically nothing. It is all very well to say that the press is responsible for this state of affairs. We have a press in England that is, upon the whole, of the lowest calibre of any in the civilized world — I am, of course, speaking in terms intellectual, for our news organization is as good as it could be. But from the point of view of criticism of any kind, whether of the fine arts, of letters, of music or of life itself, all but the very best of our newspapers of to-day would disgrace a fourth class provincial town of France or Germany. And this is a purely commercial matter. When I was conducting a certain publication I was rung up on the telephone by the advertising managers of two of the largest and most respectable daily newspapers. The first one told me that if I would take a six-inch double column in his literary supplement once a week, he would undertake that a favourable notice of my publication should appear in his organ side by side with the advertisement. The advertising manager of the other newspaper asked me peremptorily why I had not advertised in his columns; I replied that it was because I disapproved very strongly of a certain action to which his newspaper had committed itself.
“Very well, then,” he said, “you quite understand that no notice of your periodical will be taken in our literary columns.”
I am bound to say that this gentleman was merely “bluffing,” and that quite impartial notices of my publication did appear in his paper. Indeed, I should imagine that the literary editor of the journal in question never spoke to an advertising manager. But just think of the state of affairs — though it
ivas
only a matter of bluff — when such a threat could be made! I do not mean to say that there is any very actual or overt corruption in the London press of to-day, but the hunt for advertisements is a bitter and unscrupulous struggle. Advertisement canvassers are — or at any rate I have found them so — men entirely without scruples, and the editorial departments of newspapers are thoroughly slack in the supervision of their representatives. The advertisement canvasser will come into the editorial office and will say to the literary editor in a friendly but slightly complaining manner — I have heard this speech myself —