Read Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) Online
Authors: Ford Madox Ford
So the writer of fiction would estimate the chances, and I do not know whether he would be right or wrong; for certainly the ordinary man of letters has precious little to offer anybody and none too much for himself. Poor devil, he is between the necessity for an expenditure that would have seemed vast to his grandfather and a buying public that day by day shows less desire to buy books. For this too the South African War was partly responsible. I had a young connection who lately went up for the preliminary examination at the Admiralty. Said the examining admiral:
“Now, my man, what papers does your father read? And what do you judge from that that his politics are?”
This was not an invidious political question on the admiral’s part; the object of the examination is to test a boy’s powers of observation. The boy’s answer was: “Oh, my governor’s a Tory. He reads the
Daily Chronicle
, the
Daily News,
the
Westminster Gazette
, the
Manchester Guardian..
..”
“But,” said the admiral, aghast, “those are all Liberal papers. You said your father was a Tory.”
“Oh yes,” the boy answered with assurance, “he takes in
The Times,
the
Saturday Review
, the
Spectator,
and
Field
, to give his side a show — to put the money into their pockets. But he never reads any of them except now and then, and the
Field
always on Sunday. He says he can do all the lying that is wanted on his side for himself, without reading the Tory papers. But he wants to know what lies the other side are telling, because he can’t make
them
up for himself.”
The admiral laughed and passed the boy, but the admiral was old-fashioned. He had a pre-Boer-War habit of mind as regarded the newspapers. In his prime he took
The Times
or the
Morning Post,
and that was all he had in the way of a paper. But with the coming of the South African War we acquired the habit of skimming through from seven to ten papers a day — to get a little hope. I don’t blame us. The man who could go through the period of Spion Kop without rushing anywhere to read the latest bulletin, or could keep in his pocket one single penny that might give him some glimmer of hopeful news, was something less than a man. I suppose I was as hot a pro-Boer as any one well could be, but I know I came very near to crying with joy when Mafeking was relieved. I remember that that night I had been up to Highgate. I was coming back very late and I asked the tram-driver if there was any news. He said there was none. Suddenly the conductor came running out of the fire-station shouting:
“The relief-party is in!”
Immediately he scrambled on board the tram, the driver whipped his horses to a gallop, and we went tearing madly down that long hill into the darkness, the conductor standing on top of the tram and shouting at the top of his voice that Mafeking was relieved. And, in those black and grim streets, shining with the wet, suddenly every window lit up and opened, and from each there came out a Union Jack. It was as if we entered a city given over to night, to the tears of the rain, to merciless suspense, and as if we left behind us streets gay, triumphant, illuminated, imperial. Or perhaps imperial is not the word. I don’t know.
Farther down in the town we came upon places where the news was already. I went towards St. Paul’s to see if there was not some sort of inspiring demonstration. But in Holborn I was knocked down. A fat and elderly gentleman, bearing over his shoulder a long pole on which were nailed about twenty little flags, turned suddenly round and the end of the pole caught me under the ear.
Imperial? No, I think not. We were more like a nation of convicted murderers, suddenly reprieved when the hangman’s cap was over our eyes. I think I was as glad as any one else. But the Nemesis remains. Still, every day I read my five newspapers. And, in common with the rest of England, I don’t believe a single word that I read in any one of them. Like the father of the boy who was up for examination, I prefer to read papers of the shade of politics that for the moment may happen to be not my own. I can lie so much more skilfully than any journalist upon my own side.
But this enormous and unimpressed reading of newspapers has given the last kick to the writer of books. It is the end of him. He has gone out. Before the War a rich man occasionally bought a book. The other day I owned a periodical. Said a man to me
— he
owned seven motor cars:
“I wish your paper did not cost half-a-crown. If it was only a shilling I would certainly buy it. But times are so hard that I have to put down my book bill.”—” And he had great possessions.”
Before the War this gentleman would have been forced, by sheer hypocrisy, to pay that particular cock to Æsculapius. But the War gave us our excuse for “putting down” anything — book bills coming of course first — and since the War my friend has had to keep it up against a Rand magnate of his immediate circle. At that moment this other gentleman owned six motor-cars. My friend had therefore to have his seven. I believe he was the second richest man in England.
I cannot, however, say that the poor come any better out of that particular struggle. Thus at about the same time I received a whining letter from a working men’s club in the north of London. They said that they numbered exactly thirty, that my periodical was absolutely necessary to them, and that they could not possibly afford half-a-crown.
They were mostly school-teachers. I answered perfectly seriously that if my periodical was so absolutely necessary to the saving of their souls, there were exactly thirty of them, so that to purchase a copy for their club would cost each of them exactly one penny per month. I suggested that if each one of them would once a month walk a penny tram fare, or smoke l-64th of a pound less tobacco, or drink one quarter of a pint less beer, or go for one day without a daily paper, their club might very well purchase monthly a copy of my so necessary periodical. I received in reply a note from the secretary of that club stating that my letter was ribald, insulting and utterly unsympathetic to the woes of the poor who had paid me an undeserved compliment.
No. I do not think that the workman, the schoolteacher and the rest of them will be any better masters for literature which is falling under their dominance. And I do not see any hope of improvement until the state supplies literature free. That of course is coming, but I have no doubt that the state will sweat the author even more mercilessly than do, in effect, the millionaire, the shopkeeper, the schoolteacher and the workman of to-day. For all these people demand such literature as they have time, or deign, to consume — they demand it at derisorily cheap rates. And you cannot have good new literature cheaply. It cannot be done, simply because the author, too, has the right to live. Of course you may have cheap reprints of the works of dead authors — as cheaply as you like, for the state, with its contempt for all things of the mind, steals the only property which is really created by any man. So the heirs of Shakespeare and of Dickens may go starve whilst their non-copyright editions contribute to the starvation of succeeding authors.
That authors themselves have contributed to the want of interest in literature that the public displays is also true. That is a legacy of Pre-Raphaelism — the worst legacy that any movement ever left behind it. For those young men from whom I fled into the country invented later, or had already invented, the dreary shibboleth that literature must be written by those who have read the
Cuchullain Saga
or something dull and pompous, for those who have read similar works. Literature, these people say, is of necessity abstruse, esoteric, far-fetched and unreadable. Nothing is less true, nothing more fatal. Great literature always is and always has been popular. It has had, that is to say, its popular appeal. Homer was a popular writer, Virgil was a popular writer, Chaucer wrote in what was then called the vulgar tongue for the common people. This, too, Dante did. I believe that Shakespeare deliberately “wrote down” in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Goethe was one of the most populars authors of his day, and the most popular author of to-day or any time was also the finest artist of his own or any day. This was Guy de Maupassant.
Who, I wonder, in England will ever realize that literature, besides being “elevating,” is a gay thing, is a pleasant thing, is a thing made for the increase of joy, of mirth, of happiness, and of those tears which are near to joy? It is the business of a book to be easy to read — to be as easy to read as any book upon its given subject can possibly be. I do not mean to say that a book about the Treaty of Tilsit can ever be as easy for a water-side labourer or for me to read as a work about things that I or the water-side labourer know perfectly well. But it is the duty of the author to capture attention, and then to make his subject plain; there is no other duty of an author.
It is not for him to pose as a priest dwelling amongst obscurities. If his readers, if his lovers will regard him as priest it is very well. Or, if his readers, if his lovers will find and seek to cast light upon obscurities in his pages it will be still better, for that will mean that in them he has awakened thought and emotions. And when an author — when any artist has awakened in another person thoughts and emotions, he is, to the measure of the light vouchsafed him, blessed indeed. This author will have told his tale in language as simple as his personality will permit him to use, in thoughts as simple as God will give him.
Here stand I, the man in the street. I have no special knowledge, I have no special gifts. I desire to be interested as I was interested when I read in the coal-cellar the adventures of Harkaway Dick. I desire to be interested as I was interested when I first read
Ivanhoe, Lear
,
Nicholas Nickleby, La Maison Tellier
,
Fathers and Children
,
The Trial of Joan of Arc
,
The Arabian Nights
, or — twenty years ago —
The Dolly Dialogues
or
Daisy Miller.
You see, the poor man in the street is catholic enough in his tastes. And he has a passionate desire to be interested. This is indeed the noblest and the finest of all desires, since it means that he desires to enter into the fortunes, the hopes, the very hearts of his fellow-men, and it is in this way and in no other that literature can render a man better. I once lent a book to an old and quite ignorant cottage woman who had always had a taste for reading novels. And there are few cottage people who will not read novels with avidity. Some days afterwards I went in to see this old woman. The tears were dropping down her cheeks, and she was wiping them away as fast as she could. She had just finished the book in question. She said:
“Ah! aw do jest love yon book. It does me all the good in the world. Aw feels a score of years lee ter for the cry!”
This book was
Fathers and Children.
Yet what was Bazarow to her or she to Bazarow?
And there the matter is in a nutshell. Here I stand and cry for such a writer, and when such a writer, with such a purpose, disregarding all shibboleths, considering himself not as a priest who has to express
himself
but as quite a humble man who has before him the task of interesting me and the millions that I represent — when this writer comes he will sweep away all barriers. No markets will be closed to him, and no doors; there will be no hearts that he will not enter and no hearth that will not welcome him as its guest. He will be honoured by emperors, and ploughmen will desire to take his hand. Wealth will be his beyond belief, and power. And he will be such a priest as Moses was, or those who were greater than Moses. But I do not think that he will have the
Cuchullain Saga
by heart.
CHANGES
I WAS walking the other day down one of the stretches of main road of the west of London. Rather low houses of brownish brick recede a little way from the road behind gardens of their own, or behind little crescents common to each group of houses. Omnibuses pass numerously before them and there is a heavy traffic of motor vehicles, because the road leads out into the country towards the west. But since this particular day happened to be a Sunday, the stretch of road, perhaps half a mile in length, was rather empty. I could see only two horse ‘buses, a brougham and a number of cyclists. And at that moment it occurred to me to think that there were no changes here at all. There was nothing at that moment to tell me that I was not the small boy that thirty years ago used, with great regularity, to walk along that stretch of road in order to go into Kensington Gardens. It was a remarkably odd sensation. For the moment I seemed to be back there, I seemed to be a child again, rather timid and wonderingly setting out upon tremendous adventures that the exploring of London streets then seemed to entail.
And having thus dipped for a moment into a past as unattainable as is the age of Homer, I came back very sharply before the first of the horse ‘buses and the fourth small band of cyclists had passed me — I came back to wondering about what changes the third of a century that I can remember had wrought in London and in us. It is sometimes pleasant, it is nearly always salutary, thus to take stock. Considering myself, it was astonishing how little I seemed to myself to have changed since I was a very little boy in a velveteen coat with gold buttons and long golden ringlets. I venture to obtrude this small piece of personality because it is a subject that has always interested me — the subject, not so much of myself, as in how far the rest of humanity seem to
themselves
to resemble me. I mean that to myself I never seemed to have grown up. This circumstance strikes me most forcibly when I go into my kitchen. I perceive saucepans, kitchen spoons, tin canisters, chopping boards, egg-beaters and objects whose very names I do not even know. I perceive these objects and suddenly it comes into my mind — though I can hardly believe it — that these things actually belong to me. I can really do what I like with them if I want to. I might positively use the largest of the saucepans for making butter-scotch, or I might fill the egg-beater with ink and churn it up. For such were the adventurous aspirations of my childhood, when I peeped into the kitchen, which was a forbidden and glamorous place inhabited by a forbidding moral force known as
Cook.
And that glamour still persists, that feeling still remains. I do not really very often go into my kitchen although it, and all it contains, are my property — I do not go into it because lurking at the back of my head I have always the feeling that I am a little boy who will be either “spoken to” or spanked by a mysterious
They.
In my childhood
They
represented a host of clearly perceived persons: my parents, my nurse, the housemaid, the hardly ever visible cook, a day-school master, several awful entities in blue who hung about in the streets and diminished seriously the enjoyment of life, and a large host of unnamed adults who possessed apparently remarkable and terrorizing powers. All these people were restraints. Nowadays, as far as I know, I have no restraints. No one has a right, no one has any authority, to restrain me. I can go where I like: I can do what I like: I can think, say, eat, drink, touch, break, whatever I like, that is within the range of my own small empire. And yet till the other day I had constantly at the back of my mind the fear of a mysterious
They
— a feeling that has not changed in the least, since the day when last I could not possibly resist it, and I threw from an upper window a large piece of whitening at the helmet of a policeman who was standing in the road below. Yesterday I felt quite a strong desire to do the same thing when a bag of flour was brought to me for my inspection because it was said to be mouldy. There was the traffic going up and down underneath my windows, there was the sunlight, and there, his buckles and his buttons shining, there positively, on the other side of the road, stalked the policeman. But I resisted the temptation. My mind travelled rapidly over the possibilities. I wondered whether I could hit the policeman at the distance, and presumed I could. I wondered whether the policeman would be able to identify the house from which the missile came, and presumed he would not. I wondered whether the servant could be trusted not to peach, and presumed she could. I considered what it would cost me, and imagined that, at the worst, the price would be something less than that of a stall at a theatre, whilst I desired to throw the bag of flour very much more than I have ever desired to go to a theatre. And yet, as I have said, I resisted the temptation. I was afraid of a mysterious
They.
Or again, I could remember very distinctly as a small boy, staring in at the window of a sweet-shop near Gower Street Station and perceiving that there brandy balls might be had for the price of only fourpence a pound. And I remember thinking that I had discovered the secret of perpetual happiness. With a pound of brandy balls I could be happy from one end of the day to the other. I was aware that grown-up people were sometimes unhappy, but no grown-up person I ever thought was possessed of less than fourpence a day. My doubts as to the distant future vanished altogether. I knew that whatever happened to others I was safe. Alas! I do not think that I have tasted a brandy ball for twenty years. When I have finished my day’s work I shall send out for a pound of them, though I am informed that the price has risen to sixpence. But though I cannot imagine that their possession will make me happy even for the remaining hours of this one day, yet I have not in the least changed, really. I know what will make me happy and perfectly contented when I get it — symbolically I still desire only my little pound of sweets. I have a vague, but very strong, feeling that every one else in the world around me, if the garments of formality and fashion that surround them could only be pierced through — that every one else who surrounds me equally has not grown up. They have not in essentials changed since they were small children. And the murderer who to-morrow will have the hangman’s noose round his neck — I am informed at this moment that criminals are nowadays always executed on Tuesdays at eleven o’clock — so let us say that a criminal who will be executed next Tuesday at that hour will feel, when the rope is put round his throat, an odd, pained feeling that some mistake is being made, because you do not really hang a child of six in civilized countries. So that perhaps we have not any of us changed. Perhaps we are all of us children, and the very children that we were when Victoria celebrated her first Jubilee at about the date when Plancus was the consul. And yet we are conscious, all of us, that we have tremendously changed since the date when Du Maurier gave us the adventures of Mr. Cimabue Brown.
We have changed certainly to the extent that we cannot, by any possibility, imagine ourselves putting up for two minutes with Mr. Brown at a friend’s At Home. We could not possibly put up with any of these people. They had long, drooping beards: they drawled: they come back to one as being extremely gentle, and their trousers were enormous. Moreover the women wore bustles and skin-tight jerseys. (I have a friend the top cushions of whose ottomans are entirely filled with her discarded bustles. I cannot imagine what she could have been doing with so many of these articles. After all, the fashion of wearing them did not last for ten years; and the bustle was itself a thing which, not being on view, could hardly have needed to change its shape month by month. So that although the friend in question already possesses nine Chantecler hats and may, in consequence, be said to pay some attention to her personal appearance, I cannot imagine what she did with this considerable mass of unobtrusive adornments).
In those days people seem to have been extraordinarily slow. It was not only that they dined at seven and went about in four-wheelers; it was not only that they still asked each other to take pot luck — I am just informed that no really modern young person any longer understands what this phrase means — it is not only that nowadays if we chance to have to remain in Town in August we do not any longer pull down the front blinds, live in our kitchen, and acquire by hook or by crook a visitor’s guide to Homburg, with which we could delude our friends and acquaintances on their return from Brighton into the idea that in the German spa we had rubbed shoulders with the great and noble. It is not only that our menus now soar beyond the lofty ideal of hot roast beef for Sunday, cold for Monday, hash for Tuesday, leg of mutton for Wednesday, cold on Thursday and so on; it is that we seem altogether to have changed. It is true that we have not grown up, but we are different animals. If we should open a file of
The Times
for 1875 and find that the leader writer agreed with some of our sentiments to-day, we should be as much astonished as we are when we find on Egyptian monuments that the lady who set snares for the virtue of Joseph was dissatisfied with the state of her linen when it came home from the wash.
Now where exactly do these changes, as the phrase is, come in? Why should one feel such a shock of surprise at discovering that a small slice of High Street, Kensington, from the Addison Road railway bridge to the Earl’s Court Road has not “changed”? Change has crept right up to the public-house at the corner. Why, only yesterday I noticed that the pastrycook’s next door to the public-house was “to let.” This is a great and historic change. As a boy I used to gaze into its windows and perceive a model of Windsor Castle in icing-sugar. And that castle certainly appeared to me larger and more like what a real castle ought to be than did Windsor Castle, which I saw for the first time last month. I am told that at that now vanished confectioner’s you could get an excellent plate of ox-tail soup and a cut off the joint for lunch. Let me then give it the alms for oblivion of this tear. Across the front of another confectioner’s near here is painted the inscription, “Routs catered for.” What was a rout? I suppose it was some sort of party, but what did you do when you got there? I remember reading a description by Albert Smith of a conversazione at somebody’s private house, and a conversazione in those days was the most modern form of entertainment. Apparently it consisted in taking a lady’s arm and wandering round amongst show-cases. The host and hostess had borrowed wax models of anatomical dissections of a most realistic kind from the nearest hospital, and this formed the amusement provided for the guests, weak negus and seed biscuits being the only refreshment. This entertainment was spoken of in terms of reprobation by Mr. Albert Smith — in the same terms as we might imagine would be adopted by a popular moralist in talking of the doings of the smart set to-day. Mr. Smith considered that it constituted a lamentably wild form of dissipation and one which no lady, who was really a lady, ought to desire to attend.
Yes, very decidedly we have changed all that. Though we have not grown up, though we are still children, we want something more exciting than anatomical dissections in glass cases when we are asked out of an evening. We have grown harder, we have grown more rapid in our movements, we have grown more avid of sensation, we have grown more contemptuous of public opinion, we have become the last word.
But if we are more avid of sensations, if we are restless more to witness or to possess, to go through or to throw away always a greater and greater number of feelings or events or objects, we are, I should say, less careful in our selections. The word “exquisite” has gone almost as completely out of our vocabulary as the words “pot luck.” And for the same reason. We are no longer expected to take pot luck because our hostess, by means of the telephone, can always get from round the corner some sort of ready-made confection that has only to be stood for ten minutes in a
bain-marie
to form a course of an indifferent dinner. She would do that if she were mildly old-fashioned. If she were at all up to date she would just say, “Oh, don’t bother to come all this way out. Let’s meet at the Dash and dine there.” In either case pot luck has gone as has “dropping-in of an evening.” Social events in all classes are now so frequent; a pleasant, leisurely impromptu foregathering is so seldom practicable that we seldom essay it.
Dining in restaurants is in many ways gay, pleasant and desirable. It renders us on the one hand more polite, it renders us on the other less sincere, less intimate with our friends and less exacting. We have to be tidier and more urbane, but on the other hand we cannot so tyrannically exact of the cook that the dishes shall be impeccable. We are democratized. If in a restaurant we make a horrible noise because the fish is not absolutely all that it should be, we shall have it borne in upon us that we are only two or three out of several hundred customers, that we may go elsewhere, and that we shall not get anything better anywhere else. If the tipping system were abolished it would be impossible to get a decent meal anywhere in London.
At present it is difficult. It is difficult, that is to say, to get a good meal anywhere with certainty. You may patronize a place for a month and live well, or very well. Then suddenly something goes wrong, everything goes wrong, a whole menu is uneatable. The cook may have gone; the management, set on economizing, will have substituted margarine for real butter in cooking; the business may have become a limited company with nothing left to it but the old name and redecorated premises. And five hundred customers will not know any difference. Provided that a book has a binding with a sufficiency of gilt; provided that a dinner has its menu; provided that a picture has its frame, a book’s a book, a dinner’s a dinner, a picture will cover so much wall-space, and, being cheapened, will find buyers enough.