Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (661 page)

Thus, if we were immolated in butter-muslin fetters and in Greek plays, we kept our own end up a little and we never got hurt. Why, I remember pushing my brother out of a second-floor window so that he fell into the area, and he didn’t have even a bruise to show; whilst my cousins in the full glory of their genius were never really all of them together quite out of the bone-setter’s hands.

My aunt gave us our bad hours with her excellent lessons, but I think we gave her hers so let the score be called balanced. Why, I remember pouring a pot of ink from the first-story banisters on to the head of Ariadne Petrici when she was arrayed in the robes of her namesake whose part she supported. For let it not be imagined that my aunt Rossetti foisted my cousin Arthur into the position of hero of the play through any kind of maternal jealousy. Not at all. She was just as anxious to turn me into a genius or to turn
anybody
into a genius. It was only that she had such much better material in her own children.

Ah, that searching for genius, that reading aloud of poems, that splendid keeping alive of the tradition that a poet was a seer and a priest by the sheer virtue of his craft and mystery! Nowadays, alas, for a writer to meet with any consideration at all in the world, he or she must be at least a social reformer. That began, for the aesthetic set at least, with William Morris. He first turned all poets and poetesses into long-necked creatures with red ties, or into round-shouldered maidens dressed in blue curtain serge. For indeed when æstheticism merged itself in social propaganda, the last poor little fortress of the arts in England was divested of its gallant garrison. It might be comic that my aunt Lucy should turn her residence into a sort of hot-house and forcing school for geniuses; it might be comic that my grandfather should proclaim that Mrs. Clara Fletcher’s sonnets were finer than those of Shakespeare; it might be comic even that all the Pre-Raphaelite poets should back each other up, and all the Pre-Raphaelite painters spend hours every day in jobbing each other’s masterpieces into municipal galleries. But behind it, there was a feeling that the profession of the arts or the humaner letters was a priestcraft and of itself consecrated its earnest votary. Nowadays...

Last week upon three memorable days I had for me three memorable conversations. On the Saturday I was sitting in Kensington Gardens with a young French student of letters, and after we had conversed for sufficiently long for the timid young man to allow himself a familiarity, he said:

“Now tell me why it is that all your English novelists so desperately desire to be politicians?”

This seemed to him to be an astonishing, an unreasonable and even a slightly indecent state of affairs, so that he mentioned it under his breath.

On the next day, being Sunday, I had the privilege of being admitted into the drawing-room of a very old lady of distinction. She happened, after talking of persons as long dead as D’Orsay, to mention that the wife of a cabinet minister had come into her drawing-room on an afternoon shortly before, and had said that she had been present at the first night of a play. This had so enormously moved her that she had fainted and had been removed from the theatre by another cabinet minister, a friend of her husband’s. This play dealt with prison life; the scene which so moved the lady showed you a silent stage — a convict seated in his cell. From a distance there came the sound of violently shaken metal. It was repeated nearer, it was echoed still nearer and nearer. And then the convict, an enormous agitation reaching him with all these contagious sounds, flew desperately at his cell door and shook it to the accompaniment of an intolerable jangle of iron. This scene of this poor wretch, with his agonized nerves shaken by long solitary confinement, so worked upon the sympathetic nerves of the cabinet minister’s wife that she declared herself determined to leave no stone unturned until the prison laws of the United Kingdom were altered infinitely for the more humane.

We have thus one more instance of a work of literature which destroys whole methods of thought and sweeps away whole existent systems. And this play must take its rank along with
Unde Tom’s Cabin,
which destroyed slavery in the United States; along with
Oliver Twist,
which destroyed the Poor Law system in England; with
Don Quixote,
which destroyed chivalry; or with Beaumarchais’
Figaro,
which led in the French Revolution. But as an epilogue I should like to add my third conversation, which took place on a Monday. On that occasion I was afforded the privilege of talking for a long time with a convict — a gentleman on the face of him, one of the most degenerate Irish Cockneys that our modern civilization could bless us with. In his queer uniform of mustard-colour and blue this odd, monstrous little chap with a six days’ beard and a face like that of a wizard monkey, trotted beside me and uttered words of wisdom. He told me many interesting things. Thus, being a criminal of the lowest type, he was a Roman Catholic, and he enlarged upon the hardships that prisoners of his religion had to put up with in gaol. Thus, for instance, one of the two meat courses which prisoners are allowed during the week falls upon Friday and the poor papists do not eat meat upon Fridays. Or again, Roman Catholic prisoners are not allowed the enormous luxury of a daily religious service. And readers of Mr. Cunningham Grahame’s prison experiences will realize how enormous this deprivation is. With its hours, giving possibilities of conversation, of joining in the hoarsely roared Psalms and of meeting, under the shadow of God Almighty, even the warder’s eyes on some sort of equality, there are few occasions of joy more absolute in the life of a convict or of any man. Yet these deprivations my friend Hennessy cheerfully suffered, and talking of a prisoner called Flaherty, who had written himself down a Protestant in order to earn these extra privileges, Mr. Hennessy said in tones of the deepest reprobation: “I call that a poor sort of conjuring trick!” and, spitting out a piece of oakum that he had been chewing, he repeated in abstracted tones, “a b — poor kind of conjuring trick!”

Mr. Hennessy, you will observe, was the worst type of criminal, the greater part of his life having been spent on “the Scrubbs,” as the prisoners call it when they are talking amongst themselves, or “in the cruel place,” as they say when they are being interviewed by gentle philanthropists. Mr. Hennessy pulled another small piece of oakum from the lining of his waistcoat, which boasted a broad arrow upon either chest; and proceeded to soliloquize:

“Cor!” he said, “it
do
do you blooming good to be in this blooming hotel. It soaks the beer out of you. Reg’lar
soaks
the beer out of you. When you’ve bin in ‘ere free days, you feels another man.
Soaks
the beer out of you, that’s what it does.”

He proceeded upon the old line, harking back upon his thoughts:

“A poor sort of conjuring trick, that’s what it is. And I guess God A’ mighty looks after us. He sends the b — sparrows.”

For the sparrows, recognizing the chapel-time of the Protestants, are accustomed to fly in at the cell windows whilst chapel is on and to search the cell for crumbs. And if by chance they find a Catholic there, they do not seem to mind him very much.

My friend Hennessy indeed had a “b — sparrow” that would come and perch upon his forefinger, and this appeared to afford him as much gratification as if he had earned all the profits of his poor sort of conjuring trick. It afforded him much solace, too, since it appeared to him a visible sign from the Almighty that He who disregardeth not the fall of a sparrow could by means of that little bird find means and leisure to solace him whilst he suffered from sectarian injustice. For this sectarian inequality would pursue my friend Hennessy even when he left the gaol gates, the Protestant chaplain being provided with a sum of money wherewith to pay the fares home of departed prisoners, to furnish them with boots, and even to set them up in coster’s stalls. “Flaherty,” Mr. Hennessy said, “he’ll get his blooming half-crown or free-and-six, but our blooming priest, he’s as poor as meself.” And Mr. Hennessy once more spat reflectively, and added, “But I call it a poor sort of conjuring trick.”

Considering the opportunity an excellent one for getting information, I proceeded to describe as vividly as I could the scene from the play that I have mentioned — the scene which had made the cabinet minister’s wife faint, the scene which had so drastically altered the prison laws of the United Kingdom. Mr. Hennessy listened to me with an air somewhat resembling philosophic disgust.

“Cor!” he said. He crooked his two forefingers one into the other and drew my attention to them.

“D’ye know what that means, sor?” he asked.

I said I didn’t, and he continued: “It means Flanagan’s trick. When we make that sign to each other at exercise it means that every man jack in gaol will shake his door after lights out. If you all make the row together, the b — bloaters can’t spot any one of you, and they can’t have the whole b — prison up before Dot and Dash in the morning. It’s the fun of yer life to hear the bloaters curse.”

The “bloaters” are, of course, the warders, and Dot and Dash was the nickname for the governor of this particular gaol, since one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other and he walked unequally.

Thus “the fun of your life,” invented by the immortal Flanagan, whoever he was, and celebrated by my excellent friend Mr. Hennessy, becomes the epoch-making scene of a drama which changes the law of an empire. I have no particular comment to make, being a simple writer, recording things that have come under my own observation, but I should like to put on record, as linking up the
constatation
of what may otherwise appear an extremely loose dissertation, my reply to my young friend the Frenchman, who, with his eyes veiled, as if he were asking a rather obscene question, had put it to me: “Is it true, then, that all you English novelists desire to be politicians?”

I answered that it was entirely true, and the reason was that in England a writer, not being regarded as a gentleman, except in the speech of the cabinet minister who may happen to reply to the toast of Literature at a Royal Academy banquet, or if he happens to sit upon a jury when he becomes
ipso facto
one of the “gentlemen” to whom learned counsel yearningly addresses himself — in England all writers being well aware that they are not regarded as gentlemen, and indeed aware that they are hardly regarded as men, since we must consider the practitioners of all the arts as at least effeminate if not a decent kind of eunuch — all writers in England desire to be something else as well. Sometimes, anxious to assert their manhood, they cultivate small holdings, sail the seas, hire out fishing boats, travel in caravans, engage in county cricket or become justices of the peace. I related to my young French friend how, one day, it being my great privilege to lunch with the gentleman whom I consider to be the finest writer of English in the world, the man possessing the most limpid, the most pure, the most beautiful of English styles, I happened modestly and bashfully to express my opinion of his works to the great man. He turned upon me with an extraordinary aquiline fury and exclaimed:

“Stylist! Me a stylist! Stevenson was a stylist, Pater was a stylist, I have no time for that twiddling nonsense. I’m a coleopterist.”

And there, as I explained to my young French friend, you have the whole thing in a nutshell. This great writer had the strongest possible objection to being classed with a tuberculous creature like Stevenson, or with an Oxford Don like Pater. He wanted to be remembered as one who had chased dangerous reptiles — if coleoptera
are
dangerous reptiles! — through the frozen forests of Labrador to the icy recesses of the Pole itself. He wanted to be remembered as a Man, a sort of creature once removed from an orang-outang, who smote a hairy breast and roared defiance to the rough places of the earth. So that some of us plough the seas, some of us dig up potatoes, some of us jump the blind baggage on transcontinental trains in the United States of America. Some of us are miners and some of us open rifle ranges, some of us keep goats, others indulge in apiculture — but by far the most of us desire to be influences.

“And I assure you, my dear young friend,” I said to the Frenchman, “this is a very great temptation. L’
autre jour fêtais assis dans un club littéraire
— I was seated in a literary club, conversing with some of
Messieurs mes confrères
, when there entered a young man like yourself — very much like yourself, but not-so modest. We were drinking tea. Yes, my young friend, in England all the literary men drink, not absinthe, nor orgeat, nor bocks, nor even
chassis
, but tea — and this young man who entered, being young, with great confidence, contradicted every single word that was uttered by my distinguished confrères, but, more particularly, every single word that was uttered by myself. He contradicted me indeed before I could get my words out at all, and I felt very refreshed and happy, for it is very pleasant when the extremely young treat one still as an equal. But it happened that one of my distinguished confrères, possessed of a loud and distinct organ, pronounced my name so that it could not escape the ears of this young man, who until that moment did not know who I was. He was lifting a cup of tea to his mouth, and — it struck me as an extraordinary fact — the cup of tea remained suspended between mouth and saucer for an immensely long period of time. The young man’s eyes became enormous; his jaws fell open and he remained silent. The conversation drifted on. He succeeded in drinking his tea eventually, but still — he remained silent. My honoured confrères, one by one, went away on their errands to make, each one, the world a little better. I remained alone with our silent young friend, and at last, making my decent excuses, I rose to go. Suddenly this young man sprang up, and formally addressing me by name he brought out in rather trembling tones: