Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (675 page)

And this tendency pervades every class of establishment; it is not only that French cookery is everywhere very risky to set out upon. Always repulsive in appearance and hopelessly indigestible, English plain cooking is dead. At my birth I was put up for election at an old club that has now disappeared. My name came up for election when I was eighteen, and I was allowed, with proper restrictions — when, as it were, I was accompanied by a nurse — I was allowed the use of the premises. The members were almost all Anglo-Indians of considerable age, and many were of a fine stinginess. They used to find the club prices for meals unthinkable, and it was their habit, about lunch-time or towards seven, to toddle off to an eating-house in the immediate neighbourhood. Here, for the sum of eightpence, they would obtain a plate of meat and a piece of bread. There were no tablecloths on the tables that were covered with black leather wiped clean with a wet cloth; table-napkins cost a penny, and the floors were sanded. But the food was splendid of its kind, and the company consisted entirely of venerable clubsmen. There was a special brew of ale, the best in the world; the cheese was always the finest October, and a realty wonderful port was to be had. My venerable fellow-members, however, as a rule limited themselves to their plate of meat, after which they would walk back to the club. Here they could have bread and cheese and a glass of ale for nothing. (I wonder if there is still in London any club like this? I know there is one yet where your change is washed and wrapped in tissue paper). But there was the club and there was the Dash Eating-house.

The other day I was anxious to prove to a stranger that London was the cheapest city in the world, and casting about in my mind for a means of proof I remembered the Dash. It was still there. The low rooms were the same; the leather-covered tables were the same. The menus were the same; but dismay came upon me when I observed that every item on the menu was a penny cheaper. And napkins were handed to us gratis!

And then the meat. Oh dear! And the old special ale was no more to be had; the place was tied to a London brewery. And the cheese was
Canadian!
The place, you see, had been discovered by the city clerk. There was not one old face, not one bald head there. The new management had taken in many more rooms. I do not know if anywhere there was written Ichabod on the walls, and no old waiter sadly deplored the changes, for we were waited upon by girls. The food was tepid and tough, but as I paid my ridiculously tiny bill the voice of a clerk behind me remarked, “Quite the good old times.” So that there we are.

If I try to illustrate my meaning in terms of eating rather than by illustrations less material it is not that exactly similar processes are not observable everywhere else. We grow more rapid, but our senses are coarsened: we grow more polite, we grow even more tolerant, but we seek less earnestly after the truth. In the ‘seventies and ‘eighties men were intolerably slow, but they had enthusiasms. A writer thought more about writing, a painter thought more about painting, a preacher, for the matter of that, more about preaching. A quixotic act to-day is regarded as something almost criminal if it entails loss of money. It is not so long since the word quixotic meant foolish but fine, whereas nowadays, so seldom does any action really quixotic occur, that it is almost invariably regarded with suspicion, and the person indulging himself in such an action is apt to find himself avoided. His friends may think that he is “going to get something out of it” that they cannot see, and they dread lest that something be got out of themselves. Probably we have not gained much, probably we have not lost much. Probably the thinker has a worse time of it; the unthinking certainly have an immensely better one. The squalor and the filth of the existence of the poor in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties are almost unthinkable to-day. I am physically and mentally in the most wretched state when I happen to travel by one of the London “tubes.” The noise is barbaric, the smell of humanity sickening, and the sight of the comparatively imbecile faces of my fellow townsmen of the middle and lower classes is sometimes more depressing than I can stand. For what can be more depressing than to sit with 40 or 50 of one’s fellow-beings in a strong light, all of them barbarously and unbecomingly clad and each of them with a face dull, heavy, unvivacious, to all appearances incapable of a ray of human intelligence, of a scintilla of original thought? So, at least, I imagine the late Mr. Herbert Spencer thinking if his ghost could come once more from the shades of the billiard-room of the Athenæum Club, and, paying his twopence, descend into the lift and take the tube from Shepherd’s Bush to Tottenham Court Road. (This, by the bye, would pretty exactly have represented Mr. Spencer’s attitude. That gentleman once sat at table next to a connection of my own for three consecutive days. He sat in deep silence. Upon the fourth day he took from his ears two little pads of cotton wool. He exhibited them to the lady and remarking, “I stop my ears with these when I perceive there is no one at the table likely to afford rational conversation,” he put them back again.)

But if the thinker, if the man with a taste for the exquisite, have to-day a pretty bad time of it unless he stops at home, all we humbler people get through our little lives and accomplish our ultimate end in becoming the stuff that fills graveyards, upon the whole much more agreeably. If exquisite editions of books are not at our hand, we get them plentifully in editions of an extreme cheapness. If we desire to see pictures, it will no longer be an expedition of a day to go from Hammersmith, which is now called West Kensington Park, to the National Gallery.

I can remember very well the time when it meant a tenpenny ‘bus fare and an hour’s slow drive to go from Hammersmith to Trafalgar Square, and it cost as much and took as long to go from Shepherd’s Bush to Oxford Circus. And these sums and these spaces of time, when they come to be doubled, require to be seriously thought about. Nowadays we do not think at all. Life is much fuller, and I fancy we value a visit to the National Gallery much less. But if we value it less still it is more agreeable. I remember travelling in an odious horse-box of grimy yellow wood in an intolerable stench of sulphur and shag tobacco along with eleven navvies in the horrid old underground trains. The conditions were unspeakable, the fares relatively high. This occurred to me perhaps once or twice, but they must have been the daily conditions of how very large a class! Nowadays our friend the workman steps into a clean lift and descends into cool, white, brilliantly lit tunnels that twenty-five years ago would have been things entirely beyond his experience or his dreams. And because of them, too, he can live further out, in a cleaner air, in conditions immeasurably superior. Routs are no longer catered for, leisure is an unknown thing, and the old-fashioned confectioner’s shop will be pulled down to make way for a cheap-jack of some sort, inhabiting a terra-cotta palace with great plate-glass windows and white, soft stone facings. There will be about the new man something meretricious, flashy, and not altogether desirable. I do not know that I shall ever want to go into such a shop, but to many people the little pictures on tickets that are given away with little packets of cigarettes — to a great many hundreds of simple and kindly people, the arms of the City of Bath or the portrait of the infant son of the king of Spain, will afford great and harmless joy and excitement. I do not mean to say that in the pockets of this great alluvial world of humanity the old order will not remain in an even astonishing degree.

I was talking the other day to a woman of position when she told me that her daughters were immeasurably freer than she had been at their age. I asked her if she would let her daughters walk about alone in the streets. “Oh dear yes,” she said. I asked her whether she would allow one of them to walk down Bond Street alone. “Oh dear, certainly not Bond Street!” she said. I tried to get at what was the matter with Bond Street. I have walked down it myself innumerable times without noticing anything to distinguish it from any other street. But she said no, the girl might walk about Sloane Street or that sort of place, but certainly not Bond Street. I should have thought myself, from observation, that Sloane Street was rather the haunt of evil characters, but I let the matter drop when my friend observed that, of course, a man of my intelligence must be only laughing when I pretended that I could not see the distinction. I pursued therefore further geographical investigations. I asked her if she would permit her daughter to walk along the Strand. She said, “Good gracious me! The Strand! Why, I don’t suppose the child knows where it is!” I said, “But the Strand!”

“My dear man,” she answered, “what should she want to walk along the Strand for? What could possibly take her to the Strand?” I suggested timidly, theatres. “But you only go to them in a brougham, muffled up to the eyes. She wouldn’t see which way she was going.” And she called to her daughter, who was on the other side of the room: “My dear, do you know where the Strand is?” And in clear, well-drilled tones she got her answer, “No, mamma,” as if a private were answering an officer. The young lady was certainly twenty-five. So that perhaps the old order does not so much change. Reflecting upon the subject of Bond Street, it occurred to me that it would not be so much a question of the maiden’s running the risk of encountering evil characters as that since every one walks down Bond Street, every one would see her walking there alone. You have got to make the concession to modern opinion, you have got to let your daughter go out without an attendant maid, but you do not want to let anybody know that you have done it. And that, after all, is the fine old British spirit gallantly manifesting itself in an unfriendly day. No doubt, in spite of the constant planing that we are undergoing, in spite of the constant attrition that constantly ensues when man rubs against man all day long in perpetual short flights, each flight the flight of a battalion; in spite of the perpetual noises by which we are deafened, in spite of the perpetual materialism to which we are forced in order to find the means for all this restlessness — in spite of it all the “character” still flourishes amongst us. Perhaps we are each and every one of us characters, each and every one of us outwardly cut to pattern but inwardly as eccentric as an old gentleman friend of mine who will not go to bed without putting his boots upon the mantelpiece? In one thing I think we have changed. I had a very elderly and esteemed relative who once told me that whilst walking along the Strand he met a lion that had escaped from Exeter Change. I said, “What did you do?” and he looked at me with contempt as if the question were imbecile. “
Do!
” he said. “Why, I took a cab.” I imagine that still in most of the emergencies of this life we fly to that refuge. But I believe that the poor Strand has changed in another respect. I was once walking along the south side — the side on which now stand the Cecil and Strand Hotels — when my grandfather happened to drive past in a hansom, sprang suddenly out, and addressing me with many expletives and a look of alarm, wanted to know what the devil I was doing on that side. I really did not know why I should not be there or how it differed from the north side, but he concluded by saying that if he ever saw me there again he would kick me straightway out of his house. So I suppose that in the days of Beau Brummel there must have been unsavoury characters in that now rigid thoroughfare. But I doubt whether to-day we have so much sense of locality left. One street is becoming so much like another, and Booksellers’ Row is gone. I fancy that these actual changes in the aspect of the city must make a difference in our psychologies. You cannot be quite the same man if daily you joggle past St. Mary Abbott’s Terrace upon the top of a horse ‘bus: you cannot be the same man if you shoot past the terra-cotta plate-glass erections that have replaced those gracious, old houses with the triangle of unoccupied space in front of them — if you shoot, rattle and bang past them. Your thoughts must be different, and with each successive blow upon the observation your brain must change a little and a little more. And the change is all away from the Changes direction of leisure, of spacious thought, of ease. Each acceleration of a means of access makes you more able to get through more work in a given time, but each such acceleration gives each of your rivals exactly the same chance. With each, competition grows sterner and sterner, with each the mere struggle for existence becomes more and more fierce. And we leave things nowadays so irrevocably behind us. It is a quaint thought, but a perfectly sound one, to say that we are nearer to habits of barbarism, that we could more easily revert to days of savagery than we could pick up again the tone of thought, of mind and habit, of the men of thirty years ago. The terra-cotta and plate-glass will inevitably in the course of ages be replaced by swamps, marsh and tidal river-beds. That will return, but the old houses of St. Mary Abbott’s Terrace will never come back. And as these things change, so, oddly, do our appreciations veer round. It was the custom of the ‘eighties to talk of houses like those of Harley Street as ugly, square, brick boxes, as the most contemptible things in the world, as the last word of the art and the architecture of a miserable bourgeoisie. They seemed then permanent, hideous, unassailable. But already we regard them with a certain tenderness, and consider that they may soon be gone. We think them quaint, Georgian and lovable, and it is with a certain regret that we realize that before very long they, too, will be swept away and another characteristic piece of London will be gone for ever. We are unifying and unifying and unifying. We are standardizing ourselves and we are doing away with everything that is outstanding. And that, I think, is the moral to it all, the moral of our day and of our age. We are making a great many little people more cheerful and more comfortable in their material circumstances. We are knocking for the select few the flavour of the finer things out of life. In the atmosphere of to-day the finer things cannot flourish. There is no air for them: there is no time for them. We are not rich enough: we do not care for anything, and we never can come to care for anything that we do not like at first. And the finer the flavour the longer we take to get used to it. So that that is going, and many, many, many little pleasures are coming. Whether you like it or whether you do not, depends solely upon yourself. There is no man living who can say for us all whether it is good or evil. An old shoeblack said to me the other day, “These are bad times we live in, sir. Now there ain’t so many horse ‘buses there ain’t so much mud in the streets, and it’s bitter hard to get a living.”