Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (677 page)

And this crowd of unpresentable people uttering disagreeable sounds, packed itself into an ill-lit train; and we rumbled through an ugly night, emitting from each compartment trails of nasty sounds. We screeched popular songs, called out foul epithets, occasionally we punched each other’s heads; we swayed from side to side of the compartments, in solid struggling masses. And this type of life seemed to continue all the way from the heart of Bedfordshire to about the middle of the northwest of London. Changing at the terminus, we took an entirely unfamiliar London local line whose termination was, I think, Hammersmith. And there as it were in a long trail from the north-west to the extreme west of London, was the same atmosphere of gloom, of yellow light, of disagreeable humanity and really hateful sounds. So that in our clean, white, spick-and-span London, with its orderly and well-behaved, pleasant crowds, there remains this — corners into which, as it were, the housemaid’s broom has swept the dust and detritus of a dead age. It was like, that journey, going back a quarter of a century. We were Victorians once again, Victorians in our ugliness, in our coarseness, in our objectionable employment of the Saturday night, in our drunkenness and in our sham respectability. For amongst the crowd at the London terminus, I perceived a gentleman — a working-man of the most awe-inspiring respectability, who occasionally cleans my windows and reproves my frivolity with quotations from Ruskin, as if I were a worm and he a calvanistic Savonarola. This gentleman the day before had come to me with a piteous tale. He had founded a lecture hall in Lambeth, where he was accustomed to read extracts from William Morris’s socialistic pamphlets, from the works of Henry George, Joseph McCabe, Upton Sinclair, Ruskin and Carlyle, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells, Mr. J. K. Jerome and other social reformers — he had founded this lecture hall where, every Sunday morning, he was accustomed to act the part of preacher. On the Friday night, he had come to me with the lamentable story that the landlord had seized the furniture, had seized his library and had closed the hall. My function was to head his subscription list and I suppose I headed it. I had always been taught to consider Mr. — the most respectable of men, though he cleans my windows shockingly badly. But then the poor fellow had been out of work for nearly eleven years, employers disliking his free thinking and radical outspokenness.

And then on that Saturday night I perceived Mr. — upon the platform of the terminus. He had a peacock’s feather in his billycock hat, he was dancing to the tune of “God save the people!” in a ring that the railway police vainly endeavoured to move on — and there was not a trace of priggishness about his face. He was in his shirt sleeves and snapping his fingers over his head. I doubt for the moment if he could have quoted Ruskin, but he shouted “Down with the landlords!” just before the police reached him, and hustled him off into a cloak room.

Filled with curiosity, I went next morning to his lecture hall. It was open, and Mr. — himself was arranging pamphlets for sale upon the trestles. He was very forbidding, in a decent suit of black broadcloth with a turn-down collar, a prominent Adam’s apple and a red satin tie.

He said that the landlord had consented to let him open the hall again, though he still wanted thirty-two shillings for the rent, and had taken Mr.—’s typewriter in pawn until that sum should be paid. Mr. — once more quoted Carlyle and Henry George. He proved that landlords were unmitigated villains and that I — it was in his tone of haughty seriousness and earnest moral effort — that I was a frivolous puppy. Upon investigation I discovered that I had paid the whole quarter’s rent of the hall. Mr. — had misrepresented the figure to me, a fact which he had forgotten upon the Sunday morning. Other friends had found still more money, which I presume had assisted to put Mr. — in spirits on the night before. I did not mention these things to Mr. — , who continued to overwhelm me with moral sneers as to the uselessness of my life. He, a poor working man, had worked his way so high, whereas I, with all the advantages of education and what he was pleased to declare was lavish wealth, had achieved no more than a few frivolous books. And mind you, so fully did Mr. — believe in himself, that I retired apologetically as his audience began to file in. I was filled with a sense of my own unworthiness.

I should say that Mr. — is just another Victorian survival; I remember so many of these figures in my extreme youth. There was W., a socialist cabinetmaker, with flashing eyes, who founded a free-labour association for the supply of blacklegs to firms whose employees had gone on strike. W., I remember, frightened me out of my young life, he was so vociferous, and his eyes flashed so. He was generally in my grandfather’s kitchen eating excellent meals, and persuading my grandfather that he was wanted by the police for political reasons — a romantic lie which very much appealed to Madox Brown’s simplicity. Then there was also a Mr. B., a usually intoxicated paper-hanger; he had, I think, no political aspirations, but he was largely supported by my family, because of his flow of Shakespearian quotations. These never stopped, and they seemed as romantic in those days as it was to be in hiding for political reasons. They never stopped. I remember once when Mr. B. was standing on the top of a ladder, putting up a picture rail and more than reasonably intoxicated, the ladder gave way beneath him. He grasped the picture rail by one hand, and hanging there recited the whole of the Balcony Scene from
Romeo and Juliet
, waving his other arm towards the ceiling and feeling for the top of the ladder with his stockinged feet, his slippers having fallen off. He was a nasty, dirty little man, but he too impressed me with the sense of my unworthiness. So they all did. I remember at the time of the great Dock Strike, being taken to dinner by a Manchester Labour leader who was anxious to improve my morals. There were present Prince Krapotkin, Mr. Ben Tillett, Mr. Tom Mann and I think Mr. John Burns. The dinner took place at the Holborn Restaurant, and the waiters were frightened out of their lives amidst the marble, the gilding and the strains of the band. For such a group in those days was considered a wildly dangerous gathering. Prince Krapotkin might have a bomb in the tail pockets of his black frock-coat, and as for Messrs. Tillett, Burns and Mann, there was no knowing whether they would not slay all the customers in the restaurant with single blows of their enormous fists.

“We must destroy! We must destroy!” Mr. Mann exclaimed.

“On the contrary,” Prince Krapotkin replied in low tones, “we must take example of the rabbit and found communistic settlements.”

So they thundered, and the waiters trembled more and more, and there were a great many emotions going; as for me, I felt the same emotion of unworthiness. In those days I had written a fairy tale which had met with an enormous, and I suppose deserved, success; and I remember that, as we walked away from under the shelter of the restaurant in torrential rains, Prince Krapotkin told me that it was a very bad, a very immoral book. It dealt entirely with the fortunes of kings, princes, the young, the idle or the merely beautiful. And I was so overwhelmed with the same sense of unworthiness, that, as I was about to sink into the wet pavements, it occurred to me that I might find salvation by writing a fairy tale all of whose heroes and heroines should be Labour leaders. I did indeed write it — that was exactly twenty years ago — and from that day to this I have never been able to find a publisher for it.

But do not let me be misunderstood. I am not by any means attempting to condemn Mr. — of the lecture hall. He got money out of me so that he might elevate his brother workmen, and so that he might get drunk on the Saturday night. But I am convinced that in the atmosphere in which he lived, the one thing would have been impossible without the other. I fancy that no man can be a really moving preacher without committing sustaining sins. I am quite certain that the trainloads of people from these gloomy midland towns, contained hundreds of excellent and respectable persons, all recruiting themselves by the orgies of the Saturday night for the cramped formalities of Calvinistic worship on the Sunday morning. They could not bear the monotony of their lives without occasionally letting hell loose, and that is really all that there is to it. But there is this much more. The other day I went out to post a letter about
12.30 a
m. Upon the pavement lay a man bathed in blood, his pockets had been rifled, his watch was gone, his tie-pin was no longer there. I understand that since that date some seven months ago, he has never recovered his reason, so effectually had he been sand-bagged. And this happened at a little past 12 at night, in one of the broadest, most well-lit and most populous highways of London, the man being not forty yards from the entrance to the Tube Station, and not twenty-five from a coffee stall. It had been done so quickly and so silently that as Froissart says in his chronicles: “They slew him so peaceably, that he uttered no word.” And the police never discovered a sign of the man’s assailants. The point is that behind my house for a distance of nearly two miles there stretches towards Wormwood Scrubbs Prison a long dreary neighbourhood containing all the criminals and outcasts of London. This of course, is a sombre comment on the brightness and gayness of which I have spoken before. It means, that the breaking up of the slums in western London has driven these unfortunate populations in a body into this now dangerous quarter, just as similar movements, commercial or economical, drive other classes of the conventionally undesirable population into other considerable portions of the western regions of London.

CHAPTER X
V

WHERE WE STAND

UPON reconsidering these pages I find that I have written a jeremiad. Yet nothing could have been farther from my thoughts when I sat down to this book. I said to myself: I am going to try to compare the world as it appears to me to-day with the world as it appeared to me, and as I have gathered that it was, a quarter of a century ago. And the general impression in my mind was that I should make our life of to-day appear to be a constant succession of little, not very enduring, pleasures, a thing as it were of lights, bubbles and little joys — a gnat-dance into the final shadows. I want nothing better, and assuredly nothing better shall I get. I want nothing better than to be in Piccadilly five minutes after the clock has struck eleven at night. I shall be jammed to the shoulders in an immense mass of pleased mankind, all pouring out of the theatres and the music halls. We shall move slowly along the pavement between Leicester Square and the Circus. In that section it will be a little dark, but before us, with the shadowed houses making as it were a deep black canon, there will be immense light. Perhaps it will be raining very slightly. All the better, for from the purple glow before us light will be reflected on a thousand, on half a million little points. The innumerable falling drops will gleam, born suddenly out of the black heavens. The wet sides of the house walls will gleam; the puddles in the roadway will throw up gleaming jets as carriage after carriage passes by, their sides, too, gleaming. The harness of the horses will gleam, the wet wind-shields of the innumerable automobiles with the innumerable little drops of rain caught upon them will gleam like the fairy cobwebs, the cloths of Mary, beset with drops of bright dew.

I will have upon my arm some one that I like very much; so will all the others there. In that short passage of darkness there will be innumerable sounds of happiness, innumerable laughs, the cries of paper boys, the voices of policemen regulating the massed traffic; the voices of coachmen calling to their horses. And then we shall come out into the great light of Piccadilly.

No, I ask nothing better of life. Then, indeed, amongst innumerable happy people I shall know that we are all going to Heaven and that Turgeniev will be of the company.

Such indeed was my frame of mind when I sat down to this book, and so it remains. But yet, my jeremiad! I have personally nothing to grumble at; I dislike no one in this wide world. If anybody ever did me an injury it was so slight a one that I have forgotten all about it. Yet, in this frame of mind of a perfect optimism — for my fellow-creatures are all too interesting to be disliked when once one can get the hang of them, and if some poor devil desires to steal my watch, forge a cheque upon my bank, or by telling lies about me get for himself a “job,” an appointment or an honour that might well be mine, surely that man’s need is greater than my own — yet in this frame of mind of a perfect optimism I seem to have written a jeremiad. I have praised the ‘seventies, the ‘eighties and the ‘nineties, I have cast mud at our teens. I remain unrepentant. I take nothing back; what I have written is the exact truth. And yet...

To-day we have a comparative cleanliness, a comparative light, we have as it were reduced everything in scale, so that no longer are we little men forced to run up and down between the mighty legs of intolerable moralists like Ruskin or Carlyle or Tolstoi, to find ourselves dishonourable graves. We are the democracy, the stuff to fill graveyards, and our day has dawned. For brick we have terra-cotta, for evil-smelling petroleum lamps we have bright and fumeless light; for the old Underground that smelled and was full of sulphur vapours we have bright, clean and white Tubes. And these things are there for the poorest of us. And yet — a jeremiad!

Is this only because one sees past times always in the glamour of romance which will gild for us even a begrimed and overcrowded third-class smoking carriage of the Underground? No, I do not think that it is only because of this. I would give a great deal to have some of the things, some of the people, some of the atmosphere of those days — to have them now. But nothing in the world would make me go back to those days if I must sacrifice what now I have.

We are civilized; we are kindly, we have an immense deference for one another’s feelings; we never tread upon each other’s corns; we never shout our political opinions in public conveyances, we never say a word about religion because we are afraid of hurting some one else’s feelings. We are civilized — used to living in a city; we are polite, fitted to live in a ‘polis’; we are polished by the constant rubbing up against each other, all we millions and millions who stream backwards and forwards all the day and half the night. We could not live if we had rough edges; we could not ever get so much as into a motor ‘bus if we tried to push in out of our turn. We are Demos.

And how much this is for a rather timid man, who would never get into any ‘bus if it were a matter of pushing — how much this is I realized some years ago when I spent some time in the close society of a number of very learned Germans. It was terrible to me. I felt like a white lamb — the most helpless of creatures, amongst a set of ferocious pirates. It was not so much that I could never remember any of their bristling titles; that did not matter. It would have mattered if I could ever have got a word into a conversation, but I never could. My voice was too low; I was used to the undertones of our London conversations, where we all speak in whispers for fear of being overheard and thus hurting somebody’s feelings.

But these German savants were simply pirates. They were men who had issued savagely forth into unknown regions and had “cut out” terrific pieces of information. There did not appear to be one of them who did not know more than I did about my own subjects. They could put me right about the English language, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the British constitution, the reign of Henry VIII. or the Elizabethan dramatists. They knew everything, but it was as if they had acquired, as if they held, their knowledge ferociously. I did not know that there were left in the world men so fierce.

Take German Philologists. These are formidable people. To set out upon the history of a word is an adventurous and romantic thing. You find it in London or in Gottingen to-day. You chase it back to the days of Chaucer when knights rode abroad in the land. You cross the Channel with it to the Court of Charlemagne at Aix. You go back to Rome and find it in the mouth of Seneca. Socrates utters it in your hearing, then it passes back into pre-historic times, landing you at last in a dim early age amongst unchronicled peoples, somewhere in the Pamirs, on the roof of the world, at the birth of humanity. Yes, a romantic occupation — but, in a sense, piratical. For why otherwise should a comfortable and agreeable gentleman over a large pot of beer become simply epileptic when one suggests that the word “sooth” may have some connection with the French
sus
, the perfect participle of
savoir
, which comes from the Latin
scire
? Personally I care little about the matter. It is interesting in a mild way, but that is all. But my friend became enraged. He became more enraged than I have ever seen in the case of a learned gentleman. You see, some rival Captain Kidd, or some rival Francis Drake had enunciated the theory as to the word “sooth” which I had invented on the spur of the moment. Individualism in fact flourishes in Germany still in a way that died out of England when Ruskin died and Carlyle died. And being badgered, in my civilized timidity, by these formidable and learned persons, I feel very much as I used to feel when as a boy I was browbeaten by the formidable great figures that flourished when Victoria was queen. Perhaps it is only that in England we have lost interest in great subjects, or perhaps it is that we know better how to live since it takes all sorts to make a world. In an English drawing-room I should never think of abusing a Protestant, a Nonconformist, a Jew or a Liberal. I should never think of airing my own opinions. There might — probably there would — be representatives of all shades in the room. In a mild way I should call myself a sentimental Tory and a Roman Catholic. Now in a German drawing room I have never been for more than ten minutes without hearing the most violent abuse of Roman Catholics, of Jews, of Protestants, of Liberals, or of Reactionaries, according to the tastes or ideas of my hosts. This makes society more entertaining, more coloured, but much more tiring. Good Friday before last I gave a lunch to four men at my London club. I passed the meat as a matter of habit, of good manners, of what you will. What was my astonishment to discover that each of my guests passed the meat. In short each of us five was actually a Roman Catholic of a greater or less degree of earnestness. Yet, although we were all five fairly intimate, meeting frequently and talking of most of the things that men talk about, we were not any one of us aware of the other’s religious belief. This, I think, would be impossible anywhere but in London, and it is just for that reason that London of to-day is such a restful place to live in.

But no doubt it is just for that reason that this book of mine has turned out to be a jeremiad. We don’t care. We don’t care enough about anything to risk hurting each other’s feeling. As a man I find this delightful, and it is the only position that, in a democracy, mankind can take up if it is to live. For the arts, the sciences, thought and all the deeper things of this life are matters very agitating. We are a practical people, but it is impossible to be practical in the things both of Heaven and of earth. There is no way to do it. We are materially practical when we arrange our literature upon the scale of the thousand words. But we cannot then be practical when it comes to the machinery of the books we produce. We cannot pay any attention to that matter at all. A book has outlines, has ribs, has architecture, has proportion. These things are called in French technique. It is significant that in English there is no word for this. It is significant that in England a person talking about the technique of a book is laughed to scorn. The English theory is that a writer is a writer by the grace of God. He must have a pen, some ink, a piece of paper and a table. Then he must put some vine-leaves in his hair and write. When he has written 75,000 words he has a book.

Yes, we are an extraordinary nation. It seems rather wonderful to me that, practical as we are, we cannot see that since every book has its machinery the best book will be produced by a man who has paid some attention to the machinery of books. But no, we roar with laughter at the very mention of the word technique. The idea of Flaubert spending hours, days or even weeks in finding the right word is sufficient to send us happy to bed, in a frame of mind beatifically lulled by superior knowledge. We know that a book consists of 75,000 words. It does not surely matter what those words are as long as in our mind we have had a great moral purpose and in our hair those vine-leaves. A practical people!

So, with our 75,000 words under our arm, we set forth in search of fame. And this we know we can only achieve if our book will forward some social purpose. For it is necessary for us to prove that we are earnest men. To be a good writer is nothing. No, it is worse than nothing, for it generally leads — in nine cases out of ten it leads — to the divorce courts. So that we must espouse some “cause” in our books. It does not much matter what it is. Personally I am an ardent, I am an enraged suffragette. So far I have not found that this fact has led to my books selling one copy more. But I hope that when Miss Pankhurst is Prime Minister of England she will nominate me to some humble post — say that of keeper of her official wardrobe. I shall be a gentleman by prescription, and my immense earnestness will be recognized at last, and publicly.

“For the thing to do” — I am taking the liberty now of addressing a supposititious and earnest young writer—” the thing to do if you would succeed is to identify yourself prominently with some ‘cause’ or with some faith. I myself have had in literature a success which I am quite certain I do not deserve. My books cannot by any measure of means be called popular, and they are of all shapes and sizes. There will be thirty-seven of them by the time this reaches your young hands. In the first place, because I have a German name, I am usually taken for a Jew, and this has secured for me a solid body of Jewish support. In the second place, a great number of Roman Catholics know that I am a Roman Catholic — though a very poor one — and
they
support me too. I also get some support from Socialists who think me a Socialist, and some — but not as much as I deserve — from Suffragettes. All the support I get comes from these accidental labels. The quality of my writing is nothing. So that, oh, young writer, I implore you very earnestly to take some label. Become the champion of the Church of England; write a novel all of whose characters are curates, in which there is no love interest, and all the villains must be Nonconformist grocers who refuse to give credit to the curates so that they all die of starvation. Something like that.”

But I am afraid I am letting something of the bitter scorn that I feel peep through. That would be a pity. The fact is, all the tendencies that I have described are inevitable in our time. No one is to blame; it can’t be cured; it can’t be helped. I can’t blame the literary editor who turns his pages slowly into a vehicle for catching advertisements. There are some who do not, but they will go, and it is the same story all the world over. The newspapers cannot live without advertisements, so that I cannot blame the newspaper proprietor for sacking the editor who does not bring him advertisements. If not to-day then to-morrow there will not be a newspaper left of which any man might not be the editor if he could guarantee from some other firm in which he is interested £30,000 a year’s worth of advertisements. It is sad, it is tragic, but there it is. Neither do I blame the publisher who has cut me down to my one set of proofs that must be marked here with red ink, here with blue. He must do it. At his throat, too, is the knife that is at all our throats.