Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1005
My poor friend explained that I wrote books. It would perhaps have been better if he had not.
When, holding a number of forms, I rejoined him in the atrium outside I found him standing in the shadows looking expressionlessly at the bust of Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus. I handed him his share of the formulæ that the clerk had given me. I assured him that he had only to write to the Principal Librarian to be treated with the most exquisite politeness … I have only one passionate pre-occupation of a patriotic order–that that England should appear in a favourable light to distinguished foreigners.
That New Yorker slowly tore those printed slips into minute fragments, looked round for a waste-paper receptacle and dropped the pieces into his pocket. He said:
“I have come to the conclusion that the Cockney accent is really responsible for the perpetuation of the class-system in this country. It would be otherwise incomprehensible.”
I repeated:
“I assure you, the most exquisite….”
“Other accents,” he went on, “are merely local. There is a Virginian accent which I find disagreeable, a Cantonese, a Pekin, Lyons, Strasburg or Viennese accent. But to have the Cockney accent is not only evidence of low birth and probably defective education, it at once ensures that such an individual will never climb any social ladder at all and paralyses him in his efforts to that end….”
I said that my friend had no idea of what his tea is to the Englishman. We should not have gone in just on closing time.
He continued:
Did I remember a chap we had met about a month before, sitting alone in a corner at some reception? He proved to be intelligent, instructed and gave evidence of a fertile and refined imagination. But he turned all his “a’s” into “aï’s” so that it had been impossible even for my friend to believe in his culture … That must be souring–and paralysing.
To the Englishman, I went on, his tea was the sacred episode of the day. It was at once his dope, his ruin and his badge of freedom. It spoilt his digestion, let him believe that he was not one of the lesser breeds who need apéritifs or cocktails before lunch and established an intolerable craving in the name of which he will commit any crime … Our men in the trenches were admirable soldiers. But if they did not get their morning tea they would refuse duty. Even if the refusal jeopardised the safety of the whole army … And to be kept from your tea by a septuagenarian and loquacious bore who belonged to the lowest social class of the community….
That New Yorker brought out, regrettably:
“Shucks! … I am neither a writer, nor septuagenarian nor loquacious at the wrong moment.”
That of course was true. At the interview that had so irritated him all that poor Septentrional from across the world had got out had been the inopportune information that Mr Ford wrote books.
I said:
“If the British soldier will jeopardise….”
My friend span irritably round on me and brought out:
“The Hell he will … I’ve been rude to by functionaries in every language between Vladivostok and Portland, Oregon. That’s nothing. It wasn’t even merely the fellow’s rudeness to you that makes me determined to shake the mud-plus-gasoline of this burg for ever from my Stetson …” A Stetson is a hat. “It is,” he finished, “that you should have been deprived of your poor old patriotic demonstration … For a bum display it was a bum display. And I wanted Ulysses to get something out of the suitors. After twenty years of wandering.” I have, you see, my friends.
But I was appalled to the point of tears.
Was it I, I exclaimed, that had said that the inhabitants of this city were the gentlest and kindest people you could find the world over? Was it I that had said that poor old London was the last stronghold of Christism? … No, Sir!
For what had most struck that ingenuous Occidental in London–but most of all–after of course the evidences of shocking indigestions, insomnias and mendicancies, had been the extraordinary part that Christ seemed to take in the affairs and imagination of the City. You went to Hyde Park expecting to see red flags and hear Communists. You saw, instead, nothing but banners, waving to the skies in the insupportable north-cast wind the words: JESUS; JESUS CHRIST; CHRIST JESUS; COME TO THE SAVIOUR; THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB; CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE; CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOUR; and all that you could hear was the sound of brass bands who invited you as Christians militant to go onwards … You went to see the Tower. On the hill above it were assemblages of men with banners proclaiming: JESUS; JESUS CHRIST; CHRIST JESUS … with tonsured monks, laymen looking like pickpockets; laymen looking like cheesemongers; clerics with purple peeping above their waistcoats; clerics lamentably threadbare and rednosed in the biting breezes … All proclaiming the virtues of the Saving Name in the heart of the business quarter of the city … At tea-time!
It had of course been really in the lunch-hour.
And, according to the testimony of that witness, there had been no end to it. If you paused in the Strand for a moment you would be jostled by an individual with the aspect of a city merchant, smiling inwardly and at intervals shouting: Read the GOS … PELS; you passed elderly gentlemen with hatbands inscribed in golden letters ARE YOU SAVED. On the very walls of half the houses in the city you read, scrawled in purple and white chalks: COME TO JESUS.
And there were even more significant things. In the United States if you read a thin volume of new poetry you were astonished at the intimacy with Death that the young poet would display … All the young poets! They seemed to take their stands on hills beside that awful potentate; they interpreted for Him; they despised you, the reader, because you were neither dead nor personally acquainted with His ways … It was the Mode–and the expression of a defeatism that saw no way out for the world save in negation.
In London, if you took up such a booklet, you found the figure of the Redeemer substituted for that of Him whom the Saviour overcame. Otherwise it was the same thing. The poet represented himself as knowing what Christ would have done; would have thought; what he would recommend and how he would have viewed the poet’s unblest and inferior contemporaries. On Christ these young men moulded themselves and their minds. You seemed to see them, with arms outstretched, cross-fashion; kneeling on the Mount or with slightly lunatic, Oxford Movement eyes, agonising in the Garden. The garden would most usually be in Sussex … In this case too it was an expression of defeatism. Only, in London where they had the faculty of not knowing when they were beaten it was not annihilation that they saw as the solution–it was calling in the aid of the Supernatural….
But all this would have to be seriously discounted if, as I appeared to imply, all these–writers, poets, preachers, ranters and scrawlers on walls would become gnashing Hatheists if they were kept ten minutes waiting for their nice cupsertea.
It is difficult to explain the nuances of national traits to foreigners. And the more intelligent they are the more difficult it is. They will observe too much.
I tried still, if faint-heartedly, to bolster up the institutions of my country. I recommended my friend to take a hold of himself. The American is particularly prone–too prone–to take offence at the British official manner. He will submit unprotestingly to the physical brutalities of his own functionaries and to the moral insolence of those of every other nation. The English official drives him off his head. It was the Boston tea-party over again … When one has jeered as much as I have in a long life at German-descended scholarship it is only reasonable that the clerk to the Grand Master of that Teutonic Order should order one to provide him with the assurance that one will not use the fane over which he pontifies for support in one’s, to him, pestilential and Gallic Heresies … and to get the assurance backed up by a Judge of the High Court, the chairman of a leading firm of stockbrokers or an Admiral of the Blue … And I pointed out to that by now cachinnating New Yorker that it was not fitting that a writer of a certain age and industry, with fifty odd entries in, and items covering seven or so pages, in the British Museum Library Catalogue, should be mocked by an immature non-Anglo-Saxon from the East Side.
He said:
“Cheese, vieille fève, it’s useless your trying to promote international cordialities and understandings in the very shadows of your national institutions … Besides, you’ll get in ten minutes at the Bibliothèque Nationale all the incorrect dates you need” … Since I had to leave Town next day but one that was what I resigned myself to doing.
… Patriotism is the meanest of all the virtues and an alcoholism to which one succumbs at one’s peril … I had wanted to prove to that Transatlantic how superior were I and mine to him and his–and heaven knows I have received almost unreasonable courtesies at his Public Library. Without that pot-valiant impulse I do not suppose I should have thought of going to the Museum. There are enough public libraries in Provence and filled with documents about that country. Just at the foot of the hill on which I live is a magnificent library, established before that of the British Museum, and full of just the material that I need. I can walk into it,–my secretary has done it for me again and again–ask for priceless first editions and receive them without any question at all. On the other hand the Museum Library is hopelessly overcrowded with poor devils who have nowhere else to go for warmth and shelter–and the nutriment of the book worm. So it was really wrong for me to ask for a ticket, besides which I am the holder of a life-ticket which, as far as I know, has never been rescinded….
A mean vice. The gods who wish to destroy our civilisations invented it to drive us mad … I was at a party yesterday and happened to say to a very pleasant Englishman that it was impossible without unreasonable expenditure to get decent vegetables in London whilst in the South of France vegetables were so cheap that they could be sold in London for next to nothing; but they were kept out by the tariff.
He said that that was splendid. Thank God, the outrageous and unreasonable French swine were being taught a lesson. I said that nevertheless many Englishmen were being kept out of work by the quota tariff that the French had imposed in retaliation on our manufactured goods.
For that too, he thanked God. He said that the damned swine of English workmen damn well needed a lesson taught to them too. Let them starve, the brute beasts who asked nothing better than to live on the dole–let them starve the whole lot of them. And if the French were not careful one day the German army would be in Paris and what price their tariffs then … Not that he wanted war, God forbid. It would spread through the whole world.
There are high matters as to which I am hardly capable of forming an opinion. My friend was of great-public-school-Balliol-Inner-Temple distinction. He could no doubt speak with authority. But it seems to me that if you succeed in starving a proportion of the population of nation A whilst starving a portion of nation B for the sake of starving that proportion of nation A and making both nations go without, the one, food necessary to health and the other, tools that are helpful in producing food and if as a consequence you run the risk of plunging the two nations and in equally natural consequence the whole of the world into war–well, you seem to be indulging in some confusion of feeling when you ask the Almighty to protect you from the results of your actions …
PART THREE. MISE A MORT
CHAPTER I. THERE THE POOR DARE PLEAD
NEXT day we were in a train, going South.
I ask to be regarded, from this moment, not as Moralist; nor as Historian; but simply as prophet. I am going to point out to this world what will happen to it if it does not take Provence of the XIII century for its model. For there seems to be a general–and universal–impression that our Civilisation–if that is what you want to call it–is staggering to its end. And for the first time in my life I find myself in agreement with the world from China to Peru.
Do you happen to know Haydn’s symphony? … It is a piece that begins with a full orchestra, each player having beside him a candle to light his score. They play that delicate cheerful-regretful music of an eighteenth century that was already certain of its doom … As they play on the contrabassist takes his candle and on tiptoe steals out of the orchestra; then the flautist takes his candle and steals away … The music goes on–and the drum is gone, and the bassoon … and the hautbois, and the second … violin … Then they are all gone and it is dark….
That is our Age … There have stolen away from us, unperceived, Faith and Courage; the belief in a sustaining Redeemer, in a sustaining anything; the Stage is gone, the Cinema is going, the belief in the Arts, in Altruism, in the Law of Supply and Demand, in Science, in the Destiny of our Races … In the machine itself … In Provence there is every Sunday a Mise à mort that is responsible for the death of six bulls. In the world outside it one immense bull that bears our destiny is at every hour of every day slowly and blindly staggering to its end.
I may seem to have written disproportionately of Mrs Patrick Campbell and I may seem to be going disproportionately to write about bull-fighting. But that is of set purpose … Mrs Patrick Campbell represents–and who could do it more magniloquently–the Muses of our day that, in the general break up of our financial machinery, have to creep into the mouse-hole of a mechanical method of reproduction that is itself dying of commercial tuberculosis. In Provence–and of course in Spain–the bull-fight continues still its triumphant progress at the sword-ends of actors who alone today are as beloved as the boy who in Antipolis a couple of thousand years ago danced and gave pleasure. The bull-fight too may die out in the whole general collapse; it is an immensely expensive mass-art–though its essentials are neither the expense nor the immense crowds; its essentials are swiftness and skill in wielding a thin spike of steel against a furious and alert monster. For still today the most admired matadors are not those who offer the most display of agility. They are those who with the classic nonchalance of the hidalgos who first practised this art–and who alone have the right to the name toreador–stroll about the arena, their sword beneath the arm, or sit on a chair till the moment comes to deliver to the bull who has meanwhile been worked into position by the servants, the coup de grace. For that no lists are needed; no tiers on tiers of humanity … no limelight, no publicity … Nothing but a smooth place, some shade-trees, the arms, the man and the bull.
Yes, the great, shining corridas whether of Nîmes or Pampeluna or Perpignan or Madrid and St Sebastian may go, though it seems unlikely since that art has lasted two thousand years in these places.
But the art will not go, the courage, the skill; the alertness In every village in Provence there is a bull-ring and on every Sunday of the year when the days are warm enough all the young men of courage face, without arms, the wild bulls of the Camargue doing nothing more deadly to them than affix rosettes beneath their horns or on each shoulder … And they face the charging bull, place a foot between the horns and spring right over the beast, or vault over him with a jumping pole, or catch him as he charges with their two hands on his horns and somersault across his back … It is just a sport, like cricket, but without advertisement, carried on so obscurely that you might well say it was secret … a sport in the blood of the people, carried on by the sons of the barbers, the furriers, the peasants, the bakers … It is as it were the contefable as against the high and renowned gestes of the troubadours. It is considered that, before a man should have wherewith to pay for his seat at the mise à mort, he must have worked bulls himself….
It is that spirit–the tradition that a man should not eat high cooking till he can cook; shall not inhabit a house of his own till he can sweep the floor; shall not drink the juice of fabulous fruits brought from the Indies till he can grow the fruits of his own land; shall not go to the play till he has proved himself an actor who can improvise his part; shall not travel till he has made a home … and shall not wear a fine coat till he can grow the wool, card, spin and weave the cloth, cut out, baste, fit and sew an every-day one … It is that spirit that could yet save the Western World … But to do that it must be enjoined on the world that Mass and the Machine are the servants not the master of Man and a man must blush as if he were caught in a petty theft if a stranger coming into his house should find anything that was not made by the human hand or if a guest should find himself being offered food out of a can or unseasoned meat that should have been kept beyond its due season by preservatives. It is in that way and in that way only that an economic balance could be re-established, a law of Supply and Demand be re-enacted and the Great Trade Routes be restored to their beneficent function of distributing civilisation to the darkest ends of the earth … It is that or extinction: the one or the other must come … It does not take any great prophet to foresee that….
As I sat in that train lumbering down through Sussex I came to the conclusion that I would write no more of the public history of Provence, for the real history of the country went underground at the death of King René when Provence fell to the King of France and the first Mass Product in the way of modern nations was begun. It is–that public history–a long, sad story of an attempt at standardisation foiled by secret tenacities–by the bakers, the barbers, the blacksmiths, the curriers, the gardener’s and peasants’ sons who kept alive the subterraneous flames of the poetry, the crafts, the pacificisms, the dangerous sports, the theatrical entertainments and the great passion for the beloved earth.
Francis I and several other kings decreed the death of the Provençal language; Louis XIV robbed of its power the family of Orange, the last of the independent sovereigns of the triangle between the Rhone, the Alps and the sea. The Wars of Religion waged themselves in the religion-less country; the lawyers of the Parlement at Aix fixed on Provence the gadfly yoke of the armies of functionaries that have ever since bled and crippled not Provence alone but all the country of the Lilies–and for myself I hardly ever go to Aix en Provence, birthplace of Cézanne though it be, and though it be the gravest and most stately eighteenth century town that you will find anywhere. For though the mistral and the Durance may be the flails of Provence the Parlement of Aix wrought so much the more and the more lasting harm….
