Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1039
VI. REALLY TO THE LINE
It has grown nearly dusk in the studio. Esherick is giving Biala a lesson in wood-engraving. I should have thought it would be bad for their eyes. But artists never seem to bother about that. I suppose the trained eye can see where the lay one can’t and engrossment carries them forward. Happy people!
I suppose the artists are the only happy people left in this anxious world.
§
It has been decided that we shall continue this journey only to-morrow morning. We are to go in the bus of some strolling players who have their headquarters in the mists of the valley below... across the Delaware border: the Mason and Dixon Line.
It is curious that in this State we should have come across the only constituents of the body politic who are indispensable to the Small-holder Estate. You could get on without almost anybody else. A cabinet-maker can dig, or milk cows; a shepherd at a pinch can make a table. But no one can replace the artist or the player. Those employments are vocations. And you cannot keep people on the land without them. A village that has a great artist has a local pride; one that is the headquarters of strolling players has a night life. So it is queer to find them at home in this land of Modern Miracles.
§
I don’t know why I should so dislike this State. Or “dislike” is too strong a word. It would be better to say that I feel restless here — with the itch to get across the border. And it is hardly the country that I dislike.... Since we are not moving on till to-morrow morning we have leisure to think desultorily for a little longer....
The quiet country seen through these tall windows runs in long, gentle lines between the hedges. The grass is a little pallid in the twilight. I could have sworn I heard a horn. You would expect to see the hounds coming back to the kennels, the horn calling in the stragglers, the riders sitting hunched together on their covert hacks, riding slowly, talking in low but contented undertones. There is a little mist rising... just as it does at the day’s end in the East Kent country. Selby Lowndes’ country with the kennels at Smeeth Paddocks. Old Selby Lowndes who came from a trencher-fed pack in the vale of Cleveland and rode seventeen stun at his death.... A good pack of hounds, too, is needed to make a country complete.... Artists, players, hounds, and... oh, say cricket, this being a cricketing State.
And, if you will believe me, there are foxhounds in the wood, going home through the Eshericks’ garden path — just as they used to do at Cooper’s.... The white tips of the tails feathering, the white patches of the coats standing out of the shadows like camouflage. And there is the horn calling the wayward:
“Come along home. Come! Come! Come along home,
Come along home. Come! Come! Come along... home.”
As who should say:
“Le son du cor, le soir
Au bois dormant.”
if that is correct quoting of the onomatopoeic verse of Musset’s we used to be told to get enthusiastic over at school.
So that you see they have here everything for local pride.
§
I say to Esherick:
“I see you’ve got hounds in this country.”
He answers, engrossed over Biala’s first attempt at a woodcut:
“Yes! Everybody detests them. They will soon be got rid of.”
There you have it.... I guess the artists and the actors are detested too.... Not to mention the cricketers.
§
I mentioned cricketers on purpose because cricket is almost indigenous to Philadelphia... and because that city has played a remarkable part in the history of the game... which is also a moral standard.
§
When I was in Philadelphia cricket was dying. It is always dying — like bull-fighting and football and civilization. But it certainly was rather dying then in England. People would not go to county matches; tennis was being taken up in the great schools. There was also golf... and stamp-collecting. I could feel it dying behind my back as I sat at the Clover Club banquet.
At that feast there was a charming young man against whom I was particularly warned. I could discover nothing against him. He appeared to be what they call a gentleman in England. He was said to have a good deal of money; to be a large landlord; to have shown great public spirit in fighting the beef trusts for the benefit of his tenants.... Still, my friends all pursed up their lips and hinted.... No. No. I had better not know him. It would not be liked. I could understand.
It was, of course, only that he was a Democrat. And played cricket, which people in Philadelphia were trying to get rid of.
§
Well, next year Philadelphia sent a team to England to play the English Counties.... And English cricket came alive again.... Because that young man introduced into the English game... the googly ball. At least I think it was that young man. The innovator had, at any rate, the same surname.... I am ashamed to say that I did not take enough interest in cricket to inquire if the initials were the same.
At any rate one of the Philadelphians introduced the googly to England and the game came alive again. It came alive because the googly was for the time an almost unplayable ball. Till then you had had fast bowling and slow, and medium, and on-the-wicket bowling and round-the-wicket bowling and yorkers and so on. And the good English batsmen had got so skilful at playing all those sorts of balls that it had become almost impossible to get them out. A stone-waller could stay in for the whole of two days and matches did not finish. And cricket is only exciting when either wickets fall or runs come fast.
And the Philadelphian cricketers took the English wickets so fast at first that games finished over and over again in much less than the statutory three days. Of course the better English batsmen eventually worked out methods of protecting their wickets and their wickets did not fall so fast. But in the meantime the English crowd had got into the habit of going to cricket matches and cricket came alive again. It has remained alive ever since, I believe.
Yes, of course it has. Because, if you remember — but you won’t — a year or so ago Australia nearly declared war on Great Britain because some English bowler had invented a new sort of fast ball to which the Australians could not stand up. They said it was not cricket.
I don’t know that England ever wanted to go to war with Philadelphia over the googly. English cricketers are not so keen as Australians. But Great Britain and the United States might well become embroiled over the respective merits of cricket and baseball. They would say it was because of the question of fortifications in the North-West Passage.... But it would be really because some prominent Englishman had drawled that, of course, baseball wasn’t cricket.... Let us examine the matter a little whilst we wait for the dinner bell.
(I am at this point reminded of the Tenby pilot who remarked: “Rocks: Why I know every rock in Tenby harbour.... There’s one!” as he ran the vessel on it. Because here the patient and omniscient gentleman who reads my proofs drily notes in the margin: “The inventor of the googly, an Englishman named Bosanquet, has recently died at Ewhurst.” I had not forgotten Bosanquet any more than I have forgotten Watson of Lancashire, but I did not know that it was claimed for him that he was the inventor of what he certainly perfected. In late 1906 — my friend H. of Philadelphia bowled to me at the nets for a quarter of an hour or so balls that broke back both in the air and on the ground and that I found absolutely unplayable. His fellow cricketers who were more used to them played them more easily. They were there called “googlies.” H. afterwards went with a cricket team from Philadelphia to England. I have perhaps exaggerated their prowess there, but if I have I remain unrepentant. Fas est ab hoste doceri; and it is even more fas, as I learned in the cricket fields of Kent, hostem laudare. Isn’t it, indeed, the essence of cricket? I do not lay claim to cricketing — or any other — omniscience? But it certainly seems to me that it was after 1907 that Bosanquet distinguished himself with the googly so that my good faith is at least unaffected. In any case cricket is dead for me. Last Canterbury Cricket Week I saw Kent declare with seven wickets down — to Lancashire — and get beaten by five wickets. Surely a game at which Kent can be beaten by Lancashire is not one for gentlemen or scholars. Why, even the patient New Yorker whom I had at last succeeded in making to understand why there were two sets of sticks in threes stuck in the ground and why the field changed over for a lefthander... even then the patient New Yorker, beginning without any explanation to understand how you can spend three days on a bank beside a Kentish field and like it... all but cried.)
§
The googly method of bowling owes a good deal of its deadliness to the game of baseball — which owes its existence to the game of stoolball, which is the ancestor of cricket, which was invented in the playing-grounds of Cheetham College, Manchester, England, in or about the year 1570. Well, the googly is a ball so bowled that it doublecurves in the air and when it reaches the ground behaves as if it were a rat avoiding the blows of a club until finally it crawls up against the wickets with just strength enough to knock the bails off and put the batsman out. In itself it is not formidable, but a sudden googly coming in the middle of a series of straight, swift, or medium, round-the-wicket balls will bewilder the finest international batsman.... So the game of cricket was saved.
It was first played with an inverted, three-legged stool for the bowler’s target, the batsman defending it from the ball with a club and running round bases just as they do at rounders — I mean baseball. The boys of Cheetham’s who could not obtain the use of a stool used to play without it, imagining the space that it would occupy in the ground. That game is still played in England by poor little boys who cannot afford the paraphernalia of cricket. For at Cheetham’s Grammar School about 1570 some genius of the Columbus order suddenly had the idea — in order to make the game faster — of using two inverted three-legged stools twenty yards apart so that there could be two batsmen and two bowlers functioning at the same time. And to make runs come faster the batsmen ran between the wickets instead of round a circle.
§
So cricketers regard baseball with contempt because it is only fit for little boys short of pocket-money; and baseball players regard cricketers with contempt because their game does not lend itself to secret intrigues, whispered instructions, signs from the stands, and all the manoeuvres that make the game. The cricketers say that it’s boring to be so keen about a mere game, don’t you know. And the baseball players say, what the hell, we haven’t time to sleep for three days over a mere game like cricket. And so you can go on for ever until you set to trying it out with iron balls that burst and blow your entrails to the moon.
I am quite serious. That sort of idiocy is the cause of almost more ill-feeling between nations than any other department of human folly. And it can enter into every department. I don’t know to what extent Spaniards, Mexicans, Portuguese, Provençaux, and the rest cherish vengeful feelings because English, Americans, French, Germans, and others say they are loathsomely cruel... about bull-fighting. They could, at any rate, if they liked, take the insults philosophically because they can well say that those Nordics know nothing about the matter. But the other day a Virginian lady who has ridden much to hounds in the South said to me:
“You loathsomely cruel English, you kill your foxes when you hunt!”
And she gave a spirited account of how her grandfather’s hounds had hunted the same fox seven seasons running without killing him. Then one of the hounds killed him by accident to the general regret. Well, in the East Kent we hunted a large dog fox with a black tufted tail at odd times for four seasons and he always got away. Then we discovered that he broke the scent by springing from a wall-top into a pollard willow. So Selby Lowndes gave orders that he was not to be hunted any more — for fear of accidents!
Actually the English hunters have to kill some foxes from time to time. The English country is crowded — with hen-keepers who would poison all the foxes if they were not kept down, whereas that lady’s grandfather hunted in relatively deserted country. He could do what he liked.
On the other hand, three days after that spirited lady had knocked me down backwards, I met an agreeable gentleman who was said to be the only owner of a private pack of fox-hounds in the United States. He said that Long Island, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and other American packs killed on an average five times as many foxes as the Quorn or the Pytchley or any of the long-grass country packs, throwing in John Peel and his coat so grey to make weight. They killed four times as many, because the English hounds were inferior and the English masters did not know how to hunt. So where are we — if not in danger of getting into a mess of bad blood?
§
It becomes at this point my duty to repeat once more that we are all one civilization living on the edge of a great oval. Most of us learn, or have learned, a great deal from all the other agglomerations. Almost all of us could learn a great deal more. We mostly don’t because if anyone starts to teach us anything — or merely appears to be doing things better than we do — we take it as a personal insult. So we are all losers. Let us consider food.... That is hardly fair in the absence of the patient New Yorker who is our eating specialist. But we are just going to eat.
§
In a very few minutes we are going to go down the hill through the dark wood. And, in a candle-lit room in which every piece of furniture, every dish, every platter, every implement, every piece of textile ware, every article of clothing has been made by hand, we are going to eat a meal in which every constituent — except the pepper — has come straight out of the garden, the hen-house, or the dairy. It is the first time we shall have been able to do this since we left the Roman province that runs along the sea to Marseilles from Ventimiglia, where we left Columbus walking and thinking that he was an emissary of the Holy Ghost who would eventually make a million in the slave-trade.... At any rate, he said he thought the first and he certainly did the second.
For the first time since then we are going again to become men.
For you are not a man if your body is built up of long dead meats kept in suspended putridity by refrigeration plus every imaginable coal-tar products from picric acids to arsenical fruit washes. You are x° man and the rest drug shelf. And your brain is to match.... And even with the learned and impassioned help of the patient New Yorker, who has penetrated into all sorts of Wop, Dago, Russky, Hebrew, and Polack markets in cellars and under elevated railroads, we have not been able since we left Provence to get anything really fresh, though we have as a rule been able to get things that have not been treated with chemical preservatives. Those simple breeds without Mr. Kipling’s law won’t stomach such powders and brews in their foods....
This is not an insult to New York alone; it is one that must be shared by all great and small cities from Constantinople westwards. It is a state of things due, in part to the indifference of industrial populations, in part to absolute necessity. You cannot get food as fresh as it should be in a city — unless you grow mustard and cress in soup-tureens or raise chickens in your refrigerator. And food is the basis of health, and health the basis of mentality. It is no use saying that after a diet of peas grown wholesale in vast fields, forced under electric light, with chemical manure, picked by the ton, left for three days to decay, canned with, let us say, a boric preservative and consumed two years later, a man will be the same as after a diet of the same vegetables grown in the sunlight on a sheltered plot, manured with natural composts or dung, picked by hand and maggoty or inferior pods rejected, the peas themselves not much more than twice as large as a pin head and cooked and on the table twenty minutes after they have left the vines. He won’t. He won’t be the same either physically or in immediate mentality. Eating dead peas out of a can is a dullness that adds to the slatternly indifference of the mass-worker; eating your own live peas twenty minutes off the vine is a mental stimulant both immediately and during several days of anticipation whilst you watch them coming to the exactly right moment for picking.
Just try growing a little mustard and cress in any old utensil that is slightly cracked so that the earth will not sour under it. And you will get a little fun saying that in three days’ time you will invite Mrs. Delane, who is an Anglomaniac, to tea and give her mustard and cress sandwiches — and a little more fun in giving them and in tasting their brownish sub-bitterness, and a little more in talking it over afterwards... not to mention the little bit of engrossed interest that you will have had at watching the seeds swell and burst and send up their green filaments.... You will be less of a clod and just a little in touch with the mysteries of the earth from which you are segregated.
§
This is not the exasperating patronage of the alien talking to the inhabitants of the United States in the familiar way. It is a depressed optimist telling the whole world how it may better itself. I address these words to the Universe from the neighbourhood of Philadelphia because Penn’s State in its publicity asserts that it is the one district in the world that has not felt the Crisis — which is not true, for I know an almost worse city — and because of the image of the Millions and Millions of Beans passing on endless belting beneath the Eyes of Hawk-Eyed Inspectors before being canned. But London has got the canned goods fever to-day even worse than the city of Brotherly Love. According to her slogan you must Eat Things out of Tins to save the empire.... Nothing less.... That is what Protection will do to human beings whom Patriotism has first driven mad.
And the case of France is not much better — or rather there are in France cases that are even worse. Listen. The other day we were asked to dine at the house of one of the greatest names in France. One of the very greatest. A name known over the whole world and having been so known ever since the days of Louis XIV. (I mention the fact not out of snobbishness but to emphasize the horror of what is to come.) It is the first time I have seen the patient New Yorker faint. Because we were given peas out of a can. In spite, that is to say, of the fact that her name is as illustrious as that other illustrious ornament of France — petits pois à la française, which is made by cooking microscopic peas with a head of lettuce and only so much water as the lettuce will take up, sauter-ing them afterwards with butter straight from the churn — in spite of that that lady is also Anglo-mane, and she had heard that in London it was the thing to do.... This is the literal truth.
