Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1046
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But in Virginia everything becomes historic at once.... Even, looking back from here across the Potomac, Washington itself seems to bask in the tender light of history. I can see President Washington in his cocked hat and ruffles, on the top of the bluff across the water. He is pointing inland with his cane, the young French engineer, l’Enfant, attentive at his side., L’Enfant now sleeps somewhere quite near here in the cemetery, and it always pleases me to think that in the century or so that succeeded his death, though every kind of financier, speculative builder, and jerrymanderer tried to get changes made in the plans of the city, it was always to l’Enfant’s original plan that they had to return, so strong is the Mediterranean influence even at this distance away along the Great Route. It has to prevail here because of the suave climate, the white sunlight, the material at disposal, the slope of the hills, and the tempo of the thoughts in the mind. You could not, building in wood, achieve any dignity or harmony except in this style, nor could you here think leisurely in any other form of building. Nor, indeed, in buildings that never get far from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes could you have dwellings other in shape than that of the here traditional dog-run arrangement. You build a temple with the peak of the roof above the entrance; then to get as much head-room as possible on the upper or upmost floor you must have your corridor in the middle. And the lower corridors must be below that one. So the dwelling-rooms must open out on each side, and there you are.
I am bound to say that, with the contrariety that distinguishes a proper man, the house I like best of those that I know in Virginia is Gunston Hall, with its red-brick suggestion of the age of Queen Anne in England. But I dare say it is the box walks and timber round the house that really take my fancy and the staircase and other interior fixings... and the relative smallness. Westover and the Nelson House at Yorktown, in the same style, would be too lordly for me and their gardens have not the same attraction. So if you are in the mood to be the Squire or the Lord of the Manor or the wife of the Colonial Governor you may have them for me.
And of these mansions in Virginia the catalogue would seem to go on for ever and ever... and then you would have forgotten... oh, say Chatham, “where Washington courted Martha Custis, Robert E. Lee courted Mary Randolph Custis, and Abraham Lincoln visited the Army of the Potomac.”... A sentence that seems rather naïve.... You would have thought that Lincoln would have chosen some other place in which to visit his legalized murderers... or that his biographers would be silent about it.... For what would Lincoln have thought or said or done if he had met the mournful shade of his first predecessor?... who was a Virginian. It would have been much as if Mr. Hitler should meet the shade of Christ... who was a Jew. Only worse really, because Mr. Hitler at least is not Christ’s “fellow-citizen” and, since Mr. Hitler is not a Christian, there is no reason why Christ should be first in his heart.
But, from the historic point of view, what is important about the Old Dominion State is the profusion of these buildings and courtships and visitings of armies. The profusion!... I don’t profess to be an authority on Virginian colonial houses... and I am glad of it. But what I am still more glad of is that, though there are several catalogues of historical and picturesque buildings of Virginia, I don’t know of one that is complete. That is the real note of profusion. You love countries where the soil is beloved and hallowed by suffering and the voice of poets. But you love them still more when you know that for you they will be inexhaustible. They will have so many buildings in gentle decay, so many battlefields, the memory of so many old unhappy things that you give up the idea of coming to an end of them. And, above all, they won’t stick out. You will come unawares, and when you are not in the least in a sight-seeing mood, upon some delightful, uncatalogued, forgotten fragment... and then you are glad that you are not an authority and swear that you never will become one. That is the desideratum.
Obviously Virginia is not Provence or Liguria or Andalusia and Richmond and Fredericksburg are not Rome or Paris or Granada. And poor martyred Williamsburg is not Oxford nor the Quarter of the Sorbonne and you will not see the Castle of the Popes dominate the Shenandoah Valley.
But in their own ways they are good enough.... Good enough, really for anybody, simply because once you have passed the State line you don’t have to go sight-seeing to see things simple and beautiful enough. You can walk along any road anywhere and come upon something to add to your mental stock of memorabilia.
It is no good saying that the view from any high place in North Dakota or Wyoming or Illinois is as good as the view into Virginia from the Blue Ridge or that territory in the Wheat Belt is as good to look at as the Shenandoah Valley — or the Tidewater or Piedmont. It isn’t: they aren’t.
The silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien trick is good enough once in a while and pioneering is an amusing enough occupation for people with inhibitions. The sight of a log-cabin newly erected beneath Sequoia pines may stimulate the imagination to the point of seeing futures for the descendants of those hairy squatters. But immediately comes a dreary period of money-grubbing and sordidnesses amongst empty cans and garbage dumps in an earth polluted and unloved. And history begins to be made.... You climb six thousand feet to see — if the mists permit — through a telescope at a distance of ninety miles the roof of the shack in which President Coolidge had tea with Mr and Mrs. Minton Winesop II.... That sort of thing.
Virginia glamour has been overdone because it makes such easy writing — just as do Paris or Provence or Taormina or the Holy Land... or almost any neighbourhood on the Great Route. But it makes easy writing just because it is authentic. You don’t have to bother about getting in an atmosphere; it is done all ready for you. So you overdo it... unless you are a very good writer indeed. There wasn’t really the profusion of cocked hats and scarlet coats at the race-meetings; the ladies’ dresses would look pretty homely affairs to-day; the silver teaspoons may have clicked romantically while the Indians yelled without the houses — but there would not be very many of them and the candle lighting for the routs and levees was a pretty dim affair. When Lord Dunsmore was in Norfolk County in 1774, only one local gentleman could be found who was dressed sufficiently de rigueur — in a great plumed hat with enormous silver buckles on his shoes — to dance with Lady Dunsmore.Hospitality was on an incredible scale and that alone cut severely into the planters’ power to purchase furnishings and gear from England or France in the days when the only currency was tobacco of varying prices. And, as I have already pointed out, slave-labour farming was not immensely profitable even in good years and when the planter himself was incessantly directing the labours of his estate. Fluctuations in values of crops occurred then as now. When tobacco went out of use as currency the planting of that weed fell to a mere fraction of its former acreage. The price of tobacco immediately rose, and so much tobacco was planted next season that a large part of it could not be sold. George Washington was left with forty thousand pounds unsaleable in his barns.... And it should not be forgotten that though Jefferson actually died in Monticello he died bankrupt and was only allowed to die in his house on the suffrage of his creditors and mortgagors... who, anyhow, could not sell the estate.... It sold eventually for a mere
§25,000, plus the value of the practice of the chemist who bought it on his retirement from business — and who at once cut and sold the timber and shade trees and planted indigo, rather unsuccessfully.
Jefferson, of course, was an artist with the extravagances of the artist. He had set himself at any cost to have the most beautiful home in America... and he got it. As he says about his purchase of the MSS. of Ossian, money was to him completely inconsequential in comparison with the thoughts you may have over beautiful poetry or in a beautiful house. So he set himself to follow out the lordliest designs of Palladio.... The Mediterranean again! And he surpassed them... “with some faults,” said the Marquis de Chastellux who visited him at Monticello in 1782. And the Marquis adds: “We may safely aver that he is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how to shelter himself from the weather.”
That is the great note, of Jefferson and of Virginia. He broke his back over his palace as the Roi Soleil broke the back of the French nation over his palace of Versailles. But it was only his own back that he broke. His profusenesses were extraordinary. When the British burnt the Library of Congress — which was housed in one room — Jefferson sold his own library to the Nation for almost the same sum as the chemist afterwards paid for all Monticello.... You think that pathetic, the great artist and scholar having to sell his library which had been the patient collection of years because he was pressed for money.... Not a bit of it. He was certainly pressed for money. But at once he unearthed from Williamsburg a library almost exactly as large and quite as carefully selected. It had been warehoused there for forty years.
You will say that the end of Jefferson is a salutary warning against extravagance. But it isn’t. It is an incitement. He had the glory of a satisfied passion, the glory of immense achievement, and he retains the glory of having splendidly influenced his countrymen towards civilization. For what is wrong with the world is not that it contains too many men who indulge in extravagant expenditure on the arts and the cultured amenities of life. It is that there are too few.
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Let us then say that Jefferson stands for the best that is in Virginia — for, if you like, the best in the modern world that began when the Golden Age came finally to an end.... Say when Columbus founded the city and port of Novidad in an estuary which seemed to him adapted for the embarkation of the slaves he proposed to ship to Europe. I don’t myself mind how much you praise Virginia. But it is well to remember the fate that befel Aristides, who was too monotonously extolled as being a just man.
Virginia, then, until the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, represented a type-civilization that it is convenient to call feudal — a type that is probably one of the only two systems of body politic that have ever proved at all satisfactory in this world.
Humanity divides itself into two distinct varieties. There are men too supine to interest themselves in public affairs. For these the state of feudalism is best adapted. There are in the alternative those who are prepared either to watchpublic characters with unceasing vigilance or who refuse to have any public characters at all, preferring themselves to attend to their own public affairs... or to have no public affairs at all.
You had both types of body politic well represented in the lands through which we are passing... there were the highlands of the Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia Piedmont climatic and terrene system, where life remains to-day much as it was in the earlier Colonial times. And then there was, at its best developed in Virginia, the quasi-feudal systemof the great plantations of the Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and, say, Richard Henry Lee type — which has disappeared. Both were almost equally favoured in climate, soil,... and an atmosphere of at least some sort of religious tolerance.
The practical disadvantage of the Golden Age — or part-time farming — type of civilization is its relative defencelessness from attack from the north. It will have the tendency to group up into small communities. Being contented they will be unwarlike, being prosperous they will not be over-populated, and being independent they will be disinclined to place much power in the hands of whatever federal organization they may have evolved. They will also as a rule not possess much civilizing influence over the outer world, whilst they will have the dangerous reputations of being themselves Golcondas or lands where grow fabulous apples of gold.
The disadvantages of feudalism at its best are in part similar. A feudal unit had the great advantage of having a head which could be lopped off if the Community did not prosper or was discontented. Thus being forced against their wills to pay taxes to the Crown as well as doing suit and service to their feudal lord, the tenants of the third Earl Percy met him as he came home from hunting and cut him in pieces with razors. Or thus the inhabitants of Great Britain have always dealt with their kings — from Edward II, who could not make his country prosperous with the plunder of the Scots, the princes in the Tower, who could not govern, and Henry VI, who lost the famous plundering-ground in France, to Charles I, who irritated and be-panicked not only his relatively few surviving feudal lieges but the great merchants who were replacing them.
By the time of the development of the Colonies the temper of Anglo-Saxondom had changed so that actual, federal-centred feudalism had become impracticable. The sort of palatinate that Locke evolved would not stand up in face of a populace who believed that there should be no taxation without representation. A few great lords drifted along on their possessions until the revolution, but they, like the Crown itself, were mere survivals — as it were the last of the dodos.
... Until you developed the Modern system of representatives with obscure and almost illimitable power, no responsibility and such a grip on the electoral machine as to be practically irreplaceable except before tremendous gusts of public bewilderment or despair. It is not merely the lands through which we are passing that are afflicted with this class of political machine. Every nation along the great oval which is the extension westward of the Great Route is almost similarly accursed, be-panicked, and engaged in seeking expedients, each more desperate than the other.... And the most favoured expedient in every nation is the putting up against a wall of all alien nationals and all classes of his fellow-citizens obnoxious to the individual who proposes expedients. It is, indeed, as Mr. Dreiser said, a problem.... But... put ’em up against a wall, the Technocrat continues to asseverate.
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The other great disadvantage of the feudal cosmogony resembles that of the assemblage of units of Small Producers. It is that, flourishing as a rule and tending to self-centredness, they exercise very little educative influence on their northern neighbours and they will have the appearance and reputation of easily gained wealth. The most salient instance of this tendancy in the history of the Route is the destruction — the complete wiping out — of the gentle, beautiful, and highly-cultured feudal civilization of the Troubadours by the North French in the thirteenth century.
The wiping out of the civilization of Virginia in the years 1860-65 has had effects infinitely disastrous to our immediate selves. But one may be allowed the speculation that, if some of the civilization of Provence had spread to their immediately Northern neighbours and so to us Nordics, the horrors and catastrophes that have since afflicted us would have progressed at a diminished speed. We should have been spared the Inquisition, the wars of Religion, very likely the Reformation, the counter-Reformation.... There is, indeed, no knowing what would not have been the progress of civilization if it had been proved at that moment to St. Dominic and his northern murderers that the plundering of a civilized people on the grounds of their immorality is not really a paying proposition. The Troubadours were subjected to wholesale murder on the grounds that they were heretics; the civilization of the American South was wiped out by other Northerners who preferred to use slaves in a different way. The result of the one catastrophe as of the other is that to-day we are in a condition more miserable, more distracted, more disunited, and, alas, infinitely more bloodthirsty. And do not try to evade the question by saying that this is an exaggeration or a piece of casuistry. It is not. Until the days of Napoleon they still talked of the laws of war and the dictates of humanity and were horrified at the idea that broken glass should be fired from cannon. The chivalry of the chivalric ages was a real thing; the loss of less than six hundred lives at Balaclava sent a thrill of horror round the entire world; the lives of non-combatants were spared whenever possible by the Prussians in the Franco-German War. Even in 1914 traces of belief that the non-combatant was sacred still obtained and rumours of atrocities shook the whole world.... The whole world. Or to be, for an instant speculative: I do not suppose that if a scientist had offered St. Dominic the use of poison gas at the siege of Béziers he would have refused it. But he would almost certainly have felt remorse similar to that of Bismarck after he had employed it. He showed sometimes some traces of humanity.
But to-day, such has been the gradual growth of cupidity under the Industrial system and the diminution of sensibility caused by familiarity with the wonders of science, that the most civilized amongst us views with equanimity the fact that our elected rulers are all preparing at this moment — the chosen rulers of each one of us at this moment — this very moment — are preparing planes and bombs that will wipe out the populations of whole cities. Whole populations.... Every man, every child, every woman, every child in the womb, every cat, every mouse, every flea, every streptococcus and other bacillus. Don’t you think you ought to do something to stop it? Yes, you.
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“One hundred million dollars of damage has been done to Georgia,” writes Sherman in his despatches, “twenty million inured to our benefit, the remainder simply waste and destruction.”... And again: “War at its best is barbarism, but to involve all — children, old men, women, the helpless — is more than can be justified.” Yet he let his army carry on in its rapine—”lest its vigour and energy be impaired.”
He let Columbia be burned by his troops who were drunk. He acknowledges that they were drunk. The German troops in Liège and places in 1914 are said to have committed atrocities when they were drunk. I do not know whether they did or did not. But the Great German Staff had at least the decency to deny fierily that their troops were drunk. Sherman, however, let Columbia be burned and then laid the charge against General Hampton, the Confederate General... that Hampton had burned Georgia. In his Memoirs he says: “Now I confess I did it pointedly to shake the faith of his people in him.”... Yet General Hampton was a soldier and Sherman passed for a soldier.
