Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 818
Workers in London divide themselves, roughly, into those who sell the labour of their bodies and those who sell their attentions. You see men in the streets digging trenches, pulling stout wires out of square holes in pavements, pecking away among greasy vapours at layers of asphalte, scattering shovelfuls of crushed gravel under the hoofs of slipping horses and under the crunching tyres of wheels. If walls would fall out of offices you would see paler men and women adding up the records of money paid to these others. That, with infinite variations, is work in London.
You get the two things united here and there. The other day I was in Tilbury Docks. (It is difficult to get away from this river.) The vast, empty squares of water lay parapeted, arbitrary and dim in their eternal perspectives; the straight lines of the water, the straight lines of the parapets, of the bottoms of the goods sheds, of the tops, of the gray corrugated roofs, all dwindled together into the immense and empty distances. The rows of four-footed, gaunt, inactive cranes, painted a dull rust colour, and the few enormous steamers at the inner ends of the quays — all these things were wetted, fused and confused in their outlines, beneath a weeping sky in which a drapery of clouds had the look of a badly blotted water-colour painting, still wet and inefficient. Knots of stevedores in dim and neutral coloured clothes seemed to be doing nothing perfunctorily in the shadow of the great hulls.
A big, red faced, heavy-moustached man in blue clothes and with cheerfully brass-bound cap and shoulders, hurried out of a tin shed. It was labelled: “Office of the Steam Navigation Co.” He slipped hastily between the black side of one of the huge sheds and a gray, rusty and sea-fretted liner. Her lower sides gaped in large holes screened with canvas, and from moment to moment obscured by grimy buckets of coal that rose from a lighter; her square, white upper deck cabins were being painted more white by painters in white jackets. He hurried very fast, with a masterful and engrossed step, a cheerful blue figure with pink cheeks, dodging mechanically the pools of greasy water and the fat black mud between the sleepers. He dived into another small office. He was the chief officer of the liner that was coaling and he had a pencil behind his ear.
He was uniting as it were the labours of the men shovelling in the buckets of coal, of the men uttering melancholy wails as they swung-in a white boat, of the men hooking up long planks for the painters to sit on, and of the painters themselves on the upper decks. With that pencil he controlled all their labours, as if he were twisting them into an invisible rope which passed through that tin office and up, far away into town where other pencils and other pens recorded these things on large pages, digested them into summaries and finally read them out to Boards of Directors.
Those invisible ropes — they are strong enough in all conscience — seem to be the only tie between these two classes of workers, between these two great camps set one against another. It is astonishing how different London looks from one or from the other end. Speaking broadly, the man who expresses himself with a pen on paper sees his London from the west. At the worst he hopes to end with that view. His London of breathing space, his West End, extends from say Chiswick to say Portland Place. His dense London is the City as far as Fenchurch Street, his East End ends with what he calls “Whitechapel.”
The other sees his London of elbow room extend from say Purfleet to say Blackwall. He is conscious of having, as it were at his back, the very green and very black stretches of the Essex marshes dotted with large solitary factories and small solitary farms. His dense London, his City, lies along the line from Blackwall to Fenchurch Street. Beyond that, the City proper, the city of the Bank and the Mansion House, is already a place rather of dilettante trifling. Its streets are tidied up, its buildings ornamented and spacious. The end of the West End is for him the Piccadilly Fountain, and this latter quarter of large, almost clean, stone buildings, broad swept streets and a comparative glare of light, is already a foreign land, slightly painful because it is so strange. That, further west, there may be another enormous London never really enters his everyday thoughts. He reads about it sometimes, he hears it spoken of; sometimes perhaps in a holiday frame of mind he goes through it. But it never “matters” to him, it is never like his familiar, rigid rows of streets all of blackened bricks, windows that are square openings in boxes and plasters of blue and white and begrimed enamelled iron advertisements. These are familiar, these are real life, these are homely, as if warm and alive. The other he does not much want to think about, it would worry him. In just the same way the penworker does not want to think about several dark towns of a million or so east of “Whitechapel.” It is an unpleasant thought. Given ill-luck, a craving for drink, disease or one or other of the fatal falls of humanity, he too might have to sink into those gloomy and shadowy depths. The other man is vaguely troubled at the idea of the West. There he would have to be tidy, constrained, worried about specks on his clothes, careful of his tongue, less than a man.
These two types, in their mass very human and very comprehensible, are in general very foreign and in general very hostile the one to the other. Yet upon their combined workings the life of London depends. And because there they may work one into another like the teeth of cogwheels revolving antithetically, London attracts them. For the obvious secret of London, its magnetism, is the work that it offers to be done or to be “organised.” You go there whether you got your training at the tail of a plough in Kent or in Lithuania, with the most salient fact in your experience the knowledge of a pollard willow in which there is always a dog-fox asleep; or whether beside the Isis, on the links of St. Andrews, or in the University of Bonn you learnt the sorrows of Achilles, the binomial theorem, or the chemical formulae of all the coal tar by-products. You go there, whether your ideal is to get a wage of fifteen shillings a week more with lighter work and shorter hours, or whether you dream that before “retiring” you will get yourself turned into a limited company with a capital of six cyphers at the tail of a numeral — you go there to get “something to do.” That is the grosser view.
But the finer side is the romantic, the adventurous, the dreamer’s spirit in mankind to whom work itself in imagination remains the primal curse. In certain cellars here and there in the City, in cellars that have been oil-clothed and tiled, garnished with rows of hat-pegs and with leather seats like planks along the walls, above white marble table-tops that loom like horizontal tombstones through the delicate films of cigarette smoke, contending in the dim atmosphere with the delicate fragrance of coffee — in a City Mecca, in fact — you will see men sit. Their faces of the palest, of the ruddiest, of the blondest, of the most black-avised, will be all united into one serious frown over black and white stones, like smaller tombstones standing or lying prone as if in a disastrously wrecked graveyard. A man will rise in a far corner, pull the lapels of his coat one towards another, shake his umbrella a little, and walk away with a swift step and a half self-conscious air. A young man will look up and lose for a moment his engrossed expression. He will stop his companion’s domino in mid air with “Do you know who that is? Why, Plumly!”—”What, Plumly of the Dash United?” They will gaze with half awe at the disappearing trouser-ends and boot-heels on the stairs.
“Yes. Plumly was only an auctioneers’ clerk in Honiton, where my father is. And now look what he’s worth! That was what made me come to town.” The eyes of both young men will have serious and reflective expressions before they resume their game. They will both be thinking, in one way or another, that what man has done man can do.
Or, on the seat before the ferryman’s hut in a small harbour you may see a hook-nosed, bearded, begrimed, weather-soiled and wonderfully alert London bargeman. He will wave his tiny pipe at the faces of half-a-dozen young fishermen standing in a circle before him.
“Yes,” he will say, “you’re too young to remember Johnston. But his mother and Mrs. Spence, who keeps the ‘Blue William’ here, were first cousins.... Bill Johnston of the ‘Britisher.’”
Bill Johnston of the “stumpy” called “Britisher” had in his childhood sailed from that port aboard a coaling schooner. Afterwards he had “been South,” he had been in the Cape Mounted Police, then he had returned to London. He had saved a little money and bought a share in his “stumpy,” which is a barge without a topsail: he had carried freight unceasingly from Rotherhithe into the Pool or into the canals; his employers had advanced him money to buy the barge outright; he had carried freights until he had paid them back. “And now,” his eulogiser comments, “he sails that there river, Bill Johnston, with his missis for mate and his kid for apprentice; he’s in his own home with a cooking range in the cabin and a joint hanging in the hatchway for a larder. He’s his own master; he comes when he will and he goes; he draws a steady three quid a week, and he’s buying up other barges gradual.”
The young fishermen standing round dive their hands deeper into their russet breeches pockets and gaze out over the rubble of old boats, cork floats, harbour mud and piles. The old man sucks at his pipe, spits, waves a grimy hand wanting a thumb, and says, “Just such a lad as you be Bill Johnston were,” and a boy moves his hands in his pockets sighing “Ah!”
You will see scenes just the same besides the Bay of Naples and, mutatis mutandis, in Ukrainia and the Levant. For London calls out across the lands to the spirit of Romance, to the spirit of youth and the spirit of adventure — to the Finer Spirits.
There are such glorious plums. And the thought of them eventually fills alike those City Meccas and the square, blackened brick, balconied dock-dwellings; it fills the bare rooms in Whitechapel, where dark and hook-nosed men sit amid the stench of humanity, their mouths filled with small brass nails, silent amid the rattling clatter of hammers on boot soles. It fills, too, the behind-counters of large drapers, the very sewers with large neutral-coloured scavengers, and the great Offices in Whitehall. In the whitewashed and grimy courts of Saffron Hill splendid-limbed, half-nude children tumble, dark eyed, like the cherubs of Cinquecento pictures, round the feet of dark men puffing cigarette smoke, and fair Venetian girls lean back, smiling and chattering, in bright head-cloths, bright neck-cloths, bright bodices and bright petticoats against brilliant barrows. Hook-nosed, saturnine and imperturbable old men mix, with the air of sorcerers, flour, vanilla, cochineal, and condensed milk in pewter freezing pots like infernal machines. The Finer Spirit... because, to-day as always and for ever, the streets of London are paved with gold.
I remember reading somewhere a long time ago an ingenious article pronouncing boldly that this splendid figure of speech, this myth shining down the ages, was literally true. I remember the bare existence of the article, but I cannot remember its arguments. It was, perhaps, because the ground in front of the Mansion House is worth its area in sovereigns set on edge. Or it may have been that, according to the writer, the mud trodden underfoot was, for some profound chemical reason, worth its weight in gold. In either case a favoured few do undoubtedly possess the secret of alchemy, in that everything they touch — mud, too, no doubt — turns to gold. And the number of that favoured few is very great, because in London there are so many things to touch. Hence the immensity of London’s silent appeal. She calls to all the world.
“In the old days,” there were, say, The Holy Land, the “Wars” where thousands of mercenaries cut by turns the throats of Ferrarese, of Bolognese, of French, of Burgundians, of Kaiserliks and of each other. There were afterwards the Indies, Peru, Mexico, the Spanish Main; then more Wars of Seven, of Thirty years’ duration — then the opening up of the silent East, then goldfields. These things called to the adventurous of succeeding generations for ten centuries. But these appeals were limited. They called only to those who felt able to handle a sword, fire a thatch, cut the rings off a woman’s hand, set a sail, shoot in a wood, march a thousand miles or come out of a death of thirst. They were for the valorous alone who could work with their hands.
The appeal of London is far wider. She has seemed for the last century or so to stand on high, offering, like the figure on the Duke of York’s column, laurel wreaths to all the world. She seems to hold them for bank clerks and for bargees, for charlatans and the Founders of Faiths, to poets and to privates in the Foot Guards, to actors as to all sorts of robbers with violence. But the appeal is on the whole a modern one: it was not until the wider world of woods and seas was nearly all exploited that the Occidental peoples “discovered” London. To enter minutely into this movement would be impracticable. It would take one very deep into that odd psychology of statistics that is called Political Economy.
But it had its rise, this modern appeal of London, at about the time of the triumphing principle of Free Trade;1 it had its beginning at about the time when the world evolved the equally triumphant principles of Limited Liability, Specialism in Labour and the freedom of knowledge.
(1 I have, however, just read the book of a well received Political Economist who asserts that it did not. The modern spirit is by him attributed to the “consistent, unrelenting, true-sighted policy of five centuries of English Governmental action to a protective system which, in fact, was only relaxed when the supremacy had been reached.” It isn’t, of course, my business to assert the one or the other dogma. The supremacy of London’s particular attraction came at about the time of Free Trade. But Free Trade itself may have come because just then London had become supreme owing to five centuries of Protection. Or the reverse may have been the case.
Both are possible enough, because in the arena of Triumphant Principle pendulums swing backwards and forwards: the undisputed right of to-day becoming the open question of to-morrow, and the unquestioned wrong of the immediate future. That is a platitude because it is one of the indisputable verities. In the country they say that large clocks when they tick solemnly and slowly, thud out the words: “Alive — Dead; Alive — Dead” — because in this world at every second a child is born, a man dies. But, in London, a listener to the larger clock which ticks off the spirits of successive ages, seems to hear above the roar of the traffic, the slow reverberation: “Never — Again; Never — Again,” as principles rise and die, and rise and die again. For in London that fact forces itself upon the ear and upon the eye; it is a part of the very dust. It is, perhaps, the final lesson of the great, human place. Arts rise and die again, systems rise and die again, faiths are born only to die and to rise once more; the only thing constant and undying is the human crowd.)
It was probably foreshadowed in the opening years of last century by the triumphant figure of Napoleon I. He more than anyone stands for that other triumphant principle: What man has done man can do. He raised the standard of the adventurer not only towards respectability but towards apotheosis.
Before his day the great London adventurers were, actively, the Drakes and the Raleighs; passively, Casanovas and Cagliostros. Roderick Random’s idea of “making a career” after the Wars had failed him, was to pretend in London to be a man of fashion, to victimise an heiress, or in some miraculous way to pick up a “patron” with influence. There was not in those days any other career in the Town. Macshanes, O’Creegans, an occasional Colonel Evans, perhaps a French barber spying in the service of the Pretender, a few poets like Thomson of the “Seasons” and a few bastards like Tom Jones — all these people were obsessed by these two ideas. They sat in their best clothes toying with their snuff-boxes or ostentatiously winding up jewelled watches in boxes at the Opera; they panted to attract the attention of an heiress or they wrote dedications and fee’d the footmen of peers.
It would be fanciful to make Buonaparte too responsible for the Modern Type; but he, upon the whole, was the discoverer of the principle: apply yourself to gain the affection of the immense crowd. After his day the mere heiress and the patron as ends of a career vanish. They remain merely as stepping stones.
But the immense crowd is still the indubitable end. If hardly any of us aspire to its suffrage in its entirety, we have, in London at least, discovered the possibilities of capturing its custom in its smallest trifles. To make a corner in collar studs would be rather American: the method in London is to invent, or to buy up the invention of, a collar stud that will appeal straight to the heart of the million, a collar stud that will be not only in all the street vendors’ trays, but in all the barbers’, all the hosiers’, all the drapers’ windows. It ought to be very cheap, very picturesquely “put on the market,” and just perishable enough to make a constant supply desirable. The man who did put it on the market would immediately become the Napoleon of the Collar Stud.
There are already so many of these: there is at least one, I am not sure that there are not several, of the Press; Napoleons of the Lower Finance find their Waterloos every few years. There is a Napoleon of Pharmacy, one of the Tea Trade, one of Grocery, one of Underclothing. This is not a mere figure of speech on my part: the words are used month by month by each of these Trade Journals. There is very obviously one of politics, but that “career,” as things are in London of to-day, has become comparatively decorative — a hobby for Napoleons in retirement. What one would sigh for is no longer the making of a people’s laws or of a people’s songs, but of a people’s socks. With that behind one, one may die Chancellor of the Exchequer and a peer of the realm.
This obviously is desirable enough; we sigh very reasonably for business men in our cabinets. It is picturesque too, and inspiring, it brings about kaleidoscopic changes, and the wildest of contrasts. It makes life more worth living, because it makes life more interesting, and more amusing. The trouble, the defect of this particular Quality, is that the work suffers. The workers and their immediate dependants suffer perhaps still more.
