Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 822
You carry away from it a vague kaleidoscope picture — lights in clusters, the bare shoulders of women, white flannel on green turf in the sunlight, darkened drawing rooms with nasal voices chanting parodies of prayers, the up and down strokes of fiddle bows, the flicker of fifty couples whirling round before you as with a touch of headache you stood in a doorway, a vague recollection of a brilliant anecdote, the fag end of a conversation beneath the palms of a dimmed conservatory, and a fatigue and a feverish idea that if you had missed any one of these unimportant things you would have missed life.
But, if you had been a beanfeaster who missed a beanfeast, or if you had been a Saturday footballer who missed one match, you might have missed so much more of your life. And, indeed, since life is no more than a bundle of memories, your life is so much shorter, since you remember seasons, not events. It is with you: “The season when good old Hinds had his place in Cadogan Square”; or, “The year, don’t you remember? when we used to drink barley water,” or, “Hermit’s year.” But the Saturday footballer remembers so many glorious Saturdays relieved by so many blank weeks. He remembers the splendid crowded journeys back—”The time when Old Tommy sang ‘Soldiers of the Queen’”—”The time when we had the cask of beer on the luggage rack coming back from playing Barnes”—”The time when Black and Moses stuck the ticket collector under the seat and kept him there till Waterloo.”
So the life of seasons and years is shorter, swifter, more regretful, less filled. And, the breaks being less marked, the life itself is the more laborious and less of a life. For it is in the breaks, in the marking time, that the course of a life becomes visible and sensible. You realise it only in leisures within that laborious leisure; you realise it, in fact, best when, with your hands deep in your trousers pockets, or listless on your watch-chain, you stand, unthinking, speculating on nothing, looking down on the unceasing, hushed, and constantly changing defile of traffic below your club windows. The vaguest thoughts flit through your brain: the knot on a whip, the cockade on a coachman’s hat, the sprawl of a large woman in a victoria, the windshield in front of an automobile. You live only with your eyes, and they lull you. So Time becomes manifest like a slow pulse, the world stands still; a four-wheeler takes as it were two years to crawl from one lamp-post to another, and the rustle of newspapers behind your back in the dark recesses of the room might be a tide chafing upon the pebbles. That is your deep and blessed leisure: the pause in the beat of the clock that comes now and then to make life seem worth going on with. Without that there would be an end of us.
For, whether we are of the leisured class, whether we are laundry-women, agricultural labourers, dock labourers, or bank clerks, it is that third state that makes us live. Brahmins would call it contemplation; the French might use the word, assoupissement. It would be incorrect to call it reverie since it is merely a suspension of the intellectual faculties; it is a bathing in the visible world: it is a third state between work and amusement — perhaps it is the real Leisure.
It is not obviously a product of London alone. For your agricultural labourer who hangs over a gate at dusk, just gently swinging a foot and gazing, wrapt unthinking and voluptuous, at black and white, at speckled, at bright red and flame-plumaged poultry on the green below him, tastes it very well along with the flavour of the straw in his mouth — and the women who, after their hard days, stand above the half doors of cottages and gaze at nothing. But with them it is not a third state, since it takes the place of amusement as well as rest. Your London dock labourer really has this third state, since along with his hard physical work he has his sing-songs, his club nights, his visits to music halls, his nights when he takes his “missus” to the theatre. I knew one very good fellow, a plasterer’s labourer, hardworking, making good money, and as regular as a church clock. His hobby was chaffinches. In the mornings before work and in the evenings he gave a certain amount of time to teaching his birds to pipe. At nightfalls he would go to his public house for a couple of pints of ale and a few pipes. On a Saturday afternoon he was shaved and went to a club where there were singing and debates. He always came home sober enough to put beside his bed — he was a bachelor — a pailful of treacle beer that he had brewed himself, and an indiarubber tube.
And there on a Sunday he would lie nearly through the day sucking up the treacle beer through the tube and gazing at the ceiling, thinking nothing at all, letting his eyes follow the cracks in the plaster from one wall to another, backward and forward for ever. Late in the afternoon he would get up, dress himself carefully in his best; wrap his chaffinch cages in old handkerchiefs, and, carrying them, saunter along Petticoat Lane, look restfully at the cages of birds exposed for sale, meditating a purchase for next year, passing the time of day with a Jew or two, and losing himself, stolid, quiet, and observant, in the thick crowd. He would come to a greengrocer’s shop, the door open, the interior a black and odorous darkness, where you trod upon cabbage leaves and orange paper. Behind this was another dark room, in the centre of which a ladder stood up going into an upper loft through a trap-door. This loft was the “Cave of Harmony” where, in the light of brilliant gas jets were held the contests of the piping chaffinches. There, taking the gas jets for a fiercer sun, the little birds sang shrilly and furiously one against another, the attentive crowd of faces around them, thrown into deep shadows and strong lights, hard featured and intense, with every eye fixed upon the small and straining singer, fingers ticking off turns in the song and a silence broken by no shuffling of feet and no clearing of throats.
So, having scored his “marks,” our friend would go slowly and soberly home; set another pailful of treacle beer to brew against next Sunday morning, and put himself quietly to bed.
Thus his life was perfectly regular and calm; hard muscular work giving place to sober amusement, dashed once a week with that intense leisure of lying still, looking at the ceiling and thinking nothing. On off days, bank holidays and the like, he would take his cages, wrapped up, under his arm, out into Epping Forest. For these chaffinch fanciers have a notion — no doubt it is a true one — that unless their captive birds refresh their memory of the wild song by chanting against free chaffinches in the woods or parks, they will lose the brilliance of their note, and finally mope and die. There are in London many thousands of men like this.
Chaffinches, bullfinches, prize bantams, prize rabbits, whippets, bull terriers, canaries, and even pigs occupy their leisure moments, and are regarded with pride by their wives, and awe by their young children. These breeders and fanciers are mostly country born, deliberate, gentle, sober, with a pipe generally in the corner of the mouth, from which come rare jets of smoke accompanying words as rare and as slow. And their “fancies” provide them with that companionship of animals that is such a necessity to the country-bred Englishman. It gives them a chance to get rid of some of the stores of tenderness towards small living things which, for lack of words, they cannot so well lavish on their wives and children. I have known a carter who did not apparently trouble himself in the least about illnesses in his own house, driven to a state of distraction because one of his old companions, a draught-horse, was on the point of death.
They give him, too, these “fancyings,” not only the chance to gaze ineffably, like the agricultural labourer, at the motions of animals, but the chance of emulation, the chance, if you will, of sharing in a sport. That, as it were, is what London supplies, and what makes London in a way both attractive and salutary. For we may say that the man who ceases to compete ceases to be a perfect man, and, in the actual stages of heavy manual work there is no room for emulation. It is true that in the country you have ploughing matches, but they touch only the very few; you have cottage garden prizes, but those are artificially fostered “from above,” and, indeed, they call for efforts too like those of the everyday work to afford much of an occupation for a man’s leisure. — So that, as a rule, these prizes flourish most in the neighbourhood of the small towns, and fall to railway signalmen, cobblers and the non-agricultural. Starling and sparrow shoots are, of course, mere bank holiday carouses, not the hobbies that are necessary for the everyday life of a man. Thus the country districts are depleted.
And, inasmuch as the arts are matters of association, we, loving a picture, a melody, a verse, because for obscure reasons it calls up in us forgotten memories of times when we were young, in love or happy, so these “fancies” which are Arts, call up in the hearts of these countrymen become town-labourers, moods like those they felt in forgotten green fields. I know a man who breeds pheasants in the green enclosure of a City church-yard, and when, towards October in the early black mornings of that tiny and shut-in square, roofed in from the sky by plane leaves high up near the steeple, overlooked by the gleaming plate-glass windows of merchants’ offices, these noble birds utter their shrill, prolonged and wild crockettings, like peals of defiant laughter, their owner says rhapsodically: “Doesn’t it make you think of Norfolk?” It makes me think of covert rides in Kent, dripping with dew, and of the clack of the beaters’ sticks and their shrill cries; but all the same it makes that City caretaker have all the sensuous delight of the green fields of his youth.
Nevertheless, he comments; “It’s better here nor there. — Down there it meant forty shillings if the keeper caught you so much as smelling a pheasant’s neck feather.” — Here he needed no gun license, and they paid him ten times over for their keep, and kept his hands nicely full.
So the birds with their delicate gait, high and dainty spurred steps, and peering, brilliant necks, seek unceasingly for issues from the closed railings of the churchyard, and contribute all that, in London, is needed to keep their owner there for ever. I knew a Rye fisherman, a lazy, humorous scoundrel, who never went to sea when he had the price of a pint in his pocket. He grew tired of that life and became a doorkeeper in some Southwark chemical works. He spends his leisure time with his hands in his pockets, leaning over the river wall, spitting into the eddies of the water and commenting on the ineptitude of the men on the dumb barges. Their sweeps dip up and down, to all appearances senselessly and futilely, and H — comments that ne’er a one of them ever seems to know that twenty yards in shore there’s a current that would take them down three miles an hour faster. H — will scull you down to Greenwich for a pipe of tobacco just for the fun of the thing; whereas five shillings, in the old days, would not have induced him to scull you down from Rye to the harbour mouth, a matter of two miles. Sails, he used to say, were his business, oars being against nature. — But London has changed that, making of former toils present leisure.
Your London ‘bus-driver takes his days off sitting on the front seat of an omnibus with his head close to that of the driver at work, just as the sailor lounges round harbours, glances along ropes with quietened but still professional eyes. — He gets in this way the feeling of leisure “rubbed in” and, without anxieties, his mind is kept employed by the things he best understands. And it is because in London there are so many things to see, so many anecdotes to be retailed, such a constant passing of material and human objects, that London holds us.
I do not know that it really sharpens our wits: I fancy that it merely gives us more accidental matters on which to display them, more occurrences to which to attach morals that have been for years crystallised in our minds. — I was listening to the observations of two such ‘bus drivers. They were like this: of a red-nosed four wheel driver: “Now then old danger signal!” To a driver of a very magnificent state carriage: “Where are you going with that glass hearse?” Of a very small man conducting a very tall lady across the road: “I reckon he wants a step ladder when he kisses her goodnight!”
Whereupon the driver who hadn’t made the remark muttered: “Just what I was going to say, Bill. You took the very words out of my mouth.” — Thus these famous witticisms of the London streets are largely traditional and common property. No doubt London breeds a certain cast of mind by applying men’s thoughts to a similar class of occurrences, but the actual comments float in the air in class and class. In the classes that are as a rule recruited from the country, the type of mind is slower, more given to generalisation, less topical, more idealising. It is broader, in fact, because it has two experiences of life, and depends less upon the daily papers.
The children of these countrymen are quite different. The power of generalisation has left them altogether, with their town breeding; their conversation is a collection of town topics, their allusions are gathered from the interests of daily papers, they have international nicknames for the food in cheap eating houses and for common objects. — Thus whiskers become “Krugers”; slices of German sausage are “Kaiser’s telegrams”; macaroni is called “A. J. B.” out of a fancied resemblance to the entwined legs of the Prime Minister of a certain epoch. Thus for the Londoner the “facts” of the daily and weekly press take the place of any broad generalisations upon life.
It takes, too, for at least the poorer classes, the place of animal “fancies”; it dictates, the daily and weekly press, their very hobbies. For to a man with an individuality — and the countryman has a strong and knotted one as a rule — his hobby is his mental anodyne. To the real Londoner the press is that. You get the distinction strongly in this way. My Lincolnshire waggoner become a soapmaker’s hand, has his bit of cold steak wrapped up in a fragment of newspaper six weeks old. At lunch time he spells out from this, laboriously, a report of the trial of a solicitor for embezzling,£40,000. He says slowly: “Well, well: why do the Law always breed rogues and ruin fools?”
— a general speculation. He reads the report of a wife unfaithful to her husband who has been fighting in South Africa, and he says: “You can’t trust a woman out of your sight.... Reckon he didn’t beat her oft enow.... A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, the ofter you beat ‘em the faithfuller they be” — and many more speculations of a general kind.
But his son, an office boy, his overseer, a smart London born workman, the clerks in his office, his general manager, the directors of the Company he serves; these sit morning after morning in their city-going trains, with the sheets held up before them, swallowing “news” as they swallow quick lunches later on. These things pass through their quiescent minds as under the eyes of the clubman that string of vehicles: “The Play that Failed; A Chat with the Manager”—”Varieties in Weather”—”Scorned Woman’s Vengeance”—”’Objected to Fireguards’”—” Comedy in the County Court”—”Slavery to Drugs; Alarming Growth of the Opium Habit”—” Country’s Loneliness; Mental Isolation of the Cultured”—” Infant Motorists; The Automobile as an Adjunct to the Nursery”—”Home Rule for Egypt; Khedive’s interest in an Organised Agitation”—”Married to a Scoundrel”—”Batch of Stabbing Cases.” All these things flicker through the dazed and quiescent minds without leaving a trace, forgotten as soon as the first step is made upon the platform at Mark Lane or the Mansion House Stations — as much forgotten as any telegraph pole that flickered past the train window out towards the suburbs. Very salient and very characteristic figures may make a certain mark upon the mind — the German Emperor is, for some reason or another, particularly impressive to the lower order of Londoner—” Kaiser’s telegrams” is an evidence of it. He will evoke some such comment as “Willie’s a bit dotty,” but practically never such trite general reflections as that immense power, immense isolation, or immense conspicuousness, will drive a man to eccentricities of speech and action. And indeed, anyone who made such an observation aloud, would run the risk of being silenced with: “Oh, don’t talk like a book here.” Or: “When we want to hear a preacher, we go to the City Temple.” In a country cottage, on the other hand, the remark would be considered, accepted, and even commented on. This dislike for generalisations is as a rule set down as an English trait. An English trait it is not: but the London habit of mind it is. Probably, too, it is what has made conversation in London a lost art. It gives one something of a shock to read in Emerson: “English stories, bon-mots, and table talk are as good as the best of the French. In America we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained to the same perfection: for the range of nations from which London draws, and the steep contrasts of conditions create the picturesque in society, as a broken country makes picturesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because dressing for dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage every thing good. Much attrition has worn every sentence to a bullet An American writing that passage to-day would be accused of irony, since we no longer utter sentences at dinners. Yet when we consider the ages of Johnson, of the Prince Regent, even when we think of the Table Talk of Shirley, we must remember — and we must wonder what has become of that mighty stream. And we must wonder why we will no longer listen to talkers: why a talker is something we resent; why, in fact, a conversational artist strikes us nowadays as” a bounder.”
The really good raconteurs of the Brummel type did survive in London, as very old men, into the late ‘eighties: the mild, splendid, whiskered creatures of the Crimea still talked; the mild, splendid and bearded creatures of the ‘seventies still told anecdotes “à propos of” some general idea or other; nowadays we tell a “good story” with diffidence, being afraid of being taken for a sort of Theodore Hook or professional diner out. But, as a general rule, London limits itself to: “Did you see that extraordinary case in the So-and-so to-day?...” or “Have you read Such-and-such a novel? Seen such a play? Or such a picture show?” and it comments: “Rotten, I think,” without reason given for the condemnation.
