Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 865
That young American was Mr. James.
To come back, however, from this biographical digression — to which, however, I must later once more return — to come back to the question of what is the real greatness of Mr. James, I must allow myself an immensely long quotation from one of his prefaces — a quotation throwing light upon, or at least adumbrating the matter of why during all his literary life he remained so sedulously “up town.”
What is more to the point is the moral I at present find myself drawing from the fact that, then turning over my American impressions, those proceeding from a brief but profusely peopled stay in New York, I should have fished up that none so very precious particle as one of the pearls of the collection. Such a circumstance comes back, for me, to that fact of my insuperably restricted experience and my various missing American clues — or rather at least to my felt lack of the most important of them all — on which the current of these remarks has already led me to dilate. There had been indubitably and multitudinously, for me, in my native city, the world “downtown” — since how otherwise should the sense of “going” down, the sense of hovering at the narrow gates and skirting the so violently overscored outer face of the monstrous labyrinth that stretches from Canal Street to the Battery, have taken on, to me, the intensity of a worrying, a tormenting impression? Yet it was an impression any attempt at the active cultivation of which, one had been almost violently admonished, could but find one in the last degree unprepared and uneducated....
For there it was; not only that the major key was “down-town,” but that down-town was, all itself, the major key — absolutely, exclusively; with the inevitable consequence that if the minor was “uptown,” and (by a parity of reasoning) “up-town” the minor, so the field was meagre and the inspiration thin for any unfortunate practically banished from the true pasture. Such an unfortunate, even at the time I speak of, had still to confess to the memory of a not inconsiderably earlier season when, seated for several months at the very moderate altitude of Twenty-fifth Street, he felt himself day by day alone in that scale of the balance; alone, I mean, with the music-masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies and children — immensely present and immensely numerous these, but testifying with a collective voice to the extraordinary absence (save as pieced together through a thousand gaps and indirectnesses) of a serious male interest. One had heard and seen novels and plays appraised as lacking, detrimentally, a serious female; but the higher walks in that community might at the period I speak of have formed a picture bright and animated, no doubt, but marked with the very opposite defect..!.
What it came to was that up-town would do for me simply what up-town could — and seemed in a manner apologetically conscious that this mightn’t be described as much. The kind of appeal to interest embodied in these portrayals and in several of their like companions was the measure of the whole minor exhibition, which affected me as virtually saying: “Yes, I’m either that — that range and order of things, or I’m nothing at all; therefore make the most of me!”...
To ride the nouvelle down-town, to prance and curvet and caracole with it there — that would have been the true ecstasy. But a single “spill” — such as I so easily might have had in Wall Street or wherever — would have forbidden me, for very shame, in the eyes of the expert and the knowing, ever to mount again; so that in short it wasn’t to be risked on any terms.
There were meanwhile the alternatives, of course — that I might renounce the nouvelle, or else might abjure that “American life,” the characteristic towniness of which was lighted for me, even though so imperfectly, by New York and Boston — by those centres only. Such extremities, however, I simply couldn’t afford — artistically, sentimentally, financially, or by any other sacrifice — to face; and if the fact nevertheless remains that an adjustment, under both the heads in question, had eventually to take place, every inch of my doubtless meagre ground was yet first contested, every turn and twist of my scant material economically used....
As I wind up with this companion-study to Daisy Miller the considerable assortment of my shorter tales, I seem to see it symbolise my sense of my having waited with something of a subtle patience, my having still hoped as against hope that the so ebbing and obliging seasons would somehow strike for me some small flash of what I have called the major light — would suffer, I mean, to glimmer out, through however odd a crevice or however vouchsafed a contact, just enough of a wandering air from the down-town penetralia as might embolden, as might inform, as might, straining a point, even conceivably inspire (always where the nouvelle, and the nouvelle only, should be concerned); all to the advantage of my extension of view and my variation of theme. A whole passage of intellectual history, if the term be not too pompous, occupies in fact, to my present sense, the waiting, the so fondly speculative interval: in which I seem to see myself rather a high and dry, yet irrepressibly hopeful artistic Micawber, cocking an ostensibly confident hat and practising an almost passionate system of “bluff”; insisting, in fine, that something (out of the just-named penetralia) would turn up if only the right imaginative hanging about on the chance, if only the true intelligent attention, were piously persisted in.
Put into my own much less luxuriant phraseology these passages simply mean that, throughout all his life, Mr. James has regarded the business life at least with curiosity and possibly with some small measure of awe. But I cannot believe, however much Mr. James might wish to hoodwink us into believing it, that our distinguished subject ever had any “, yearning to penetrate practically into the secrets of business life. And, indeed, let us take upon ourselves to throw down the glove that Mr. James, not being militant in any sense here upon earth, has been unwilling to throw down. Let us say boldly — for, indeed, in an Anglo-Saxon community it needs saying — that business and whatever takes place “down town” or in the City is simply not worth the attention of any intelligent being. It is a matter of dirty little affairs incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence. It can teach nobody anything and, if an immense cataclysm overwhelmed at once the whole of “down town” New York and the whole of the financial quarters of the city of London, in ten days the whole system would be running again, conducted by men of similarly mediocre intelligences. Of them this world contains millions and millions.
It is possible that there is something to be said for the actual manufacturer, the organising producer of cotton, wool, coal and the rest of the material products upon which our civilisation is based. And it is certain that a great deal might be said of the inventor of new processes, or of the man who actually and with his hands works in the mines, the mills, or upon the face of the earth.
The really producing classes have something to tell that is worth the attention of a man of intelligence, and so have the really leisured classes. The one may tell you what sort of an animal man becomes under the pressure of necessity, the other may tell you what sort of a being he will be when, the pressure of necessity being removed, he has leisure to attend specifically to those departments of life which differentiate man from the animal. And any other way of looking at these problems of our civilisation is the merest cant.
I am not, of course, writing a sociological essay, and I have said no more than is necessary to make, for my own immediate purposes, my own immediate point. And the fact remains as far as Mr. James is concerned, that Mr. James, if he has drawn a very perfect picture of one phase of occidental life, has done the greatest service that it is possible to do to the humanity of his day. If he has done this he has, in fact, shown us to what tend all the strivings of the men digging drains in the road, of the men setting brick upon brick in the building of houses, of the men toiling in the mines, of the inventors of new engines, of the clerks incessantly blackening pieces of paper, of the manufacturers organising the labourers of all these people, and of the business men, Semitic or others who by the means of that most rascally of all forms of victimising — company promoting — take the profits of the labour of all us toiling millions. If Mr. James, then, has given us a truthful picture of the leisured life that is founded upon the labours of all this stuff that fills graveyards, then he, more than any other person now living, has afforded matter upon which the sociologist of the future may build — or may commence his destructions.
For, given that he has achieved this, the problem which will then present itself to the sociologist is no more and no less than this — are the prizes of life, is the leisured life which our author has depicted for us, worth the striving for? If, in short, this life is not worth having — this life of the West End, of the country-house, of the drawing-room, possibly of the studio, and of the garden party — if this life, which is the best that our civilisation has to show, is not worth the living; if it is not pleasant, cultivated, civilised, cleanly and instinct with reasonably high ideals, then, indeed, Western civilisation is not worth going on with, and we had better scrap the whole of it so as to begin again. For, you may by legislation increase the earnings of the labourer; you may by organising or by inventing increase the wealth of our particular Western communities, but what is the use of this wealth if the only things that it can buy are no better than are to be had in any city store — unless, along with material objects that it does buy, it gets “thrown in,” as the phrase is, some of the things that were never yet bought by mortal’s money. For it is no use saying anything else than that the manual labourer, if you give him four hundred a year and an excellent education, will have no ambition to live any otherwise, things being as they are, than as the dwellers in any suburb. And, supposing that you gave him a thousand a year he would, as things at present stand, have no other ambition than to live like one of the less wealthy characters of any one of Mr. James’ books. There is no getting away from these facts in any Anglo-Saxon community, and even in France and Germany the tendency is much the same; though, of course, in both of those countries you happen upon such phenomena as farmers of very large income who continue to live the life and to wear the dress of farmers, without any thought of snobbishly imitating the lives and habits of suburban clerks or of hunting gentry.
So that the problem remaining to the sociologist, the politico-economist or the mere voter, after reading Mr. James’ work is simply this: is the game worth the candle; is the prize worth the life? If they are not, then political economists must entirely change their views of what is meant by supply and demand, introducing a new factor which I will call the “worth whileness” of having one’s demands supplied; the sociologist must shut up all the books that he has ever read until he, too, has evolved some theory of what is worth while; and the voter must insist upon the closing of all the legislatures known to this universe — until some reasonable plan of what they are all striving for shall have been arrived at. For the fact is that our present systems of polity and laws, being entirely based upon theories of economics, we have paid — none of us who are interested in public questions — any heed at all to the purchasing power of that money which by our activities we produce and which by our legislation we seek as equally as possible to distribute.
It is because Mr. James has so wonderfully paid attention to this question that I have advanced for him — and heaven knows he won’t thank me for it — the claim to be the greatest servant of the State now living. Heaven knows too, that, things being as they are, it isn’t much of a claim. For as greatness goes, looking at the world as it now appears, when was there ever such an amazing, such an overwhelming dearth of “figures”? Where is the Bismarck of to-day, the dominating figure who balanced our whole world in one hand whilst he used the other for pouring down great draughts of mixed champagne and stout? I heard the other day that there was a Bismarck of the Balkans. But this morning I read that he had been put in prison for peculation. Where is our Napoleon of to-day? I know of a gentleman who, advertises himself in public conveyances as the Napoleon of the roll collar for the City of London, but I know of no other Napoleon. Where are our Palmerstons, our Disraelis, our Lincolns, our Grants, our Stonewall Jacksons, our Emersons, our Carlyles, our Stephensons? Why, even Mr. Pierpont ‘ Morgan is dead, and his, I think, was the last of the names with which you could have conjured through the whole world. So that it is not much of a claim that I am making for Mr. James — it is no more than saying that he is the only unbiassed, voluminous and truthful historian of our day. And, in our day, the greatest need of society is the historian who can cast a ray of light into the profound gloom, into the whirl of shadows, of our social agnosticism.
I do not mean to say that we haven’t today historians galore, shoals of statisticians, whole heaps of philanthropic novelists, whole armies of Fabian pamphleteers. We have also Chancellors of the Exchequer in huge quantities throughout the Empire; there are several Reichs-Kanzlers in Europe, and I have not heard that there are any portfolios lacking holders in the Cabinet of the President of the United States. But all these things amount to nothing as far as any constatation of how we really stand is concerned. Our historians usually commence, like myself, as advanced democrats and, like myself, end as Papists and upholders of the Feudal system — at any rate, our historians are always trying to prove something, when they don’t degenerate into mere machines for the collection of Ur-Kunde.
Our statisticians are almost invariably gentlemen with axes to grind either for or against some tariff or some social policy; our earnest English novelists are almost invariably, by some fatality, sentimental humanitarians with, in a public sense, an extraordinary number of axes to grind. Our less earnest English novelists remain recounters of anecdotes that are usually hardly even polite, or pathologists dealing exclusively in romantic exceptions. And our Fabian Pamphleteers — well, they are still Fabian Pamphleteers, members of the middle classes who try to force the working man into broadcloth clothes of their own particular pattern and into the employment of babies’ bottles of their own particular make. Our Chancellors of the Exchequer — well, they are merely the opportunists of the moment, trying to force collectivist legislation upon an unwilling world when their particular party label bespeaks them individualists, or preaching individualist sentiments beneath a collectivist banner to audiences equally unwilling. As to the United States Cabinet — well, I know nothing about it; but then, neither, I think, does anyone else outside Washington.
Now God forbid that I should be held as saying that any of our eloquent Chancellors, Fabian Pamphleteers, earnest and humanitarian novelists or upholders of the feudal system are in the wrong. They are probably every one of them absolutely in the right, and each of them would be the infallible saviour of Society if only Society would listen to them, or if human nature could be kept from creeping in. But the point is that each and every one of them is a partisan of something or other — each and every one of the considerable figures, such as they are, of the world of to-day, with its confusing currents, its incomprehensible riddles, its ever present but entirely invisible wire pulling, and its overwhelming babble, its whole surface dominated by the waving of the halfpenny papers — every “figure” in the world is a partisan of some cause or other. Even M. Anatole France, who is a great, clear and negational intellect, is an antireligious socialist, and to that end colours all his writings, observing like any other politician only that which he desires to observe. Mr. James alone, it seems to me, in this entire weltering universe, has kept his head, has bestowed his sympathies upon no human being and upon no cause, has remained an observer, passionless and pitiless like the narrator of The Four Meetings. As a writer, he has had no more sympathy for chivalrous feelings than for the starving poor. He just sits on high, smiling his sardonic smile and exclaiming from time to time: “Poor dear old world!”
III What then distinguishes Mr. James’ picture of society — since I have claimed for it so high a quality of truth — from the pictures drawn by Walter Scott, Thackeray, Alexander Dumas, who is to all intents and purposes an English novelist, or, say, from the works of Charles Dickens or Charles Reade?
Dickens was, of course, a propagandist, but, when he is engaged in propagandising, his work is so crude as to be almost beneath notice, and as much might be said for the late Charles Reade. Their novels aimed at the reform of definite institutions — the convict prison, the debtors’ prison, the lunatic asylum and the workhouse. They took hard cases of institutions of this description, peopled them with characters all black, who perpetrated physical violences and other tyrannies upon characters who were white-hued as the angels are. They achieved notable reforms but, as writers, they were merely negligible in so far as the reforming passages of their works were concerned. A considerably greater skill in characterising is employed by the reforming novelists of to-day — by Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Wells and other writers with purposes. But their works probably lose dynamic power as pamphlets on account of the art that they employ, whilst the value as documents is seriously impaired by the bias of their minds.
