Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 901
VII. ANARCHISTS AND GRAY FRIEZE
THE art with which William Morris and such disciples of his as Commendatore Walter Crane propagandized on behalf of that splendid thing, the “Social Revolution,” was, upon the whole, still within the canons which would have been allowed by the aesthetes who called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. In his News from Nowhere Morris tried to show us young things what a beautiful world we should make of it if sedulously we attended the Sunday evening lectures at Kelmscott House, the Mall, Hammersmith. At Kelmscott House, I believe, the first electric telegraph was constructed, and it was in the shed where the first cable was made that we used to meet to hasten on the Social Revolution and to reconstruct a lovely world. As far as I remember those young dreams, it was to be all a matter of huge-limbed and splendid women, striding along dressed in loose curtain - serge garments, and bearing upon the one arm such sheaves of wheat as never were and, upon the other, such babies as every proud mother imagines her first baby to be. And on Sunday afternoons, in a pleasant lamplight, to a number perhaps of a hundred and fifty, there we used to gather in that shed. William Morris would stride up and down between the aisles, pushing his hands with a perpetual, irate movement through his splendid hair. And we, the young men with long necks, long, fair hair, protruding blue eyes, and red ties, or the young maidens in our blue curtain serge with our round shoulders, our necks made as long as possible to resemble Rossetti drawings, uttered with rapt expression long sentences about the Social Revolution that was just round the corner. We thought we were beautiful, we thought we were very beautiful; but Pre-Raphaelism is dead, æstheticism is dead. Poor William Morris is very dead, too, and the age when poetry was marketable is most dead of all. It is dead, all dead, and that beautiful vision, the Social Revolution, has vanished along with the ‘bus that used to run from the Langham Hotel, beloved of American visitors, to Charing Cross — the ‘bus with its three horses abreast, its great length, and its great umbrella permanently fixed above the driver’s head. Alas! that ‘bus will serve to build up no barricade when the ultimate revolution comes, and when it comes the ultimate revolution will not be our beloved Social one of the large women, curtain serge, wheat-sheaves, and the dream babies. No, it will be different. And, I suppose, the fine flower that those days produced is none other than Mr. Bernard Shaw.
But in those days we had no thought of Fabianism. Nevertheless, we managed to get up some pretty tidy rows among ourselves. I must, personally, have had three separate sets of political opinions. To irritate my relatives, who advocated advanced thought, I dimly remember that I professed myself a Tory. Among the bourgeoisie, whom it was my inherited duty to épater, I passed for a dangerous anarchist. In general speech, manner and appearance I must have resembled a socialist of the Morris group. I don’t know what I was; I don’t know what I am. It doesn’t, I suppose, matter in the least, but I fancy I must have been a very typical young man of the sort who formed the glorious meetings that filled the world in the eighties and early nineties. There used to be terrific rows between socialists and anarchists in those days. I think I must have been on the side of the anarchists, because the socialists were unreasonably aggressive. They were always holding meetings, at which the subject for debate would be: “The Foolishness of Anarchism.” This would naturally annoy the harmless and gentle anarchists, who only wanted to be let alone, to loaf in Goodge Street, and to victimize any one who came into the offices of The Torch and had half-a-crown to spend on beer.
In The Torch office, which, upon the death of my aunt Rossetti, left the house of William Rossetti, you would generally find some dirty, eloquent scoundrel called Ravachol or Vaillant who, for the price of a pint of beer, would pour forth so enormous a flood of invective and of self-glorification that you would not believe him capable of hurting a rabbit. Then, a little afterward, you would hear of a bomb thrown in Barcelona or Madrid, and Ravachol or Vaillant, still eloquent and still attitudinizing, would go to his death under the guillotine or in the garrote. I don’t know where the crowds came from that supported us as anarchists, but I have seldom seen a crowd so great as that which attended the funeral of the poor idiot who blew himself to pieces in the attempt on Greenwich Observatory. This was, of course, an attempt fomented by the police agents of a foreign state with a view to forcing the hand of the British Government. The unfortunate idiot was talked by these agents provocateurs into taking a bomb to Greenwich Park, where the bomb exploded in his pocket and blew him into many small fragments. The idea of the government in question was that this would force the hand of the British Government so that they would arrest wholesale every anarchist in Great Britain. Of course, the British Government did nothing of the sort, and the crowd in Tottenham Court Road which attended the funeral of the small remains of the victim was, as I have said, one of the largest that I have ever seen. Who were they all? Where did they all come from? Whither have they all disappeared? I am sure I don’t know, just as I am pretty certain that, in all those thousands who filled Tottenham Court Road, there was not one who was more capable than myself of beginning to think of throwing a bomb. I suppose it was the spirit of romance, of youth, perhaps of sheer tomfoolery, perhaps of the spirit of adventure, which is no longer very easy for men to find in our world of gray and teeming cities. I couldn’t be Dick Harkaway with a Winchester rifle, so I took it out in monstrous solemn fun, of the philosophic anarchist kind, and I was probably one of twenty thousand. My companion upon this occasion was Comrade P., who, until quite lately, might be observed in the neighborhood of the British Museum — a man with an immensely long beard, with immensely long hair, bareheaded, bare-legged, in short running drawers, and a boatman’s jersey, that left bare his arms and chest. Comrade P. was a medical man of great skill, an eminently philosophic anarchist. He was so advanced in his ideas that he dispensed with animal food, dispensed with alcohol, and intensely desired to dispense with all clothing. This brought him many times into collision with the police, and as many times he was sent to prison for causing a crowd to assemble in Hyde Park, where he would appear to all intents and purposes in a state of nature. He lived, however, entirely upon crushed nuts. Prison diet, which appeared to him sinfully luxurious, inevitably upset his digestion. They would place him in the infirmary and would feed him on boiled chicken, jellies, beef-tea, and caviare, and all the while he would cry out for nuts, and grow worse and worse, the prison doctors regularly informing him that nuts were poison. At last Comrade P. would be upon the point of death, and then they would give him nuts. P. would immediately recover, usually about the time that his sentence had expired. Then, upon the Sunday, he would once more appear like a Greek athlete running through Hyde Park. A most learned and gentle person, most entertaining, and the best of company, this was still the passion of his life. The books in the British Museum were almost a necessity of his existence, yet he would walk into the reading-room attired only in a blanket, which he would hand to the cloak-room attendant, asking for a check in return. Eventually his reader’s ticket was withdrawn, though with reluctance on the part of the authorities, for he was a fine scholar, and they very humane men. Some time after this Comrade P. proposed to me that I should accompany him on the top of a ‘bus. His idea was that he would be attired in a long ulster; this he would take off and hand to me, whereupon I was to get down and leave him in this secure position. My courage was insufficient — the united courages of all Comrade P.’s friends were insufficient to let them aid him in giving thus early a demonstration of what nowadays we call the Simple Life, and Comrade P. had to sacrifice his overcoat. He threw it, that is to say, from the top of the ‘bus, and, with his hair and beard streaming over his uncovered frame, defied alike the elements and the police. The driver took the ‘bus, Comrade P. and all into an empty stable, where they locked him up until the police arrived with a stretcher from Bow Street. At last the magistrate before whom Comrade P. habitually appeared grew tired of sentencing him. Comrade P. was, moreover, so evidently an educated and high-minded man that the stipendiary perhaps was touched by his steadfastness. At all events, he invited P. to dinner — I don’t know what clothes P. wore upon this occasion. Over this friendly meal he extracted from P. a promise that he would wear the costume of running-drawers, an oarsman’s jersey, and sandals which I have already described, and which the magistrate himself designed. Nothing would have persuaded P. to give this promise had not the magistrate promised in return to get for P. the reader’s ticket at the British Museum which he had forfeited. And so, for many years, in this statutory attire P., growing grayer and grayer, might be seen walking about the streets of Bloomsbury. Some years afterward, when I occupied a cottage in the country, P. wrote and asked to be permitted to live in my garden in a state of nature. But, dreading the opinions of my country neighbors, I refused, and that was the last I heard of him.
What with poets, arts and craftsmen, anarchists, dock-strikes, unemployed riots and demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, those years were very lively and stirring for the young. We continued to be cranks in a high-spirited and tentative manner. Nowadays, what remains of that movement seems to have become much more cut and dried; to have become much more theoretic; to know much more and to get much less fun out of it. You have, on the one hand, the Fabian Society, and, on the other, the Garden Cities, where any number of Comrade P.’s can be accommodated. The movement has probably spread numerically, but it has passed as a factor out of the life of the day. I don’t know what killed it.
As far as I am personally concerned, my interest seemed to wane at about the time when there was a tremendous row in one of the socialist clubs because some enthusiastic gentleman in a red tie publicly drank wine out of a female convert’s shoe. Why there should have been a row, whether it was wrong to drink wine, or to drink it out of a shoe, or what it was all about, I never could quite make out. But the life appeared to die out of things about then. Perhaps it was about that time that the first Fabian tract was published. I remember being present later at a Fabian debate as to the attributes of the Deity. I forget what it was all about, but it lasted a very considerable time. Toward the end of the meeting an energetic lady arose — it was, I think, her first attendance at a Fabian meeting — and remarked:
“All this talk is very fine, but what I want to know is, whether the Fabian Society does, or does not, believe in God?”
A timid gentleman rose and replied:
“If Mrs. Y. will read Fabian Tract 312 she will discover what she ought to think upon this matter.” They had codified everything by then. But in the earliest days we all wobbled gloriously. Thus, upon his first coming to London, Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a pamphlet called Why! Am an Anarchist. This was, I think, printed at The Torch press. At any rate, the young proprietors of that organ came into possession of a large number of copies of the pamphlet. I have twice seen Mr. Shaw unmanned — three times if I include an occasion upon a railway platform when a locomotive outvoiced him. One of the other occasions was when Mr. Shaw, having advanced a stage further toward his intellectual salvation, was addressing in the Park a socialist gathering on the tiresome text of the “Foolishness of Anarchism.” The young proprietors of The Torch walked round and round in the outskirts of the crowd offering copies of Mr. Shaw’s earlier pamphlet for sale, and exclaiming at the top of their voices, “Why! Am an Anarchist! By the lecturer!”
But even in those days Mr. Shaw had us for his enthusiastic supporters. I suppose we did not put much money into his pockets, for I well remember his relating a sad anecdote whose date must have fallen among the eighties. As Mr. Shaw put it, like every poor young man when he first conies to London, he possessed no presentable garments at all save a suit of dress clothes. In this state he received an invitation to a soiree from some gentleman high in the political world — I think it was Mr. Haldane. This gentleman was careful to add a postscript in the kindness of his heart, begging Mr. Shaw not to dress, since every one would be in their morning clothes. Mr. Shaw was accordingly put into an extraordinary state of perturbation. He pawned or sold all the articles of clothing in his possession, including his evening suit, and with the proceeds purchased a decent suit of black resembling, as he put it, that of a Wesleyan minister. Upon his going up the staircase of the house to which he was invited the first person he perceived was Mr. Balfour, in evening dress; the second was Mr. Wyndham, in evening dress; and immediately he was introduced into a dazzling hall that was one sea of white shirt - fronts relieved by black swallow-tails. He was the only undressed person in the room. Then his kind host presented himself, his face beaming with philanthropy and with the thought of kindly encouragement that he had given to struggling genius! I think Mr. Shaw does not “dress” at all nowadays, and in the dress affected, at all events by his disciples, the gray homespuns, the soft hats, the comfortable bagginess about the knees, and the air that the pockets have of always being full of apples, the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived. Madox Brown always wore a black morning coat edged with black braid during the day, but Rossetti, at any rate when he was at work, was much addicted to gray frieze. He wore habitually a curious coat of pepper-and-salt material, in shape resembling a clergyman’s ordinary dress, but split down the lateral seams so that the whole front of the coat formed on each side one large pocket. When he went out — which, as Mr. Meredith has informed us, was much too seldom for his health — he wore a gray frieze Inverness cape of a thickness so extraordinary that it was as stiff as millboard. This grayness and roughness very much influenced his disciples and spread to the disciples of William Morris, with the results that we see at present. I know this to be the fact from the following circumstances: Upon Rossetti’s death his Inverness, to which I have alluded and which was made in the year 1869, descended to my grandfather. Upon my grandfather’s death it descended to me, it being then twenty-three years old. I wore it with feelings of immense pride, as if it had been — and indeed, was it not? — the mantle of a prophet. And such approbation did it meet with in my young friends of that date that this identical garment was copied seven times, and each time for the use of a gentleman whose works when Booksellers’ Row still existed might ordinarily be found in the twopenny box. So this garment spread the true tradition, and, indeed, it was imperishable and indestructible, though what has become of it by now I do not know.! Wore it for several years until it must have been aged probably thirty, when, happening to wear it during a visit to my tailor’s and telling that gentleman its romantic history, I was distressed to hear him remark, looking over his pince-nez:
“Time the moths had it!”
This shed such a slight upon the garment from the point of view of tailors that I never wore it again. It fell, I am afraid, into the hands of a family with little respect for relics of the great, and I am fairly certain that I observed its capacious folds in the mists of an early morning upon Romney Marsh some months ago, enveloping the limbs of an elderly and poaching scoundrel called Slingsby.
But, indeed, the gray frieze apart, there was little enough in externals about the inner ring of the Pre-Raphaelites that was decorative. Rossetti wore gray frieze, because it was the least bothersome of materials; it never wanted brushing, it never wanted renewing; there it was. Madox Brown wore always an eminently un-Bohemian suit of black. Christina Rossetti affected the least picturesque of black garments for daily use, while on occasions of a festive nature she would go as far as a pearl-gray watered silk. Millais, of course, was purely conventional in attire, and so was Holman Hunt. I remember meeting Holman Hunt outside High Street, Kensington Station, on a rather warmish day. He was wearing an overcoat of extremely fine, light-colored fur. To this he drew my attention, and proceeded to lecture me upon the virtues of economy, saying with his prophetic air: “Young man, observe this garment. I bought it in the year 1852, giving a hundred and forty pounds for it. It is now 1894. This overcoat has therefore lasted me forty-two years and I have never had another. You will observe that it has actually cost me per annum something less than £3 10s., which is much less, I am certain, than you spend upon your overcoats.” And here Mr. Hunt regarded Rossetti’s garment, which was then aged thirty-three, and cost £6 10s when it was new. I did not, however, interrupt him, and the great man continued:
“And you will observe that I still have the coat, which is worth as much, or more, than its original sum, while, for all these years, it has enabled me to present a flourishing appearance whenever I had to transact business.”
