Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 904
A weekly paper last year wrote of one of my books: “This is undoubtedly the finest historical novel that has appeared since the days of Scott.” Next week, in the same column, written by the same hand, there appeared the review of a novel by a female connection of the critic. “This,” he said, “is undoubtedly the finest historical novel that has appeared since the days of Scott.” Where, then, do I stand, or to whom shall I go to find out? Is it to my sales? They are satisfactory, but they might be larger. Is it to my publisher? He will inevitably tell me — and every writer who ever used a hyphen — that he loses money over my books.
It is twenty years since I published my first novel, and every year or so since then the publisher of that early work has written to tell me that he lost one hundred pounds by that book, and why will I not give him another? And I ask myself why — if this gentleman once lost so largely over me — why does he wish to publish me again? Or why should any one wish to publish my work? Yet I have never written a line that has not been published.
This, of course, is only the fortune of war; but what strikes me as remarkable was that my grandfather was as anxious to embark me upon an artistic career as most parents are to prevent their children from entering into a life that, as a rule, is so precarious.
My father’s last words to me were: “Fordie, whatever you do, never write a book.” Indeed, so little idea had I of meddling with the arts that, although to me a writer was a very wonderful person, I prepared myself very strenuously for the Indian civil service. This was a real grief to my grandfather, and I think he was exceedingly overjoyed when the doctors refused to pass me for that service on the ground that I had an enlarged liver. And when, then, I seriously proposed to go into an office, his wrath became tempestuous.
Tearing off his nightcap — for he happened at the time to be in bed with a bad attack of gout — he flung it to the other end of the room.
“God damn and blast my soul!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t it enough that you escaped providentially from being one kind of a cursed clerk, but you want to go and be another? I tell you, I will turn you straight out of my house if you go in for any kind of commercial life.” So that my fate was settled for me.
IX. POETS AND PRESSES
I THINK that there is no crime — literary or connected with literature — that nowadays an average, fairly honest English writer will not commit for the sake of a little money. He will lengthen his book to suit one publisher; he will cut it down to suit another. Nay, men otherwise honorable and trustworthy will, for the matter of that, perjure themselves in the most incredible manner as to financial arrangements they may have come to, or in the most cold-blooded style will break contracts and ignore obligations. I suppose that never before was the financial struggle among the literary classes so embittered and so ignoble. The actual circumstances of literary life may have been more humiliating in the days when Johnson waited upon the patron that he never found. Hazlitt and the English essayists who seem to have existed in an atmosphere of tallow candles and porter, and to have passed their days in low pot-houses, may have been actually worse off than writers of their rank would be to-day. Hood starved, Douglas Jerrold, Hannay, or Angus B. Riach led existences of extreme squalor with spirits of the most high. And, indeed, disagreeable as Bohemianism seems to me, the somewhat squalid lives of writers and artists of the forties and fifties had about them something much more manly, and even a little more romantic, than is to be found in the literary life of to-day. I do not know that the artist of the forties troubled himself much about social position. Cruikshank was violently angry when Maclise, in his wonderful series of pen-and-ink portraits in Fraser s Magaziney gave to the world a likeness of the immortalizer of Pickwick sitting upon a barrel in a boozing-ken, his sketch-block held before him, while his keen and restless eyes surveyed what the commentator in the text calls “This scene of tumult and crime., Mr. Cruikshank wrote indignantly to declare that it was shameful to pillorize him forever as sitting in such low haunts. He wished to say that he was as good a gentleman as the Duke of Wellington, and passed his days as a gentleman should. And, indeed, I dimly remember being taken to call at Cruikshank’s home in Mornington Crescent — though Cruikshank himself must have been long dead — and seeing there such Nottingham lace curtains, pieces of brain-coral, daguerreotypes, silhouettes, and engravings after Cruikshank as would have been found in any middle-class home of early and mid-Victorian days. One of the principal of these engravings was the immense caricature that Cruikshank made for the Good Templars. This represented, upon one hand, the prosperous and whiskered satisfaction that falls to a man who has led a teetotal existence, and, in many terrible forms, what would happen to you if you indulged in any kind of alcoholic beverage.
Dickens avowed quite frankly and creditably his desire to have footmen in purple velvet small-clothes to hang behind his carriage, and Thackeray was never quite easy as to his social position. But, on the other hand, there was, as a general rule, very little thought about these matters. You earned very little, so you sat in a pot-house because you could not afford a club. And you got through life somehow without much troubling to make yourself of importance by meddling in politics. Thus, for instance, there was my grandfather’s cousin, Tristram Madox, who, being along with James Hannay, a midshipman, was, along with him, cashiered and turned out of the Service for breaking leave and going ashore at Malta and “violently assaulting Mr. Peter Parker, Tobacconist.” Tristram Madox ran through several subsequent fortunes, and ended by living on ten shillings a week that were regularly sent him by Madox Brown. This allowance was continued for many years — twenty or thirty, I should think. One day it occurred to Madox Brown that he would like some news of his poor relation. I was accordingly sent down to the squalid cottage in a suburb of Ramsgate, to which for so many years the weekly postal orders had been addressed.
Upon my mentioning the name of Madox, consternation fell upon a pale-faced household. Tristram Madox had been dead ten years; in the interval the cottage had changed hands twice, but the incoming tenants had always accepted gratefully the weekly ten shillings that fell upon them from they knew not where.
Hannay, on the other hand — presumably because he had no fortunes to run through — adopted the life of a man of letters. He wrote one sufficiently bad novel, called Eustace Conyers, and lived that life which always seemed to lie beneath the shadow of the King’s Bench Prison. I never heard my grandfather say much that was particularly illuminating about this group of men; though his cousin took him very frequently into their society. Their humor seems to have been brutal and personal, but only a bludgeon would suppress it. Thus, when Tristram Madox was talking about one of his distinguished ancestors of the tenth century, Douglas Jerrold shut him up by saying, “I know! The man who was hanged for sheep-stealing.” Or, again, when Douglas Jerrold was uttering a flood of brilliant witticisms, a very drunken woman who had been asleep with her head upon the table opposite Jerrold shut him up by raising a bleared face and exclaiming:
“You are a bloody fool.”
Nothing else would have shut Jerrold up. But I never heard my grandfather say that it was reprehensible or remarkable that they should sit in low pot-houses, or even that he should go there to meet them. They could not afford anything better; so they took what they could get. As for the social revolution, they never talked about it, and, although Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and Bleak House, it was done with a warm-hearted enthusiasm, and the last thing that he would have considered himself was a theoretic social reformer. Between this insouciance and the uneasy social self-consciousness of the present-day literary man there arose for a short time the priestly pride, as you might call it, of the Pre-Raphaelites.
These people undoubtedly regarded themselves as a close aristocracy. They produced works of art of one kind or another, and no one who did not produce works of art counted. The laity, in fact, might not have existed at all. Indeed, even the learned and professional classes were not excluded from the general contempt. An Oxford don was regarded as a foolish, useless, and academic person, and my grandfather would say, for instance, of a doctor: “Oh, those fellows have nothing better to do than to wash their hands twelve times a day.” It never, I think, entered his head to inquire why a doctor so frequently washed his hands. He regarded it as a kind of foppishness. And I can well remember that I entirely shared his point of view. So that to speak to any one who made money by commercial pursuits was almost not to speak to a man at all. It was as if one were communicating with one of the lower animals endowed with power of speech.
And to a certain extent the public of those days acquiesced. From the earliest mediæval times until toward the end of the nineteenth century there has always been vaguely in the public mind the idea that the man of letters was a sort of necromancer — as it were a black priest. In the dark ages almost the only poet that was known to man was the author of the Æneid. I do not suppose that many men had read this epic. But all men had heard of its author. Was not his fame world-wide? Was he not Duke Virgil of Mantua? Did he not build the city of Venice upon an egg? Yes, surely he indeed was the greatest of all magicians. He left behind him his books of magic. If you took a pin and stuck it into one of these books, the line that it hit upon predicted infallibly what would be the outcome of any enterprise upon which you were engaged. These were the Sortes Virgiliance. Similarly, any one who could write or was engaged with books was regarded as a necromancer. Did he not have strange knowledges? Thus you had Friar Bacon, Friar Bungay, or Dr. Faustus. The writer remained thus for centuries something mysterious, some one possessing those strange knowledges. For various classes, by the time of Johnson his mystery has gradually been whittled down. The aristocracy, in the shape of patrons, came to regard him as a miserable creature, something between a parasite and a pimp. To his personal tradesman he was also a miserable creature who did not pay his bills and starved in a garret. By the nineteenth century the idea that he was a sort of rogue and vagabond had spread pretty well throughout the land. A middle-class father was horrified when his daughter proposed to marry an artist or a writer. These people were notorious for marital infidelities and for the precariousness of their sources of livelihood. Nevertheless a sort of mysterious sanctity attached to their produce. There can hardly have been a single middle-class household that did not have upon its drawing-room table one or two copies of books by Mr. Ruskin. I remember very well being consulted by a prosperous city merchant as to what books he should take with him upon a sea voyage. I gave him my views, to which he paid no attention. He took with him Sesame and Lilies, Notes Upon Sheepfolds, Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Swinburne’s Atalanta. With this singular library my portly friend set sail. He had not the slightest idea of what any of these books might be about, but he said, “Ah! they’ll do me a great deal of good.” As if, in his cabin, these volumes would act as a spiritual lifebuoy and float him, supposing the ship should founder, if not to land, at least to heaven. That was the trace of the old necromantic idea that something mysterious attached to the mere possession of books.
But the same gentleman would introduce a writer to his friends with a sort of apologetic cough, rather as if he had been found in the company of a prostitute; and when revelations of Carlyle’s domestic misfortunes were published he manifested a calm satisfaction. He had always suspected that there must be something wrong because Carlyle was an author. But he still expected that his soul was saved because he possessed the Life of Frederick the Great.
Thus in the seventies and eighties things were at a very satisfactory pass. Artists regarded themselves as an aristocracy set apart and walled off. The rest of the world regarded them as dangerous beings producing mysterious but, upon the whole, salutary works. There was no mixing and there was no desire to mix. As far as the arts were concerned there was in those days a state of affairs very much such as has subsisted in France since the time of the French Revolution. It is true that in France somewhat more social importance attaches to the man of letters. That is largely because of the existence of the French Academy. At the time when there is a vacancy in the ranks of the Immortal Forty you may observe a real stir in what is known as All Paris. Duchesses get out their carriages and drive candidates round to pay their calls upon the electors; nay, duchesses themselves canvass energetically in favor of the particular master whose claims they favor, and the inaugural speech of an elected Academician is a social function more eagerly desired than were the drawingrooms of her late Majesty Victoria. But otherwise, the worlds of letters and of arts mix comparatively little with commercial society in France.
And this has always seemed to me to be a comparatively desirable frame of mind for the practitioner of the arts to adopt. For, unless he do consider himself — rightly or wrongly — as something apart, he must rapidly lose all sense of the dignity of his avocation. He will find himself universally regarded no longer, perhaps, as anything so important as a dangerous rogue and vagabond, but as something socially negligible. And all respect for literature as literature he will find to have died out utterly and forever.
Flaubert was obsessed by the idea that literature was a thing hated by the bourgeoisie; that was the dominant idea of his life. And in his day I think he was right. That is to say that the common man hated violently any new literary form that was vital, unusual, and original. Thus Flaubert came to sit upon the criminal’s bench after the publication of Madame Bovary. But nowadays, and in England, we have a singular and chilling indifference to all literature. Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante might all put out their works to-day — for all I know, writers as great may actually be among us — and the actual effects of their publishing would be practically nothing. It is all very well to say that the press is responsible for this state of affairs. We have a press in England that is, upon the whole, of the lowest calibre of any in the civilized world — I am, of course, speaking in terms intellectual, for our news organization is as good as it could be. But from the point of view of criticism of any kind, whether of the fine arts, of letters, of music, or of life itself, all but the very best of our newspapers of to-day would disgrace a fourth-class provincial town of France or Germany. And this is a purely commercial matter. When I was conducting a certain publication I was rung up upon the telephone by the advertising managers of two of the largest and most respectable daily newspapers. The first one told me that if I would take a six-inch double column in his literary supplement once a week he would undertake that a favorable notice of my publication should appear in his organ side by side with the advertisement. The advertising manager asked me peremptorily why I had not advertised in his columns. I replied that it was because I disapproved very strongly of a certain action to which his newspaper had committed itself.
“Very well, then,” he said; “you quite understand that no notice of your periodical will be taken in our literary columns.”
I am bound to say that this gentleman was merely “bluffing,” and that quite impartial notices of my publication did appear in his paper. Indeed, I should imagine that the literary editor of the journal in question never spoke to an advertising manager. But just think of the state of affairs — though it was only a matter of bluff — when such a threat could be made! I do not mean to say that there is any very actual or overt corruption in the London press of to-day; but the hunt for advertisements is a bitter and unscrupulous struggle. Advertisement canvassers are — or, at any rate, I have found them so — men entirely without scruples, and the editorial departments of newspapers are thoroughly slack in the supervision of their representatives. The advertisement canvasser will come into the editorial office and will say to the literary editor in a friendly but slightly complaining manner (I have heard this speech myself):
“Look here, Messrs. So-and-So say that they have spent forty pounds a week with us for the last three months and that you never give their books any space at all. Couldn’t you see that they have a mention now and then?”
The literary editor, knowing perfectly well — or feeling subconsciously — that his position as editor, or perhaps even the very existence of his literary supplement, depends upon its power to attract advertisements, will almost certainly look out for something among the works published by Messrs. So-and-So and will then praise this work to the extent of a column or so. He will not always do this out of fear. Sometimes it will be because he desires to help the poor devil of an advertisement canvasser who has a wife and family. Sometimes he will do it to oblige the publisher, who may be the best of good fellows. But always inevitably the result will be the same. And, armed with this achievement, the advertising canvasser will go round to other publishers and assure them that, if they will spend money on advertisements in his paper, he will secure for them favorable notices upon the day when the advertisement appears. All this is very natural, a slow and imperceptibly spreading process of corruption. But it is bitterly bad for literature. Twenty-five years ago it would have been impossible, fifteen years ago it would have been impossible. Now, it is. There are exceptions, of course, but every day they grow fewer. The fine old newspaper whose advertisement manager proposed that I should give him every Thursday a six-inch double column, and receive in exchange my favorable notice — this fine old newspaper had just a week before passed into new hands! And nowadays, alas! almost invariably new brooms sweep very dirty! Cataclysmic and extraordinary changes take place every day in the world of newspapers. In one week two years ago I received visits from just over forty beggars. Every one of these introduced himself to my favor with the words: “I am a journalist myself.” One of these poor men had a really tragic history. He bore a name of some respectability in the journalistic world. He had been a reporter upon a midland daily paper; he had become the editor of a Southwest local journal. One day he was riding a bicycle outside his town, when a motor-car approached him from behind, knocked him down, and as he lay on the ground spread-eagled it ran over both his legs and both his arms and broke them. The car went on without stopping, and this poor man lay for eighteen months in a hospital. When he came out he was penniless, and he found that the whole face of journalism had altered. The midland paper for which he had written had passed into the hands of Lord Dash, and the entire staff had changed; his south-coast local paper had passed out of existence; so had the great London morning paper for which he had occasionally written. In another newspaper office with which he had been connected he found two editors, each properly engaged quarrelling as to who should occupy the editorial chair, and neither one of these had been the editor of the paper when he had gone into the hospital. In the short space of eighteen months all the men he knew had lost their jobs and had disappeared from Fleet Street. That is why one will receive visits from forty beggars in one week, each of them introducing himself with the words: “I am a journalist myself.”
