Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 910
The mention of this wonderful contrivance will extort from a French or a German writer a look of utter incredulity. They will think that you are “pulling their legs.” And then gradually you will observe to be passing into their faces an expression of extremely polite, of slightly ironical, admiration:
“Ah, yes,” they will say, “you English are so practical.”
And indeed we are very practical. But it is only on the material side that we even begin to consider ways and means. Thus, lately we had an enlightening and lively discussion as to the length a “book” should have. (By “book” a six-shilling novel should, I suppose, be understood.) We were instructed that the public desires, nay, insists on, a certain fixed amount of reading matter. You might weigh a book in scales, you might measure its lines of bourgeois or pica type with a foot-rule. But your book must be able to be assayed either by weight or by measure. Indeed, nowadays your publisher, when he commissions a novel, insists in his agreement that it shall be seventy-five thousand words in length. Just imagine! You might want to write the chronicle of a family, as Thackeray did in The New comes, and you must do it all in 75,000 words. Or you might want to write the story of how a young man got engaged to a young woman during five accidental meetings in omnibuses. And, if you cannot do it in 4,000 words, so as to make it a “short story” for one of the popular magazines, you must extend it to 75,000 or there will be, every publisher will tell you, “no market for it.” In the earlier nineties the publisher cheated his authors as a rule tyrannically enough, and, since no author ever looked at an agreement in those days, things went smoothly. The publisher, on the other hand, considered sometimes the quality of the work that he published, and seldom thought about the length of the book. Indeed, everything was then made more easy for the author’s activities. When I published, at the age of eighteen, my first novel, it was borne in upon me that there was no need to be acquainted with the mysteries of grammar — or, rather, of syntax, since in England there is no such thing as grammar — of syntax, of spelling, or of punctuation. The author of that day could write exactly as he pleased; he could make mistakes as to dates; he could rechristen his heroine by inadvertance four times in as many chapters. But he knew that he would have three succeeding sets of proofs and revised, and that each proof and each revise would be gone through with an almost incredible care by a proofreader who would be a man of the highest education and of a knowledge almost encyclopaedic. I once by a slip of the pen wrote the name of the painter of the “Primavera,” Buonarotti. Sure enough the proof came back marked in the margin: “Surely there is no picture of this name by Michael Angelo. Query Botticelli?” So that, indeed, in the nineties, and before that, one had a sense not only of dignity and luxury, but of security. And this was very good for writing.
Consider where we are now! In the case of the last novel but one that I published I received from the publisher the most singular and the most insolent document that I think an author could possibly receive. This requested me to mark with red ink any printer’s error and with black my own changes in the text. Just think of what this means! An author, when he is correcting his proofs, if he is anywhere near worth his salt, is in a state of the most extreme tension. It is his last chance for getting his phrases musical or his words exactly right; it is an operation usually more trying than the actual writing of a book. And into this intense abstraction there is, as it were, to come the voice of a damned publisher exclaiming: “Red ink, if you please; that hyphen is a printer’s error.” Nowadays, indeed, the publisher only allows his author one proof and no revises unless the author makes a horrible row about it. And the publisher’s proofreader seems to have disappeared altogether. Last March I received three sets of proofs — forty-eight pages — in which the printer had uniformly spelled the word receive wrong. Now I know how to spell receive, and so does my typist. Yet it is a matter as to which one always has a lingering doubt. So that when nine times in forty-eight pages I found the “i” preceding the “e” I was frightened and turned to a dictionary. But do you imagine that the “reader for the press” had once noticed this? Not a bit of it. The whole forty-eight pages were guiltless of a speck from his pen, and after that I had my nerves perpetually on the stretch to find out and to examine all words like believe or deceive. My mind was in a woful state of jangle and exasperation, and the one critic who appeared to carefully have read the book remarked that I had split an infinitive. It is not that this particular thing so particularly matters; it is that the whole spirit is so atrocious and so depressing. The half-ruined libraries, we are told, badger the unfortunate publisher; the unfortunate publisher has beaten down the unfortunate printer until, I am told, the printing schedule of to-day is only fifty-five per cent, of what it was in 1890. As a consequence the printer will only send one set of proofs and no revises. He sacks any proofreader whose competence commands a decent wage, so that all the really efficient “readers for the press” are said to be employed by the newspapers.
And along with all this there has gone the tremendous increase in the cost of living and the enormous increase of the public indifference to anything in the nature of the arts. This last — and possibly both of these factors — began with the firing of the first shot in the Boer War. That was the end of everything — of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the Henley gang, of the New Humor, of the Victorian Great Figure, and of the last traces of the mediæval superstition that man might save his soul by the reading of good books.
Africa has been called the grave of reputations. South Africa has bitterly revenged itself upon us for our crimes. It was undoubtedly the Rand millionaire who began to set the pace of social life so immensely fast. And the South African War meant the final installation of the Rand millionaire in Mayfair, which is the centre of English — and possibly of European and American — social life. The Rand millionaire was almost invariably a Jew; and whatever may be said for or against the Jew as a gainer of money, there is no doubt that, having got it, he spends it with an extraordinary lavishness, so that the whole tone of English society really changed at about this time. No doubt the coming of the motor-car, of the telephone, of the thousand and one pleasant little inventions of which no one had any idea in the nineteenth century — no doubt the coming of all these little things that have rendered life so gay, so sensuous, and so evanescent — all these little things have played their part in adding immensely to the cost of life if one has to live at all as pleasantly as one’s neighbors. But they are the accident; it is the people who set the measure of the amount to which these luxuries are to be indulged in; it is those people who, in essence, rule our lives.
It is all very well to say that luxury — which is the culture of life — is neither here nor there in the world of the arts or the ideas. My German great-grandmother, the wife of the Burgermeister of one of the capital cities of Germany, could never get over what appeared to her a disastrous new habit that was beginning to be adopted in Germany toward the end of her life, about 1780. She said that it was sinful, that it was extravagant, that it would lead to the downfall of the German nation. This revolutionary new habit was none other than that of having a dining-room. In those days Germany was so poor a country that even though my great-grandparents were considered wealthy people they were always accustomed to eat their meals in the bedroom. There was, that is to say, only one room and a kitchen in their house. The beds of the whole family were in niches in the walls surrounding the living-room, and it was here that they ate, slept, changed their clothes, or received their guests. The families of merchants less wealthy even cooked in their bedrooms. This appeared to my great-grandmother the only virtuous arrangement. And it was no doubt in the same spirit that Madox Brown considered it a proof of decadent luxury to wash one’s hands more than three times a day. Nowadays, I suppose, we should consider my great-grandmother’s virtue a disgusting affair, and one that, because it was insanitary, was also immoral, or at least anti-social; while my grandfather, who washed his hands only three times a day — before breakfast, lunch, and dinner — would be considered as only just scraping through the limits of cleanliness. Yet the price of soap is increasing daily.
It may well be said: Why could my German grandfather when he married not have gone on eating his meals in his bedroom after the patriarchal manner? But to say so would argue a serious want of knowledge of the creature that man is. He would have been intolerably miserable; his wife would have been intolerably miserable; his children would have been miserable and crestfallen among their playmates, for by that time — say a hundred years ago — all the neighbors had dining-rooms. So that the problem before my grandfather was to set his printing presses to work with redoubled speed and so to earn money enough to build for his wife and his children a sufficiently large house. And so he did, so that when he died he had not only bought the very large town house of a Westphalian nobleman, but he was able to leave to each of his fourteen children the sum of £3,750 — which, taken in the aggregate, represented a very large fortune for a German of the forties. But, then, four hundred a year in the eighties was considered sufficient for a man to marry on in London. It is not enough for a bachelor nowadays, if he is to live with any enjoyment.
And the artist must live with enjoyment if his work is to be sound and good. He ought, if he is to know life, to be able to knock at all doors; he ought to be able to squander freely upon occasion; he ought to be able to riot now and then. It is no good saying that he ought to be able to live with his muse, as with his love, in a cottage. L’un et l’autre se disent, but though it is very well to live with love in a cottage in your young years when the world is a funny place, and the washing-up of dishes such a humorous incident as makes of life a picnic, the writer who passes his life at this game will be in the end but a poor creature, whether as a man or a writer. Or, no, he may make a very fine man of the type of little St. Francis of the Birds. But he will be a writer purely doctrinaire. And for a writer to be doctrinaire is the end of him as an artist. He may make an excellent pamphleteer.
This is very much what has happened to English literary life. The English writer appears to me — in the pack, for obviously there are the exceptions, mostly of an old-fashioned order — in the pack like a herd of hungry wolves. Yet, unlike the wolf, he is incapable of herding to any sensible purpose. The goodness of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was its union in a common devotion to the arts. Its actual achievements may have been very small. I should not like if I were put upon my critical judgment to say that either Rossetti or Holman Hunt, either Swinburne or William Morris, Millais or Burne-Jones, or, for the matter of that, my grandfather, were first-rate artists. But their effect in heightening the prestige and the glamour of the arts was very wonderful, and remains, for the Continent, if not for England, a wonderful thing too. Similarly with Henley’s crowd of friends. Their union was very close, though not so close as that of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Their devotion to a sort of practical art was very great too, though it was not so conscious as that of Flaubert and his ring. Henley, at least subconsciously, taught his followers that the first business of art is to interest, and the second, to interest, and the third, again — to interest. And I think that nearly all that is vital, actual, and alive in English work of to-day is due to the influence of Henley and his friends, just as I am perfectly certain that the two first-class purely imaginative writers of England of to-day — Mr. Henry James and Mr. Joseph Conrad — are the direct products artistically of Turgeniev and of Flaubert. It is mortifying to have to consider that each of these great writers is a foreigner. But so it is, and I should rather imagine that neither of these distinguished foreigners has ever heard the phrase that I have in this place so often used.
And great though Pre-Raphaelism was as an influence, great though Henleyism is as an influence, yet each of these influences left behind it a curse that has miasmatically affected the English world of letters.
I remember — years ago before I went into the country — sitting in one of those distressingly unpleasant French restaurants of Soho that even in those days these superior and Morris-influenced writers considered as being at once romantic and satisfactory — I remember sitting listening to a group of my fellow-socialists of that type. I was always frightened of my companions, they were so bitterly contemptuous of me if I failed to know exactly what was the proper doctrine about any point of the Ideal Commonwealth, or as to what sort of clothes Dante wore at Ravenna. Yes, I was frightened; and suddenly it came into my head to understand that a temporal tyranny might be a bad thing, but that the intellectual tyranny that my young friends would set up, when their social revolution came round the corner like the three-horse omnibus — that this intellectual tyranny would be infinitely worse than anything that Ivan the Terrible could ever have devised. For these young men, my companions, would keep all the good things of life for those who understood what would happen to babies in the Ideal State, for those who knew what Beatrice ate on the morning before she met Dante for the first time, for those who had the “Cuchullain Saga,” the “Saga of Grettir the Strong,” and possibly “Ossian” and “News from Nowhere” by heart. As for me, I never could understand anything at all about the economic conditions of the Ideal State. Most of the Celtic and Scandinavian epics appeared to me to be intolerably long and amateurish productions of dull peasants who occasionally produced passages of brilliancy accidentally surpassing anything that was ever written or ever will be. And, as for “News from Nowhere”... So, looking at my contemptuous young companions, each with his soft frieze coat, the pockets of which suggested that they contained many apples; each with his low collar, each with his red tie, and looking at the dirty table-cloths, the cheap knives, the cheap and poisonous claret, I felt suddenly guilt, humility, and intense dread; I felt that I was a Philistine! I felt that every moment that I sat there I might be found out and conveyed swiftly to the chilling dungeons of the Ideal State. I seemed to hear from round the corner the rattle of the three-horse ‘bus. I seemed to catch in the eyes around that table a threatening gleam as if they suspected that I was a sort of spy at that banquet of conspirators.
I fled — into the country. Looking at the matter now, I perceive that Henley was responsible for this — Henley and his piratical gang. These people had struck me as rough and unduly boisterous when I went to them out of a Pre-Raphaelite household. But, my grandfather being dead, I suddenly reacted. I did not know then, but I know now, that my brain was singing to me:
“Under the bright and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.”
Only I wanted to have some tussles with the “good brown earth” before that hilltop should receive me. Well, we have most of us found the “good brown earth” part of a silly pose — but I am not sorry. It was Henley and his friends who introduced into the English writing mind the idea that a man of action was something fine and a man of letters a sort of castrato. They went jumping all over the earth, they “jumped the blind baggage” in the United States, they played at being tramps in Turkey, they died in Samoa, they debauched the morals of lonely border villages. You see what it was — they desired to be men of action, and certainly they infected me with the desire, and I am very glad of it, just as I am very glad that the intolerable boredom of a country life without sport or pursuit taught me better in time.
With the idea that a writer should have been a man of action before he begins to write I am cordially in agreement; indeed, I doubt whether any writer has ever been thoroughly satisfactory unless he has once had some sort of normal existence. No greater calamity could befall one than to be trained as a genius. For the writer looks at life and does not share it. This is his calamity; this is his curse. If Shakespeare had not held horses outside a theatre or taken an interest in commercial enterprises, or whatever it was of a normal sort that he did before he wrote his first play, I think it is certain that the Baconians would not to-day be troubling their heads about him. He would have remained a poet of about the calibre of Fletcher, who was a very beautiful and poetical soul. Shakespeare had a soul not a bit more poetic, but he was of his world and he knew life. Hence he had not only the gifts of a poet, but the knowledge of how to invent along the lines of probability, and the one faculty is as essential to the perfect work of art as is the other. And Shakespeare had the immense advantage of belonging to a circle — to a circle that praised art high, that troubled its head about the technical side of things, and a circle that troubled itself very little about its social position. Shakespeare — or whoever it was — wrote the ballad beginning:
“It was a lording’s daughter,
The fairest one of three,”
in which a learned man and a soldier contend for the favor of an earl’s daughter. They put up a fairly equal fight of it, so that for the moment I do not remember which got the upper hand. But do you imagine that an English writer of to-day would give a man of letters a show if he had to picture him as the rival of an officer in the Guards, or, on the other hand, as the rival of a colonial pioneer? Not a bit of it! The modern English writer — and he would not be of necessity a traitor to his cloth — would argue in this way: A writer has in England no social position; an officer in the Guards is at the top of the tree. Therefore the heroine would take the officer in the Guards. Or, again, he would say a man of letters is regarded as something less than a man, whereas any sort of individual returning from the colonies is regarded inevitably as something rather more than two supermen rolled into one. So that the heroine would inevitably take the returned colonist.
No, this writer would not be a traitor to his cloth. It does not matter that officers in the Guards are mostly rather silly fools, without conversation or any interests beyond the head of their polo mallets, or that nearly every returned colonial can do nothing better than talk of the affairs of his dull colony in the language at once of a bore and a prig — for of necessity his mind is occupied with a civilization of a low kind. But still the poor depressed writer will see that the heroine — being a bright and beautiful English girl — will prefer money or social position to any of the delights of communing with giants of the intellect. And to marry a lieutenant in the Guards is to have duchesses on your visiting list or to go yearly to Ascot in the smartest of frocks, though there may be some difficulty in meeting the bills sent in by Madame Somebody. Or, again, to marry a colonial administrator or one of those rather sketchy gentlemen from Australia who are always lecturing us as if they were so many Roosevelts by the grace of God — to marry some such gentleman is in all probability to become at least the wife of a K.C.M.G., possibly of a peer, to have eventually a palace in Park Lane and the country estate of an impoverished earl.
