Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 911
So the writer of fiction would estimate the chances, and I do not know whether he would be right or wrong; for certainly the ordinary man of letters has precious little to offer anybody, and none too much for himself. Poor devil, he is between the necessity for an expenditure that would have seemed vast to his grandfather and a buying public that day by day shows less desire to buy books. For this too the South African War was partly responsible. I had a young connection who lately went up for the preliminary examination at the Admiralty. Said the examining admiral:
“Now, my man, what papers does your father read? And what do you judge from that that his politics are?”
This was not an invidious political question on the admiral’s part; the object of the examination is to test a boy’s powers of observation. The boy’s answer was: “Oh, my governor’s a Tory. He reads the Daily Chronicle, the Daily News, the Westminster Gazette, the Manchester Guardian....”
“But,” said the admiral, aghast, “those are all Liberal papers. You said your father was a Tory.”
“Oh yes,” the boy answered with assurance, “he takes in the Times, the Saturday Review, the Spectator, and the Field, to give his side a show — to put the money into their pockets. But he never reads any of them except now and then, and the Field always on Sunday. He says he can do all the lying that is wanted on his side for himself, without reading the Tory papers. But he wants to know what lies the other side are telling, because he can’t make them up for himself.”
The admiral laughed and passed the boy, but the admiral was old-fashioned. He had a pre-Boer-War habit of mind as regarded the newspapers. In his prime he took the Times or the Morning Post, and that was all he had in the way of a paper. But with the coming of the South African War we acquired the habit of skimming through from seven to ten papers a day — to get a little hope. I don’t blame us. The man who could get through the period of Spion Kop without rushing anywhere to read the latest bulletin, or could keep in his pocket one single penny that might give him some glimmer of hopeful news, was something less than a man. I suppose I was as hot a pro-Boer as any one well could be, but I know I came very near to crying with joy When Mafeking was relieved. I remember that that night I had been up to Highgate. I was coming back very late and I asked the tram-driver if there was any news. He said there was none. Suddenly the conductor came running out of the fire-station, shouting:
“The relief-party is in!”
Immediately he scrambled on board the tram, the driver whipped his horses to a gallop, and we went tearing madly down that long hill into the darkness, the conductor standing on top of the tram and shouting at the top of his voice that Mafeking was relieved. And, in those black and grim streets, shining with the wet, suddenly every window lit up and opened, and from each there came out a Union Jack. It was as if we entered a city given over to night, to the tears of the rain, to merciless suspension, and as if we left behind us streets gay, triumphant, illuminated, imperial. Or perhaps imperial is not the word. I don’t know.
Farther down in the town we came upon places where the news was already. I went toward St. Paul’s to see if there was not some sort of inspiring demonstration. But in Holborn I was knocked down. A fat and elderly gentleman, bearing over his shoulder a long pole on which were nailed about twenty little flags, turned suddenly round and the end of the pole caught me under the ear.
Imperial? No, I think not. We were more like a nation of convicted murderers, suddenly reprieved when the hangman’s cap was over our eyes. I think I was as glad as any one else. But the Nemesis remains. Still, every day I read my five newspapers. And, in common with the rest of England, I don’t believe a single word that I read in any one of them. Like the father of the boy who was up for examination, I prefer to read papers of the shade of politics that for the moment may happen to be not my own. I can lie so much more skilfully than any journalist upon my own side.
But this enormous and unimpressed reading of newspapers has given the last kick to the writer of books. It is the end of him. He has gone out. Before the war a rich man occasionally bought a book. The other day I owned a periodical. Said a man to me — he owned seven motor-cars:
“I wish your paper did not cost half-a-crown. If it was only a shilling I would certainly buy it. But times are so hard that I have to put down my book bill.”
“And he had great possessions.”
Before the war this gentleman would have been forced, by sheer hypocrisy, to pay that particular cock to Æsculapius. But the war gave us our excuse for “putting down” anything — book bills coming, of course, first — and since the war my friend has had to keep it up against a Rand magnate of his immediate circle. At that moment this other gentleman owned six motor-cars. My friend had therefore to have his seven. I believe he was the second richest man in England.
I cannot, however, say that the poor come any better out of that particular struggle. Thus at about the same time I received a whining letter from a working-man’s club in the north of London. They said that they numbered exactly thirty, that my periodical was absolutely necessary to them, and that they could not possibly afford half-a-crown. They were mostly school teachers. I answered perfectly seriously that if my periodical was so absolutely necessary to the saving of their souls, there were exactly thirty of them, so that to purchase a copy for their club would cost each of them exactly one penny per month. I suggested that if each one of them would once a month walk a penny tram-fare, or smoke one-sixty-fourth of a pound less tobacco, or drink one-quarter of a pint less beer, or go for one day without a daily paper, their club might very well purchase monthly a copy of my so necessary periodical. I received in reply a note from the secretary of that club stating that my letter was ribald, insulting, and utterly unsympathetic to the woes of the poor who had paid me an undeserved compliment.
No. I do not think that the workman, the school teacher, and the rest of them will be any better masters for literature which is falling under their dominance. And I do not see any hope of improvement until the state supplies literature free. That, of course, is coming, but I have no doubt that the state will sweat the author even more mercilessly than do, in effect, the millionaire, the shopkeeper, the school teacher, and the workman of to-day. For all these people demand such literature as they have time, or deign, to consume — they demand it at derisorily cheap rates. And you cannot have good new literature cheaply. It cannot be done, simply because the author, too, has the right to live. Of course you may have cheap reprints of the works of dead authors — as cheaply as you like, for the state, with its contempt for all things of the mind, steals the only property which is really created by any man. So the heirs of Shakespeare and of Dickens may go starve, while their noncopyright editions contribute to the starvation of succeeding authors.
That authors themselves have contributed to the want of interest in literature that the public displays is also true. That is a legacy of Pre-Raphaelism — the worst legacy that any movement ever left behind it. For those young men from whom I fled into the country invented later, or had already invented, the dreary shibboleth that literature must be written by those who have read the “Cuchullain Saga” or something dull and pompous, for those who have read similar works. Literature, these people say, is of necessity abstruse, esoteric, far-fetched and unreadable. Nothing is less true, nothing more fatal. Great literature always is and always has been popular. It has had, that is to say, its popular appeal. Homer was a popular writer, Virgil was a popular writer, Chaucer wrote in what was then called the vulgar tongue for the common people. This, too, Dante did.
I believe that Shakespeare deliberately “wrote down” in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Goethe was one of the most popular authors of his day, and the most popular author of to-day or any time was also the finest artist of his own or any day. This was Guy de Maupassant.
Who, I wonder, in England will ever realize that literature, besides being “elevating,” is a gay thing, is a pleasant thing, is a thing made for the increase of joy, of mirth, of happiness, and of those tears which are near to joy? It is the business of a book to be easy to read — to be as easy to read as any book upon its given subject possibly can be. I do not mean to say that a book about the Treaty of Tilsit can ever be as easy for a water-side laborer or for me to read as a work about things that I or the water-side laborer know perfectly well. But it is the duty of the author to capture attention, and then to make his subject plain; there is no other duty of an author.
It is not for him to pose as a priest dwelling among obscurities. If his readers, if his lovers, will regard him as priest it is very well. Or, if his readers, if his lovers, will find and seek to cast light upon obscurities in his pages it will be still better, for that will mean that in them he has awakened thought and emotions. And when an author — when any artist — has awakened in another person thoughts and emotions, he is, to the measure of the light vouchsafed him, blessed indeed. This author will have told his tale in language as simple as his personality will permit him to use, in thoughts as simple as God will give him.
Here stand I, the man in the street. I have no special knowledge, I have no special gifts. I desire to be interested as I was interested when I read in the coal-cellar the adventures of Harkaway Dick. I desire to be interested as I was interested when I first read Ivan hoe, Lear, Nicholas Nickleby, Là Maison Tellier, Fathers and Children, The Trial of Joan of Arc, The Arabian Nights, or — twenty years ago — The Dolly Dialogues or Daisy Milled. You see, the poor man in the street is catholic enough in his tastes. And he has a passionate desire to be interested. This is indeed the noblest and the finest of all desires, since it means that he desires to enter into the fortunes, the hopes, the very hearts of his fellow-men, and it is in this way and in no other that literature can render a man better. I once lent a book to an old and quite ignorant cottage woman who had always had a taste for reading novels. And there are few cottage people who will not read novels with avidity. Some days afterward I went in to see this old woman. The tears were dropping down her cheeks, and she was wiping them away as fast as she could. She had just finished the book in question. She said: “Ah! aw do jest love yon book. It does me all the good in the world. Aw feels a score of years leeter for the cry!”
This book was Fathers and Children. Yet what was Bazarow to her, or she to Bazarow?
And there the matter is in a nutshell. Here I stand and cry for such a writer, and when such a writer, with such a purpose, disregarding all shibboleths, considering himself not as a priest who has to express “himself” but as quite a humble man who has before him the task of interesting me and the millions that I represent — when this writer comes he will sweep away all barriers. No markets will be closed to him, and no doors; there will be no hearts that he will not enter and no hearth that will not welcome him as its guest. He will be honored by emperors, and ploughmen will desire to take his hand. Wealth will be his beyond belief, and power. And he will be such a priest as Moses was, or those who were greater than Moses. But I do not think that he will have the “Cuchullain Saga” by heart.
XIII. CHANGES
I WAS walking the other day down one of the stretches of main road of the west of London. Rather low houses of brownish brick recede a little way from the road behind gardens of their own, or behind little crescents common to each group of houses. Omnibuses pass numerously before them, and there is a heavy traffic of motor-vehicles, because the road leads out into the country toward the west. But since this particular day happened to be a Sunday, the stretch of road, perhaps half a mile in length, was rather empty. I could see only two horse buses, a brougham, and a number of cyclists. And at that moment it occurred to me to think that there were no changes here at all. There was nothing at that moment to tell me that I was not the small boy that thirty years ago used, with great regularity, to walk along that stretch of road in order to go into Kensington Gardens. It was a remarkably odd sensation. For the moment I seemed to be back there, I seemed to be a child again, rather timid and wonderingly setting out upon tremendous adventures that the exploring of London streets then seemed to entail.
And having thus dipped for a moment into a past as unattainable as is the age of Homer, I came back very sharply before the first of the horse ‘buses and the fourth small band of cyclists had passed me — I came back to wondering about what changes the third of a century that I can remember had wrought in London and in us. It is sometimes pleasant, it is nearly always salutary, thus to take stock. Considering myself, it was astonishing how little I seemed to myself to have changed since I was a very little boy in a velveteen coat with gold buttons and long golden ringlets. I venture to obtrude this small piece of personality because it is a subject that has always interested me — the subject, not so much of myself, as in how far the rest of humanity seem to themselves to resemble me. I mean that to myself I never seemed to have grown up. This circumstance strikes me most forcibly when I go into my kitchen. I perceive saucepans, kitchen spoons, tin canisters, chopping - boards, egg - beaters, and objects whose very names I do not even know. I perceive these objects, and suddenly it comes into my mind — though I can hardly believe it — that these things actually belong to me. I can really do what I like with them if I want to. I might positively use the largest of the saucepans for making butterscotch, or I might fill the egg-beater with ink and churn it up. For such were the adventurous aspirations of my childhood when I peeped into the kitchen, which was a forbidden and glamourous place inhabited by à forbidding moral force known as Cook. And that glamour still persists, that feeling still remains. I do not really very often go into my kitchen, although it, and all it contains, are my property. I do not go into it because, lurking at the back of my head, I have always the feeling that I am a little boy who will be either “spoken to” or spanked by a mysterious They. In my childhood They represented a host of clearly perceived persons: my parents, my nurse, the housemaid, the hardly ever visible cook, a day-school master, several awful entities in blue who hung about in the streets and diminished seriously the enjoyment of life, and a large host of unnamed adults who possessed apparently remarkable and terrorizing powers. All these people were restraints. Nowadays, as far as I know, I have no restraints. No one has a right, no one has any authority, to restrain me. I can go where I like; I can do what I like; I can think, say, eat, drink, touch, break, whatever I like that is within the range of my own small empire. And yet till the other day I had constantly at the back of my mind the fear of a mysterious They — a feeling that has hot changed in the least since the day when last I could not possibly resist it, and I threw from an upper window a large piece of whiting at the helmet of a policeman who was standing in the road below. Yesterday I felt quite a strong desire to do the same thing when a bag of flour was brought to me for my inspection because it was said to be mouldy. There was the traffic going up and down underneath my windows, there was the sunlight, and there, his buckles and his buttons shining, there positively, on the other side of the road, stalked the policeman. But I resisted the temptation. My mind travelled rapidly over the possibilities. I wondered whether I could hit the policeman at the distance, and presumed I could. I wondered whether the policeman would be able to identify the house from which the missile came, and presumed he would not. I wondered whether the servant could be trusted not to peach, and presumed she could. I considered what it would cost me, and imagined that, at the worst, the price would be something less than that of a stall at a theatre, while I desired to throw the bag of flour very much more than I have ever desired to go to a theatre. And yet, as I have said, I resisted the temptation. I was afraid of a mysterious They. Or, again, I could remember very distinctly as a small boy staring in at the window of a sweet-shop near Gower Street Station and perceiving that there brandy balls might be had for the price of only four-pence a pound. And I remember thinking that I had discovered the secret of perpetual happiness. With a pound of brandy balls I could be happy from one end of the day to the other. I was aware that grown-up people were sometimes unhappy, but no grown-up person I ever thought was possessed of less than fourpence a day. My doubts as to the distant future vanished altogether. I knew that whatever happened to others, I was safe. Alas! I do not think that I have tasted a brandy ball for twenty years. When I have finished my day’s work I shall send out for a pound of them, though I am informed that the price has risen to sixpence. But though I cannot imagine that their possession will make me happy even for the remaining hours of this one day, yet I have not in the least changed, really. I know what will make me happy and perfectly contented when I get it — symbolically I still desire only my little pound of sweets. I have a vague, but very strong, feeling that every one else in the world around me, if the garments of formality and fashion that surround them could only be pierced through — that every one else who surrounds me equally has not grown up. They have not in essentials changed since they were small children. And the murderer who to-morrow will have the hangman’s noose round his neck — I am informed at this moment that criminals are nowadays always executed on Tuesdays at eleven o’clock — so let us say that a criminal who will be executed next Tuesday at that hour will feel, when the rope is put round his throat, an odd, pained feeling that some mistake is being made, because you do not really hang a child of six in civilized countries. So that perhaps we have not any of us changed. Perhaps we are all of us children, and the very children that we were when Victoria celebrated her first jubilee at about the date when Plancus was the consul. And yet we are conscious, all of us, that we have tremendously changed since the date when Du Maurier gave us the adventures of Mr. Cimabue Brown.
