Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 922
She was a witness – or an almost witness – of one of the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel. She certainly came on the body of one of the victims and claimed to have seen a man vanish into the fog. I never actually heard the details of that. My mother, worried by the advent of a questioning police sergeant and the hysterics of the household below stairs forbade the old lady to tell us children about it. But her impressive and mysterious absence in her best black bonnet and jet beaded cloak, and the whispers of the household made me fully aware that she was giving evidence at the Inkwedge. For long afterwards heaven knew what horrors were not concealed for me in the pools of shadow beneath the lamp-posts. In solitary streets your footsteps echoing and a smudge of fog in the gaslight!
The last time I saw the old lady she was sitting – as she did day in day out for years – in the window of a parlour that occupied the apex of a corner lot in an outer suburb. She could look right up and down two long streets.
She greeted me with great vivacity. The day before there had been a tremendous thunderstorm. The streets up which she looked had been almost obscured by falling water. She said to me:
‘I calls out to Lizzie … Good gracious me! That man! “‘E’s struck dead!” … N’e was!’ she added triumphantly.
I fancy the physical gloom of London adds to the heaviness of my memory of those days. A city whose streets are illuminated only by the flicker of rare street lamps seems almost darker than one not lit at all. And the corners of rooms are always filled with shadows when the sole illuminant is a dim oil-lamp or a bluish gas flame. And in London it was always winter. I remember at any rate no spring.
Above the darkness brooded the Hard Times. I am talking now of the early ‘nineties. It is difficult to think how people lived then. In cold, in darkness, lacking sufficient clothes or sufficient food. With the aid of gin perhaps: or beer when you could cadge a pint. Charles Booth in his Life and Labour of the Poor in London states that ninety per cent of the population of London in those days depended for its menus plaisirs – its glimpses of light, of pleasure, its beanfeasts, its pints at the pubs – on windfalls. A working man got the price of a pint of beer for dexterously holding a lady’s skirt off the wheel as she stepped out of a carriage. He would get as much for hailing a cab on a wet night. A charwoman got an old dress given her and sold it in a rag and bone shop for the price of a quartern of gin. Cooks had their perquisites: their ‘perks.’ Old women with ‘puffity pockets’ beneath their skirts slunk up and down area railings. When they went up the pockets would contain pounds of dripping: mutton fat: half plum cakes: remains of joints of beef. With the price of them the cook would get a new hat and some tobacco for her father in the workhouse. You lived in slums in Seven Dials, Whitechapel, Notting Dale. You burned the stairrails and banisters, the door jambs, the window frames for fuel. The rest of the world was no better. In Paris half the population was insufficiently fed; on sunny days the most horrible, half nude creatures sunned themselves on the benches of the Champs Elysees. In Berlin the greater part of the population never thought of tasting meat. In St. Petersburg the condition of the poor would not bear thinking of. When you did witness it, you went mad or divested yourself of all your goods. Kropotkin had done that and was only one of scores of princes and great landowners. ‘The poor,’ the middle class householder said, ‘are always with us. These are the words of Jesus Christ.’ So he put on several mufflers, buried his purse in an inner pocket and buttoned up his overcoat to the chin the better to avoid the temptation to give a starving woman a ha’penny. I remember taking the young daughter of my father’s most intimate friend, who was Queen Victoria’s Master of Music, on the River Blythe in a canoe. I talked to her about the conditions of the poor. Next day her mother Lady Cusins said to me:
‘Fordie, you are a dear boy. Sir George and I like you very much. But I must ask you not to talk to dear Beatrice … about Things!’ Punch itself was once almost suppressed. It printed a drawing of Charles Read’s showing two miserable women of the ‘Unfortunate Class’ soaked by rain and shivering under one of the Adelphi Arches. One of them says to the other: ‘Dearie… Ow long ‘ave you been gay!’ Gay of course signified ‘unfortunate’. The consternation in Victorian London was terrific. Punch had spoken about Things. It never has again.
The natural corollary of these pressures was … Anarchism, Fabianism, Dynamitings, Nihilism. I saw a good deal of the inner workings of these.
I never took any stock in politics. But political movements have always interested me. I have only once voted. It is one of my most passionate convictions that no one individual can be sufficiently intelligent to be entrusted with the fortune or life of any other individual. Far less can he be morally capable of influencing to the extent merely of a single vote the destinies of millions of his fellows. I at any rate never could feel myself so entitled. I don’t believe a creative artist can have any intellect: he is an observer and a recorder. He may have passions but he must mistrust them.
My own predilections have always been toward the Right. I like Pomp, Banners, Divine Rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness. It seems to me that when the world was a matter of small communities each under an arbitrary but responsible head then the world was at its best. If your community did not prosper you decapitated your chief. Till then he was possessed of Divine Rights. Presumably you cannot better the Feudal System.
So I was always a sentimental Tory. But inasmuch as the Tories stood in the way of Home Rule for Ireland I never voted or wrote for that Party. The Liberals of the ‘nineties on the other hand were mostly great employers of labour. Their aim was to have always fringes of pauperised and parasitic working people so that wages might be kept low. It was perhaps an unconscious aim. My Tory view was that every workman should first be assured of four hundred a year. Let the employer of labour assure that before he started his factory – or clear out. So, though the Liberals supported Irish Home Rule I could not support them.
The Literary Man in England is usually predestined to the Left. Ranking socially with the Governess and the Butler – a little above it if he prospers, a little below if he is poor – he cannot, qua writer, be a Gentleman. In consequence he tries to achieve Importance outside his Art. The Tory Party was always the Stupid Party. And proud of it! In the ‘nineties it let Henley starve and cold shouldered Mallock. The Left on the other hand forever stretches out its arms toward Intellect. In consequence English Intelligentsia are almost invariably of the Left – Liberals, Fabians, Communists, Nonconformists or worse. The Liberals once offered me myself a constituency… Clackmannan and Kinross. A scattered and bleak district to work in politically.
It has from my earliest days been my fate to be regarded as a brand to be snatched from the burning by the Left. From my earliest days in darkest London! I never quite knew why. I suppose it was because as a boy I was of a family influential in the Arts and Letters. At any rate whether it was the Rossettis or the Garnetts of the Left or straight Labour, Fabian or Morris-Socialist agitators I was seldom between the ages of twenty or thirty without someone putting Left pressure upon me. I was for ever being shouldered off to meetings of Hammersmith Socialists at William Morris’ house, to meetings of Marxists at the Avelings, of Anarchists in Hyde Park, of Parliamentary Labour leaders at the Holborn Restaurant or to those of pro-Boer agitators in Piccadilly Circus. In that way I saw some pretty tidy fights. I saw the Anarchists break up a Morris-Socialist meeting at Kelmscott House, the Morris-Socialists break up an Anarchist assembly in Hyde Park and a tremendous set-to between Morris-Socialists and Fabians in a North Kent suburb – the Crays, I think, or Eltham. In addition, being profoundly impressed by the uselessness to England of the British Empire and with the savage nature of the Dopper Boers and wishing solely that South Africa might be returned to its real owners, the natives, and Kruger and Mr Chamberlain hung on the same gallows, I was once chased for three-quarters of a mile along New Oxford Street by a howling mob of patriots. That was during the South African War. On the other hand I once saw Mr George Bernard Shaw brought to a clean stop in the middle of a Socialist Speech. Few people can have seen the like.
My cousins, the young Rossettis did that.
They were Anarchists. Today they are almost infinitely respectable. But when the hot blood roared in the young ‘nineties what were young Intelligentsia to do? The young Philistine joined the Skeleton Army and brought bladders of ink or flour with which to disfigure young women of the Salvationists. The Salvation Army was then young and marked out for persecution. I remember Mr Edward Garnett, then too, young and gallant. He constituted an anti-Skeleton Army and purchasing an enormous cudgel went down to protect the Salvationist lasses at Brighton. But if you did not do that and were young and hot-blooded and militant, Anarchism was your logical occupation.
The young Rossettis then were Anarchists. They fostered the Red Revolution with their pocket moneys, they harangued meetings with childish voices, they ran a printing press and an Anarchist journal called The Torch, in the basement of William Rossetti’s house – which belonged to his wife, my aunt Lucy. The Torch Press printed two literary curiosities at least. A pamphlet by Mr George Bernard Shaw called Why I am an Anarchist, and my own first poem.
In our families as children we were trained to be geniuses under the powerful shadow of pre-Raphaelism. I still remember the painfulness of the process and the conviction that whilst my young cousins undoubtedly were geniuses I at least was a Philistine. They wrote Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen. I read penny dreadfuls in the coal cellar to avoid my father’s eyes. And one of the acutest agonies of my childhood, after I was past the age of fearing the shadows at night was being pressed into acting in those dramas. The Rossetti’s large back drawing-room in Endsleigh Gardens was converted into a stage…
It is astonishing how memories come back. When I write ‘Endsleigh Gardens’ suddenly the name ‘Borschitzky’ comes up before me. That is because I used to have violin lessons from the queer, tragic Borschitzky whose dismal adventure caused Euston Square to be rechristened. He came home late at night and found his landlady murdered in the kitchen. Being nearly blind he fell over the body, got himself covered with blood and as a foreigner and a musician was at once arrested by the intelligent police. He was, of course, acquitted; but the trial caused so much sensation as the ‘Euston Square murder’, that the respectable inhabitants petitioned to have the name of the square changed and it became Endsleigh Gardens. (Do you know how the inhabitants of Rugeley tried to get the name of their city changed? An atrocious series of murders were there committed by a man called Palmer, the reports of the Rugeley murders shaking all England. The inhabitants sent a deputation to the Home Secretary – Lord John Russell. Lord John listened to them with attention and then suggested critically that they might call Rugeley after the Opposition Minister – Palmerston. They didn’t.)
Poor Borschitzky was a small, bald man with an immense nose, who wore his greyish hair brushed stiffly forward into peaks, and Gladstone collars that came forward into peaks equally stiff. He was usually dressed in an immensely long frock coat that nearly hid his tiny legs and enormous feet. He spoke the most extravagantly pidgin English I have ever imagined and told the longest and most extraordinary stories.
His stories went like this:
‘Zair voss a Gris-chun mit a Chew. E sez to im:
‘“You uckly Chew I haf ad a mos orible tream. It voss a mos orible tream. I tream I co to dhe Chewish Evven an it voss a mos orible place. Ze spiddons voss all filzy an ze dables coffered viz creese and dher voss no sand on de floor and de praziers voss dhick wiz rust. O it voss a mos orible place an it voss fooll fooll fooll of orible uckly Chews spiddin on ze floor and shmoking; shmoking filthy filthy paipes.”
‘“Dad vos vairy curious,” sez ze Chew. “I ollso haf a tream. I tream I co to dze Gris-chun Evven. O, and it voss a mos loffely place. De spiddoons voss of prass zat shone laike colld and dhe sand on der floor laike silber. Ond de daples voss viter ass a snotrift ond de praziers voss silber ond de dobacco poxes oll retty do be smoaked; O it voss a mos loffly place. Loffly; loffly! ontly … zer vos nowun in it!”’
Towards the end of his life great troubles fell on poor Borschitzky. His mainstay had for years been the preparatory school to which I was sent. All his other pupils fell away; no orchestra would any longer employ him. Nor play his compositions. Then his old friends the owners of the school died. They had supported him for years in spite of his peculiarities. The new owners of the school dismissed him. Then he had nothing and was perhaps seventy-two. He packed up his never played compositions in several bundles and took them to the British Museum Library. Dr Garnett told him kindly that the Museum only accepted the compositions of the dead. He went to the Post-office at the corner of Endsleigh Garden, mailed the parcel to the Museum and then went back to his room. He tidied it very thoroughly and destroyed a number of papers. Then he went out, and by the railings of the Square before his windows he cut his throat. If he had done it indoors it would have caused his landlady a great deal of trouble and have made a horrid mess for her to clean up.
But still when in Continental Cathedrals I hear the boom of the serpent and the sharp tap of the cantor as he starts the choir in its plain-song I see the form of poor old Borschitzky with his bow held over his beloved fiddle and the school choir with its mouths all open before him. He taps magisterially three times with his bow, his side-locks stick forward, his coat tails hanging down to his enormous boots. ‘Van! Doo! Dree … Pom-Pom,’ he shouts, and off we all go on his rendering of the words that accompany the Ninth Symphony. God send him an old leather cushion stuffed with straw for his hard chair in his Chewish Evven… and send to all old, worn out artists to be as considerate in their final distress.
Those were grim enough times for artists – the ‘eighties and early ‘nineties. I don’t know that they are any better now. There was a blind poet called Philip Bourke Marston. He was not a very striking poet, but because he was blind he occupied a position of some note amongst the minor pre-Raphaelite group. He was bearded like an elder statesman of those days and, with his down-glancing eyes, was of noble appearance. Members of the group used to take it in turns to read to him in his gloomy room in the Euston Road. One day another poet of much greater reputation came in. He threw a fit of delirium tremens and imagined himself a Bengal tiger; he fell upon poor Marston and mauled him rather severely, the blind man being unable to defend himself at all. William Sharpe came in and found them struggling on the floor. He pulled off the dipsomaniac who immediately burst a blood vessel, his blood pouring all over both Marston and Fiona Macleod. Sharpe ran around to the nearby hospital to fetch a doctor. The physician in charge immediately cried out that Sharpe must be arrested for murder. He was drunk. In the meantime, the dipsomaniac bled to death and Marston nearly went out of his mind… Yes, grim times in that city of dreadful night!
I don’t know if you know how many material comforts were lacking in the civilisation of those days. I was told by one of the frequent hostesses of Mr Gladstone that that statesman and his wife always took to bed with them a hot water bottle filled with beef tea. They drank the fluid in the night. At six in the morning Mr Gladstone had a grilled chicken leg and an egg beaten up in sherry brought to his bedside. At eight he ate a great breakfast.
But all the statesmen I have known were hearty feeders. I remember being privileged to wait on a Lord Chancellor at lunch at his Club. A young relative of mine to whom I acted as guardian had just become a Ward of Court and my financial adviser had strongly recommended against investments in Consols which stood then at 113. His Lordship disposed of the affairs of his wards at any odd moments outside the Law Courts.
The meal that he consumed was unthinkable, considering that it was lunch. He began with a tumbler of sherry and half of the upper side of an enormous turbot au gratin. (Brillat Savarin says that the perfect lunch consists of a small slice of turbot au gratin, a glass of sherry and a slice of thin bread and butter.) Then he had two immense beefsteaks, the greater part of an apple-pie, at least a quarter of a pound of Stilton and some grilled herring-roes on toast. With the turbot after the sherry, he drank a bottle of hock, with the steak a bottle of Burgundy, with the cheese and savoury two dock glasses of port and he topped it all with a small glass of very good wine. His conversation was of a singular joviality on the side of salaciousness.
Immediately afterwards he delivered in the House of Lords a judgement in a peerage case – of extraordinary acumen, clearness of language and memory of details. And he was in his place in the Lords till far into the night, a full dress sitting. I don’t know what he had for dinner.
I have always thought that these extraordinary assimilative powers of statesmen were necessitated by the great fatigue incident on their calling. A man like a Prime Minister or a Chancellor of the Exchequer must burn up in the forced draughts of his career at least twice as much fuel as anyone leading a retired or a contemplative life. At any rate they gorge – and live to the ages of Methuselahs.
It is probably that, too, that makes them so extraordinarily touchy, and ready to accuse their opponents of drinking. At any rate all the Prime Ministers and most of the Members of the Cabinet who occupied seats in my time, were automatically accused by the Opposition of drinking. On the face of it that would be impossible. You cannot drink habitually to intoxication and attend to innumerable details in an atmosphere of lunacy and at the same time live to great old age – any more than you can write good prose for long if you are habitually drunk.
