Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 951
In that respect he marked the passing of a very distinct phase. There had been before him novelists the sons of working men or of lower middle class origin. Their characters, at any rate in their earlier works, were always portrayed as of those classes and concerned, even to paroxysms of confusion, over social minutiae. They wilted under the eyes of butlers and waiters, were horribly confused over the use of fish-knives and aspirates. About Lawrence there was no sign of that either in his characters or in his personal life. His characters are perfectly self-sufficient and unembarrassed by the sense of class. They move with complete freedom in a world that seems to belong to them alone: they are beings of absolute ignorance of class fetters and of confidence that they and their likes are the only persons that matter in the world. It was the same with Lawrence himself.
He came to dine with me and some people I had asked to meet him. He brought with him the young lady who had sent his manuscripts. But there was no confusion about them. The young lady asked the housemaid whether she was expected to take off her hat; Lawrence asked the servant who waited at table what knives he was expected to use with fish or asparagus. That being settled he went on to talk and was completely at his ease.
He was at that time a teacher in a school at Croydon. The confinement in a close atmosphere had caused him to have tuberculosis and he was about to be forced to give up that career. The fatigue of it he found in any case to be terrible. Had the school in which he taught been in the administrative County of London he would have received substantial compensation. But, though undistinguishable from any other London suburb, Croydon is just inside the County of [Surrey] and the school board of that division made no provision for disabled teachers. Lawrence had been very distressed at the thought of having to return home and be a burden to his parents. Masterman, who had a great admiration for his work of that date, approached the Ministry of Education on Lawrence’s behalf. I think he did eventually receive a small sum for medical treatment and the ministry put pressure on the East [Surrey] school board to make them improve their treatment of their teachers.
Lawrence I think went home. At any rate I visited him in Nottingham and was astonished at the atmosphere in which he lived, though less astonished by then as to the great sense of culture in his work. Lawrence’s father, of French extraction and great force of character, was a buttyman down the mine, and one of his brothers also lived underground. His sister I think was like Lawrence a school teacher. Other young people from down the pit or from schools and offices drifted in and out of the Lawrences’ house with the sort of freedom from restraint that I have only seen elsewhere in American small towns. I have never anywhere found so educated a society. Those young people knew the things that my generation in the great English schools hardly even chattered about. Lawrence, the father, came in from down the mine on a Saturday evening. He threw a great number of coins on the kitchen table and counted them out to his waiting mates. All the while the young people were talking about Nietzsche and Wagner and Leopardi and Flaubert and Karl Marx and Darwin and occasionally the father would interrupt his counting to contradict them. And they would discuss the French Impressionists and the primitive Italians and play Chopin or Debussy on the piano.
I went with them on the Sunday to a Nonconformist place of worship. It was the only time I was ever in one except that I once heard the Rev. Stopford Brooke who was a Unitarian preach a sermon on Tennyson. The Nottingham chapel – it was I think Wesleyan – made me of course feel uncomfortable at first. But the sermon renewed my astonishment. It was almost entirely about – Nietzsche, Wagner, Leopardi, Karl Marx, Darwin, the French Impressionists and the primitive Italians. I asked one of Lawrence’s friends if that was not an unusual sort of sermon. He looked at me with a sort of grim incredulity.
‘What do you suppose?’ he said. ‘Do you think we would sit under that fellow if he could not preach like that for fifty-two Sundays a year? He would lose his job.’
I asked him if the elder generation liked it. He said that of course they liked it. They wanted their sons to be educated people. And they liked it for itself. They could do their religious thinking without help of preacher.
The fact is that that atmosphere was life to those young people. They could not imagine any other way of living. They lived like that ‘of course’ – and that ended it. By the Monday of that weekend I was pretty certain that the days of middle-class government in England were numbered. The time was passing when Mrs Sidney Webb would say that one person or another would not be able to be an official of the Fabian Society because he was not a gentleman.
I mentioned my astonishment to Mr Wells as soon as I got back to Town. He said:
‘Didn’t you know? English public education is the best in the world. There was never anything as good at any time, anywhere. But you must not say so in public for fear of the ratepayers.’
I suppose I may say so now that it has done its work.
I will permit myself now thirty odd lines of sermonising.
When I saw the environment in which Lawrence lived I learned at once the lesson of my life. Prosperity is identical with culture. Here were people absolutely prosperous, not of great means nor yet of very small ones but having sufficient education to expend those means frugally and so as to obtain the greatest amount of rational pleasure out of life. That is the chief function of education. A society, a coterie, a nation, a civilisation so equipped is bound to outlast nations or classes within a nation whose idea of prosperity – nay of culture itself – is that of material hegemony of the world. I read this paragraph yesterday in a Paris-American journal:
The body of a woman was found floating in the Seine off Suresnes. As the fingers of the body were covered with costly rings and the neck and breast with very expensive necklaces and brooches it is evident that she was a woman of culture.
It isn’t. A culture that is founded on the activities of the applied scientist, the financier, the commercial engineer is not only very little elevated above the state of savagedom but is foredoomed. Armageddon, as it was called, came upon us because of those activities. We fought so as to determine which set of savages should decorate the corpses of its women with the more costly rings and the neck and breasts with the most expensive necklaces and brooches.
The little society in which Lawrence moved was a microcosm of what the world must come to if it is to be permanent. Its existence foretold to me even then the disappearance of the ruling power of the middle-classes as they then were and even of the class that in England was called the ruling one. The disappearance of Eton as the educational home of the nation’s legislators was there as plainly foreshadowed as the fact that England’s victories were never again to be won on Eton’s playing fields. The one was to go down before the type of education that had produced Lawrence’s small coterie and nourished the genius of Lawrence himself just as surely as the other was to disappear before wireless telegraphy, the aeroplane, motor traction and the other wonders of science. You cannot fight an atmosphere of poison gas with the rules of cricket any more than you can expect to rule cultured people – or any people – if you are unacquainted with the highest imaginative thought of the world of your day. This, Anglo-Saxondom has never believed. That is why Anglo-Saxondom is crumbling as Rome did to its doom. Even in the Middle Ages they knew that. They used to say:
‘When lands are gone and money spent
Then learning is most excellent.’
I will relate two incidents.
At a time when France was in very dire financial straits, the franc tumbling to nothing in value and panic beginning to appear in the land, I had to wait for an hour in the railway station of a village only just outside the devastated districts. There was around the station door a queer collection of vehicles from the oddest of farm-carts to small motors and push bicycles. There was also a small crowd of pedestrians. They were waiting for the train from Paris. It came; they crowded to the station bookstall and each came away with a paper. It was the first number of a new literary review. I asked a man I knew what this meant. He said:
‘Well, I have had to put down my motor car. So I read more.’
The other purchasers were peasants, graziers, small tradesmen and the petite bourgeoisie in general. They had all had to put down something so they read more and wanted instruction as to what to read. The first number of that journal sold a prodigious number of copies throughout France.
I was stopping with the late Sir Alfred Mond – afterwards Lord Melchett, and probably the richest man in the world if riches be counted by possession rather than the control of securities. It was at the time when the Liberal Government had introduced the supertax into the country’s financial system. Panic was supposed to be besetting British industries.
I was talking to him before dinner about Marwood’s sole contribution to the English Review. The Government was then preparing its scheme of national insurance and Masterman had asked me to persuade Marwood to prepare an actuarial insurance plan for Masterman’s private satisfaction. Marwood had protested violently. He was not the sort of fellow to do that sort of thing. He hated the Government in any case. Why should he do anything towards the private satisfaction of Charles Masterman? In the end the fascination of the financial problem had proved too strong for him. He began making a few notes and gradually produced a complete scheme. I am too inexpert in mathematics to know if it had any influence on the Government’s legislation but Masterman told me that it had some. Marwood’s own proposal – not the published one – was that every employer of labour must be prepared to assure to every workman he employed, £400 a year before being granted a licence to start a company or build a factory. He assured me that that was actuarially perfectly practicable. Of course as a Tory of the landowning class he had a special distrust of all employers of labour and a special affection for Labour as individual – if not for the working classes in the mass. He began to work out a complete survey of the trade of the United Kingdom in order to prove his contention but he died before it was finished. He used to assert that such a scheme was the only thing that would save Western civilisation from inevitable communism. I daresay he was right. On the other hand he saw no great reason why he should exert himself to save the world from communism. He was not really interested in the world after, say, 1668.
I met Mr Bonar Law at a party at Lady St. Helier’s at about that time and called his attention to the existence of Marwood. I suggested that his Party might at least give Marwood secretarial assistance. He said depressedly that the Party had no funds for the purpose. It had more than a million sterling in its Party chest at the time. It was always called the Stupid Party – and proud of it. It preferred giving the working classes beer about election times.
Well, Sir Alfred Mond had read Marwood’s actuarial scheme for State Insurance. It had appeared in two numbers of the English Review. He discussed it with some acumen, for he was a man of extremely great intelligence. The only objection he found to it was that he foresaw that it would not please the Labour supporters of the Government who by that time were numerous and intelligent. They wanted the famous ninepence for fourpence. Marwood’s scheme worked out at something like ninepence for something like 5.333 pence. I had asked Mr John Burns, the President of the Board of Trade and the first working man to occupy a seat in the English Cabinet, what he thought of the figures. He too said that for his part they seemed to him to be good enough but the extreme left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, led by Messrs Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Ponsonby would never agree. They were the tail that wagged the Liberal dog.
When then Sir Alfred had finished his remarks on Marwood’s scheme I congratulated him amiably on being one of the too rare subscribers to the Review. He said that he was not a subscriber but had read Marwood’s article at his club. He said that times were very bad owing to the super-tax and its effect on business; his family insisted on having a new Rolls Royce so he was cutting down his subscriptions to such periodicals as he did take in so that he could not possibly contemplate paying half a crown a month for another. I took it that he was half joking, half acting the part of the bluff Briton.
That was before dinner. After dinner whilst the other members of the house-party were playing billiards I asked him if the supertax would really make any difference to him. He said:
‘Difference! What difference could it make? It will cost me about £50,000 a year. I can make £100,000 by working five minutes longer every day if I want to.’ I believe that was true.
Mond under a grotesque exterior had a supreme intelligence in the matter of commercial – and indeed of national – finance. And he had considerable aesthetic intelligence. His largesses to distressed practitioners of one art or the other were very great and they went to good people. He eventually bought the English Review and tried to run it on serious business lines. The affair was not very successful. It must have cost him a good deal more than the half-crown a month that he at first did not want to spend on it.
To me it had been obvious that the Review could not be run on any sort of sound commercial lines or at any rate that I was not the person to attempt the feat. If Byles had been there to run it on the business side it might have done well enough. Or if Marwood had done it. But Marwood was physically prevented from doing anything of the sort. As a result of the cramming he had undergone at Clifton and Christ’s College he had contracted tuberculosis of the bladder. The greater part of that organ had to be removed, with the result that he could not possibly live any sort of town life. He used therefore to come up and stay with me for a day or two every month whilst I was engaged in making up the month’s number. But as to in any way taking part in business interviews outside my office, that would have been impossible to him.
It was almost equally impossible to me. I have always given anyone any price they asked for anything and have always accepted any price that was ever offered me for my services. That does not work out very satisfactorily. I find that I am usually charged more than other people and the offers that are made to me for quite considerable labours are not unusually nothing at all. In addition, when making our joint agreement for the Review, Marwood and I had both undertaken not to take any profits, or any pay for contributions that we might make to the Review itself. If the undertaking made any profits they were to be distributed to any of the contributors who cared to ask for them.
That was not unsatisfactory from the point of view of the review itself. I used, pointing out that fact, to ask contributors to demand any kind of pay they liked, leaving it to their consciences to ask a fair average price for their work. That too worked out very well. One or two certainly asked for and got a great deal more than they had ever before imagined getting. On the other hand many of the wealthier – and not a few of the quite indigent – writers wrote for me for nothing. I might however add as a corollary that a good many of these afterwards tried to get payment out of Lord Melchett, alleging that I had offered to pay them but had not done so. I suppose that that was in strictness true. It caused me to be a good deal discredited. I don’t know what Lord Melchett did about it.
Once you sit in an editorial chair you conceive for contributors a singular dislike. They become ‘They’. I used to receive on an average twenty manuscripts a day from the first day the periodical started to the day when I gave it up. Everyone of these contributions I read myself. I had of course readers who went through the whole and proposed a number of them for acceptance. But although I would read those first I always later read and not infrequently annotated the others for the benefit of the writers. Then ‘They’ would reply, and re-reply and re-reply until my patience and that of Miss Thomas, my admirable secretary, gave out altogether. When I proposed for the fifth time to answer a lady who remonstrated with me for refusing to publish a paper of verses on the solar system whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury had praised a volume she had sent him, Miss Thomas absolutely refused to take down my letter. We hit at last on a scheme that considerably alleviated that trouble. If a person once written to wrote again repeating his previous letter with variations Miss Thomas without asking instructions would simply send him a carbon copy of my first letter. That must have caused a great deal of irritation. It was usually successful. Once it was not.
I had written to ask Mr Arnold Bennett who was then in Paris to give me something, saying that I would pay him anything he liked to ask but that I left it to his conscience to ask a fair average price. He wrote back that he never did business with editors direct. Presently arrived Pinker, the agent, with a short story, magnificent in execution but quite unsaleable to the commercial magazines owing to its length. Pinker asked me £40 for it. I gave him thirty saying that Mr Bennett had never received anything like that sum before for a short story. Pinker went off with the cheque quite contentedly.
The story duly appeared. On the day after its publication I received a letter from Mr Bennett:
MY DEAR H — , – You owe me ten pounds. That story for which you paid Pinker thirty pounds was honestly worth forty.
I answered:
MY DEAR BENNETT, – I offered to pay you any sum you liked to ask for a contribution. You preferred to send me your agent. Agents are created by God to be beaten down. He sold the story to me for thirty pounds. I do not owe you anything.
Two days later I got a letter from Mr Bennett. It read:
