Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 987
In such places you should be circumspect. You should give the impression that you are what the French call sérieux–at any rate if you are a novelist or an honest man. If you are a moralist it is different; you will want to distort truths so you do not need to see them. But the moment that you present to the world an aspect that is not “serious,” the world will change its attitude towards you and the class of men who present themselves to you will also be “unserious.” The novelist and the honest man on their travels need to see the world and the Great Trade Routes under their normal aspects. They have serious missions; they desire to make acquaintance with the truth, whereas for poets, conquerors, bankers, moralists or street singers that is unnecessary. A State Senator from the Middle West can–and not unusually does–make a hog of himself in a Paris night resort and no great harm will be done. He does not come there to learn and he will find himself amongst his kind. He will offend no prejudices.
But the novelist is an ambassador and the honest man with his voice and his vote will influence the policy of his home-country towards the country that he is visiting. It is their duty to see straight and in order to see straight they must attract to them and form their transitory society of normal and honest men like themselves. So they must appear neither frivolous nor fanatical, neither mean nor over-generous, though it is less harmful to be close than to be prodigal; and they must seem neither puritan nor loose in manners. Otherwise they will give unfavourable aspects to their own country and see the country that they are visiting in disagreeable lights.
I do not care who sees me coming out of what sort of resort in London or New York; I shall in those cities be seen in a number of places, my conduct will be averaged out and I am indifferent to the impression that I there produce. But in Tarascon I will not be seen coming out of a café to which a Dancing is attached so that M. Bonhoure and I will never meet again….
I had for the moment forgotten that I have fallen from my high ambassadorial estate and, in pursuit of advancement, have announced myself a Moralist–and the Moralist will never be seen leaving whatever sort of café because he will never visit one. He will acquire his knowledge of life lying on his bed behind the closed jalousies of his hotel room, reading salacious gossip about Montparnasse–that will have been written for him specially. But a café is a serious place where serious people discussing serious subjects mould civilisations–and if the Moralist frequented such places his occupation would be gone.
But though I may change my condition it is extremely hard to change of set purpose one’s habit of mind or even of body. So, though I try to break myself of it, my habit still remains that of one always out and about seeking for human instances where humane men congregate or go about their normal occupations…. And I doubt if, even though I repeat again and again: “Every day and in every way I get more ethical and more ethical and more ethical” I shall now much change….
Still, inward change does occur in men without any consciousness on their parts, so that there may yet be hope.
I have, as you may be aware, lately been thinking about the Troubadours…. Talk of changes! I began in my young days and under the serious and rather awful auspices of my father by regarding the troubadour as occupying an enormously important part in the poetic cosmogony and as being a man, serious, subtle and heroic upon whom one should model oneself. Then, shortly after my father’s death, I became possessed of a piano of my own.
I came then upon a popular song that I strummed unceasingly in our playroom. It ran:
“Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar
As he was hastening home from the war,
Singing: ‘From Palestine homewards I come;
Lady-love, lady-love welcome me home!”
Alas, the vapidity of the tune and of the occupation of its subject–for I was by then of an age when it began to appear to me to be unmanly to be overmuch concerned, or to be concerned at all, with ladies and it seemed to me that that fellow would have been much better employed getting on with the Crusades. So I put my father’s books on a back shelf and, as it were, subscribed to the Northern reaction. Ibsen and Sudermann and Hauptmann and Tolstoi were coming.
I did not go altogether to those lengths. I do not think that I ever went mad about Ibsen and Sudermann. Tolstoi I always disliked, though I actually printed a long, long poem in German, by Herr Hauptmann, in the English Review at a time when I was looking for world figures and paid enormous sums for articles by President Taft, for unpublished poems by D. G. Rossetti and sketches by Anatole France….
But towards the age of fourteen I substituted, as my life’s hero and Greatest Poem in the World, for Guillem de Cabestanh, that is to say, and Li Dous Cossire the Minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide and his poem “Tandaradei.” My translation of that latter poem begins:
Under diu Linde Under the lime-tree Uf der Heide On the heather Da unser zweie Bette was There was our two-fold resting-place Ir muoget vinden You might have found there Sckoene beide Close together Gebrokken Bluomen unde Gras Broken flowers crushed i’ the
grass Bei ein Wald in einem Thal Near a shaw in such a vale “Tandaradei,” “Tandaradei,” Suose sanh diu Nachgingal Sweetly sang the Nightingale … It afterwards achieved its little celebrity and was belauded by Mr Pound. It must have been made when I was just over fourteen though, as is the case with the poem of Cabestanh. I have gone on mentally polishing it ever since. Indeed it is only ten minutes ago–for a reason which will be apparent to those whose memory goes back for twenty years–that I substituted in the first line the word “lime-tree” for the word “lindens” which for forty years odd must have given that translation a Potsdamish aspect.
I am about to make a confession.
There can have been few literary figures that I more disliked–or who more disliked me–and few poets for whom I can have had more, if kindly, contempt than respectively Mr–afterwards Sir–Edmund Gosse and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet it is to a poem of Longfellow’s and a book, “Northern Studies,” by Sir Edmund Gosse that I owe the beginnings of my knowledge of Walther von der Vogelweide–a knowledge that became almost a passion and that has lasted all my life.
Longfellow’s poem began:
“Vogelweid the Minnesinger when he left this world of ours
Laid his body in the cloisters underneath yon abbey towers;
And he gave the monks his treasure, left them all with this behest,
They should feed the birds at noontide, daily on his place of rest….”
That poem too was set to voluptuous music and over and over again I used to play it on my piano in the basement playroom and, with my voix de compositeur I used to chant those words….
I will add as a digression that, on the same piano and with the same voice–I was then intending to be a composer of music–I used to chant the words of a song called “By The Waters of Babylon” which, to music suited to a throaty contralto, began:
“The harp is now silent; unstrung is the lute;
The voice of the minstrel for ever is mute;
Each day bringeth trial, each night bringeth woe
Whilst o’er Judah’s children exulteth the foe.
Oh, fatherland dear, once happy and free,
We ne’er shall return from our bondage to thee!”
And when, as I subsequently did, I used all my powers of persuasion to impress on Masterman and through him on the Asquith Cabinet the desirability of making the return of Zion to the Jews one of the items of our return to peace, I used to hear myself–putting the loud pedal down meanwhile–playing, rallentando and exceedingly portamento, in those basement shadows, the resolution, adding b flat to the common chord of C. major–the resolution from the dominant into the tonic, which preceded my bellowing the words … “Oh, fatherland dear! …”
And don’t I, too, when sitting beneath my olive-trees above the Mediterranean, thinking of bouquets to present to the nightingale that, from above my head, is with his little throat shaking the whole world…. Don’t I–not always, but every now and then–see the red binding with gilt letters of “Northern Studies by Edmund Gosse” … and the Middle High German words of “Tandaradei” that Mr. Gosse printed in his appendix? I must have read at any rate that part of the book over and over again in my shadows and certainly I set “Tandaradei” to music, chanting that, in turn, over and over again … for months.
I make these confessions for a set purpose of moralisation.
Down below my house resides a distinguished American scholar, and along the coast an almost more distinguished American poet. When they condescend to visit me the main burden of either’s conversation is reproaches to me for having praised writers whose prosperity annoys them or may be taken to interfere with the careers of their friends. I remain however Damas, or it may have been Daimas, the unrepentant thief of the Crucifixion…. I never, I think … or never but once, wrote a contemptuous word of another living writer and I have praised, along with one or two who subsequently became swans, an almost infinite number of goslings.
I have said that dog shouldn’t eat dog so many times that I won’t any more dilate on the text that noblesse oblige. But merely as a matter of expediency one writer should never abuse another. The reason for the abuse is as a rule that A thinks that if B is praised and so sells his books A’s sales will be diminished–or, as Conrad used to put it: “Le bien est l’ennemi du mieux”–The pretty good is the enemy of what is best.
Nothing is more fallacious. The real obstacle to any writer’s fame and wealth is not the sale of books by others but the extreme distaste that the Public–and particularly the Anglo-Saxon public, though under infection from the North the Northern French are taking too to football, though not, thank God, the Provençal who is faithful to his bullfights and his Escolo de Targuen–the real obstacle is that the Public has an extreme distaste for reading books. If, then, the layman can be induced to acquire the habit of reading, the writer–any writer–will have a proportionately increased chance of making money. When the first troubadour with harp, lute and attendant jongleur first went pricking across the plains below les Baux and sought by his sirventes and albades to obtain hospitality from the Les Baux family, he was roughly chased away from the rocky slopes. “What,” said the Vicomte-King, “do we want with this gut-scraping and caterwauling?” But when, taking his wife’s advice, Raymond Bérenger of Barcelona got some troubadours to attend him on a visit that he was making to the Emperor Frederick at Milan, Bérenger got from the Emperor all the boons that he desired…. Without question, because the Emperor was so delighted with the musical knights that he himself straightway became a troubadour and incontinently wrote the canzone beginning: “Plasz mi cavalier Francez…”
Immediately the boom was on. Raymond Bérenger was granted not only the investiture of the fief of Provence but its ratification. And “Hearing thereof,” as Mistral sings, “the lords of Baux”–those Philistines who had repelled the troubadours–”came down in wrath with a great clangour of armed men. But music had already gained the day and where the Phoebus of Provence had shone the Æolus of storm-shaken les Baux was powerless.”
The great Sordello sang the triumph of the Provençal lute and rhyme; every lord of Christendom hastened to write verse to be sung and to attract troubadours to his Court. Henry II of England was worsted by Bertran de Born of Altaforte who carried off later the mistress of the Lion Heart. So he shook the world, even as did Orpheus or Philomela. It was the golden age of writers!
Now supposing that some scholar of the day had written against the unnamed bards of Bérenger and had persuaded the Emperor that those poets were unworthy to be listened to. Or supposing the great Sordello had persuaded the Emperor that your only poetry came from the Province of Genoa…. I do not mean to hammer on the moral; but it must be obvious that many troubadours would have lacked hospitality and many more would have had to put up with the fate of Guillem de Cabestanh at the hands of a lord of les Baux…. Whereas, is it not well known, that when la Louve, wife of the lord of the twin castles of the Black Mountain up behind Carcassonne–when la Louve treated with disdain the advances of the great singer Peire Vidal who was the son of a furrier, her husband not only remonstrated with her but even fitted out an expedition to bring back the troubadour when he had got himself into trouble on the way to the Crusades? He did that so that the bard should write more and always more odes to the charms of his–the lord’s–wife. Such advantages must be seldom enjoyed by the scholars and poets of Anglo-Saxondom today–or such publicity! Only think! … Yet it all came, in the end, from what we may well call the team-spirit! Nor did even patriotism interfere with that boom, for it is odd to think that few indeed of those writers and contrivers of the Provençal tongue came from true Provence–and a great many Northern French poets took in those days to writing the Langue-d’Oc…. Much as if American writers in a sudden period of Eastern boom in books should take to writing in English-English…. Or of course, the reverse! …
Scholarship is a quality for which I have always had a great contempt and of which I have always felt the most supreme distrust…. The best scholar of his day would have interrupted and destroyed the flow of the Sermon on the Mount by cavilling at the Preacher’s use of the enclytic de and if in Bloomsbury I should chance today to say that I consider Frédéric Mistral a greater poet than Homer the most prominent critic of that district would wince and exclaim: “Oh, but surely, Mr F. Not Homer!”
That is what I mean when I say that Provence is not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind. To find yourself in harmony with the soul of Provence you have to be of a type that will not be pained when someone says that Mistral was a greater poet than Goethe–or that the Maries, after the Crucifixion, came to and settled in the country round Tarascon. Indulgent Provence has no vested interests and there illusions do not matter.
I don’t know whether Mistral was a greater poet than Virgil and I don’t care…. Where I went to school in London, amidst the dreaming spires, we used to have a mathematics master. His name was Thompson and he had waxed moustaches. I did not see as much of him as I ought to because his classes were held in the afternoon and, most afternoons, in furtherance of my musical education I used to go to concerts. But when I did attend his courses I would hear him setting problems of which I only remember one and that dimly. It was this: If you had for lever a straw of sufficient length and, for fulcrum the planet Mars, how much force, the weight of Mars and of the Earth being ascertained, must an elephant, standing on the end of that straw exert in order to move the Earth 1.065 millimetres? … He would then add: “The weight of the elephant may be neglected.”
So I don’t know whether Mistral was a greater poet than Tennyson…. What I do care about is that if, for the purpose of an argument or to hear what it may sound like or in furtherance of a train of thought, I choose to say and, intoxicated by the sun, momentarily to believe, that Mistral so was, I don’t want to be interrupted in my sermon or my train of thought by someone who will be pained. The question of what is ‘greatness’ may be neglected.
And in the frame of mind that is Provence I shan’t be interrupted. Almost anywhere else along the Great Trade Route I shall. Certainly in London; almost certainly in Paris, where too there are mental vested interests…. As to the territory behind the Statue of Liberty I am not so sure. In New York, for instance, you may declare any number of goslings to be birds of paradise. No one will be pained; some few, or a large crowd, will believe you; and you yourself will not grieve when your cygnet begins to waddle and hiss. That, I fancy is why, on my journeys, I am content to stay in that city for longer periods than anywhere else–except the sea-shore of the Roman Province. What I–and civilisation–most need is a place where, Truth having no divine right to glamour, experiments in thought abound. And that, neglecting the weight of the elephant, may open for the mind the road to regions of conjecture that could not otherwise be explored. That place will be found on the left bank, not of the Seine, but the Rhone.
In that country there is room to think. For, though there is little there is a little of everything…. It would be absurd to say that there are as many vital pictures in Provence as in the galleries of London or that in the whole Roman Province you could get as bad a gallery headache as you can in any fourth-rate town in an Italy that is one long gallery headache. But with the matchless picture in the convent at Villeneuve les Avignon–the picture that the popular mind ascribes to the good King or the slightly more learned to Clouet and the positively learned to Quarton or some other painter of the Avignon Group–with that and the miraculously beautiful ivory virgin of the church of the same place, with the Avignon primitives of the museum in that city and scattered here and there in churches and monasteries; with the primitives of the Nice atelier; with the thought of Cézanne at Aix en Provence; Renoir at Cagnes; Monticelli at Marseilles; Gauguin and Van Gogh at Arles and the votive paintings at Notre Dame de Laghet in the hinterland between Cannes and Nice–with all those there is in this territory enough to last a proper man for his lifetime. And he can live a fine life without the agonising wildernesses of worthless Old Masters that make the searching for living painting in the Louvre, the Vatican, the Pitti or even the Metropolitan Museum one long calvary! And as with painting so with poetry, prose, music, myth, religion, history, science–remember Henri Fabre of Avignon!–economics, handicrafts, gardens, seafaring, bulls, crime, and above all architecture, there is in this territory enough. And there is neither mass-production nor the worship of mass-production and Provence is at once the cradle and the conduit of that humane, Romance Latinity that alone can preserve from putridity our staggering civilisation and world….
The perspicacious Reader will by now have perceived what I am here getting at in the way of Form. The Novel, as Mr Wells long ago told me, can very well be based on the structure of the Sonata! FIRST SUBJECT Hero; SECOND SUBJECT Heroine; RE-STATEMENT of Case of Hero; ditto of Heroine; the FREE FANTASIA or mix-up of the affairs of Hero and Heroine; the RECAPITULATION or Marriage in which the themes of Hero and Heroine are re-stated in one and the same key…. Well, for this book I have chosen the larger form of the Opera. We approach now the limits of this section–the fin de section that the careful bus-conductor in Paris announces when, if you have not already done it, you must pay a supplementary fare…. And the perspicacious Reader will have perceived that this section is in fact the Overture of the Opera–the division in which the composer adumbrates, without dwelling on, the themes that he will later work out. He has, that is to say, put in and registered, his leit-motiven … his main-subjects. In what follows they shall be worked out in as you might say two keys, the dominant and the tonic…. With that statement I seem to have drifted into a thing I never thought to find myself perpetrat ing…. But, pun and all, it is illustrative enough. For in music the ‘tonic’ is the normal, or first and last, key of a piece, the ‘dominant’ being the key whose scale begins with, and is named after, the fifth note…. In this piece you may say that the dominant theme is that of our great, noisy and indigestion-sick Anglo-Saxondom which can only be touched by inspiration from the spirit of Provençal Latinity, frugality and tolerance. That consideration begins and ends and is the tonic or normal key of this piece of writing.
