Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (645 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
Those were her ideals. If you translate them into terms of greater material prosperity you find them identical with anyone else’s. One desires for the later years of one’s life a little ease. She would have it when the law permitted her children to aid her. One desires privacy when one suffers, she would have it if the enquiry blokes would keep away. One desires that one’s children should grow in virtue.
I should say that she was as contented and as cheerful as myself; she probably knew better than people more enlightened and with higher ambitions, the truth of the saying that was constantly on her lips, “We can’t b... well all have everything.” And, as I have said, to be in her presence was to find all “problems.” Police court missionaries, societies, and sisters of the poor grow dim and childish along with the Modern Spirit itself. It was like interviewing the bedrock of human existence in a cavern deep in the earth. “Influences” on the surface, busy about raising her seemed to become mere whispers a long way above. She supported them all.
As you went upstairs to her room you were presented with an astonishing picture. (I was at the time looking for an investment, and this house had been offered to me as producing a highly desirable rental.) It had once been a model dwelling; the stairs were of stone, but the railings, the banisters, the panels of nearly all the doors, and sometimes the very doorposts, every cupboard and every shelf, had been chopped down for firewood. As I went up past all these open doors and ragged door holes, in absolutely every room there were women, sometimes several, sometimes several children, bending over tables or over old sugar cases, silently and with great swiftness making matchboxes, making umbrella tassels, running together cheap coats, making artificial flowers — the very poor.
The thought — or rather it was a sensation so irresistible as to be an obsession — that in all that district all the houses were as similar inside as their outsides were unvarying, the thought was more than overwhelming. To look at London from that grim warren was to have a foreground like an untidy and uninspired battle field in which the background of broad streets and fine gray buildings vanished to almost nothing. No cathedral spires and the turrets of no museums peeped over those serrated roofs.
That problem that is no problem — the matter of the very poor workers — becomes there the only question of London. It is not, unfortunately perhaps, one that we can write or think about with any amiable cocksureness. It is not, unfortunately, one that any one man, any ten, or any two hundred can even touch from the outside. All these districts are honeycombed with missions, brotherhoods, and organisations. But the solution must come from within, and, inside there, there is no movement and only work. It is, in fact, a problem to all human intents insoluble, precisely because this particular class of worker is composed of individuals who, through heredity, through “type,” through temperament, for a hundred predestined and tragic reasons, are absolutely incapable of creating Movements.
Their whole nerve force, and nearly all their thoughts are given to their work. They are the dust filtered down from all the succeeding dominant types, they are the
caput mortuum
precisely because they are hopelessly old fashioned. They cannot combine, they have not any thoughts left for it; they could not strike because they have no means of communication; they are inarticulate.
They are forming, and they have been forming for years, an hereditary class. Education hardly touches their children. It means that for ten or eleven years the poor little things are made acquainted with facts, and are underfed, and that when they are fourteen they fall again to their parents. They learn no trade, they go apprentices to no craft. After a year or two of matchbox making the “facts” of their instruction are worn down out of their minds.
And that very virtue of their mothers, that fierce determination to keep the little things “respectable,” means tying them more and more to their rooms. That particular striving, a fierce craze for keeping the children straight, is an almost universal “note,” a dominant passion among the mothers of the very poor.
These, then, are the obverse and the reverse of the medal of work in London that appears to be so much of a gamble, that is really so fierce and so logical a struggle. For if we take X. as paying too little attention to his actual work, we must think of this woman as paying too much.
Work in London to-day, if it have become in all its branches less of craft, depends more and more, if its worker is to make any individual success, on “temperament.” Temperament in that particular sense we must take to mean the quality of inspiring confidence in one’s employer or in one’s customer. It is something akin to the artist’s temperament, it is something akin to the charlatan’s power to hypnotise mobs. The worker, if he is to rise out of the ruck, must impose his private personality upon a greater, or upon a lesser, public.
This tendency is most observable in the periodical press, that most enormous and most modern of industries. Here upon the whole the aesthetically intrinsic quality of the work offered by a young man does not matter much. The employer sits as it were in an office chair between the great public and the men who besiege him. It is not, obviously, his business to secure men whose work will remain, he wants stuff that will “go.” He will select for his permanent favours men who inspire him with confidence, men who have not any nonsense about them. Nonsense in this case is impracticable ideas of one kind or another.
X. will drive down to an editorial office in a nice dogcart and during an interview, interrupted by frequent calls at a telephone, will fidget towards a window overlooking the street in order to call pointed attention to the fact that his horse will not stand. In that case he may demonstrate that there is not any nonsense about him, that he is not dreamily poetic, but up to date and practical. He makes, perhaps, a chance for himself, but he might have done still better by studying his market, by acquiring a knowledge of the characteristics, the tone and the scope of the journal he has designs on. The editor, on the other hand, merely wants to get at whether X. will appeal to his own particular “crowd.”
This tendency of dependence on the tastes of the great crowd is most handily demonstrable in the case of the Press; but it underlies every other industry. I happen to have followed the career of a man who is now still young and a very flourishing cabinet maker. He was the son of a widow in domestic service, Huguenot by descent, merry, dark and handsome whilst a young boy, but not otherwise strikingly intelligent.
The master of his mother got him apprenticed to a working carpenter, and he developed what was practically a passion for fret-sawing. He rather lost his looks and his clothes were always dusted with the little particles of wood that fall away from the teeth of fretsaws. As soon as he was out of his time he set up for himself as a jobbing cabinet maker, in a small Walthamstow shop; he continued to pay serious attention to fretwork. Eventually he evolved what was practically a style: he made small hexagonal coffee tables, of the sort one sees now in the smoking divans of seaside hotels. These things had a kind of pierced screen, Oriental in inspiration, between each pair of legs and were painted a dead white. He made perhaps a dozen of these, with more than a dozen little stools, and some over-mantels and settees to match, all in white, with quasi-Moorish perforations.
About this time W. saw an announcement in his trade paper: a certain large linoleum seller was giving one of his windows to bamboo furniture. W. set off at once with a specimen coffee table under his arm; he managed to see the proprietor of this shop — it was in a well-frequented thoroughfare. The latter consented to “stock” the rest of W.’s white things, which were ludicrously inexpensive. He arranged in his window an alcove in which a white coffee table, some white stools, and a white settee stood, or supported cheap Oriental trays and vases full of peacock’s feathers. There was not a day to wait for the things to “take on.”
In a few days W. was turning out scores of white tables and overmantels. His ingenuity ended by no means at quasi-oriental nick-nacks, he had in him an astonishing faculty for knowing what the public — in this case mostly young marrying couples — could be induced to “want.” He turned out cheap Chippendales, cheap Louis XIVs, cheap farm-house styles; he went with his customer, the former linoleum seller, to Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Whatever there appeared to them as a “line” in tables, chairs, beds or whatnots he could modify very slightly, cheapen very substantially, and turn out in large quantities, and W. is rapidly growing rich.
This, of course, is a
Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre
, but it is something more because it casts a strong light upon the characteristics of work in modern London. For of the worker nowadays there is demanded more than the old-fashioned attention to work. Unless you wish to live for posterity you cannot any more put out good work, work that is solid and lasting, leaving it alone to push its way in the world and to bring you customers paying a goodly price. You must obviously produce work that is good in the sense of being attractive for the moment; that is the one essential. But also, as I have said, you must have temperament — the temperament that brings luck, because it makes you take the right step instinctively and at the right moment. And you must have that sympathy with the humanity around you that will let you know just what modification of your product will for the time hold the sympathy of the crowd. This essential holds as good for the company promoter as for the cabinet maker. And you must have the qualities of inspiring confidence and of knowing instinctively whom you can trust.
This personal element tends to become, paradoxically perhaps, of more and more importance as the spirit of combinations spreads. And it is spreading into the most personal of the industries of to-day. There died in March of
The tendency in all things is either towards the trustification of all activities or towards State and Municipal trading.1 Into either the personal factor must enter very largely. We may suppose the grocery trade to be taken over by the State. There will be no scope at all for individual brilliancy; counter clerks will take orders with about the same capabilities, and what “rises” there may be will go either by routine or by the recommendations of foremen. These latter, as to-day they do, will recommend juniors who appeal to them for one reason or another. The same thing will happen if the grocery trade in the alternative becomes one vast Trust.
(1 I do not wish to imply that the prospect pleases or displeases me. But the strong feeling against say Municipal Trading must disappear as soon as Trusts become universal. The Trusts may simply become the State as is the tendency in America. Or in the more likely alternative they may grow so oppressive that an outcry for State Trading will arise. In either case the individual trader will have disappeared, and with him the opposition to State Trading. The individual’s sons and daughters will be simply the employees of the Trusts, and will view with indifference or with more probable favour their absorption by the State or the City in which they are interested. The third issue, the triumph of the co-operative system, will be so precisely the same in its effects on the individual worker that it may for my purposes be classed with either. The broad fact remains that the individual worker for the time being is doomed. He has been so for a long time, in London at least. This again is most strikingly observable in the periodical press. Upon the whole that of literature makes of all the pursuits the most call for individuality. Yet ever since Cave let Johnson dine behind his screen, ever since those two started the “Gentleman’s Magazine” it has become more and more essential to men of letters to live in London. And to-day it is impossible for the many of them to exist, or for the very few to grow rich without the aid of journalism in one or other of its manifestations. This means their becoming the employees of small or of very large combines. All the learned professions have for centuries now been combined with their headquarters in London. They have been empowered with charters to become administrative, examining, or penal bodies, of solicitors, barristers, surgeons, doctors and even pharmacists, — to become close corporations.)
This tendency is as observable in a London bank as in a London cement factory. The bank manager watches and considers the personal characteristics of his clerks with an anxious solicitude. He notes the particulars of his clerk’s dress and the details of his home life. A subordinate, who hopes for promotion must be careful never to be seen wheeling a perambulator for his wife; it would, if he happened to become manager of a suburban branch, damage the standing of the Bank in the eyes of the customers, excellent accountant though he may be. On the other hand he must be an excellent accountant, and he must impress his superior with his knowledge of human nature. He must be able to gauge, both with his intuition and by the skilful utilisation of local gossip, what customers it is safe to trust with those overdrafts that are the life of suburban trade.