Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (649 page)

London was always press-ridden. In the days of Johnson — who invented the Magazine — the Newspapers would make a prodigious fuss; they could drive a lady so sensible as Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi almost to distraction, with comments upon her debated marriage, and supply the Town with Talk — as opposed to Conversation — about such a matter as that Piozzi marriage, for days, months and years on end. And earlier, even, Defoe, who was the first of the Journalists, made Town Talk out of solid facts, unsolid fiction, or practical projects. But books still monopolised the airy realms of philosophical speculations; preachers still retained the sole right to lecture upon divinity — and books and preachers entered intimately into the lives of men and women. People read “Clarissa” by the year, and debated, at dinner tables, as to the abstract proprieties of the case of Pamela. The Generalisation flourished; Conversation in consequence was possible.

But, with the coming of the Modern Newspaper, the Book has been deposed from its intimate position in the hearts of men. You cannot in London read a book from day to day, because you must know the news, in order to be a fit companion for your fellow Londoner. Connected thinking has become nearly impossible, because it
is
nearly impossible to find any general idea that will connect into one train of thought: “Home Rule for Egypt,”

“A Batch of Stabbing Cases,” and “Infant Motorists.” It is hardly worth while to trace the evolution of this process. In the’7o’s-’8o’s the Londoner was still said to get his General Ideas from the leader writers of his favourite paper. Nowadays even the leader is dying out.

So that, in general, the Londoner has lost all power of connected conversation, and nearly all power of connected thought. But if his dinner-table has become democratized, and he will not suffer a connected talker among his friends, he still retains some liking for duly licensed preachers, some respect for the official talker or moralist. Generally speaking, he sets apart one day in seven for this individual, and, generally speaking, that one day is the Sabbath.

The stolid London of squares and clean streets, to the westward, still retains something of its Sunday morning hush: the pavements are empty, and as if whitened, and where there are the large detached houses, with bits of garden, and large old trees, the town still has its air of being a vast cemetery of large mausoleums, that no one ever visits. Then indeed that third state, the deep leisure, settles upon the middle London of the professional and merchant classes. There is a stillness, a hush. Breakfast is half-an-hour or an hour later than on other days, the perfume of coffee, the savour of bacon, of fish, of sausages, floats on a softer and stiller air. The interminable rumble of all the commissariat wagons, of butchers’, of greengrocers’, of stores’ carts, all that unending procession that on week days rattles and reverberates throughout the morning, is stilled. In the unaccustomed quiet you can hear the decent hiss of the kettle on its tripod, you can hear the rustle of stiff petticoats coming down from the second floor, you can hear even the voices of the servants in the kitchen, just suggested, as if down there an interminable monologue were being carried on.

And beside the breakfast dishes there lie, still, the Sunday papers. As a rule there are two of these, strips of white, and strips of buff, like supplementary table-napkins. The more venerable contain practically no news; they are glanced at to see the “Prices” of the day before. But the arms that support these sheets are not the nervous, hurried arms of the week day; the glances meander down the columns. There is time, there is plenty of time — as if the reader in that hush and pause, realised and felt, just for once, that he is after all a creature of Eternity, with All Time before him. There is an opulence, a luxury of minutes to be bathed in, as it were, in that sort of London Sunday, that makes one understand very well why that part of London is so loth to part with its Sabbath.

The Sunday paper is now, I should say, a much more general feature than it used to be. It invades the most Sabbatarian breakfast tables. But I remember that, as a boy, I used to have to walk — in Kensington — nearly two miles to procure an “Observer” for my father, every Sunday morning. (It was considered that the exercise was good for me, lacking my daily walk to school.) And the paper-shop was a dirty, obscure and hidden little place that during the week carried on the sale, mostly, of clandestine and objectionable broad sheets directed against the Papists. The Sunday paper, in fact, was shunned by all respectable newsagents — and, in consequence the Sunday breakfast table was a much less restful thing, since no book of sermons beside the plate could equal that respectable anodyne.

All over the town these sheets, as if they were white petals bearing oblivion, settle down, restful and beneficent, like so many doses of poppy seed. In the backyards of small cottages, separated one from another by breast-high modern palings you find by the hundreds of thousands (it is certified by accountants)—’s Weekly News;—’s Weekly Paper;—’s News of the Week; and, on each back doorstep, in his shirt sleeves, in his best trousers and waistcoat, voluptuously, soberly and restfully, that good fellow, the London mechanic, sits down to read the paper.

And, in general, those Sunday and Weekly Papers preach to a considerable extent. One middle class favourite contains at least six different headings under which can be found reflections on social subjects, on sporting subjects, on religious subjects, even on subjects purely jocular and on such abstruse matters as “Are Clever Women Popular?” And the mechanics’ Weeklies have sturdy “tones” of their own; they fulminate against the vices, meannesses and hypocrisies of the wealthy; they unveil the secrets of Courts; they preach patriotism or the love of God. So that, even if he no longer go to church or chapel, the Londoner on Sunday mornings, before his Sunday dinner, gets as a rule his dose of general reflections. And it is characteristic of him that, although he cannot bear preaching that he might have to answer — conversational preaching — he dearly loves the preacher who is beyond his reach. He will listen to sermons, to funeral orations, to public speeches, to lectures; he loves no novel that has not a moral basis of one kind or another, that has not some purpose or other, that does not preach
some
sermon; upon the stage he likes most of all moralising old men and heroic generalisations in favour of one virtue or another. But it is characteristic of the strong lines that he draws between life and the arts, that although he is never tired of seeing a Hamlet upon the stage he will call a Hamlet of private life morbid, dangerous, unhealthy and insupportable.

Thus, in the London of leisure, any social intercourse between men and women is now-a-days become almost impossible. For no man can be himself without sooner or later proclaiming whatever may be the particular moral that he draws from life. He could not really utter his thoughts without revealing the fact that he loves virtue, or does not; or that he considers there is such a thing as virtue, or is not. He is therefore driven, the social Londoner at his leisure, to action instead of to speech. He puts his feet on the dinner table; beguiles his after dinners with cards, with recitations, with mechanical pianos, with the theatres, with moonlight automobile drives or with watching skating competitions on artificial ice. He plays golf; he witnesses cricket matches, football matches, billiard matches; he goes to twopenny gaffs in Mile End or parades in dense and inarticulate crowds of young men and young girls, for hours of an evening, in front of the shops of the great highways.

And these paradings are, for the million or so of the young people of this huge world that is London, the great delight, the great feature of a life otherwise featureless enough. In externals one parade is like another, but the small gradations are infinite. Thus in one parade there will be a great number of sets each of the same social level; each set with its gossip, its chaff, its manner of accost, its etiquette, its language. You get, as it were, an impression of entering one vast family party amid the rustle of feet, of dresses, the clitter-clatter of canes, the subdued shrieks of laughter, the hushed personal remarks. As a rule in all these parades, in the Fleet Street “Monkey Walk” as at Shepherd’s Bush; in Islington as in Mile End Road; the youths early in the evening stand in knots, cloth caps not consorting with bowler hats and straw-yards with neither. They talk with a certain ostentation and a certain affectation of swagger, boasting, or acting as chorus in praise of one another. The girls parade up and down arm in arm, white aprons being shunned by stuff dresses, and feather hats shunning the straws perched forward over the eyes. Heads steal round swiftly over shoulders as line of girls passes knot of youths, and at these electric moments the voices grow higher and little shoves and nudges pass like waves in a field of corn. There is not any psychical moment for pairing off, but the process begins as the kindly dusk falls. A youth slips away from a knot, a girl hangs back from a line, till little by little the knots dwindle away altogether and there are no more lines.

The ceremonials of the actual greeting are astonishingly various and more rigidly observed than the etiquette of the Court of Spain. In Westbourne Grove the young shop assistant raises his bowler, drawls “How are you, Miss — ?” for all the world as they do in Rotten Row. In the Mile End Road and in Shepherd’s Bush the factory girls slap likely youths violently upon the back and are as violently poked in the side for answer, both girl and young man uttering obscenities positively astounding, without any obscene intention in the world. And then commences, mysterious and ceremonial, the walking out, the period of probation, the golden age. For, after all, it is a golden age, an age of vague emotions, of words uttered, insignificant, but fraught with more meaning in each absurd syllable than in all the tirades of Romeo to the moon: “Do you like fringes?”

“Um! — ah! — um! —

Well — .”

“There, you
are
a one — .”

“I dote on blue eyes —

So that, by nine o’clock, the parades are full of couples, orderly, quiet, moving unceasingly up and down, with conversation utterly exhausted, with the glamorous fall of light and shade, with titillating emotions, with inscrutable excitements, rustling, supremely alive and supremely happy, with here and there a violent heartache, and here and there a great loneliness. And here for the good democrat is the best sight — the really good sight — of London at leisure, since here is London, the great London of the future, the London that matters to the democrat, in the making. This is London really young, really pagan, really idyllic, really moral, really promising a future to the race, really holding its population by the spell that nothing will ever break, the spell of contagious humanity and of infinite human contacts. These are the Londoners who will never go back.

So by her leisure moments London holds us. And if you desire a sight, equally impressive, of London at leisure, go down Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner on a pleasant summer day. On the right of you you have all those clubs with all those lounging and luxuriating men. On the left there is a stretch of green park, hidden and rendered hideous by recumbent forms. They lie like corpses, or like soldiers in a stealthy attack, a great multitude of broken men and women, they, too, eternally at leisure. They lie, soles of boots to crowns of heads, just out of arm’s reach one from the other for fear of being rifled by their couch-mates. They lie motionless, dun-coloured, pitiful and horrible, bathing in leisure that will never end. There, indeed, is your London at leisure; the two ends of the scale offered violently for inspection, confronting and ignoring steadily the one the other. For, in the mass, the men in the windows never look down; the men in the park never look up.

In those two opposed sights you have your London, your great tree, in its leisure, making for itself new sap and new fibre, holding aloft its vigorous leaves, shedding its decayed wood, strewing on the ground its rotten twigs and stuff for graveyards.

CHAPTER
V

REST IN LONDON

IN the black and dismal cloisters of our Valhalla — for still for London’s heroes it is” Victory or Westminster Abbey,” though Nelson, who uttered the words, is buried under all the stones of St. Paul’s — there is a small, pale mural tablet. “In memory of Elizabeth, Dear Child,” it reads, and sets us thinking of all sorts of dead children, dear in their day, and now how utterly unremembered, as wavelets are forgotten! And recumbent before it is a blackened paving stone, smoothed with the attrition of thousands of the feet of Londoners, of American tourists, of Members of Parliament, of prostitutes, of school boys. It states that here lie the remains of so and so many monks who died of the plague so and so many centuries ago.

When I was last in that dim place a man with a quick, agitated step hurried up and down the cloisters like a dog nosing out a rabbit in a hedge. He had a penetrating eye, a sharp nose, and high, thin cheekbones. He caught my glance and suddenly stretched out a hand. His voice was sonorous and rather pompous, with the
ore rotundo
in which Victorian poets used to read their own poems to one another. He uttered:

And I said:

Happy are they that do slumber and take their solace here For they cease from their labours and have known the worst.

He added, confidentially and confidently that: into this fane his corpse would be translated by his thousand votaries of the day to come. His name was one that posterity would not willingly let die.

His name was Tockson; he was by trade a cobbler, and he was rather a good poet. I really believe that Posterity might be none the worse if it ever come to read some of the verses that, with his own hands, he printed at odd moments on grocers’ bag-paper and stored in the back of his shop. He troubled no reigning sovereign and no established poet with his verses; he never sent them to papers; sometimes he wrapped up repaired boots in an odd sheet, and he was not in the least discontented or in the least mad, unless it be a madness to trust in the literary judgement of Posterity and to take “Marlowe’s mighty line” (the words were for ever on his lips) as a model.

He liked these cloisters, he said, because he could “contemplate the memorials” of forgotten monks, legislators, children and philanthropists freezing in the cold and soot outside the walls, whilst it was his destiny to be “translated” from Kensal Green Cemetery into the inner warmth of the “fane.” And it pleased him to recite his verses there, because there, it seemed to him, they sounded better than in Clerkenwell.

He came to see me once or twice, then I lost touch with him, and going down to Clerkenwell, found that his little shop had another tenant. He had been run over by a brewer’s dray. His verses — half a hundredweight of them — had been removed by a medical student from the hospital to which he had been taken. There were vague ideas in Clerkenwell that they were going to be made into a book, so that Posterity may still benefit, and his dust, which duly lies in Kensal Green, may still ensue “translation.” London is full of such men — poets, generals, framers of laws, men of great mechanical talents, of great strength of will, of lofty intellects. They get called “characters” because they never have the chance, or have not the luck, the knack of self-advertisement, the opening to use their talents, their wills, their intellects. And this is the heaviest indictment that can be brought against a city or a world — that it finds no employment for its talents, that it uses them merely to form layers, as it were, of fallen leaves, that it blunts our sense of individualities.

This London does more than any other place in the world. As a city, it seems, as has been said, not only to turn Parsees into Londoners but to make us, who are Londoners, absolutely indifferent to the Parsees, the Kaffirs, the pickpockets or the men of genius we may pass in its streets. It blunts, by its vastness, their peculiarities, and our interest it dulls. So that it seems to be a City formed, not for you and me, not for single men, but for bands of Encyclopaedists, Corporations, Societies. Speaking roughly, we may say that the pleasantest size for a graveyard — and what is London but a vast graveyard of stilled hopes in which the thin gnat-swarm of the present population dances its short day above the daily growing, indisturbable detritus of all the past at rest? — the pleasantest size for a graveyard is one in which each man and woman at rest could rise up and proclaim: “In my day I played a part I had an influence upon the whole community here. Who is here that does not know my virtues and my vices? I planted the chestnut that gives all that shade on the green.” But imagine the great London “Cemeteries” — for they are graveyards no longer — those vast stretches of heavy clay land, desecrated with all manner of hideous and futile excrescences that no passer-by will be caught to look at, appealing like piteous beggars in endless rows for the charity of your glance; the trees that appear half unreal in the mistiness because they are such that no one would place anywhere but in a “Cemetery”; the iron railings that are grotesque because they serve to keep nothing within a space that no living mortal is anxious to enter. But no doubt it is the penalty of being dead that one’s memorial should be grotesque: the penalty of fighting against oblivion which is irresistible and pitiless. And, no doubt, it is with the sense of the fitness of things that London, the city of oblivion, consigns her dead to the distance of dim and grim suburbs.

At any rate, there they take their rest and grow forgotten. For it is impossible to imagine the ghost of, say, Macadam, if Macadam be buried in a London cemetery — rising up at the end of some dreary and immense vista, and calling to its fellows: “I made my mark in my day: I influenced you all.” That unfamiliar voice would arouse no other spirit; late comers would answer sleepily: “Oh, our roads are all wood and asphalte now. Who are you?”

And, if that for all units be the pleasantest for our resting-places, it is also the most human of units for those still labouring on this earth. For, as soon as a city becomes a mass of Corporations, individualities die out and are wasted of necessity. We may consider Athens, which was a city not more vast than is Kensington High Street: probably its inhabitants were not really more cultured or more wise, but certainly they had, each one of them, better chances of influencing
all
their fellow inhabitants. And that for humanity would seem, in the Individualist’s eyes, to be the best of social units. Only the most hardened of Democrats, seeing humanity not as poor individuals but as parts of a theory, as negligible cog-wheels of a passionless machine, would deny that, from a human point of view Athens was better than Kensington High Street, or than Westminster itself. So London casts oblivion upon her dead and clouds out the individualities of her living.

We talk of the Londoner and we firmly believe there
is
a Londoner: but there is none. If, in walking along the streets we open our eyes, if we search for him, we never meet him. We see men like Jews, men like Arviragus, men with a touch of the negro, costermongers with the heads of Julius Caesars, but the Londoner we never see — and the search is painful. An awakened sense of observation is in London bewildering and nerve-shattering, because there are so many things to see and because these things flicker by so quickly. We drop the search very soon. And these great crowds chill out of us the spirit of altruism itself, or make of that spirit a curse to us. Living in a small community we know each member of it. We can hope to help, or to be interested in, each man and woman that we meet on the roads, or we can at least pay to each one the tribute of a dislike. But that, in London, is hopeless. The most we can do is to like or dislike bodies of men. If we read the “Morning—” we have a contempt for the readers of the “Daily—” although we know personally no such reader. If we take so much interest in our town as to be Moderates — or the reverse — we may dislike our opponents. If we be working men we despise the professional classes and distrust all others. But the individual factor has gone and the power of the individual over the mass.

What prophet shall make London listen to him? Where is London’s” distinguished fellow citizen?” These things are here unknown, and humanity, as the individual, suffers. Economically the city gains. Social reformers, those prophets who see humanity as the gray matter of a theory, would make our corporations more vast, our nations still more boundless, for the sake of fiscal efficiency, for the avoidance of overlapping, in order to make our electric light more cheap or our tram services more adequate. The London County Council should control all South England from the North Foreland to the Land’s End. But what we gain thus in the rates we must inevitably lose in our human consciousness and in our civic interests. Londoners, says the Individualist, take no interest in their municipal affairs because the spirit of place has gone. A certain vestry inscribes its dustcarts “R.B.K.” — the Royal Borough — but the proud title was gained not by any wish of the inhabitants of the Court suburb, but because of some energetic mayor or borough alderman struggling to gain for himself an infinitesimal moment of Royal attention. What Socrates of London would commence a discourse, “Oh, men of London!”—”
oti imeis o andres Athlenaioi
..

What Londoner, asks the Individualist, cares about Westminster? Nelson did at sea, and some people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., are thinking about this cradle of the spirit of their race, this old heart of England. But, for the Londoner, there is a convenient station on the Underground, and the name occurs frequently in the endless patter of many ‘bus conductors. So Westminster as an architectural whole, as a place with strong features, a great history, a place of countless anecdotes whispering from every stone, Westminster is wasted on London. Yet it is the heart of England; the cradle of its laws, of its empire, of its, on the whole, beneficent influence upon the comity of nations. So London extinguishes thoughts about places.

There is in each man of us an Individualist strain more or less strong, and in each, a more or less strong flavour of the Theorist who sees mankind only in the bulk. I imagine the Individualist-half of a man musing like this: “I inhabit a large, pompous, gloomy London house whose atrocious architecture, in any other spot on the globe, would preclude any idea of my ever countenancing it to the extent of becoming its tenant. Two doors off there lives the greatest violinist in the world, next door an old lady who sat on the knee of George IV; her mind is alive with the most vivid of anecdotes of a century or so — and next door on the other side is a girl with a face as beautiful as that of Helen of Troy, a delicate and tremulous walk, a proud neck, a radiant costume. Yet, here, I care nothing about any one of them. They are” the people next door.” For here in London we have no more any neighbours.

“In a smaller community I should choose my house carefully; I should talk to and admire the violinist, listen to and rave about the old lady, and no doubt fall in love with the girl like Helen of Troy. But here, her face will launch no ships; the old lady will find no Boswell to record her table talk; the violinist will die and, after his name has filled a decently small space in the obituary columns, will go to his rest in some cemetery — and will ensue oblivion. Had he been born in Argos, in a golden age, he would be now the twin of Apollo — or his name would have been one of the attributes of that composite mystery. So London has dulled my love of the arts, my taste for human gossip — my very manhood.”

“Vous rappelez-vous, dit-il, une réflexion d’Auguste Comte: (L’humanité est composée de morts et de vivants. Les morts sont de beaucoupleplus nombreux)? Certes, les morts sont de beaucoup les plus nombreux. Par leur multitude et la grandeur du travail accompli, ils sont les plus puissants. Ce sont eux qui gouvernent; nous leur obéissons. Nos maîtres sont sous ces pierres. Voici le législateur qui a fait la loi que je subis aujourd’hui, l’architecte qui a bâti ma maison, le poète qui a créé les illusions qui nous troublent encore, l’orateur qui nous a persuadés avant notre naissance.... Qu’est-ce qu’une génération de vivants, en comparaison des générations innombrables des morts? Qu’est-ce que notre volonté d’un jour, devant leur volonté mille fois séculaire?... Nous révolter contre eux, le pouvons-nous? Nous n’avons pas seulement le temps de leur désobéir!

“Enfin, vous y venez, docteur Socratel s’écria Constantin Marc; vous renoncez au progrès, à la justice nouvelle, à la paix du monde, à la libre pensée, vous soumettez à la tradition....” 1

(1 “Do you remember, he said, a reflexion of Auguste Comte: (Humanity is composed of the dead and of the living. The dead are much the more numerous)? Certainly the dead are much the more numerous. By their multitude, and on account of the greatness of the work they have accomplished, they are the more powerful. It is they who govern: we obey them. Our masters are beneath these stones. Here lie the legislator who made the law I submit to to-day, the architect who built my house, the poet who created the illusions that trouble us still, the orator who influenced our minds before we were born.... What is one generation of the living compared to the innumerable generations of the dead? What is our will, dating only from to-day, before their wills that are a thousand centuries old? Revolt against them? Are we strong enough? We have not even time to disobey them.’ ‘There you are then, Doctor Socrates,’cried Constantin Marc; ‘you renounce Progress, the New Justice, the World’s Peace, Free Thought; you submit yourself to Tradition.’”)