Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (662 page)

“‘I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me.’”

“‘My God!’ I ejaculated. ‘What is all this? What have I done for you?’

“‘You have,’ he answered, ‘by your writings influenced my whole life.’

“I was so overwhelmed, I was so appalled, I was so extraordinarily confused, that I bolted out of the room. I did not, my young French friend, know in the least what to do with this singular present. And I am bound to say that in about five minutes I felt extraordinarily pleased.

“I had never been so pleased before in my life. One kind writer once said that I wrote as preciously — though I was not of course half as important — as the late Robert Louis Stevenson! Another kindly editor once told me to my face that he considered me to be the finest novelist in England. He added that there was only one person who was my equal, and that the latest literary knight! That, my young French friend, was a present whose flavour you will hardly appreciate.

“But
kurz und gut
, I have had my triumphs. Yet never — no, never till that moment had I been called an influence. Oh yes, the pleasure was extraordinary. I walked through the streets as if I were dancing on air. Never had the world looked so good. I imagined that my words must be heard deferentially in the War Office which I was then passing, and I proceeded to walk down Downing Street to look at the several ministries where obviously my words must have immense weight. Very nearly I sent in my card to the foreign minister with the view of giving him my opinions on the relations between England and Germany, “In the Green Park, continuing my walk home, I said to myself: I am an influence! By God, I am an influence like A and B and C and D and E and F and G and H and like all of them — all of them influences.

“I felt as important as the Pope must have done when he penned the encyclical
Pascendi Greges.

I was astounded that no one turned round in awe to observe my passing by. The sweetest moment in my life!...

“Of course reaction came. It could not have been otherwise, since I was brought up in the back rooms and nurseries of Pre-Raphaelism, which for better or for worse held that to be an artist was to be the most august thing in life. And nowadays I seldom think of that sweet moment. Only when I am very drunk indeed, deep, deep drunk in tea, do I remember that once for five minutes I looked upon myself as an influence.

“Being a man of enormous moral integrity (my young French friend, you come of a nation inferior and unacquainted with the sterner virtues) — being a man of an enormous moral integrity — or being a low-spirited sort of a person — I have resolutely put from me this temptation. Or, if you will, I have never had the courage again to aspire to these dizzy heights.

“But now I can well understand why it is that my distinguished confrères A, B, C, D, and all the rest of the letters of the alphabet, aspire to the giddy heights of power. For figure to yourself, my dear young French friend, how I, the mere writer, despisedly walk the streets. But should I just once take up the cause, let us say, of my oppressed friend Hennessy, at once all sorts of doors and all sorts of columns would be open to me.
The Times
would print my letters; I should be admitted into the private room of whatever cabinet minister it was that had Hennessy in his charge. I would — yes, by Heavens, I would — make that cabinet minister’s wife not only faint, but go into three separate fits of hysterics by my gruesome accounts of Hennessy’s wrongs. I should dine with archbishops. I should receive a letter of thanks from the Pope. I should eventually triumphantly contest the Scotland division of Liverpool, and, becoming arbitrator of the destinies of the empire, I should be styled before the Speaker of the mother of parliaments not only a gentleman, but, by Heavens, an honourable gentleman!..

At this point of my rhapsody we were approached by an official, and on his refusal to believe that we had already paid for our chairs we were summarily ejected.

Now do not let me be suspected of preaching a campaign to the effect that the writer should stick to his pen. I am merely anxious to emphasize the lights and shadows of Pre-Raphaelite days by contrasting them with the very changed conditions that to-day prevail. You might say on the one hand our poets are now influences, and that on the other they no longer get cheques. And you might continue the pros and cons to the end of the chapter. Nor do I wish to say that the author ought to steel his heart against the wrongs of suffering humanity or of the brute creation. By all means if he shall observe individual examples of the oppressed and of the suffering — poor devils like my friend Hennessy, or the miserable horses that we export to Belgium, let him do his best to alleviate their unhappy lots. But these, the old-fashioned Pre-Raphaelite would have said, are the functions of the artist as private citizen. His art is something more mysterious and something more sacred. As I have elsewhere pointed out, my grandfather, a romantic old gentleman, of the Tory persuasion by predisposition, was accustomed to express himself as being advanced in the extreme in his ideas. Such was his pleasant fancy that I am quite certain he would have sported a red tie had it not clashed with the blue linen shirts that he habitually wore. And similarly my aunt Rossetti, to whom my infant thoughts were so frequently entrusted — this energetic and romantic lady was of such advanced ideas that I have heard her regret that she was not born early enough to be able to wet her handkerchief in the blood of the aristocrats during the French Reign of Terror. Nay more, during that splendid youth of the world in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties the words “the Social Revolution” were for ever on our lips. We spoke of it as if it were always just round the corner, like the three-horse omnibus which used to run from Portland Place to Charing Cross Station — a bulky conveyance which we used to regard with longing eyes as being eminently fitted, if it were upset, to form the very breastwork of a barricade. In these young, splendid and stern days, my cousins the Rossettis, aided, if not pushed to it, by my energetic romantic aunt, founded that celebrated anarchist organ known as the
Torch.
But though my grandfather hankered after wearing a red tie, said that all lords were damned flunkeys, that all Her Majesty’s judges were venial scoundrels, all police magistrates worse than Judas Iscariot, and all policemen worse even than Royal Academicians — it would never, no, it would never have entered his head to turn one of his frescoes in the Town Hall, Manchester, into a medium for the propaganda of the Social Revolution. He hated the bourgeoisie with a proper hatred, but it was the traditional hatred of the French artist. The bourgeoisie returned his hatred to more purpose, for, just before his death, the town council of Manchester with the Lord Mayor at its head, sitting in private, put forward a resolution that his frescoes in the Town Hall should be whitewashed out and their places taken by advertisements of the wares of the aldermen and the councillors. Thus perished Ford Madox Brown — for this resolution, which was forwarded to him, gave him his fatal attack of apoplexy. The bourgeoisie had triumphed.

Or again, Madox Brown, in his picturesque desire to champion the oppressed, once took up the cause of a Royal Academician. This poor gentleman, having grown extremely old and being entirely colour blind, so that he painted pictures containing green heads and blue hands, was no longer permitted by his brothers of the immortal Forty to occupy with his work the one hundred and forty feet on the line that are allotted to every Academician at Burlington House. Madox Brown entered into the fray for redressing the wrongs of this injured and colourblind person. He wrote articles about Mr. D — in the late Mr. Quilter’s
Universal Review.
He deluged
The Times
with letters in which he said that “though dog does not eat dog the academic vulture was ready to feed on its own carrion.” He trundled off in four-wheelers to interview the art critic of almost every daily paper in London. Indeed I never remember such a row in that picturesque household as was caused by the sorrows of this unfortunate Academician. But it never, no it never entered Madox Brown’s head to paint a gigantic picture representing all the forty Academicians gorging enormously on turkeys, walnuts and port, whilst outside the walls of Burlington House, on a winter night with the snow four feet thick, the unfortunate D — with placards bearing the words “Colour Blind” on his chest, and his bony shoulders sticking through his ragged clothes, drew in chalks upon the pavement exquisite classical pictures whose heads were green and whose hands were blue. This, however, was what William Morris, breaking away from his dyes and his tapestries, taught the young artist to do.

CHAPTER VI
I

ANARCHISTS AND GREY FRIEZE

THE art with which William Morris and such disciples of his as Commendatore Walter Crane propagandized on behalf of that splendid thing, “The Social Revolution” was, upon the whole, still within the canons which would have been allowed by the Æsthetes who called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. In his
News from Nowhere
Morris tried to show us young things what a beautiful world we should make of it if, sedulously, we attended the Sunday evening lectures at Kelmscott House, the Mall, Hammersmith. At Kelmscott House, I believe, the first electric telegraph was constructed; and it was in the shed where the first cable was made that we used to meet to hasten on the Social Revolution and to reconstruct a lovely world. As far as I remember those young dreams, it was to be all a matter of huge-limbed and splendid women, striding along dressed in loose curtain-serge garments, and bearing upon the one arm such sheaves of wheat as never were, and upon the other such babies as every proud mother imagines her first baby to be. And on Sunday afternoons, in a pleasant lamplight, to a number perhaps of a hundred and fifty, there we used to gather in that shed.

William Morris would stride up and down between the aisles, pushing his hands with a perpetual irate movement through his splendid hair. And we, the young men with long necks, long fair hair, protruding blue eyes and red ties, or the young maidens in our blue curtain-serge with our round shoulders, our necks made as long as possible to resemble Rossetti drawings, uttered with rapt expression, long sentences about the Social Revolution that was just round the corner. We thought we were beautiful; we thought we were very beautiful, but Pre-Raphaelism is dead, Æstheticism is dead. Poor William Morris is dead too, and the age when poetry was marketable is most dead of all. It is dead, all dead, and that beautiful vision, the Social Revolution, has vanished along with the ‘bus that used to run from the Langham Hotel, beloved of American visitors, to Charing Cross — the ‘bus with its three horses abreast, its great length, and its great umbrella permanently fixed above the driver’s head. Alas, that ‘bus will serve to build up no barricade when the ultimate revolution comes, and when it comes the ultimate revolution will not be our beloved Social one of the large women, curtain-serge, wheat-sheaves, and the dream babies. No, it will be different. And I suppose, the fine flower that those days produced is none other than Mr. Bernard Shaw.

But in those days we had no thought of Fabianism. Nevertheless, we managed to get up some pretty tidy rows amongst ourselves. I must, personally, have had three separate sets of political opinions. To irritate my relatives, who advocated advanced thought, I dimly remember that I professed myself a Tory. Amongst the bourgeoisie whom it was my inherited duty to
épater
I passed for a dangerous anarchist. In general speech, manner and appearance, I must have resembled a socialist of the Morris group. I don’t know what I was: I don’t know what I am. It doesn’t, I suppose, matter in the least, but I fancy I must have been a very typical young man of the sort who formed the glorious meetings that filled the world in the ‘eighties and early ‘nineties. There used to be terrific rows between Socialists and Anarchists in those days. I think I must have been on the side of the anarchists, because the socialists were unreasonably aggressive. They were always holding meetings at which the subject for debate would be, “The Foolishness of Anarchism.” This would naturally annoy the harmless and gentle anarchists who only wanted to be let alone, to loaf in Goodge Street, and to victimize any one who came into the offices of the
Torch
and had half-a-crown to spend on beer.

In the
Torch
office, which, upon the death of my aunt Rossetti, left the house of William Rossetti, you would generally find some dirty, eloquent scoundrel called Ravachol or Vaillant. For the price of a pint of beer, he would pour forth so enormous a flood of invective and of selfglorification that you would not believe him capable of hurting a rabbit. Then, a little afterwards, you would hear of a bomb thrown in Barcelona or Madrid, and Ravachol or Vaillant, still eloquent and still attitudinizing, would go to his death under the guillotine or in the garrotte. I don’t know where the masses came from that supported us as anarchists, but I have seldom seen a crowd so great as that which attended the funeral of the poor idiot who blew himself to pieces in the attempt on Greenwich Observatory. This was, of course, an attempt fomented by the police agents of a foreign state with a view to forcing the hand of the British Government. The unfortunate idiot was talked by these
agents provocateurs
into taking a bomb to Greenwich Park, where the bomb exploded in his pocket and blew him into many small fragments. The idea of the government in question was that this would force the hand of the British Government, so that they would arrest wholesale every anarchist in Great Britain. Of course the British Government did nothing of the sort, and the crowd in Tottenham Court Road which attended the funeral of the small remains of the victim was, as I have said, one of the largest that I have ever seen. Who were they all? Where did they all come from? Whither have they all disappeared? I am sure I don’t know, just as I am pretty certain that in all those thousands who filled Tottenham Court Road there was not one who was more capable than myself of beginning to think of throwing a bomb. I suppose it was the spirit of romance! — of youth, perhaps of sheer tomfoolery, perhaps of the spirit of adventure, which is no longer very easy for men to find in our world of grey and teeming cities. I couldn’t be Dick Harkaway with a Winchester rifle, so I took it out in monstrous solemn fun, of the philosophic anarchist kind, and I was probably one of twenty thousand. My companion upon this occasion was Comrade P — who until quite lately might be observed in the neighbourhood of the British Museum, a man with an immensely long beard, with immensely long hair, bare-headed, bare-legged, in short running-drawers and a boatman’s jersey, that left bare his arms and chest. Comrade P — , was a medical man of great skill, an eminently philosophic anarchist. He was so advanced in his ideas that he dispensed with animal food, dispensed with alcohol, and intensely desired to dispense with all clothing. This brought him many times into collision with the police, and as many times he was sent to prison for causing a crowd to assemble in Hyde Park, where he would appear to all intents and purposes in a state of nature. He lived, however, entirely upon crushed nuts. Prison diet, which appeared to him sinfully luxurious, inevitably upset his digestion. They would place him in the infirmary and would feed him on boiled chicken, jellies, beef-tea, and caviare, and all the while he would cry out for nuts, and grow worse and worse, the prison doctors regularly informing him that nuts were poison.

At last Comrade P — would be upon the point of death, and then they would give him nuts. P — would immediately recover, usually about the time that his sentence had expired. Then upon the Sunday he would once more appear like a Greek athlete running through Hyde Park. A most learned and gentle person, most entertaining and the best of company, this was still the passion of his life. The books in the British Museum were almost a necessity of his existence, yet he would walk into the reading room attired only in a blanket, which he would hand to the cloak-room attendant, asking for a check in return. Eventually his reader’s ticket was withdrawn, though with reluctance, on the part of the authorities, for he was a fine scholar and they were very humane men. Some time after this, Comrade P — proposed to me that I should accompany him on the top of a ‘bus. His idea was, that he would be attired in a long ulster; this he would take off and hand to me, whereupon I was to get down and leave him in this secure position. My courage was insufficient — the united courages of all Comrade P—’s friends were insufficient to let them aid him in giving thus early a demonstration of what nowadays we call the Simple Life, and Comrade P — had to sacrifice his overcoat. He threw it, that is to say, from the top of the ‘bus, and with his hair and beard streaming over his uncovered frame defied alike the elements and the police. The driver took the ‘bus, Comrade P — and all into an empty stable, where they locked him up until the police arrived with a stretcher from Bow Street.

At last the magistrate before whom Comrade P — habitually appeared grew tired of sentencing him. Comrade P — was moreover so evidently an educated and high-minded man that the stipendiary perhaps was touched by his steadfastness. At all events, he invited P — to dinner — I don’t know what clothes P — wore upon this occasion. Over this friendly meal he extracted from P — a promise that he would wear the costume of running-drawers, an oarsman’s jersey, and sandals which I have already described and which the magistrate himself designed. Nothing would have persuaded P — to give this promise had not the magistrate promised in return to get for P — the reader’s ticket at the British Museum which he had forfeited. And so for many years in this statutory attire, P — , growing greyer and greyer, might be seen walking about the streets of Bloomsbury. Some years afterwards when I occupied a cottage in the country, P — wrote and asked to be permitted to live in my garden in a state of nature. But dreading the opinions of my country neighbours, I refused, and that was the last I heard of him.

What with poets, arts and craftsmen, anarchists, dock strikes, unemployed riots and demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, those years were very lively and stirring for the young. We continued to be cranks in a high-spirited and tentative manner. Nowadays, what remains of that movement seems to have become much more cut and dried; to have become much more theoretic; to know much more and to get much less fun out of it. You have on the one hand the Fabian Society, and on the other the Garden Cities, where any number of Comrade P — s can be accommodated. The movement has probably spread numerically, but it has passed, as a factor, out of the life of the day. I don’t know what killed it.

As far as I am personally concerned, my interest seemed to wane at about the time when there was a tremendous row in one of the socialist clubs, because some enthusiastic gentleman in a red tie publicly drank wine out of a female convert’s shoe. Why there should have been a row, whether it was wrong to drink wine, or to drink it out of a shoe, or what it was all about, I never could quite make out. But the life appeared to die out of things about then. Perhaps it was about that time that the first Fabian Tract was published. I remember being present, later, at a Fabian debate as to the attributes of the Deity. I forget what it was all about, but it lasted a very considerable time. Towards the end of the meeting an energetic lady arose — it was, I think, her first attendance at a Fabian meeting — and remarked:

“All this talk is very fine, but what I want to know is, whether the Fabian Society does, or does not, believe in God?”

A timid gentleman rose and replied:

“If Mrs. Y — will read Fabian Tract 312, she will discover what she ought to think upon this matter.”

They had codified everything by then. But in the earliest days we all wobbled gloriously. Thus upon his first coming to London Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a pamphlet called
Why I am an Anarchist.
This was, I think, printed at the
Torch
Press. At any rate, the young proprietors of that organ came into possession of a large number of copies of the pamphlet. I have twice seen Mr. Shaw unmanned — three times, if I include an occasion upon a railway platform when a locomotive out-voiced him. One of the other occasions was when Mr. Shaw, having advanced a stage further towards his intellectual salvation, was addressing in the Park a Socialist gathering on the tiresome text of “The Foolishness of Anarchism.” The young proprietors of the
Torch
walked round and round in the outskirts of the crowd offering copies of Mr. Shaw’s earlier pamphlet for sale, and exclaiming at the top of their voices, “
Why I am an Anarchist!
By the Lecturer!”

But even in those days Mr. Shaw had us for his enthusiastic supporters. I suppose we did not put much money into his pockets, for I well remember his relating a sad anecdote whose date must have fallen among the ‘eighties. As Mr. Shaw put it, like every poor young man when he first comes to London he possessed no presentable garments at all save a suit of dress clothes. In this state he received an invitation to a soiree from some gentleman high in the political world — I think it was Mr. Haldane. This gentleman was careful to add a postscript in the kindness of his heart, begging Mr. Shaw not to dress, since every one would be in their morning clothes. Mr. Shaw was accordingly put into an extraordinary state of perturbation. He pawned or sold all the articles of clothing in his possession, including his evening suit, and with the proceeds purchased a decent suit of black, resembling, as he put it, that of a Wesleyan minister. Upon his going up the staircase of the house to which he was invited, the first person he perceived was Mr. Balfour, in evening dress; the second was Mr. Wyndham in evening dress; and immediately he was introduced into a dazzling hall that was one sea of white shirt fronts relieved by black swallowtails. He was the only undressed person in the room. Then his kind host presented himself, his face beaming with philanthropy and with the thought of kindly encouragement that he had given to struggling genius! I think Mr. Shaw does not “dress” at all nowadays, and, in the dress affected, at all events by his disciples, the grey homespuns, the soft hats, the comfortable bagginesses about the knees, and the air that the pockets have of always being full of apples, the last faint trickle of Pre-Raphaelite influence is to be perceived. Madox Brown always wore a black morning coat edged with black braid during the day, but Rossetti, at any rate when he was at work, was much addicted to grey frieze. He wore habitually a curious coat of pepper-and-salt material, in shape resembling a clergyman’s ordinary dress but split down the lateral seams so that the whole front of the coat formed on each side one large pocket. When he went out — which, as Mr. Meredith has informed us, was much too seldom for his health — he wore a grey frieze inverness cape of a thickness so extraordinary that it was as stiff as millboard. This greyness and roughness very much influenced his disciples and spread to the disciples of William Morris, with the results that we see at present. I know this to be the fact from the following circumstances. Upon Rossetti’s death, his inverness, to which I have alluded and which was made in the year 1869, descended to my grandfather. Upon my grandfather’s death it descended to me, it being then twenty-three years old. I wore it with feelings of immense pride as if it had been — and indeed was it not? — the mantle of a prophet. And such approbation did it meet with in my young friends of that date that this identical garment was copied seven times, and each time for the use of a gentleman whose works, when Booksellers Row still existed, might ordinarily be found in the Twopenny Box. So this garment spread the true tradition, and indeed, it was imperishable and indestructible, though what has become of it by now I do not know. I wore it for several years until it must have been aged probably thirty, when, happening to wear it during a visit to my tailor’s, and telling that gentleman its romantic history, I was distressed to hear him remark, looking over his pince-nez: