Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (667 page)

But under this amiable and scholarly personage the
Athenæum
was a wildly uncontrolled journal. The chief pages which were supposed to be given up to literary criticism were actually given over to the control of one or two antiquarians and archaeologists who used them for the purpose of battle-axing all their rival archaeologists and antiquarians. Pure literature as such was almost entirely left out in the cold, except when Mr. Watts-Dunton chose to take a hand. Novels were dismissed with a few sniffy words nearly always dictated by the personal feelings of the contributor. Then there would come endless pages of discussions as to the author of
Junius
— discussions that spread out over years and years. Then there would be the late Mr. F. G.

Stephens battle-axing
his
personal enemies in the columns devoted to art criticism, and then would come Mr. Joseph Knight, genially and amiably praising his dramatic friends. Thus under the captaincy, but certainly not under the control, of Mr. Maccoll the
Athenæum
drifted magnificently along its way. It would have done credit as an archaeological organ to a German university town; its scientific notes were excellent; its accuracy in matters of fact was meticulous beyond belief. It would condemn as utterly useless a history of the world if its author stated that Sir John Glenquoich of Auchtermuchty was the twenty-seventh instead of the twenty-sixth baronet. It was, in fact, a paradise for bookworms, but regarded as the chief organ of literary, artistic, musical and dramatic criticism of the chief city of the world, it was really extraordinary.

CHAPTER
X

A LITERARY DEITY

THE log-rolling of the ‘seventies, ‘eighties and ‘nineties might be sedate and scientific as in the case of the older organs, or it might be uproarious and truculent as it was when Henley and his gang of pirates came upon the scene; but at any rate it meant that some sort of interest was taken in the literary world, and that the literary world expected that some sort of interest would be taken in it. It certainly did. I remember my amazement — and I must add my admiration — when I first read through Rossetti’s voluminous and innumerable letters to my grandfather at about the time when he was publishing his first volume of poems. They were really magnificent — these letters. I think that no author ever in such a splendid way set about securing favourable notices from the Press. It was not that the author of
The Blessed Damozel
was not ashamed to corrupt the Press; he simply gloried in it as if it were a game, or a thrilling adventure. He might have been Napoleon conducting a successful battle; and my grandfather might have been his chief of staff.

Not a single organ was neglected. It was: Tell Watts to get at so-and-so. Nobody that I know knows Dash, but you might reach him through Blank. And so on through many letters and many hurried notes as ideas came up in the great man’s mind. I do not know whether anything of the sort had ever been done before, but I am pretty certain it can never have been done more thoroughly. It could not have been done; there would not have been room.
No
stone was left unturned. And I do not know that I see any harm in all this.

The Press responded magnificently, and Rossetti is Rossetti. Had he been “Satan” Montgomery the Press would probably have responded as magnificently and Montgomery would still have been nothing. The fact is that the great thing — for literature — is to get the public to read books at all. In that case the good book will live and the bad book will die after it has served its puffed purpose. For that reason I think we should never grudge a popular writer his success. If a man may make a large fortune out of quack medicines, why should another not have his little prosperity from quack books? Probably some percentage of his readers will go on to read something better; the great majority of them would never otherwise read anything at all, so that their tastes can not be spoken of as having been debauched.

The only thing which is fatal is indifference, and of that we have to-day a large quantity We have indeed nothing else, so that a fatal lethargy has settled down upon publishers as upon authors, upon the press, and above all upon the public. In the good old days when log-rolling was a frequent and profitable adventure, it was entirely different.

Those were fine days to have lived through. There remained the Pre-Raphaelites throning it on their altitudes, their spies and vedettes making thunder in all the journals when Mr. Rossetti or Mr. Swinburne or Mr. Ruskin, or even when any of the lesser lights, turned over as it were in his olympian slumbers and produced a new volume. There was Mr. Meredith beginning to come into his own.
The Amazing Marriage
or
Lord Ormont and his Aminta
was appearing as a serial in the
Universal Revieio
— that fine enterprise for which Mr. Harry Quilter was never sufficiently praised or thanked. There, too, Mr. Meredith’s
Jump-to-Glory Jane
was mystifying us not a little. Mr. Thomas Hardy also was coming into his own. His
Pair of Blue Eyes
was in all our mothers’ mouths. The enormous glory of
Lorna Doone
was still illuminating thousands of middle-class homes. This book I remember to have read over and over again when I was a boy. I fancy I know it nearly all by heart, so that now if any one would start me with:
If any one would hear a plain tale told plainly I, John Bidd of the Parish of Oare
... or
Now the manner of a winkie is this.
.. I could go on with the quotation for pages. Yet I cannot have looked at
Lorna Doone
for twenty years.
John Inglesant
was also having its reputation made by means of Mr. Gladstone’s post cards. So with many other books. Was there not
The Story of an African Farm?
Did not
Ships that pass in the Night
bring tears into the eyes of innumerable Young Persons? Mr. Anthony Hope’s
Dolly Dialogues
were appearing in the
Westminster Gazette.
The
Westminster Gazette
itself startled the enthusiastic world by appearing on green paper. It told us all that this green paper would be the salvation of all our eyes. I know I ruined mine by reading of Lady Mickleham night after night in the dimly lit carriages of the glamorous Underground. For in those days there was a glamorous Underground. It smelled of sulphur as hell is supposed to smell; its passages were as gloomy as Tartarus’ were supposed to be, and smokes and fumes poured from all its tunnels whilst its carriages were lit by oil lamps so that little pools of oil swayed and trembled in the bottoms of the globe-like lamp-glasses. And standing up, holding my green paper up against the lamp I used to read those Dialogues whilst the train jolted me along through the Cimmerian gloom. Why, I remember going up to Manchester with my grandfather, and in the train sat a publisher whom my grandfather spoke of as young Heinemann. He was relating with the utmost enthusiasm that he had had a MS. sent him called, I think,
The Scape Goat.
This, young Heinemann said, was the finest novel that had ever been written. It was not for some time afterwards that my grandfather realized that the author of this work was who he was, and that he himself had given this author, as it were, his literary baptism and an introduction to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

My grandfather, I remember, regarded
The Scape Goat
as a work of “genius.” His literary tastes were peculiar. Thus, during the last nights of his life, when I used to go into his bedroom to see if he were sleeping in safety, I should perceive, resting in the flat candle-stick beside his bed, not only his watch and his spectacles, but a copy of Eugène Sue’s
Mystères de Paris.
This book he was re-reading at the suggestion of Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and he considered it also to be a work of genius. He did not live to finish it, but died in the night shortly after he had laid it down. Rossetti, too, I think, regarded Sue’s work as “of genius.” And then the two painters would never be tired of reading Meinhold’s
Amber-witch
and
Sidonia the Sorceress.
But then Rossetti regarded Flaubert as morbid and too cynically immoral to be read by any respectable painter-poet — such a queer thing is literary taste.

And such a queer thing too is the ascription of morbidity. Thus Dr. Garnett, a high functionary of the British Museum, a very learned man, and the writer of the only volume of really scholarly and ironic tales that exists in the English language, found that Christina Rossetti, who had the mind of a mediaeval ascetic, was “morbid.” Yet, upon the whole, the lesson of Christina Rossetti was that, although life is a sad thing, we must put up with it and regard the trials it brings us as being a certain preparation for a serene and blessed immortality. Whereas upon the whole, Dr. Garnett’s message to the world was one of scholarly negation of a sort of mellow cynicism. Or again we find Rossetti, a man of as many irregularities as one man could reasonably desire in one earthly existence, a man whose poetry, if it has any lesson at all, teaches no lesson of asceticism — we find Rossetti in 1870 saying that it was no wonder that France danced and stumbled into disaster when it could produce a work so morbid as
Madame Bovary.

Yet Flaubert was a man of the utmost personal chastity, of the most bourgeois honesty, and of the most idealistic patriotism when his sympathies were aroused by the tragic downfall of his country. And
Madame Bovary
is a work which surely more than any other points out how disastrous from a material point of view is marital infidelity. Yet it shocked Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Flaubert, on the other hand, considered that if France had read L’
Education Sentimentale
France would have been spared the horrors of the
débâcle.
Maxime du Camp grins and giggles over this idea of Flaubert’s. But, reading and re-reading as I do this, the greatest of all modern romances, I can understand very well what this blond and gigantic writer, with his torrents of Berserker rage over the imbecilities of the common mind — I can understand very well what he meant. For L’
Education Sentimentale
is romantic in that it depicts life as being the inverse of the facile romance of the cloak and sword and catchword — the romance of easy victory and little effort. And France, from the downfall of Napoleon I. to the downfall of Napoleon III., was above all other lands that of the catchword and the easy victory. Governments fell at the mere shaking of the head of a purely selfish bourgeoisie. Charles X. fled, Louis Philippe fled, the Second Republic fell before risings that were mere flocking together of idle spouters of catch-words. Victories over trifling foes, victories in Algiers, in the Crimea, over the Austrians, over the Mexicans, victories of the most easy, were supposed to add laurels to the eagles of Jena and Austerlitz. And all the while in these easy revolutions the character of the French people grew softer and more verbose; and under the smoke of these easy victories the character of the French army became softer and more a matter of huge gestures. It was these facts that Flaubert painted in L’
Education Sentimentale.
It was these morals that his facts would have pointed out to the French people if they had read his book. But indeed
L’Education Sentimentale
is so inspired by contempt for inanity and fine phrases, it so points the finger towards the road of sanity and fine effort, that any nation that really read and marked it might well find itself mistress of the world. I am, however, as yet unaware that any nation has betaken itself to the study of the affairs of Frédéric Moreau and of Mme. Arnoux. So we shall have to go on building Dreadnoughts until the arrival of a blessed time of which no omens are very visible in our skies.

It is indeed a curious thing, the criticism that one great artist will bestow upon another. Thus Turgeniev acknowledges the receipt of
L’Education Sentimentale.
He writes to Flaubert—” This is indeed a work of genius” in the proper and conventional manner. And then growing really pleased, he proceeds to tear to pieces the beautiful little passage in which Flaubert describes Mme. Arnoux singing:

“Elle se tenait debout, près du clavier, les bras tombants, le regard perdu. Quelquefois pour lire la musique elle clignait ses paupières, en avançant le front un instant. Sa voix de contralto prenait dans les cordes basses une intonation lugubre qui glaçait, et alors sa belle tête aux grands sourcils s’inclinait sur son épaule. Sa poitrine se gonflait, ses bras s’écartaient, son cou d’où s’échappaient des roulades se renversait mollement comme sous des baisers... elle lança trois notes aiguës, redescendit, en jeta une plus haute encore, et, après un silence, termina par un point d’orgue.”

This struck Turgeniev as being supremely ridiculous, and it was the main thing which did strike him in this enormous and overpowering work. It was like the
Athenæum
, which condemned a history of the world because Sir John Glenquoich of Auchtermuchty was described as the twenty-seventh instead of the twenty-sixth baronet. I suppose this was because the
Athenæum
critic had got hold of a guide to Auchtermuchty. Similarly Turgeniev, living in the constant society of the Viardots, and more particularly in that of that great singer Pauline Lucca — Turgeniev had at the moment in his mind a meticulous admiration for musical exclusiveness. Pauline Lucca would have ended her songs with a dazzling cadenza — a shower of small notes.

Yes, it is impossible to say whether Turgeniev or Flaubert were the greatest of all novelists. They lived and unfolded their unprecedented talents in the same years, in the same city, in the same circle, filled with the same high ideals and high enthusiasms. And this is a very striking proof of how high effort in the arts flourishes by the mere contagion of contact. It is the custom of grudging Russophiles to declare that Turgeniev gained nothing by living in France. Or even it is their custom to declare that he lost a great deal. Nothing will be truer than to say that Turgeniev was born with a natural gift and a natural technique that made him at once the most gifted and the most technically perfect of all writers. His first story, which was written before he was twenty-one and before he had ever been to France, is as perfect as is
Fathers and Children
or
The House of the Gentlefolk.
And it would be as absurd to say that Flaubert or Gautier influenced the character of Turgeniev’s works, as it would be to say that Turgeniev was an influence to Zola, Maupassant or the Goncourts. Great writers, or strong personalities, when they have passed their impressionable years, are no longer subject to influences. They develop along lines of their own geniuses. But they are susceptible to sympathy, to encouragement, to ideas of rivalry, to contagious ambitions. And only too frequently they have a necessity for a tranquil and sympathetic home-life. The one set of incentives Turgeniev found amongst the French masters. The other was given him in the home of the Viardots. Such an existence he could have found nowhere else in the civilized world of that day.