Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (668 page)

I remember Turgeniev personally only as a smile. He had been taken by poor Ralston, the first of his translators into English, to call upon Rossetti — Turgeniev was in England for grouse-shooting, to which he was passionately attached. And not finding Rossetti at home, Ralston had brought the Russian master to call upon my grandfather. Both Turgeniev and Ralston were men of gigantic stature — each of them six feet six in height, or something like it, and I cannot have been more than two feet two at the most — a small child in a blue pinafore. I must have been alone in the immense studio that had once been the drawing-room of Colonel Newcome.

At any rate it is recorded as the earliest incident of my chequered and adventurous career, and moreover as evidencing the exquisite politeness that at that time had been taught me — I hope I may not since have lost it — that my grandfather, coming into the studio, found me approaching the two giants and exclaiming in a high treble: “Won’t you take a chair?” I must have been one, two or three years of age at the time.

I do not know that the anecdote is of any interest to anybody, but it pleases me to think that thus, in the person of Turgeniev, these two circles touched for a moment. For that other circle of Flaubert and his friends had aims very similar — had the same high views of the priestcraft of the arts. Each in its different way influenced very enormously the life and thoughts of their respective countries. The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was certainly less extended than that of the great French realists, nevertheless, after the passage of half a generation or so in the form of Æstheticism, this influence also crossed the Channel, so that in France, in Belgium, in Russia, and perhaps still more in Germany, you will find many houses that might have been furnished by Morris & Company — houses where the cult of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and perhaps still more that of Oscar Wilde, is carried on. These seeds have indeed been blown to the ends of the earth so that taking my walk the other morning through the streets of an obscure and sufficiently remote German town, the first thing that struck my eyes in a bookseller’s window were two large and not very good reproductions of the
Salutation of Beatrice
and of
Beata Beatrix.

In somewhat the same slow manner the influence of Flaubert, Turgeniev and their followers has crossed the Channel. And now, half a generation or so after their death, you will find a few English writers who have read a book or so of Flaubert, and perhaps a thousand or two of English men and women who have read something of Turgeniev. For this last, we have to thank in the first place Mrs. Constance Garnett, whose translation of Turgeniev’s works has given me, I think, more pleasure than anything else in the world except, perhaps, the writings of Mr. W. Hudson. Whenever I am low, whenever I am feeble or very tired or pursued by regrets, I have only to take up one or the other of these writers. It does not much matter which. For immediately I am brought into contact with a wise, a fine, an infinitely soothing personality. I assimilate pleasure with no effort at all, and so weariness leaves me, regrets go away to a distance, and I am no more conscious of a very dull self. Mr. Hudson is of course the finest, the most delicate and the most natural of stylists that we have or that we have ever had. Perhaps I should except Mrs. Garnett, who has contrived to translate Turgeniev with all his difficulties into a language so simple and so colloquial. Each of these writers uses language as little complicated as that of a child. Word after word sinks into the mind, pervading it as water slowly soaks into sands. You are, in fact, unconscious that you are reading. You are just conscious of pleasure as you might be in the sunshine. And this for me is the highest praise, or let me say the deepest gratitude, that I have to bestow. If I could express it better I would, but I find no other words.

Turgeniev, as I have said, is little read in England. I think I remember to have heard the publisher of the English translation say that he had sold on an average fourteen hundred sets of his edition. Supposing, therefore, that each set has been read by five persons, we find that perhaps seven thousand of the inhabitants of the British Isles have an acquaintance with this writer. And since Turgeniev may be regarded as one of the greatest writers of the world — the writer who has done for the novel what Shakespeare did for the drama, Homer for the epic, or Heine for lyric verse — and since the population of the British Isles is some forty-eight millions, these figures may be said to be fairly creditable.

This is creditable, for it means that if you took a walk through London with a placard on your back bearing the words: “Have you read Turgeniev?” you might during an afternoon’s walk in South Kensington receive affirmative answers from possibly two people. In Hampstead the adventure would be more profitable. You would probably find at least ten who responded. That I think is about the proportion, for it must be remembered that South Kensington is the home of pure culture in our islands, whereas Hampstead is the home of culture plus progress, rational dress and vegetarianism. This of course is why Turgeniev is read at all in England.

Being a Russian ho is supposed in some way to help you towards being a better socialist — for in England we do not read for pleasure, but, when we read at all, we read in order to be made a better something or other. That is why you will find ten persons who have read Turgeniev for one who has read Flaubert. In fact, having met, God knows, hundreds and hundreds of English literary people, I have met only one who has read the whole of Flaubert’s works or began to understand what was meant by the art of this great writer. And even he found
L’Education Sentimentale
a tough proposition. But then it is impossible to be made a better socialist by reading Flaubert, and there is a general impression amongst English writers that to read him, to be influenced by him, would be to diminish your “price per thou.” Indeed, I was once begged by the tearful, but charming wife of a distinguished English man of letters to desist from advising her husband to learn what lessons he could from the French master. She said:

“Billy has such a struggle as it is. His work isn’t at all popular. We
do
want to have a motorcar. And then there are the poor children.” And the poor lady, with her tear-swimming eyes, looked agonizedly at me as if I were a monster threatening the domesticity of her home. For the sake of the poor children I am glad to say that Billy did not take my advice. He never went to Mudie’s for a secondhand copy of U
n Cœur Simple,
his short stories are becoming increasingly popular in the sixpenny magazines. I believe he has his motor-car, but I do not know, for his wife made him take the opportunity to quarrel with me shortly afterwards. She would, I think, have encouraged him to lend me money in large sums; she would have trusted me to take her children out for walks. But I had threatened the most sacred thing of the literary domestic hearth; I had given her husband wicked counsel. Almost I had endangered his price per thousand words. I must go.

This story, which is perfectly true, has a moral of the deepest. For the gradual elevation of “price per thou.” to the estate of the sole literary god in England has come about in many and devious manners. In the old days there was a thing that was called a pot-boiler. This was an occasional piece of inferior work which you produced in order to keep yourself from starvation, whilst you meditated higher and quite unprofitable flights. Your mind was set upon immortality and from posterity you hoped to receive the ultimate crown. A quarter of a century ago this feeling was absolutely dominant. It was so strong, is was so dinned into me that still, when I really analyse my thoughts, I find I am writing all the while with an
eye
to posterity. I am ashamed of myself. Anxious to be a modern of the moderns, anxious to be as good a man of business as the latest literary knight, or the first member of the British Academy of Letters, whoever they may be, I find myself still thinking that I am writing for an entirely unprofitable immortality. I desire fervently to possess a motor-car, a country seat, a seat in the House of Commons, the ear of the Home Secretary, and a bath of cut crystal with silver taps that flow champagne or eau de Cologne. I desire immensely to be influential, expensive and all the rest of it. But still I go on writing for posterity.

It is, I presume, in the blood, in the training. My great-great-grandfather Brown was the first anti-lancet surgeon. He was a person of expensive and jovial tastes. He loved port wine and he died insolvent in the King’s Bench prison. Frederick the Great invited him to be his body surgeon, Napoleon the Great always released any English surgeon he might take prisoner if he could prove that he was a pupil of Dr. John Brown. Napoleon considered that the pupils of Brown were benefactors to humanity. But Dr. John Brown died in a debtor’s prison because he invented and stuck to the surgery of posterity. Ford Brown his son, an ardent politician of a Whig complexion, quarrelled violently with his relative and patron, Commodore Sir Isaac Coffin, who was a Tory, and lost alike all chance of promotion in the service, and all chance of patronage for his son Ford, who had been inscribed as a midshipman on the books of the
Arethusa
frigate. Ford Brown therefore died in reduced circumstances, an embittered man because of his devotion to the political principles of posterity. And Ford Madox Brown, his son, died in reduced circumstances, still painting away at pictures, the merit of which he hoped that posterity would see.

But I do not mean to say that he was above painting the humble pot-boiler. On the contrary, his efforts to do so were frequent and pathetic. Thus, for quite a long time for a guinea a day he worked at enlarging daguerreotypes and painting posthumous portraits in the portrait factory of Messrs. Dickinson. At the same time he was giving twelve years of toil to his one large picture called “Work.” During the Crimean War he tried desperately to get commissions for a series of twelve popular designs with titles like “The Bugle Calls,”

“The Troopship Sails,”

“In the Trenches before Sevastopol,”

“Wounded,” and “The Return Home,” which represented a gentleman with only one arm and one leg, coming back to the embraces of a buxom English matron and five children of varying sizes. But he never got any commission for any such work. Mr. Gambart and the print-sellers were much too wise. Later, he attempted to paint pictures of the dog-and-child order, made famous by the late Mr. Burton Barber. In this attempt he was eminently unsuccessful.

Rossetti, on the other hand, was as successful with pot-boilers as Madox Brown was the reverse. He drew in pastel or charcoal innumerable large heads of women with plentiful hair and bare necks and shoulders. These he sold for huge sums, giving them Latin or Italian titles. Sometimes the occupation palled upon him. Then he wrote: “I can’t be bothered to give the thing a name. A head is a head, and that is an end of it.” But generally he found names like
Aurea Catena.
Millais of course occupied the latter years of his life with practically nothing but pot-boilers, except that towards his very end he repented bitterly, and tried once more to paint as he had done when he was still a Pre-Raphaelite Brother. Holman Hunt was as unsuccessful as Madox Brown in turning out real pot-boilers, though “The Light of the World” had as much success as if it had been painted in that spirit.

The point is that none of these painters and none of the writers who surrounded them had any contempt for money as such. They wanted it, but it was not the end and aim of their existence. And “price per thou.” not having been invented in those days, they did not become agonized, thrilled or driven mad at the thought of this deity.

Nor indeed did this Goddess so much perturb the writers for whom Mr. Henley was the centre. His disciples desired money perhaps a little more than the Pre-Raphaelites, and revered their work perhaps a little less. On the other hand, perhaps again they really tried more to make a good job of their work. There was less of panoply, mysticism and aloofness; they expected less of the trimming of their work and put more power into their elbows. They had too, none of the feeling of standing apart from the common herd of life. They wanted as much as anything to be men — upon the whole quite commonplace men, indulging in orgies of tobacco, whisky and the other joys of the commercial traveller. About love as they handled it there was nothing mystic; passion justified nothing. It was kiss and pay and go, and when you married you settled down. Dante, in his relations with Beatrice, they voted a bore, but on the other hand they admired the tortures that he invented for his adversaries in hell.

It was an entirely different atmosphere. There was about it nothing Italianate. Most of Henley’s gang saw no shame in indulging in occasional bouts of journalism. Many of them were content to be called journalists, and did not mind a damn as long as they turned out jolly good stuff.

I confess that had I known of their attitude of mind in those days it would have shocked and pained me. Nowadays I think they were rather fine fellows, and that it does not much matter what they did. In those days they seemed to me to be strange and rough.

I came out of the hot-house atmosphere of Pre-Raphaelism where I was being trained for a genius. I regarded that training with a rather cold distaste. On the other hand Henley and his friends seemed to me to be unreasonably boisterous and too loudly cocksure. Henley, who presented the appearance of a huge, mountainous, scaly, rough-clothed individual, with his pipe always in his hand and his drink always at his elbow, once damned my eyes up hill and down dale for half-an-hour because I sustained the argument that
II Principe
was written not by Aretino but by Machiavelli. Henley had suffered from some slip of the tongue and, although he must have been perfectly aware of it in the next second, he chose to stand to his guns, and as I have said, swore at me for quite a long time. At last this seemed to grow monotonous, and I said: “God damn
you,
Mr. Henley. If Machiavelli did not write
II Principe
I will give a pound to the first beggar I meet in the street.”