Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (672 page)

The talk would continue, Mr. Rossetti beginning again to sink his head towards the fire, and explaining that, as he was not only bald but an Italian, he liked to have his head warmed. Presently, bang! would go the fire-irons again. Madox Brown would lose some more whisky and would exclaim:

“Really, William!”

Mr. Rossetti would say:

“I am very sorry, Brown.”

I would replace the fire-irons again, and the talk would continue. And then for the third time the fire-irons would go down. Madox Brown would hastily drink what little whisky remained to him, and jumping to his feet would shout:

“God damn and blast you, William, can’t you be more careful?”

To which his son-in-law, always the most utterly calm of men, would reply:

“Really, Brown, your emotion appears to be excessive. If Fordie would leave the fire-irons lying in the fender there would be no occasion for them to fall.”

The walls were covered with gilded leather; all the doors were painted dark green; the room was very long, and partly filled by the great picture that was never to be finished, and, all in shadow, in the distant corner was the table covered with bits of string, curtain knobs, horse-shoes and odds and ends of iron and wood.

CHAPTER XI
I

HEROES AND SOME HEROINES

ABOUT six months after Madox Brown’s death I went permanently into the country, where I remained for thirteen years, thus losing almost all touch with intellectual or artistic life. Yet one very remarkable pleasure did befall me during the early days of that period of seclusion. Mr. Edward Garnett, at that time literary adviser to the most enterprising publisher of that day, came down to the village, bringing with him a great basket of manuscripts that had been submitted to his firm. It was a Sunday evening. We were all dressed more or less mediævally, after the manner of true disciples of socialism of the William Morris school. We were drinking, I think, mead out of cups made of bullock’s horn. Mr. Garnett was reading his MSS. Suddenly he threw one across to me.

“Look at that,” he said.

I think that then I had the rarest literary pleasure of my existence. It was to come into contact with a spirit of romance, of adventure, of distant lands, and with an English that was new, magic and unsurpassed. It sang like music; it overwhelmed me like a great warm wave of the sea, and it was as clear as tropical sunlight falling into deep and scented forests of the East. For this MS. was that of
Almayer’s Folly
, the first book of Mr. Joseph Conrad, which he had sent up for judgment, sailing away himself, as I believe, for the last time, upon a ship going towards the East. So was Joseph Conrad “discovered.”

But that was the day of discoveries. It was an exciting, a wonderful time. In those years Mr. Rudyard Kipling burst upon the world with a shower of stars like those of a certain form of rocket. Mr. Zangwill was “looming large.”
To-day
was a wonderful periodical; it serialized the first long novel of Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Anthony Hope was going immensely strong. Mr. J. M. Barrie was beginning to “boom.” Mr. Crockett was also “discovered,” and Mrs. Craigie and the authors of the Pseudonym Library, with its sulphur yellow covers that penetrated like a fumigation into every corner of Europe. “Mademoiselle Ixe” must have found millions of readers. And it was
really
the talk of the town. Mr. Gladstone, I think, wrote a postcard about it. Then there was Olive Schreiner, who was a prophetess, wrote wonderfully well about South Africa, and lectured the Almighty for the benefit of Hampstead.

The tone of all this new literature was of course very different from that of Pre-Raphaelism. It was in many ways more vivid, more actual, and more of every day, just as it was certainly less refined and less precious. And I must confess that I at least revelled in this new note. Being very young and properly humble, all these appearances filled me with delight and with enthusiasm. It was as entrancing to me to read the
Wheels of Chance
in the badly printed columns of
To-day
as it was to read the
Dolly Dialogues
on the green paper of the
Westminster,
and it was only a more wonderful thing to be able to read
The Nigger of the Narcissus
, which was the last serial to appear in Henley’s
New Review.
I was ready to accept almost anybody and anything, though, at the one end of the scale I could not swallow
Three Men in a Boat
or, at the other,
Dreams
, by Olive Schreiner. What was called in those days the New Humour appeared to me as vulgar as the works of Albert Smith and not half so funny. On the other hand, the New Seriousness appeared to me to be more funny than either, particularly when Miss Schreiner took to arguing with God. I remember saying as much to a young Hampstead lady who came near to being my first — and who knows whether she would not have been my only — love. I had seen her home from my grandfather’s, and we walked up and down before her garden gate discussing this work, which struck me as so comic. She ended by saying that I was as vulgar as I was stupid. So there, that romance came to an end! She was a very earnest and charmingly ridiculous person, and is now married to an eminent stockbroker. But from this tender reminiscence I gather that I must have hod limits in my appreciations of the bubbling literature of that day. But the limits must have been singularly wide. I suppose those works really took me out of the rather stifling atmosphere of Pre-Raphaelism, just as in earlier days I used to lock myself in the coal-cellar in order to read
Dick Harkaway
and
Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber
and other penny dreadfuls. Then, I was reacting — and I am sure healthily — against being trained for the profession of a genius.

But I can remember with what enormous enthusiasm I used to read the little shilling, paper bound, bluish books which contain the first stories of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Mr. Kipling himself is of an origin markedly Pre-Raphaelite. He is a nephew of Burne-Jones and I suppose that the writings of poor “B. V. Thomson,” the very Pre-Raphaelite author of
The City of Dreadful Night
— that these works more profoundly influenced the author of
The Man who would be King
than any other pieces of contemporary literature. I do not know whether I knew this at the time, but I can very well remember coming up by a slow train from Hythe and attempting at one and the same time to read the volume of stories containing
Only a Subaltern
and to make a single pipe of shag last the whole of that long journey. And I can remember that when I came at almost the same moment to Charing Cross and the death of the subaltern I was crying so hard that a friendly ticket collector asked me if I was very ill, and saw me into a cab.

What, then, has become of all these fine enthusiasms — for assuredly I was not the only one capable of enthusiasms? What has become of the young men with the long necks and the red ties; what has become of all the young maidens with the round shoulders, the dresses of curtain-serge and the amber necklaces? Where are all those of us who admired Henley and his gang? Where are all the adorers of the Pre-Raphaelites? Where are all the poets of the Rhymers’ Club? Where are all the authors of
To-day
, of
The Idler
, and
The Outlook
in its brilliant days? Somebody — I think it was myself — made a couplet running:

“Let him begone,” the mighty Wyndham cried.

And Crosland vanished and
The Outlook
died.

One had such an enthusiasm for the work of Mr. Crosland in those days, and a little later.

And where is it all gone? And why? I do not know — or perhaps I do. I went, as I say, for thirteen years into the country. I lived entirely, or almost entirely, amongst peasants. This was of course due to that idealizing of the country life which was so extraordinarily prevalent in the earlier ‘nineties amongst the disciples of William Morris and other Cockneys. It was a singularly unhealthy frame of mind which caused a number of young men, totally unfitted for it, to waste only too many good years of their lives in posing as romantic agriculturists. They took small holdings, lost their hay-crops, saw their chickens die, and stuck to it with grim obstinacy until, William Morris and Morrisism being alike dead, their feelings found no more support from the contagion of other enthusiasms. So they have mostly returned to useful work, handicapped by the loss of so many good years, and generally with ruined digestions; for the country with its atrocious food and cooking is, in England, the home of dyspepsia.

I suppose that is why England is known abroad as
das Pillenland — le pays des pilules
— the land of patent medicines.

So that although I must write it down
— atque ego in Arcadia vixi
— I am able to see, having returned after this interval to a city where the things of the spirit have as much place as can be found in the country of “price per thou.” — I am able, as the French would say, to
constater
how enormous a change has come over the face of the only city in the world where, in spite of everything, life is worth living. For, after all, London is the only place in the world where there is real freedom and real solitude, where no man’s eye is upon you, since no man cares twopence what you are, where you may be going, or what will become of you. And there we have it, the reason why London is so good a place for mankind, and a place so bitter bad at once for the arts and ideas. Rushing about as we do in huge crowds, we have no time for any solidarity; faced as we are by an incredible competition we have no heart in us for self-sacrifice, and at it as we are all day and half the night we have no time for reflection. Yet it is only of reflection that ideas are born, and it is only by self-sacrifice and by self-sacrifice again that the arts can flourish. We must write much and sacrifice much of what we have written; we must burn whole volumes; deferring to the ideas of our brother artists whom we trust, we must sacrifice other whole volumes, to achieve such a little piece of perfection that, if that too were burnt, the ashes of it would not fill a doll’s thimble. Yet before us hangs always now the scroll with the fateful words, “price per thou.”

The mention of this wonderful contrivance will extort from a French or a German writer a look of utter incredulity. They will think that you are “pulling their legs.” And then gradually you will observe to be passing into their faces an expression of extremely polite, of slightly ironical admiration:

“Ah, yes,” they will say. “You English are so practical.”

And indeed we are very practical. But it is only on the material side that we even begin to consider ways and means. Thus, lately we had an enlightening and lively discussion as to the length a “book” should have. [By “book” a six-shilling novel should, I suppose, be understood.] We were instructed that the public desires, nay, insists on, a certain fixed amount of reading matter. You might weigh a book in scales, you might measure its lines of
bourgeois
or
pica
type with a foot-rule. But your book must be able to be assayed either by weight or by measure. Indeed, nowadays your publisher when he commissions a novel, insists in his agreement that it shall be 75,000 words in length. Just imagine! You might want to write the chronicle of a family as Thackeray did in
The Newcomes,
and you must do it all in 75,000 words, or you might want to write the story of how a young man got engaged to a young woman during five accidental meetings in omnibuses. And, if you cannot do it in 4,000 words, so as to make it a “short story” for one of the popular magazines, you must extend it to 75,000 or there will be, every publisher will tell you, “no market for it.” In the earlier ‘nineties the publisher cheated his authors as a rule tyrannically enough, and, since no author ever looked at an agreement in those days, things went smoothly. The publisher on the other hand considered sometimes the quality of the work that he published, and seldom thought about the length of the book. Indeed, everything was then made more easy for the author’s activities. When I published, at the age of eighteen, my’ first novel, it was borne in upon me that there was no need to be acquainted with the mysteries of grammar — or rather of syntax, since in England there is no such thing as grammar — of syntax, of spelling or of punctuation. The author of that day could write exactly as he pleased; he could make mistakes as to dates; he could re-christen his heroine by inadvertence four times in as many chapters. But he knew that he would have three succeeding sets of proofs and revises, and that each proof and each revise would be gone through with an almost incredible care by a proof-reader who would be a man of the highest education and of a knowledge almost encyclopaedic. I once by a slip of the pen wrote the name of the painter of the “Primavera,” Buonarotti. Sure enough the proof came back marked in the margin: “Surely there is no picture of this name by Michael Angelo. Query Botticelli?” So that indeed in the ‘nineties, and before that, one had a sense not only of dignity and luxury but of security. And this was very good for writing.

Consider where we are now! In the case of the last novel but one that I published I received from the publisher the most singular and the most insolent document that I think an author could possibly receive. This requested me to mark with red ink any printer’s error and with black my own changes in the text. Just think of what this means! An author when he is correcting his proofs, if he is anywhere near worth his salt, is in a state of the most extreme tension. It is his last chance for getting his phrases musical or his words exactly right; it is an operation usually more trying than the actual writing of a book. And into this intense abstraction there is as it were to come the voice of a damned publisher exclaiming: “Red ink, if you please; that hyphen is a printer’s error.” Nowadays indeed the publisher only allows his author one proof and no revises unless the author make a horrible row about it. And the publisher’s proof-reader seems to have disappeared altogether. Last March I received three sets of proofs — forty-eight pages — in which the printer had uniformly spelled the word receive wrong. Now I know how to spell receive, and so does my typist. Yet it is a matter as to which one always has a lingering doubt. So that when nine times in forty-eight pages I found the “i” preceding the “e” I was frightened and turned to a dictionary. But do you imagine that the “reader for the press” had once noticed this? Not a bit of it. The whole forty-eight pages were guiltless of a speck from his pen, and after that I had my nerves perpetually on the stretch to find out and to examine all words like believe or deceive. My mind was in a woful state of jangle and exasperation, and the one critic who appeared to carefully have read the book remarked that I had split an infinitive. It is not that this particular thing so particularly matters; it is that the whole spirit is so atrocious and so depressing. The half-ruined libraries, we are told, badger the unfortunate publisher; the unfortunate publisher has beaten down the unfortunate printer until, I am told, the printing schedule of to-day is only 55 per cent, of what it was in 1890. As a consequence the printer will only send one set of proofs and no revises. He sacks any proof-reader whose competence commands a decent wage, so that all the really efficient “readers for the press” are said to be employed by the newspapers.