Complete works of ford m.., p.1026
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1026
“Vous voyez! Un troupeau de moutons! Un troupeau de moutons! Mais si c’eût été un curé nous aurions fait demi tour...”... “I told you so.... A flock of sheep! A flock of sheep! But if it had been a priest we should have made an about turn...
She meant to say that the first thing they had met on setting out from their mountain-lakeside château had been a flock of sheep so that she could make their shepherd an offering of a small sum—”un obole” she called it, an obolus being precisely a small sum offered to a god. You put, for instance, an obolus in the slot-machine in the temple at Delphi in order to get a little perfume to offer on the altar just as to-day you do in American cathedrals to get candles for a shrine. — She could make, then, the offering of an obolus to the shepherd to procure luck on their journey.... And hadn’t they been lucky! Doing a two days’ journey in nine hours and finding an extraordinarily good lunch for almost nothing, just before Aix-en-Provence.... Hot pâté de faisan.... Exquisite! Jugged hare.... Three pieces of rable a-piece.... And roast fowl, half a fowl to a person with cheese and fruit — for fifteen francs, vin compris.... In a little patelin de rien.... An obscure little place, lost in the mountains. The wine, of course, not magnificent but perfectly sound and undoctored. A good little beverage....
Vous voyez! That is what happens when, on setting out, you encounter a flock of sheep and give an obole to the shepherd....
But if it had been a priest.... Oh, pah.... And the lady made the gesture of holding her nose.... She would order her husband to about turn and would have hidden in her bedroom till next day.... I remember that, when I used to go riding with Conrad, if we met an ordinary Anglican clergyman he would curse between his teeth. But if it was a Catholic priest from the near-by seminary he would turn pale and swing the mare round and go home. He said that Greek Orthodox priests were the most unlucky of all. Fortunately there was no Russian church within a hundred miles of the Pent.
But you could not have a more perfect instance than that of my landlord’s wife, of the reverence in which old gods are held and the under-current of discredit that attaches to the ministrants of a later-established faith.... Which is what is meant by the patient New Yorker’s saying that a god has no honour in his own country... until he is cast down and persecuted.
§
And what particularly endears the legend of St. Martha and the gipsies to me is that, in that, the sea makes, as it were, a contact with the Great Route that went along its shores.
For half a million years civilization progressed over land ways, bearing its beautiful goods on pack-beasts and then, as the Route was smoothed out, on sleds. I like to think of the gorgeously robed heralds of the dawn arriving with their sled and pack-trains at, say, Diana Marino or Alassio.
... They would just lately, say a week before, have left the great tabu-ground of Genoa. They progressed slowly. A petition is addressed to them by the inhabitants of those fishing villages. They beg to be granted a tabu-ground of their own. Genoa is a long way for them to have to go in their dug-out boats if they wish to have any additions to their fish and oil diet and their goatskin clothes.
The great caravan sweeps majestically forward; on a front of two hundred yards it takes somewhat over a day to pass a given spot. Some sledges from the front rank fall out on an empty open spot flattened out by the natives. The sledges are unloaded. This is a poor spot; the inhabitants have little to offer but fish, fresh and dried, goat’s flesh, fresh and dried, a little amber, a great mound of sea-salt, agate, some sharks’ teeth, and a number of servants of both sexes for hire. These young men and women are ready to go on the long journey to the Scillies for what they can learn on the way. They will also be useful to the caravan in making rafts and dug-out boats for the crossing of the narrow seas.
They lay what they have along a white line diagonally intersecting the tabu-ground. The prince and the elders of the village have already set up on posts at each end of the line the tabu symbols — ideographs representing open hands. The villagers depart to the ends of the open ground. The Merchants in their silks advance and inspect what the villagers have had to offer; their servants who have been drawn from other villages along the Route turn over the heaped goods and give their views of what may be the value of the offerings. The Merchants retire to confer — as to the apparent intelligence of the villagers, as to what is the value of their merchandise as compared to the slenderness of their means, as to what progress in productiveness they may be expected to make.
They advance again, their servants carrying what they propose to offer. What they offer consists almost solely of manufactured goods; fish-spears of a most cunning balance tipped with hard flint; fish-nets of an Oriental fibre that will last many years; sail-cloths for the small sails for the dug-outs and outriggers. And then articles of luxury — cloths for dresses, mirrors of polished stones, flint and pyrite wheels for making fire come more easily, dried herbs for making infusions, cabinets for holding frail valuables, perfumes and ointments, sweetmeats and dried fruits, young orange-and shade-trees in pots.
They retire in turn and once more the villagers advance to inspect what is offered them.
It was seldom that the villagers refused what had been set out for them. The Merchants under the sign of the open hand were liberal and instructed moreover in what gear each type of village would want and most prize. There is little wonder that they were regarded as sacred. For less than those villagers had given as sacrifice to gods who had disregarded them they received continuing blessings such as they had never before known, and there was no man who would harm such a Merchant anywhere from Cathay to the Cassiterides. So they were tabu.
Theft in those days had not been invented, nor yet metals. Gold was so used for ornament that that was known as the Golden Age. So the last sleds of the great caravan that had continually been passing began to approach after a day or rather more. The Merchants loaded up their own sleds with such food and perishable articles as they had taken and fell in in the rear. The permanent things — the amber, agates, sharks’ teeth, sea-ivory, jars of wine that kept well — they cached in the tabu-ground where they would remain until they came again, going, after years, homewards. They would leave behind an instructor in the use of those tools they left and in the making and ornamenting of the stuffs and of how most fittingly to worship the supreme Principle. When they came again, if the villagers had shown themselves apt craftsmen, they would be pleased and leave them gifts from the lands that King Arthur afterwards ruled over.
Their teachings may to-day be read in the Chou-King, which is a compilation of the most ancient examples of moral and political wisdom of the ancient East, made by Confucius.
I came this morning in another sort of compilation on an example of moral and political wisdom that has kept me pleased all day.
Sir Walter Raleigh was telling Lord Chancellor Bacon, who was a grafter compared with whom any of our overlords to-day were mere beginners, how he planned certainly to enrich his sovereign James VI of Scotland and I of England. The country was at peace with Spain, after the days of the sack of Cadiz and the Armada. Nevertheless, said Raleigh, who was preparing to set out on his last expedition to the Indies, if he failed to find the famous and fabled gold mine on the Orinoco that he purposed finding, he intended to set about the Spanish treasure ships in returning, and so to lay at the feet of the Scottish Solomon wealth surpassing that of the Golcondas.
Lord Bacon, expressing the utmost horror, exclaimed that that would be the rankest piracy. In those days James was seeking to curry favour with the King of Spain and it was death, as Raleigh afterwards found, to tamper with that king’s subjects....”The rankest piracy,” said the Lord Chancellor.
But no, Raleigh answered, if you take millions it is no piracy.
§
And with that speech Raleigh withdrew the curtain that concealed the New World from the Old.... I don’t mean the Western from the Eastern Hemisphere; I mean the millions of years that had preceded from the three centuries that have since lapsed. He had prophesied Mass Production.
... And, as a corollary, looking at his kettle lid he prophesied... say television. Or if there is anything later, say that.
But the second discovery is a very minor affair. The Machine itself is a stupid Moloch; it is the stealing-a-million-isn’t-piracy psychology, the gradually evolved mentality of the Technocrat of Mount Kisco at Christmas, that has brought about our ruin.... That psychology behind the Machine. We appear, as a civilization, to be about to go down in flames. The immediate cause seems to be that our Italian kinsmen think that, sheltered behind the Machine, they will be able to do what no other race ever accomplished... steal millions with impunity from Africa. It can’t be done.
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The partition of Africa which went on between 1882 and 1914 was the occasion of what happened in that latter year... and ever since.
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I am not trying to draw down your reprobation on the descendants of Q,. Fabius Maximus. They played in their day their beautiful, massacring, martyred rôle on the Great Route. You cannot much blame them if naively they now think they should have their share in the heritage of Raleigh. They are a little late, that’s all.... It is true that they it was who began the partition of Africa. That only proves how fully in sympathy they are with our modern spirit.
§
This partition of a continent from whose results we have for so long been suffering is, when it is tabulated, an amazing instance of an afflatus that, arising no one much knows why, spreads with an amazing rapidity half across a world. No one knows why Italy should in 1883 have suddenly taken it into her head to imitate her ancestors of the Punic War. But once the country of St. Francis of the Birds had shown the way, every inhabitant of every country anywhere within reach of the poor Dark Continent seemed suddenly to be visited by a new and blinding revelation. It became obvious to each such man that he could only fulfil his
These are the happenings of only the first three years of the Partition. But these million-stealings went on as thickly with the usual fallings out of the thieves right up to the Turkish War of 1913 and into the shadow of Armageddon. In March 1896 France annexed Madagascar; and the Italians were wiped out of existence by Menelik in Abyssinia. In June’98 the Fashoda Incident set Great Britain and France within an inch of war. In October’99 the Transvaal invaded the British South African possessions. The war lasted three years and a half. In 1911 for several months France and Germany, at Agadir, were within an inch of war over Morocco. Under cover of that tension Italy declared war on Turkey with the intention of annexing Turkish N. Africa. This led directly to the first and second Balkan Wars of 1912 and’13... And those wars, by bottling up Germany from the Near East, led directly to her invasion of Belgium in 1914.
Imperial destiny, properly worship his God, sleep sound at night, and wallow in prosperity if his Government went on one or other billion-stealing expedition amongst dark-skinned peoples. Nor, indeed, was the mania restricted to the Old World. Imperial adventures are opposed to the American tradition and suspect to the better sort of inhabitants of the republic. But by 1893 America was already in the game. A United States “reform party” in Hawaii called in United States marines, deposed the queen, and succeeded in getting an annexation treaty signed at Washington.... And several times during the decade the United States was within an inch of war with Germany... over Samoa. It is difficult to imagine anything more fantastic.
§
Afflati of that sort run across the world, the world for no ascertainable reason being suddenly ripe for them as it gets at other times ready to be decimated by plagues. You will have suddenly Buddhism, Christianity, Mahometanism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Renaissances of Helleno-Latinity, spirits of the Crusades, of chivalry.... I pray thee, Sir Lancelot, that thou come again to this Land... of anti-chivalry. For a couple of centuries or more you had the whole Old World in a state of unease at the idea of passage to the West towards an India that should be billion-robbed. It was succeeded by Cortez-Pisarrism. A hundred years after Columbus even Anglo-Saxondom took courage and you had Raleighism which was the meanest kind of million-stealing, tacked oddly enough on to a kind of murderous Small Producerism. It exported unfortunate people who were to take from the natives not only their gold ornaments but their very food. It is at any rate a comment on the relative mental activity of the Mediterranean peoples and us Nordics that the first colony of Spain should have been founded on the Island of Haiti and called Novidad in 1493, whereas the abortive Roanoke Island attempt of Raleigh should not have been made till 1585. Virginia Dare founded the F.F.V. two years later. Her fate is not known.
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Let us agree to set down as a part of our pattern that the wheelless New World of pre-Cortez and Raleigh days was a near-earthly paradise. It remained over after the Old World’s Golden Age had succumbed to one inventor or another.... There is this note to be made: on the island of the Madeiran archipelago that is nearest to Africa a primitive form of wheel is used in carts and ploughs. The island is Porto Santo. It is there that Columbus is said to have married and got his Atlantic lore. The geological formation of Porto Santo is African; that of Madeira proper is American. (Geologically considered America is older than Europe.) And in between the two islands the sea runs two miles deep. So let us consider that here is the parting of the ways and that it was Europeans rather than Amerindians or other Westerns who first used wheels.
And let us consider also that the Wheel is the fruit of the tree of evil.... Just consider how satisfactory the world would become if, for a year, wheels lost the property of turning.... Think how the atmosphere of Pittsburg would be improved.... And of the satisfaction in Ethiopia.
Well, you can think all that out for yourself.... We shall be in Pennsylvania soon enough.... Before then we must think out some means of restoring the World to the Golden Age.... Or of restoring the Age to the World.
§
We are perhaps nearer to that than you think....
We are all sick of to-day. There is none of us that is not.
We are all waiting for a new revelation. We are all certain that our Age — that of the Wheel — is wrong. We are all dreaming, whether at Geneva or at Baton Rouge, of a New Order when Lancelot may come again to this oval realm.
The soil is ready, and history is waiting to repeat itself.
§
There is nothing history likes better.
We are to-day in the exact situation of the inhabitants of the world before the Deluge. That cataclysm is a few hours off. It will submerge us like a wave. When it has passed there will be very few of us left. It does not matter whether God shall assail us with water, for our sins, or whether we shall, to the greater glory of Science, murder with wheel-by-products... nearly everyone of us murdering nearly everyone else. There will be almost none of us left.... Half a dozen in Schenectady; a hundred in the delightful little Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula that I hope we may get to before we are done. A few thousand will be in the Azores, the Madeiras, in Ceuta, Algeciras, the Saintes-Maries, Diana Marino, Asia Minor, Herat... on the Hoang Ho.... Then round the world, re-emerging from the clouds of poison gas, will go an afflatus. Suddenly it shall be manifest to us what we must do to be saved. History will have repeated itself.
§
Just so, after the last Deluge — the one that destroyed the unfinished Palace of the Nations, not at Geneva, but at Babel — an afflatus — an immense Will went round the fortieth parallel of latitude N. The former Mason and Dixon Line re-established itself. (We Nordics had naturally, with our efficiency, completely eradicated ourselves... then, as to-morrow we shall.)
That immense Will kept humanity to the decencies, not by Laws but by custumals. If you like, it was the product of thousands of years of pre-diluvian experience. If you prefer, it was the manifestation of innocence. No one desired to harm anyone else because the world needed all its manpower; no one desired to dispossess anyone else because there were too many possessions.... As if four people had been turned loose in an empty Macy’s and told to help themselves.
In other words, there is no imaginable reason why in a world of softly equable climate and fertile soil with no excess of population, the idea of murder as the chief, if not the sole, means to wealth should ever have been born.
§
What we need is before all to realize that there are no short cuts in the world.
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The brand of Cain was set on a brow tortured by jealousy, not by covetousness, and the sons of Noah had all their possessions in common. Yet to-day it is not merely in New York that the only road to Utopia seems to be attainable by setting millions of people up against a wall.
... There are sixteen million Jews in the United States, said the Technocrat.
... That’s a problem, said Dreiser.
... Set ’em up against a wall, said the Technocrat.
You will hear that conversation going on Mont Blanc as on Mount Kisco; in Tokio as in Buenos Aires. Therefore I beseech thee, Sir Lancelot, that thou return again into this realm....
For unless something of the sort happens, unless some Arthur and his Paladins return, I do not see how this universal wave — this Deluge — of bloodthirstiness can do anything but return us to the Dark Ages.
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“Symbols,” says you. And why not? I take it that there is no man of reason to-day but believes that Holy Writ with its symbols is the most reliable and most inspired history of the world; and certainly the Scientific Historian, if he had any sense, would see to it that there shall be set up against a wall all the sixteen million descendants of the people who evolved that epic.
