Complete works of ford m.., p.919
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 919
Thomas Hardy at Dorchester was at that time resenting the outcry against Tess of the d’Urbervilles and getting ready with Jude the Obscure to abandon novel writing. George Meredith at Box Hill was immensely eminent and writing Lord Ormont and His Aminta and The Amazing Marriage. Mr Swinburne was living at Putney with Mr Watts Dunton. The Poet Laureate was – I think – Mr Alfred Austin. But all these Great Ones, like Mr Kipling, sat apart on their little hills. The English Great Writer is seldom intercommunicative, living in the company, usually, of several devoted females, a lawyer, some scientists and a few parasitic beings, and mingling very little with his kind.
There had been – I am talking of 1898 or thereabouts – a brief moment when England had been a nest of singing birds and in that moment Mr James and his attendant Americans had played their part. There had been, that is to say, the Henley gang and the Yellow Book group. Henley was a great, rough, tortured figure but a considerable and fine influence. Without him Stevenson would hardly have bulked as he did; and such writers as Whibley, Wedmore, George Warrington Steevens and Marriott Watson made up with Henley a formidable group. In his National Observer Henley serialised Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus and I have always liked to think that according to Conrad it was Henley who recommended the author of the Nigger to ask me to collaborate with him. As I shall afterwards point out, that can hardly have been true but Conrad always maintained that it was.
The ‘note’ of Henley and his gang was on the whole one of physical force and Tory reaction. They revelled in the good brown earth, the linotype machine, motor-cars as promotive of thought and such things. The Yellow Book movement had – as became a largely American movement – much more really a technically literary impulse. The periodical was founded by Henry Harland the author of The Cardinal’s Snuffbox. Its principal backer was Henry James. It fell with the trial of the miserable Oscar Wilde.
Wilde I can never forgive. You may maintain that he had a right to live his own life and for the sake of sheer vanity get himself into Reading Gaol. For there was no reason for his going to prison and the last thing that the British authorities wanted to do was to put him there. On the day of his arrest his solicitor received warning that the warrant would not be issued until after seven p.m., the night train for Paris leaving at 6.50 from Charing Cross. I remember still the feeling of anxiety and excitement of that day. Practically everybody in London knew what was agate.
Wilde went to his solicitor – Mr Robert Humphreys: I once had him for my lawyer – about eleven in the morning. Humphreys at once began to beg him to go to Paris. Wilde declared that the authorities dared not touch him. He was too eminent and there were too many others implicated. To that he stuck. He was immovable and would listen to no argument. There came a dramatic moment in the lawyer’s office. Wilde began to lament his wasted life. He uttered a tremendous diatribe about his great talents thrown away, his brilliant genius dragged in the mud, his early and glorious aspirations come to nothing. He became almost epic. Then he covered his face and wept. His whole body was shaken by his sobs. Humphreys was extremely moved. He tried to find consolations.
Wilde took his hands down from his face. He winked at Humphreys and exclaimed triumphantly:
‘Got you then, old fellow.’ He added: ‘Certainly I shall not go to Paris.’ He was arrested that evening.
I always intensely disliked Wilde – faintly as writer and intensely as human being. No doubt as a youth he was beautiful, frail and illuminated. But when I knew him he was heavy and dull. I only once heard him utter an epigram. He used to come to my grandfather’s with some regularity at one time – every Saturday, I should say. My grandfather was then known as the Grandfather of the pre-Raphaelites and Wilde passed as a pre-Raphaelite poet.
He would sit beside the high fireplace and talk very quietly – mostly about public matters, Home Rule for Ireland and the like. My grandfather was a rather down-to-the-ground sort of person so that Wilde to him talked very much like anyone else and seemed glad to be in a quiet room beside a high fireplace.
Once, at a garden party at the Bishop of London’s, I heard a lady ask him if he were going to the dinner of the O.P. Club that evening. The O.P. Club had some grievance against Wilde. It was a dramatic society or something of the sort. Dramatic organisations are excitable and minatory when they dislike anybody. It was a dramatic society that booed and hissed at Henry James when he took his curtain call after Guy Domville. But really they were venting their wrath against Sir George Alexander, the actor manager who had that evening for the first time made a charge for programmes. So Wilde would have had a rough house at the dinner of the O.P. Club. He therefore replied to the lady at the Bishop’s party:
‘I go to the dinner of the O.P. Club. I should be like a poor lion in a den of savage Daniels.’
I saw Wilde several times in Paris and he was a truly miserable spectacle, the butt usually of a posse of merciless students. He possessed – and it was almost his only possession – a walking stick of ebony with ivory insertions, the handle representing an elephant. This he loved very much because it had been the gift of someone – Lady Mount Temple, I think. He would be of an evening in one or other disagreeable bouge in Montmartre. The students would get about him. It was the days of the apaches. There would be a fellow there called Bibi La Touche or something of the sort. The students would point him out to Wilde and declare that Bibi had taken a fancy to his stick and would murder him on his homeward way if he did not surrender it. Wilde would cry, the tears pouring down his great cheeks. But always he surrendered his stick. The students would return it to his hotel next morning when he would have forgotten all about it. I once or perhaps twice rescued his stick for him and saw him home. It would not be agreeable. He did not have a penny and I, as a student, had very little more. I would walk him down the miserably lit Montmartrois streets, he completely silent or muttering things that I did not understand. He walked always as if his feet hurt him, leaning forward on his precious cane. When I thought we were near enough to the Quartier for my resources to let me pay a cab – usually in the neighbourhood of the Boulevard de la Madeleine – we would get into one and would at last reach the rue Jacob. This happened I think twice, but the memory is one as if of long-continued discomfort. It was humiliating to dislike so much one so unfortunate. But the feeling of dislike for that shabby and incoherent immensity was unavoidable. It has proved so strong that, the locality taking on an aspect of nightmare, I have only once since visited Montmartre at night in, say, thirty-five years and then found it very disagreeable. Of course the sight of the young people, like starlings, tormenting that immense owl had a great deal to do with my revulsions.
On one occasion – I should think in the Chat Noir – I was with Robert de la Sizéranne and, looking at Wilde who was across the room, he said:
‘Vous voyez cet homme là. Il péchait par pur snobisme.’
He meant that, even in his offences against constituted society, Wilde was out to épater les bourgeois – to scandalise the middle classes. Sizéranne added: ‘Cela le faisait chaque fois vomir!’
That was pretty generally the French view and, on the face of it, I should say it was just. Sizéranne who was then accounted a very sagacious critic of art, mostly pre-Raphaelite, moved in French circles where Wilde had once throned it almost as an emperor.
The rather idle pursuit of épate-ing the bourgeoisie was very much the fashion amongst the Yellow Book group who surrounded Wilde. In order to ‘touch the Philistine on the raw’ as they called it, the Thompsons, Dowsons, Davidsons, Johnsons and the rest found it necessary to introduce an atmosphere of the Latin Quarter in its lighter – or more dismal – side, into London haunts. The Latin Quarter is in fact a very grave, silent and austere region. But it has its Bohemian fringes – and a non-Anglo-Saxon population bred to survive such dissipations as are there to be found. Anglo-Saxons are not so bred. They resemble the populations of Central Africa succumbing before the clothing, gin and the creeds of white men. That in the bulk. There are of course individuals who survive.
The Bodley Head group did not survive. They succumbed in London’s Soho haunts – to absinthe, to tuberculosis, to starvation, to reformers or to suicide. But in their day they were brilliantly before the public and London was more of a literary centre then than it has ever been before or since.
The Book World was then electric. Books were everywhere. Accounts of the personal habits of writers filled the daily papers. Minute volumes of poems in limited editions fetched unheard prices at auctions. It was good to be a writer in England. And it is to be remembered that, as far as that particular body was concerned, the rewards were earned. They were skilful and earnest writers. They were an immense improvement on their predecessors. They were genuine men of letters.
I was looking last night at the works of Ernest Dowson. They are faint; like dry-point etchings. Their daringnesses are the common coin of today. But they have the authentic note. When you read them you have a faint flavour of what was good in those days – the tentativeness of thought, the delicacy, the refinement of point of view. In their day they were international and brilliant. I do not think they will ever appear ignoble.
But all that went with the trial of Wilde.
I hardly came at all in contact with either the Henley or the Yellow Book group at that date, though later, I just knew Henley, and Messrs Whibley, Wedmore and Marriott Watson. I thought then that the others were too harshly brilliant for me. So I was astonished to find in the work of Dowson just now, almost New England delicacies – an as it were Bostonian after-taste. And, if you consider what a considerable part was played by Americans of that type in the art worlds of London and Paris you will be less astonished to find that flavour.
Those were days when James and Howells and Harland and Whistler and Sargent and Abbey, not to mention lesser lights like G. H. Boughton, more popular ones like Bret Harte or immensely great ones like Mark Twain, bulked enormously in politely advanced artistic circles in London.
The Yellow Book was, as I have pointed out, an American venture and made for those American virtues of delicacy, French technical achievement and New England refinements – thus touching hands with both sides of the Atlantic. And the Yellow Book as nearly captured the stronghold of the Established Comfortable that London is as later – and I hope to show you that – the American movement led by Ezra and called indifferently Vorticism, Futurism, Imagism so nearly achieved that feat. The condemnation of Wilde wiped out the one, a larger cataclysm the other.
Wilde, then, brought down the Yellow Book group and most of the other lyrists of a London that for its year or two had been a nest of singing birds. James and Harland were almost the only survivors. Poets died or fled to other climes, publishers also fled, prosateurs were fished out of the Seine or reformed and the great public said: ‘Thank heavens, we need not read any more poetry!’
You may think that an exaggeration. So did I at the time. But, just after the papers had announced the conviction and sentence on Wilde, I was going up the steps of the British Museum. On them I met Dr Garnett, the Keeper of Printed Books, a queer, very tall, lean, untidily bearded Yorkshire figure in its official frock coat and high hat. I gave him the news. He looked for a moment away over the great yard of the Museum, with its pigeons and lamps and little lions on the railings. Then he said:
‘Then that means the death of English poetry for fifty years.’
I can still hear the high tones of my incredulous laughter. At the moment he seemed to me an old obstinate crank, though I knew well how immense was his North Country commonsense.
Having a passion for cats, Egyptology, palmistry and astrology, the great scholar could assume some of the aspect of deaf obstinacy that distinguishes cats that do not intend to listen to you. He cast the horoscopes of all his friends and reigning sovereigns, he knew the contents of a hundred thousand books and must have stroked as many thousand ‘pussies’, pronouncing the ‘pus’ to rhyme with ‘bus’. He was inseparable from his umbrella with which he once beat off two thieves when at five in the morning he had gone to Covent Garden to buy the household fruit. He was the author of the most delightful volume of whimsico-classical stories that was ever written and the organiser of the compilers of the catalogue of the British Museum Library – an achievement that should render him immortal if his Twilight of the Gods fails to do so. He would say to you that the ancient Egyptians were the only really civilised race, for, when fires occurred in their great buildings, they organised environing cordons, not to put out the fires but to see that no cats re-entered their burning homes.
On this occasion he held his tophatted head obstinately and deafly on one side and repeated, with half closed eyes:
‘That means the death blow to English poetry. It will not be resuscitated for fifty years.’… We have a decade or so to wait for that phoenix. Dr Garnett was in the right of it…
I never, as I have said, saw much of that brilliant group. I was at that time mainly a horticulturist. I was attempting to promote the growing of corn, tobacco and wine on my own land in England. Hence my early visits to the United States. I may add as a detail that I have grown as good Golden Bantam and Country Gentlemen in Kent and Sussex as I have ever seen grown or planted in Virginia. But as for wine and tobacco, the Inland Revenue effectually stopped that by enforcing the duty of £50 per acre on all of either sort of crop. The land which I occupied at Limpsfield was stifled by thistles. I made several experiments in their quick eradication, more particularly by intensive plantations of potatoes which has become the standard method. Whilst at Limpsfield I wrote an article on this subject and submitted it to several literary journals. It was sent back.
Crane came to see me whilst I was doing these things in the troglodytic cottage that he mistook for a baronial ruin. He was brought there by Mr Edward Garnett, the son of the Keeper of Printed Books, who will be as immortal amongst publishers’ advisers as was his father among cataloguers. I don’t think Crane wanted to come and see me because he took me for a pre-Raphaelite poet. But in Limpsfield there was a strong get-together movement in those days and poor Crane had to come and plant a rose-tree beside the lintel of the door which was formed of half a mill-wheel.
The rose-tree was there a few years ago. You may no doubt still have souvenirs. I may add that Conrad and I once planted an orange-tree grown from a pip under a south wall at the Pent. That also was still growing when I visited the place after Conrad’s death. It grew no higher than the rim of the wall, the north wind cutting it back; but the fact should to the incredulous be a testimony to the climatic mildness of that Gulf-Streamed part of the shores of England.
Crane could use a spade all right. He could, that is to say, lift a heavy, wrought steel, sharp implement and, bringing it down from the full extent of his uplifted arm smash it into the yellow clay between a couple of rocks with accuracy and all his small weight duly in operation. I watched him with the sardonic attention that the inhabitants of Kent and Sussex bestow on all foreigners. One did not credit writers and particularly American journalists with much practical knowledge or skill. I once was visited by a fellow who wrote and talked about camping in the Rockies with the volubility and technical knowledge of a man who had been a lumberer all his life. I was then cutting timber and we gave him an axe. He grasped it by the extreme end of the helve, whirled it round his head as if he were throwing the hammer at the Olympic sports and, letting it glance at the tree-trunk, all but cut his leg off. My foreman turned paler than I have ever seen a man turn and we set that fellow to carrying logs and saw that it was the big ones he carried. I still have not forgiven him the scare he gave us.
But Crane was all right. He could use a spade or an axe; he rode well. And he had as I have said an enviable trick with a gun. He would put a piece of sugar on a table and sit still till a fly approached. He held in his hand a Smith and Wesson. When the fly was by the sugar he would twist the gun round in his wrist. The fly would die, killed by the bead-sight of the revolver. That is much more difficult than it sounds. One may be able to use a gun pretty well, but I never managed to kill a fly with the barrel much less the bead-sight.
I don’t know that physical gifts are necessary to the imaginative writer. But I think a certain delicacy in handiwork goes often with accuracy of observation, just as the patience of the field naturalist goes with good prose. Hudson, White of Selborne and Waterton were three of our best prose writers, Hudson the best of all. For myself, I know that the writer whose cadences have most intimately influenced me were those of Thomas Edwardes, the Scottish cobbler-naturalist who could neither read nor write till long after middle life – and after following birds alongside the sea on the links of Banffshire for years and years.
In the Middle Ages they used to say that the proper man was one who had written a book, built a house, planted a tree and begotten a child. I don’t know that Crane ever built a house. He avoided having children because he was afraid of giving them the heritage of tuberculosis. But as a writer of books he was incomparable and the Limpsfield tree that he planted is alive at this day to testify to his handiwork.
There are few men that I have liked – nay, indeed, revered – more than Crane. He was so frail and so courageous, so preyed upon and so generous, so weighted upon by misfortunes and so erect in his carriage. And he was such a beautiful genius.
When I was at the Front, on Kemmell Hill in 1916, I had – I have elsewhere related it but I will here re-adumbrate it since it is almost the most singular tribute that one can pay to a writer – the curious experience of so reading myself into the Red Badge of Courage which is a story of the American Civil War, that, having to put the book down and go out of my tent at dawn, I could not understand why the men I saw about were in khaki and not in the Federal grey. And I can still see the Bride coming to Yellow Sky, the barbarous and abrupt waves that tossed about the Open Boat, the ring of the gun-muzzle in the saloon of the White Mice… The beautiful genius!
