THE ENGLISH NOVEL

From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad

by FORD MADOX FORD LONDON CONSTABLE & CO. 1930

PUBLISHED BY Constable & Company Limited London W. C. 2 BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS LEIPZIG Oxford University Press Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

v

AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

To Hugh Walpole.

MY DEAR WALPOLE,—

This little book was intended at the time it was written solely for the consumption of students in the United States at a time when I had arrived at a decision to publish nothing more in the country of my birth. A curious set of circumstances all happening on the same day have made me change my decision, at least as to this book. In the first place I received in the morning the present publisher’s offer to publish the book; in the afternoon some kindly person gave me a copy of the New York Herald’s Literary Supplement containing your far too eulogistic references to myself; and in the evening a Rhodes Scholar from one of the Oxford Colleges told me that in that place of education typewritten and then mimeographed copies of this work were—the book being unobtainable in England—being used by certain students as a textbook viin their English classes. They were all, I understand, Rhodes Scholars.

I had by that time turned down the publisher’s offer. Indeed, I had thought that the publisher must be mad, for he must be as aware as I that a good average of English readers of my works has for many years been about four hundred. I do not mean to say that that is all that English editions of my books have sold, for there is a fashion in the United States of ordering the first editions (which are generally the London ones) of certain authors, those including my fortunate self. And the first edition of this book has appeared so long ago in the United States that that sale must be lost. But the thought of all those Rhodes Scholars having to take that trouble made me wish to make the matter easier for their devoted selves, and the reading of your words coming on top of so many generosities of yours towards me as writer made me determine to manifest some sense of my real gratitude towards yourself. And how could I do it better than by addressing to you a work, however small, on the subject of an art that you have for so long, so steadfastly, and so unswervingly pursued?

I have never felt so mortified with myself viias when on the occasion of a public dinner given to us, in conjunction I think, in New York, you, speaking first, talked of my work with such enthusiasm and such enviable generosity—for to know how to be so generous is a thing for which one may well be envied!—that I was covered with confusion and quite literally had the tears in my eyes. I was indeed so affected as to be totally unable to make any adequate reply and must have seemed curmudgeonly in the extreme to our audience.

And then, subsequently during a tour of lectures at the English Classes of certain American Universities, I found that you had spoken of me already to them with the same magnificent generosity, so that I understood that it was your praise of my work that had actually secured me the invitation to deliver those lectures—why, then I conceived towards yourself a warmth of feeling of which you can be only too little aware and I far, far too little able to express. Why should you go out of your way to do these things? I have never done you any service; I have never in that city which for long now has been my spiritual home heard of any other English novelist going out of his way to viiispeak a kind word for any other one, and, that city being the immense whispering gallery that it is, I have heard of many unkind sayings as to my works and much unkinder ones as to my person uttered there in public and private by visiting English novelists. But you just came there and ran about and said in innumerable places the dearest things—dearest to me; just, as the saying is, for

the love of God. Because how can you retain enthusiasms for books who must have read so many?

I do not think that these things are too private between us to be spoken of. For in the weary business that is the writing of books the sudden discovery of generosities towards oneself by persons hardly personally known to one—it must be twenty-three years or so since, in the old English Review days and a little after we infrequently met until we thus again in Gotham came together—such sudden discoveries of generosities are so refreshing against the dust and the haze of the road that is always uphill that their publication seems almost a duty. For how different might not have been the history of that which I am here tracing had such a sense of the co-operative thing that our art ixis, distinguished the long line of its practitioners from Cædmon to ... oh, to whom you will! Such a sense as must be yours....

The reason why I did not wish to publish this work in England was simply that, in that country, I have never found anyone to take the remotest interest in the subject and such occasional opuscules as I have there devoted to it have invariably been received with very bitter disfavour. Because it is obviously an impertinence in a novelist to insist that his art is an art or of service to the republic, and as not more than four hundred English read my novels, the craftsman’s notes of a person so ignored can have little or no interest. In the United States it is different. Even if I had no following there, the interest taken in the technical sides of any arts or processes is, in that country of intellectual curiosities, so keen, that I should without scruple have ventured on publishing for the benefit of students the notes that have occurred to me during the thirty-seven years in which I have been publishing novels. For I must be pretty nearly the doyen of English writers of the imaginative type—I mean of course in dates of publication, not in terms of age and of course not

xin terms of merit. And if, faint yet pursuing, I have been able to keep on finding American publishers during such a long space of time, there must be there some sort of a public that will take a little interest in the professional matters that so passionately have interested me. And I do not adopt an apologetic tone towards this work. I may be perfectly wrong in almost everything that I say. If I am, that is the end of me. But the great use of technical discussion is that it arouses interest in the subject discussed. I have had in my day a great number of disciples—mostly of course on the Western side of the Atlantic—and several of them have risen to positions of considerable prominence and are doing work of great beauty. But there is not one of them who to-day acts in any way according to the maxims that I enjoined on him or her. And that is how it should be, the new generation attaining its eminences by using the maxims of the generation preceding as its jumping-off posts. And if the older generation can get its craftsman’s maxims clearly expressed, the

process of demolition is all the easier and more thorough.

So, my dear Walpole, I at least see it. xiAnd since the book is written and as if by force majeure makes its appearance in our country, I do desire that its theories should secure as wide an attention as may be. So I have adopted the stratagem of attaching your name to it. Nevertheless, my gratitude is very profound, and it is in all sincerity that I inscribe myself

Your humble, obedient and very thankful servant, F. M. F.

xiii

This book was written in New York, on board the S.S. Patria, and in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August, 1927. For the purpose of rendering it more easily understood by the English reader I have made certain alterations in phrases, in Paris during the last four days of 1929 and the first two of 1930.

xv

CHAPTER ONE THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD

1

One finds—or at any rate I have always found—English History relatively easy to grasp because in it it is not difficult to see a pattern of what some one has called Freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent. One may or may not agree with the statement, one may or may not like the fact, if it is a fact, that it sets forth; but at least it gives us that pattern, some sort of jumping-off place, something by which one may measure and co-relate various phases of the story. The histories of most other races are more difficult to grasp or follow because they are less systematized and more an affair of individuals. One may be aware that the pre-Revolution history of France is an affair of power gradually centralizing itself on the throne, and that 2the Fronde was an episode in that progression. Nevertheless, the Fronde with its violent personalities, its purely individual intrigues, its Cardinals, Queens, Condés, Chevreuses and the rest, was a baffling affair to follow, and obscures the issue which doubtless was that, all power being concentrated under

one hat, the neck which supported the head which supported that hat was easy to strike off.

But when it comes to the History of Literature—and to that of the Novel in particular, almost the exact inverse is the case. Whereas almost every country other than England—or indeed every race other than Anglo-Saxondom—has a tradition of literature in which some sort of precedent broadens down into some other, it would appear that however docile the Anglo-Saxon may be in the hands of politicians or leaders—usually of a Leftwards complexion—the moment any æsthetic discipline proposes itself for his direction he becomes at least as refractory as any Condé and almost more intriguing than any Chevreuse.

Any sort of English writer takes any sort of pen and on any sort of paper with in his hair whatever sort of vine-leaves you will and at his elbow any nectar from metheglin to 3Chateau Yquem or pale ale, writes any sort of story in any sort of method—or in any sort of mixture of any half-dozen methods. So, if he have any of the temperament of an artist, you have a Fielding or a Trollope, a Samuel Butler or a George Meredith, each rising as a separate peak but each absolutely without interrelation with any other.

That was never better exemplified than quite lately when you had—all living simultaneously but all, alas, now dead—Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain. Each was a considerable figure but each sat, as it were, alone on his little peak surrounded by his lay satellites, and each was entirely uninfluenced by the work of all the others—two solitary Englishmen, two Americans and one alien. Whether or no there was any resultant literary movement I am about to try to trace for you, looking at the matter with the eyes of a craftsman surveying his own particular job.

In the case of any other country or race such a proceeding would be comparatively easy. In France, for instance, living at the same time as, but all predeceasing, the distinguished Anglo-Saxons and the alien of 4genius that I have named above, you had Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, the Goncourt brothers, Gautier, Daudet—six Frenchmen and an alien of beautiful genius. They all met frequently, dining together almost weekly at Brébant’s—where Henry James in the wake of Turgenev dined from time to time too. With amiability, with acidity, with passion or frenzies of hatred they discussed words, cadences, forms, progressions of effect—or the cannon-strokes with which one concludes short short-stories. They were during those meetings indifferent to fame, wealth, the course of public affairs, ruin, death. For them there was only one enduring Kingdom—that of the Arts—and only one Republic that shall be everlasting: the Republic of Letters.

The resultant literary movement—for with their deaths it crossed the Channel—I shall endeavour to trace, and the enterprise will concern itself with the modern English novel. For the Art of Writing is an affair as international as are all the other Arts—as International, as Co-operative and as mutually uniting. Shakespeare could not have written as he did had not Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Plutarch preceded him, nor could Flaubert 5have written Madame Bovary as he wrote it had there not been before then the Clarissa Harlowe of Richardson. Nor yet could Conrad have written Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim had Flaubert not written Bouvard et Pécuchet or Alphonse Daudet, Jack.

It is, at any rate, in this spirit that, in this small monograph, I shall present to you my reflections on the English Novel—which is the same thing as the Novel—and the pattern that, for me, it seems to make down the short ages during which it has existed. It will differ very widely from the conclusions arrived at—and above all from the estimates formed by—my predecessors in this field who have seldom themselves been imaginative writers let alone novelists, and who, by the exigencies of their professions, have usually been what it is the custom to call academic. That I cannot help. For the benefit of the reader who wishes to know what is generally thought of these subjects I have tried to state along with my own differing conclusions what that general thought is. If, I mean, I belabour the winking lewdness of Tom Jones, I am careful to point out that most of my professional predecessors or contemporaries beatify Fielding because 6of his refreshing carelessness in most matters to which decent men pay attention. The young, earnest student of literature for professional

purposes should, if he desires good marks, write in his thesis for examination pretty well the opposite of what I have here set down. But, in the end, it is as useful to have something that will awaken you by its disagreements with yourself as to live for ever in concord with somnolent elders. It gives you another point of view, though you may return to the plane from which you started. I was once watching a painter painting a field of medicinal poppies which from where he sat appeared quite black. Suddenly, he grasped me by the wrist and dragged me up a small hill. From there that field appeared dark-purple shot with gold. I said: “It doesn’t make any difference, does it, to your composition?” He answered: “No, it doesn’t make any difference, but I wish the d—d things would not do it, for, when I have finished, I shall have to come up here and do them all over again!”

2

Since the day when Thackeray obsequiously apologized to the world and his readers for 7being a mere novelist, in the interests of a pompous social system which decreed that the novel should not be seriously regarded and the novelist himself be stigmatized as something detrimental to good order and the decorous employment of spare time—since, then, Thackeray poked fun at the greatest of all his books which may well be regarded, if you will, as the greatest work in the English language, an immense change has occurred in the relative place accorded to the Novel in the Anglo-Saxon social cosmogony. Because, as novelist, Thackeray felt his social position insecure, he must attempt to retrieve himself by poking fun at his book and so proving that at least he did not take the Novel seriously, his heart being in the right place be his occupation never so ungentlemanly. So he must needs write his epilogue as to the showman rolling up his marionettes in green baize and the rest of it.

To-day, however, even the most fugitive of novelists takes his work more seriously and, perhaps all unconsciously, the public accords to the more serious amongst the novelists an attention that formerly it accorded solely to politicians, preachers, scientists, medical men, and the like. This is because 8the novel has become indispensable to the understanding of life.

It is, that is to say, the only source to which you can turn in order to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives. I use the words “entire lives” advisedly.

In older days—dating back to improvement in locomotion—it was possible for anyone, whatever his station, to observe, at any rate roughly as it were, a complete cross-section of the lives from cradle to coffin of a whole social order. In England up to the days of the stage-coach, families were planted on the land practically to all eternity and even within my memory it was nearly impossible for the agricultural labourer to move from one parish—nay, from one farm to another. One of the most vivid of my souvenirs as a boy was seeing a ploughman weep on a great down. He was weeping because he had five children and a bad master who paid him thirteen and six a week and he was utterly unable to get together the guinea that it would cost him to hire a farm wagon and move his sticks of furniture to another and better farm. Nevertheless that man knew more about human lives and their tides and vicissitudes than 9I or any other town-dweller in an age of shiftings.

He could follow the lives of local peer, local squire, doctor, lawyer, gentleman-farmer, tenant farmer, butcher, baker, barber, parson, gamekeeper, water-warden, and so on right down to those of the great bulk of the population, his fellows and equals. He could follow them from the time the kid-glove was affixed to the door-knocker as a symbol of birth and until the passing-bell heralded their disappearance into the clay in the shadow of the church-walls. And although that was more emphatically true in Great Britain, the first home of the English novel, it was almost equally true—mutatis mutandis—of the earlier settled colonial districts in the United States. Until, say, the early forties of the nineteenth century it must have been almost equally difficult to remove from Rochester, N.Y., as from the Rochester of Dickens, and as difficult to move from the Birmingham that gave to the world the word Brummagem as a term of contempt, as from the Birmingham in a Southern State of the North American Republic.

Then, with ease of locomotion came the habit of flux—which is infinitely more developed 10to-day in the United States than in Great Britain. In London and the urban districts that house by far the greater bulk of the English population the prevalence of the seven years’ lease has hitherto tended to anchor families in one spot for at least that length of time, but even that space is not sufficient to give a family much insight into the lives and habits of its neighbours. In any case it is significant that novel-reading is almost infinitely more a permanent habit in the United States than in Great Britain, and the position of the imaginative writer in so far more satisfactory.

In observing a social phenomenon like the novel these social changes must be considered. The fact is that gossip is a necessity for keeping the mind of humanity as it were aerated and where, owing to lack of sufficiently intimate circumstances in communities gossip cannot exist, its place must be supplied—and it is supplied by the novel. You may say that for the great cities of to-day its place is taken by what in the United States is called the “tabloid” and in England the “yellow” or “gutter” Press. But these skilful sensational renderings of merely individual misfortunes, necessary 11as they are to human existence and sanity in the great cities, are yet too highly coloured by their producers, and the instances themselves are too far from the normal to be of any great educational value. An occasional phrase in, say, a Peaches-Browning case may now and then ring true, but the sound common sense of great publics is aware that these affairs are too often merely put-up jobs to attach any importance to them as casting light on normal human motives.