The purpose of this volume is to bring together essays very few of which have been republished in books before. Because Ford wrote critical essays all his writing life – well over five hundred periodical contributions have been discovered – it seemed to the present editors that it would make sense to allow the general reader access to the best of them, especially now that Ford enjoys a rather general recognition as a major twentieth-century author.
Perhaps these essays will send the reader to Ford’s many books of criticism, such as Thus to Revisit, Portraits from Life, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, The English Novel, and The March of Literature; and to the essays in collections such as Sondra Stang’s A Ford Madox Ford Reader, Frank MacShane’s Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, Brita Lindberg-Seyested’s Pound/Ford, Martin Stannard’s Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier. Work now in print was not included in the present volume since it seemed wasteful to use the limited space available to us reprinting material easily accessible.
The essays are arranged chronologically. They span nearly forty years, covering most of Ford’s publishing life, from his formative collaboration with Conrad to his last years. Three phases predominate, however, and they correspond to the three phases of his greatest creative intensity, when he was not only prolific, and at his best, as a critic, but was also writing his best fiction. From 1907 to 1910, when completing the Fifth Queen trilogy and writing A Call, Ford was producing weekly reviews for the Daily Mail and The Tribune, then writing for the magazine he founded and edited, The English Review. From 1913–14, while writing his best pre-war novel, The Good Soldier, and into 1915, he contributed weekly essays to The Outlook. Then in the mid-1920s, while working on his post-war masterpiece Parade’s End, he founded and wrote for a new magazine, the transatlantic review, as well as writing for other periodicals, and producing one of his best books of critical reminiscence, Joseph Conrad.
These essays, most of which give us Ford’s response as a reader to work just published, will perhaps help us to understand why Pound claimed in 1914 that Ford was ‘the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance’, and Marianne Moore that Ford’s reviews ‘were of inestimable value to me, as method’.1 Few people today have heard of most of the books Ford reviewed in the pages of The Tribune, The Outlook, The Daily Mail and other newspapers and magazines. His portraits included writers we no longer read or whose names are only familiar to us from literary histories: Hall Caine, Mrs Mary E. Mann, Maurice Hewlett, Charles Doughty, Lord Dunsany, W.H. Mallock. Many of the books are clearly period pieces not likely to be exhumed. But because Ford asks the right questions when confronting a new work by a contemporary, these reviews of now forgotten books and the larger questions about writing they raise make them worth rescuing.
Interspersed with these are a large number of reviews of more significant figures: Shaw, Pound, Anatole France, Joyce, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Conrad, Hardy, Schnitzler, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Frost. In both categories, one reads Ford’s reviews for what he tells us about literature and its relation to a given time, and in doing that he communicates to us his distinctive note – genial and serious, civilized; if sometimes quirky, wrong-headed, and mildly outrageous. Clearly, it is immensely valuable to have the immediate response of an intelligent contemporary, especially one like Ford, who was at the same time reshaping the literary landscape.
Indeed, if all the literary portraits from The Daily Mail, The Tribune, and The Outlook were published as a group, it would provide a great source for understanding the literary situation of that time: the literary diary of one of the great minds of modern literature, showing how the modern movements (Impressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Modernism) appeared in the cultural milieu of early twentieth-century London.
He was not necessarily interested in ‘judicious’ criticism. Rather, his instinct as a critic was bold and excessive – to follow wherever the friction between the work and his temperament might take him. Always deeply engaged, always vital, his writing tended to proceed by leaps, even overstatement, never to provide a final judgement on the work he was discussing, but to arouse a response in his reader, to provoke thought rather than foreclose it. His deliberately sweeping statements were not meant to be taken literally, but he did want to be taken seriously. Hence, he was never cautious and did not mind being shocking. As he said in The English Novel,
what I am about to write is highly controversial and [… the reader] must take none of it too much au pied de la lettre. I don’t mean to say that it will not be written with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared to do a good deal of the work for himself – within his own mind.
On some of the sweeping statements of that book, he said the reader must object ‘as violently as possible: then, in reaction, thinking it over he will probably find there is something in what I say’.2
For Ford, the purpose of his criticism was to force the reader to be open to new impressions. The great enemy of art, as he saw it, was received opinion, stock responses, following conventions for conventions’ sake. To lose touch with reality – with the world outside of one’s self – would be to forestall the kind of reaction he had to reading for the first time the first Lawrence story he saw, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. In Portraits from Life he gives a marvellous vignette of that exemplary close-reading.3
His criticism is never systematic, theoretical, abstract, academic. He hated systems and the systematizing mind, the kind of mind he thought of as Prussian, resulting in the kind of work then emanating from German universities, as he hated language which loses touch with the spoken word, poetic diction, conventional language, academic jargon. (The parallels with Wordsworth’s famous preface to Lyrical Ballads are striking.) For him all writing had to be an individual rendering of what an individual really perceived. Even though he claimed to have hated Ruskin as one of the bearded Victorian greats who made his childhood miserable, Ruskin stated Ford’s credo as clearly as anyone:
… the greatest thing the human soul does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.4
Seeing clearly is what most of us do not do most of the time. It follows that when an artist sees clearly, and communicates to us his vision, something in our world has altered: our world has been transformed. According to Ford, in Provence, ‘the authentic note of the great poet is to modify for you the aspect of the world and of your relationship to the world’, and in his introduction to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, he develops this idea:
a writer holds a reader by his temperament. That is his true ‘gift’ – what he receives from whoever sends him into the world. It arises from how you look at things. If you look at and render things so that they appear new to the reader you will hold his attention [….] You have had a moment of surprise and then your knowledge is added to. The word ‘author’ means ‘someone who adds to your consciousness’.5
Thus the artist must be an individual with an individual manner of seeing, an individual temperament, yet he is also part of a larger whole, which Ford liked to call ‘the Republic of letters’, which with the other arts is ‘the only real civilizing agency at work today’. After the First World War, which ushered in an increasingly bleak world marked by nationalism, militarism, mindless technology and ‘technocrats’, and totalitarianism, he wrote: ‘beautiful talents are the desperate need of these sad months and years when we tremble on the verge of a return to barbarism…’6 In the transatlantic review he explained why, in a passage reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as the humanization of man in society:
the Arts […] make you understand your fellow human being: they may indeed make you understand your fellow brute beast. In either case in the train of comprehension come sympathy and tolerance and after subjecting yourself for some time to the influence of the arts you become less of a brute beast yourself.
This is the only humanising process that has no deleterious sides since all systems of morality tend to develop specific sides of a character at the expense of all other sides.7
Ford was clearly influenced by the aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. He writes of ‘that high, fine pleasure’ of poetry; and his great pleasure in reading comes across powerfully.8 Yet at the same time he always thought of art as communication. ‘An art is the highest form of communication between person and person’9 – again a Wordsworthian ideal, that of the poet as ‘a man speaking to men’. He is at his best as a reader of other writers – responding to their temperaments, their perceptions, their language, their art – rather than as a theorizer.
Sondra Stang, who sadly did not live to finish this project which she began, should have the last words. She wrote of Ford’s unusual preference for Christina Rossetti’s verse over that of her brother Dante Gabriel:
Her achievement was that, looking at life around her, she wrote in the ‘clear pure language of our own day’, unlike her brother Dante Gabriel, who had given the ‘numbing blow of a sandbag’ to the art of writing in English, ‘digging for obsolete words with which to express ideas forever dead and gone’.
Whether or not Ford was fair to either of the Rossettis, and whether or not Christina’s poetry was significant for the twentieth century, Ford’s preference should be understood as a moment in the gradual clarification of his own aesthetic. Readers looking for a judicious and disengaged point of view, that of an ideal literary historian, perpetually contemporary with them, have of course found Ford’s criticism disturbing, and his attack on the nineteenth-century English novel (or ‘nuvvle’, as he called it to distinguish it from what he considered was the genuine article, the Continental novel) has probably done its share in alienating readers. Ford’s judgements were highly personal, often overstated, and deliberately outrageous, but behind them was an unwillingness to corroborate an aesthetic that had already had its day. How he read other writers and how he theorized about his own writing all had to do with his forward-looking momentum: the writer must represent and interpret his own age and look toward the future.10
She also explained (in the notes she left for her selection, some of which have been incorporated into this introduction) how Ford’s criticism can give us a most refined – and at the same time realistic – sense of what art is, what it can do for human life:
Beyond their generosity and their grace, the pieces collected here contain the just pronouncements of a serious writer practising his craft and passing on to other [readers and] writers what he has clarified for himself, passing on to his readers what the work before them reveals to him. In these modest and often trenchant statements, Ford writes about the relation between language and literature, between temperament and writing; he defines for us what style is; and finally, he reminds us, if we are in any danger of forgetting, why we go to fiction, to poetry, to painting.
1 Pound, ‘Mr Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse’, Poetry, 4 (June 1914), 111–20; The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, Patricia C. Willis (London, 1987), p. 593.
2 The English Novel (London, 1930), pp. 24–5, 26–7.
3 Portraits from Life (Boston, 1937), pp. 70–74. Published in Britain as Mightier Than the Sword (London, 1938); see pp. 98–103.
4 Modern Painters, Vol. III, part 4, chapter 16.
5 Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester, 1986), p. 252. Ford reiterates this idea in It Was the Nightingale (London, 1934), p. 69, when he defines the artist as ‘the man who added to the thought and emotions of mankind’.
6 Thus to Revisit (London, 1921), p. 15.
7 ‘Stocktaking. IV’, transatlantic review, 1:4 (April 1924), 169–70.
8 Thus to Revisit, p. 129.
9 The March of Literature (London, 1939), p. 4.
10 Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York, 1977), pp. 20–1.