England and the English

Ford Madox Ford, Ford Madox Ford, Sara Haslam, Sara Haslam

• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781847778932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

England and the English is Ford Madox Ford's three-volume exploration of what it means to be English, here published in a single volume for the first time in the United Kingdom. Starting with the brilliantly impressionistic evocations of the chaotic energy of modern London in the first part, Ford proceeds to delve into the rural past that has always been identified as being at the heart of England, before concluding with an investigation of the formation of the English character. Throughout, Ford is the watchful outsider, perceptive, humorous and affectionate towards the complexities of Englishness. A fascinating introduction to the style and preoccupations of this seminal Modernist writer, England and the English has particular resonance for our own times when the sense of national identity is again under scrutiny. This edition includes Ford's preface to the one-volume American edition. Sara Haslam's introduction sets the trilogy in its contemporary context and outlines its significance in Ford's work.

The Heart of the Country

Author’s Advertisement

THE present volume forms the second of three small projections of a View of Modern Life; it is a natural sequel to a former work, the Soul of London. Its author has attempted to do in this volume just as much as in the former one he attempted to do for a modern city. As the Soul of London was made up of a series of illustrations to a point of view, so the Heart of the Country is a series of illustrations to country moods. The subject of the ‘Country’ being so vast a one the limits of the attempt must be obvious. Every man, in fact, has a sort of ideal countryside – perhaps it is a Utopian vision that he conjures up at will within his own brain, perhaps it is no more than as it were a mental ‘composite photograph’ of all the countrysides that he knows more or less well. It is this latter vision of his own, this survey of several countrysides that he knows more or less intimately, and, of many countrysides that he has passed through or visited for longer or shorter periods – it is some such mental ‘composite photograph’ that the author of such a book must attempt to render upon paper. In this book the writer has followed implicitly the rule laid down for himself in the former volume, and the rule that he has laid down for himself for the forthcoming volume of this trilogy; that is to say, that though for many years he has read many works, returns, or pamphlets dealing with rural questions, and though these may have tinged his views and coloured his outlook, he has attempted here to do no more and no less than to depict – that is the exact word – his personal view of his personal countryside. This particular countryside limits itself strictly to that portion of the British Isles that is most psychologically English. It leaves out the greater portion of Yorkshire, which is, in most of its conditions, a part of Lowland Scotland; on the west it runs no further north than Carlisle; it neglects Wales. Within these limits it gives, as well as the powers of depiction of its projector have allowed, a rendering of a rural cosmogony. If the attempt appear somewhat megalomaniac, it has been undertaken nevertheless in a spirit of true humility by a person who, having spent the greater number of his years in one or other Heart of the Country, has a very wholesome fear of awakening all the sleeping dogs of controversies most heated and most bewildering. At the same time it leaves unsaid nothing that its author wished dispassionately to record. It preaches no particular sermon; it announces no particular message; it is practically no more than a number of impressions arranged after a certain pattern and in a certain order. (What that order is may be seen if the reader who is interested in the matter will refer to the paragraph that occupies the greater part of page 122.)

F.M.H.

WINCHELSEA, April, 1906.

NOTE. A number of extracts, selected from the completed book by the Editor, have appeared in the columns of the Tribune: the book itself was written without any eye to such a form of publication.

INTRODUCTORY

The Country of the Townsman

IN the cigarette smoke, breathing the rich odours of ragouts that cloy the hunger, of verveine, of patchouli, beneath tall steely-blue mirrors, over crumpled napkins of an after-lunch in a French place of refection, an eloquent and persuasive friend with wide gestures was discoursing upon some plan that was to make for the rest of the company fame, fortune, rest, appetite, and the wherewithal to supply it – an engrossing plan that would render the Islands of the Blest territory habitable for them almost as soon as they could reach the ‘next street’, which, in most of our minds, is the Future. Their heads came close together across the table; outside in the narrow street carts rattled; all round them was that atmosphere of luxuries of a sort, with an orchestral accompaniment of knives thrown down; of orders shouted in French, in Italian, in Spanish; words in broken English, words in tones of command, of anger, of cynical passion, of furtive enjoyment – a sort of surf-sound, continuous, rising and falling, but utterly beyond analysis. And, as if it were a compartment that shut them in from all the world, beneath the shelter of this Babel they discussed their Eldorado of the day after tomorrow – their dim Cyclades of the next street.

Those names, those myths shining so graciously down the ages, have still for humanity a great fascination. In one or the other of them each soul of us finds his account. Dim Cyclades, Eldorados, Insulæ Beatæ, Happy Hunting Grounds, Lands flowing with Milk and Honey, Avalons, or mere Tom Tiddler’s Grounds – somewhere, between the range of dim islands of a purple west, or that field where we shall pick up gold and silver – somewhere in that vast region is the spot that each of us hopes to reach, to which all our strivings tend, towards which all our roads lead. The more close and airless the chamber from which we set out the more glorious, no doubt, the mirage; the longer the road, the more, no doubt, we shall prize the inn at the end – the inn that we shall never reach; the inn that is our goal precisely because we never can reach it by any possible means. But in bands, in companies, in twos or threes or singly – in labourers’ cottages, in omnibuses, in tall offices, we discuss each plan that shall bring us one step nearer, or in the dark silences of our own hearts we cherish a passion so fierce and so solitary that no single soul else in all the universe has a hint of our madness, our presumption, our glorious ambition, or our baseness.

Thus in that dubious place of refection the one friend could well enough discourse to his companions upon their common Eldorado that should, the gods being good, give them fame – and rest. It held them, the idea, among all the clatter; it made glorious with its glamour the foul atmosphere. It was, as the slang phrase has it, a master idea. Suddenly, pushing out from behind the door, came a long, grey, bronzed man.

Bewilderment at being torn from their train of thought, surprise, recognition, were the steps towards immense pleasure.

‘You!’ slipped from all their lips at once. He dropped his great length into a small chair placed askew at the corner of the table, and began to talk about the country.

He had just come up from the Heart of the Country! He was a man always very wonderful for them, as to most of us in our childhood the people are who have a command over beasts and birds, who live in the rustle of woodlands, and commune with ringdoves as with spiders. We credit them with powers not our own, with a subtle magic, a magnetism more delicate than that which gives power over crowds of men – with keener eyesight, quicker hearing, and a velvety touch that can caress small creatures. They have something faun-like, something primeval, something that lets us think that, in touch with them, we are carried back into touch with an earlier world before cities were, and before the nations of men had boundaries. There are naturalists – but these men are not naturalists; they come out of no studies; in museums they shudder and are disquieted, just as gipsies are vaguely unrestful when you ask them to enter your house. In the towns these men will see things that we never see; they will note the fall of sparrows, or, sailing through the air a mile above the cross of St Paul’s, a sea-hawk will be visible to them. Into the towns they will bring a touch of sweetness and of magic – because they come from the Heart of the Country.

He was all in grey, so that against an old stone wall you would hardly have seen him, or on a downside no bird would startle at passing him. It happened that he mentioned the precise green valley that for one of those men was the Heart of the Country. It nestles beneath a steep, low cliff, in the heart of an upland plain as vast and as purple, as wavering and as shadeless as the sea itself. But the green valley runs along a bottom, a little winterbourne directing its snake’s course; trees fill it and overshadow old stone houses, and it is alive with birds driven to it for water from the plains above.

So that, green and sinuous, a mirage seemed to dazzle and hang in air in the middle of the cigarette smoke, making a pattern of its own, vivid and thirst-inspiring, across the steely-blue of the restaurant mirrors. It seemed to waver right above, and to extinguish the luminous idea – to extinguish the very light of their Eldorado. They talked of place after place, pursuing the valley along its course, of a great beacon here, a monolith there, of millponds and villages that run one into another, boasting each one a name more pleasant in the ear, or a tuft of elms higher and more umbrageous. For if each man have (and each of us has) his own Heart of the Country, to each assuredly that typical nook, that green mirage that now and then shines between him and his workaday world, will be his particular Island of the Blest, his island of perpetual youth, his closed garden, which as the years go on will more and more appear to contain the Fountain of Youth. And as time goes on, too, life will assume more and more an air of contest between the two strains of idealism in the man – a contest between the Tom Tiddler’s Ground of the Town and Islands of the Blest that lie somewhere in the Heart of the Country.

These metaphors, this ideal of an island smoothness in Hyperborean seas, are not the less true because they are not part of our present vernacular. Our necessities, our modes of travel, our very speech, have changed; the necessity for that ideal remains. Whilst, indeed, our speech was forming itself, they wrote books with titles like Joyful Newes from the West Over Seas, and still in the tangible unknown West, they could hope to find Happy Valleys. Now with a mapped-out world we can no longer have that hope. We travel still with that ideal, but the hope has grown intangible.

On the one hand the world has become very small, since we may have it all in a book, in pink, in green, in yellow squares. We can reach any portion of it so easily, we may have so easily pictures of it all, that it is hardly worth the seeking. Intellectually, we have learned that there is no Island of the Blest; in our inmost selves, automatically, we never acknowledge it. We have brought our island nearer home, it lies beyond the horizon, but only just beyond. In a sense we may even hope to reach it by the most commonplace of methods. For the mere taking of a pill there may be ours health, which is the fountain of youth; for the mere pulling the ropes of a machine, for just waving our arms in certain magical postures before dressing in the morning, there shall – so the advertisements say – be ours a day of vigorous and unclouded brain, a day that shall see us, unhandicapped by any bodily ill, descend to do our battles in the marketplace – a day in the land of Eldorado. Thus do the clamant charlatans of the beyond in the pale columns of our journals attempt to play upon strings that three thousand or three hundred years ago were rendered sweet by the melodies of those other charlatans who were once living poets.

These things we only half believe in, even in this England, which for the rest of the world is the ‘Land of Pills’. But observe the face of your interlocutor when you tell him that you are going into the country. Observe the half envy, half yearning, the mixture of reminiscence and of forecasting plans that will waver across his face, and mark all the shades of expression in his ‘Lucky you!’

Round the flat, dark, toilsome town there is the vast green ring, the remembrance of which so many men carry nowadays in their hearts. Put it, if you will, that its attraction is simply that of the reverse of the medal, that it is a thing they love merely because it is not theirs’.

Its real pull is felt, the rope is cast off, when, in his club, on his mantelpiece at home or at his suburban post office, the townsman leaves directions for his letters to be forwarded. At that blessed moment he loses touch with the world, casts off his identity, heaves a sigh as if a great weight had fallen from his shoulders, or even moves his limbs purposelessly in order to realise to the fullest how a free man feels. He has shaken off his identity. For as long as the mood lasts he cannot be traced, he cannot be recalled to earth. And supposing he never went to the spot to which his letters are to be addressed – supposing that, instead of taking a train to that fly-fisher’s inn, to that moorland farm, or to that friend’s manor house, he went afoot to the shore of a Devonshire sea, he might never be found again. He might shake off all responsibilities; he might form ties lighter to bear than the lightest snaffle that ever horse submitted to. He might find a threshold over which, when he stepped in the fields, seas, and skies of a fabulous brightness.

He never does it – at least he has never done it since here the townsman is and here, in whatever particular town of life he has an abiding place – here he is likely to remain. Some no doubt break the chain. It has been asked, as we know well enough, ‘What’s become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?’ But they never know, they who form the ‘us all’ of the line. Waring has disappeared – gone; he no longer exists; the Heart of the Country has swallowed him up. He was a weak man who broke; those remaining are the strong, who shiver a little sometimes at the thought that they may do as Waring did.

The mood may last him for an hour or two; it obsesses him a little as he leans back in his train – the fact is still there; his letters are being forwarded to a place that he has not yet reached. For a little time he is still in the grey of the town; its magazines, its papers, its advertisements hold his eyes immediately. Gradually through the glass that encages us he sees the green flicker through the grey of the outskirts, as through the ragged drab skirts of a child you may catch the flash of her knee when she runs. The cloak spread over the ground becomes a covering less and less efficient; then it is all green, and amongst a geometrical whirl of corded posts turning-slowly right away to the horizon he shall see the figures of women with blue handkerchiefs over their heads kneeling down and tying the hops.

But that is still all remote, all shadowy. His lungs are quite literally filled with the air of his town. It is only when he steps out at his junction where he ‘changes’ that he is conscious of some strange and subtle difference. On his forehead he feels a sudden coolness, his foot falls more lightly, he draws a deeper breath. It is because he is breathing the breath of a free wind.

So he crosses the platform, and in the gloaming gets into the smaller, dirtier, stuffier and darker, and how infinitely more romantic, boxes that will carry him through a fast darkening land into his particular Heart of the Country.

* * *

Each man of us has his own particular Heart, even as each one has his own particular woman. And the allegiance that he pays to it is very similar. He has his time of passionate longing, of enjoyment, of palling perhaps, or of a continually growing passion that is a fervour of jealousy much such as a man may feel for his wife. He has his love of the past, or he has been whirled past places that later he will hope to make his; he has, and always, his ideal.

This he will never attain to. Put him upon a great hill. Below him there will stretch plains almost infinite; down into them the slopes on which he stands wave and modulate indefinitely. Above his head is the real blue infinity; on his left hand the purple sea, with just a touch of the pink shore of another land that may carry the mind to distances yet more vast. At his back there are grey silences; before his face, miles and miles away in the heart of the sunset, there are dim purplish hills, like a lion couchant, stretched out in a measureless ease. To this height he may have attained with great labour; until he reached it it had represented his ideal. But after the first intaking of free air into the lungs he will see those dim and glamorous hills. And just beyond them once more his ideal will lie hidden. A moment later, too, he will remember that in the valley that he crossed to reach this height there were an old mill with a great pond in which swallows dipped, an old wheel revolving in a dripping tracery of green weeds, a stream running down a valley all aflame with kingcups. This old mill that he passed nonchalantly enough may, he remembers when he stands upon the height, contain his ideal chamber; or if he had followed the slow stream through the marsh marigolds that would brush against his knees he might find the particular Herb Oblivion that he seeks; or, lying down within sound of that old wheel, he might by its incessant plash be lulled into slumbers how easy!

Thus along with him he will carry always those two small fardels, regret for neglected loves, longing for the unattainable. No doubt at times he will drop them. We differ much in these things. Some men will feel all burdens drop from them for a time when they buffet an immense wind; others, again, are lulled into a pleasant doze in the immense heat and haze of sheep-downs at noon; upon some an immense placidity is shed when in the late twilight they step across the threshold of their inn into the mistiness of a village street, when they hang over the stones of a bridge and see waving in the eddies of a trout-stream the reflection of rosy cottage windows.

These moods are rare enough; yet they give for us the ‘note’ of the country, and certain of them stand out for us through all our lives. Thus I remember, years ago, running down through veiled moonlight, between hedges that were a shimmering blade of cowparsley...