March of Literature

From Confucius' Day to Our Own

Ford Madox Ford

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781564787781
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This 900-page survey of world literature, "From Confucius' Day to Our Own" (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars and teachers give a false sense of literature, Ford brings alive the pleasures of reading by writing about books he is passionate about. Beginning at the beginning - with ancient Egyptian and Chinese literature and the Bible - Ford works his way through classical literature, the writings of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, continuing up to the major writers of his own day like Ezra Pound, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. With his encyclopedic reading and expertise in the techniques of writing, Ford is a reliable and entertaining guide. Ford also includes a chapter on publishers and booksellers, noting the key roles they play in literature's existence. Novelist Alexander Theroux (Darconville's Cat, An Adultery) has written an insightful introduction for this reissue, the first time this monumental book has been made available in paperback.

BOOK I

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

THE modern English sense of the word “literature” is something very difficult to define. The original Latin word from which it is derived, “litterae” (even without the adjective “humaniores”), was apparently exclusively applied to what we now call “belles-lettres” or “humaner letters.” It would be a good thing if the term were today restricted exclusively to those departments of the written, printed or the incised word.

Rather unfortunately, for a century or so, the word has here been applied to two or three other departments of human activity—to records, to catalogues, to tendential works of every kind. People say, for instance, “The literature of the subject comprises,” and they will follow with a catalogue of books or pamphlets descriptive of almost any object under the sun, from flowers or women’s clothing to astronomic speculations. Thus refreshing my memory as to Ancient Egypt, I might say: The literature of the subject includes Budge’s (Wallis) The Mummy, Weigall’s The Treasury of Ancient Egypt, Burrows’ Discoveries in Crete, Maspero’s Contes Populaires, Torr’s Memphis and Crete. And I might continue with a long list of learned works devoted to this subject. Practically none of these compilations will display any imagination, human insight or literary talent—with the possible exception of Professor Maspero’s French renderings of early East Mediterranean folklore.

But actually, in the earlier sense of the word, if we wrote the “literature of Ancient Egypt includes,” we should have to follow it by “the Messianic prophecy derived from the poem of Ipuwer of the 12th Dynasty; a number of peasant songs dating from the fourth millennium B.C.; the more naïve later literature of the age of Rameses the Second,” and so on. We should catalogue, that is to say, the works of imagination or pure literature produced by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. We should completely exclude the works of learned Egyptologists of every nation under the sun who, in the last century and a half, have dug into the sands of the Egyptian deserts and discovered, deciphered and then, not writing anything of human interest, have merely catalogued the objects of every description that they have found.

In the book that follows, we shall confine ourselves exclusively to chronicling the humaner letters of the world. If we succeed in turning out a work of insight and imagination and one couched in clear, uncomplicated and not harsh prose, we may make ourselves see the great stream of literature issuing from its dark and remote sources and broadening through the centuries until it comes to irrigate with its magnificent and shining waters, almost the whole of the universe of today. If we succeed in that, we too shall have produced . . . a piece of literature.

This may appear a contradiction of the paragraph immediately preceding the last one. That would appear to say that history cannot be literature. Actually, whether a history be literature or not depends entirely upon the animation, the perspicacity, the insight, the incisiveness, the poetic qualities—upon, in short, the personality of the writer. Thus Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the story of Ruth and Boaz may both be classed as history and also as prose or poetic literature. But Mommsen’s Roman History or a textbook of geography for the use of high schools would be neither.

The term “literature” even in its strictest sense of “belles-lettres” or in the more poetic term, “the humaner letters,” does not exclude works on account of their form or their subject. On the face of it, the pamphlets of political propagandists would not appear to come under either heading. But, because of their fire, their close-knit styles, the passion of their invectives, and their lucidity, it would be a bold man who denied that the Philippics of Demosthenes, the In Catalinam of Cicero or in the lesser rank, the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, or the famous oration of Patrick Henry were either belles-lettres or humaner letters. In short, the quality that is necessary for the production of the Art of Literature is simply that of a personality of wide appeal. An art is the highest form of communication between person and person. It is nothing more and nothing less. The more attractive the personality making the communication, the wider in extent, the deeper in penetration and the more lasting, will be the appeal. What the subject may be, is of no importance whatever. The famous Greek Idyl of a woman outside a temple carrying a baby and trying to see a procession is as poignant as any of the cantos of the Divine Comedy, any of the books of the Bible, any passage from Shakespeare, or from Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal or any story by Turgenev.

The quality of literature, in short, is the quality of humanity. It is the quality that communicates, between man and men, the secret of human hearts and the story of our vicissitudes.

It is therefore in the sense of creative, imaginative, or poetic work that we shall henceforth employ the word “literature.” This, at any rate, in Anglo-Saxondom, is contrary to the existing fashion. The French, the Germans, the Italians, and most other civilized nations differentiate between the two classes of writing by calling all imaginative literature “poetry,” and all merely instructional or cataloguing matter, generally prose. Hence the word “prosaic.” But in Anglo-Saxondom the tendency has always been to regard instructional writings as being on a higher plane and creative literature as being, at any rate, relatively frivolous. In England it is not unusual for newspapers to list books that they receive for review under the headings “Serious Literature” and “Other Books.” Thus I remember having seen in one and the same journal a volume of short biographies of music hall stars and another devoted to recipes for cocktails, classified as “Serious Literature” while Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems were dismissed as “Other Books.” American papers seldom go as heroically far as that. But the tendency of the public on either side of the Atlantic is, on the whole, similar. It would, however, be absurd to write a history of factual, scientific or instructional books and call it a History of Literature. Records of facts, statistics and scientific theories are always so swiftly superseded that in a very few years almost no trace of them remains on the public consciousness. We may doubt, for instance, if any lay people today read Darwin’s Origin of Species, or the book called Babel and Bible, works which, some decades ago, shook the civilized world. But a couple of score novels and volumes of poems written since the 1880’s are part of the necessary pabulum of every man or woman who passes for educated or who takes pleasure in the written word. And if you consider the number of serious works of the imagination that, since men began to write, have passed a similar test, the disparity is so great as to be farcical. Let us glance backwards. The educated reader needs to know of the literature of ancient Egypt a few folksongs, a few small collections of precepts written by sages, and the few first forms of the legends that are important as showing the solidarity, the permanence that unite humanity throughout all the ages—the first forms of legends of the Deluge, of the Creation, of the Messiah, of the Trinity, or of the stories told by Scheherazade. The same is true of the writings of Babylon or of Crete. Then immediately you come upon the immense mass of propaganda and prophecy that make up the Hebrew Bible.

Contemporaneously, or immediately afterwards, came the great mass of Greek poetry and drama, and later the imaginative works of the Latin writers. As against these, you have on the borderline between the serious and the creative, the dialogues, say, of Plato, a few geographical or historical works like the writing of Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, and possibly Strabo, Pliny, and the De Bello Gallico of Caesar. These serious writings that will hold the critical or pleasure-loving intelligence are very rare.

It is here necessary to make an effort to be explicit. The dialogues of Plato or Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico are philosophic or factual works. But Socrates before beginning an argument will mention that there is a hill with trees outside the city wall to which it will be agreeable to retire for discussion. The passage is so brilliantly written that you have at once an addition to your mental picture of Athens. Or Caesar, with the detail as to chariots used by the blue-stained Briton, will make you see an early battle field. That is literature. If a work devoted to the biographies of music hall stars or to cocktails contained a sufficiency of such passages, that also would be literature. Actually there exist innumerable written or incised documents, records of law suits, market accounts, astronomical speculations and codices of the Egyptian, the Babylonian, in addition to the Classical Greek or Roman unreadable matter just mentioned. But they are of a sort that is unlikely, however the taste of mankind may change, ever to bulk very large in the human consciousness, so they could hardly be called literature. There exist, for instance, case-books of Greek and early Arab physicians. In the diagnoses that they contain, even the medical layman may find a certain pleasure. He will discover that, two to three thousand years ago, people had very much the same symptoms as at times are felt by himself. And, the earliest written document in existence, being a Babylonian lawyer’s pleading in a law suit, may be equally interesting. For, in the remotest times, testamentary uncertainties were as frequent as they are today. But these things are of importance merely because of their quaintness or because they are evidence of what I have called human solidarity. . . . They show the sameness of the vicissitudes and passions of humanity down the ages. . . .

In the meantime there was being written a great—a very great—stream of literature that, coming from the East, has ever since impinged on the current of our western writings. Actual contact between Chinese, Indian, Persian and other Eastern literatures is not very hard to establish. In Greek philosophic writing, like that of Pythagoras, unmistakable traces of Chinese thought are visible. Pythagoras was a semi-mythical Greek philosopher of the sixth century whose existence is traceable almost solely, as quotations, in writings by his successors. But amongst those traces we discern many of the Precepts of Confucius. Thus, even if we didn’t know historically the commercial and aesthetic associations uniting Greece to the farthest East, we should have to suspect that some such contact had taken place. Moreover, in the great body of the great literature written in Arabic the influence and even the name of Plato occur very frequently. In any case it will be well if the reader gets into his head the image of a vast panorama of the Eastern world across which shimmered two streams of literary influence. The one descended the Nile, the other came from China, yet both discharged themselves into the Mediterranean to form that Mediterranean civilization which is today our own.

The Far Eastern Chinese stream we may take for the moment as having been more “serious” than the one which descended between Nile banks. Or it would be perhaps more just to put it that the Western world has found more use for the philosophy than for the creative imagination of the East. The names of Oriental works which spring immediately to the mind are those of the Moral Precepts or Canon of Confucius, the four Vedas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana. Against them one may set the Sakuntala of Kalidaça, a heroic epic.

Into these things we shall have to go more fully later, but it may help our initial impression to say that, as against Mediterranean literature, Oriental writings have been better preserved. The notorious First Emperor of China made, like Mr. Hitler, a spirited attempt to destroy the records of all Chinese civilizations that had preceded that over which he reigned. But he excepted from this auto-da-fé all works on agriculture, medicine and divination; thus, if he had succeeded, the balance might have gone heavily down on the side of “serious” books. But, after his death, hidden copies of the works of earlier poets and philosophers were discovered in plenty. For instance, a copy of the Canon of Confucius was found in the ruins of the house he had inhabited. Thus this holocaust is petty compared with the burning of the library at Alexandria and the almost complete rooting out, for eight hundred years or so, of the classic Greek and Roman literature. This last took place at the successive sacks of Rome and of all the littoral cities of the Mediterranean before and during what were known as the Dark Ages. Thus, the view of what we have remaining of Greek and Roman literature may well be unbalanced. The works of many reputedly great writers of whom we have traces only in the quotations made by their admirers have completely disappeared. Thus, of Hesiod almost nothing remains—sixteen hundred lines or so. And even of these it is questionable whether a thousand of them may not have been written by one of his disciples. Yet in his own day—which fell in the eighth or ninth century before Christ—and for hundreds of years later, Hesiod was a poet esteemed as on a level with, or even greater than, Homer. Similarly, almost nothing remains of the writings of Sappho.

Thus when estimating the relative outputs of imaginative or of “serious” writing in the Graeco-Roman classical age we must always remain more or less at fault. But it would seem fairly safe to say that, in what remains to the public consciousness of today, their creative imaginative literature immensely exceeds their factual writings. You might say that for one person who today, outside law schools, reads the Codices of Justinian, one hundred thousand delight in the athletic prowess of the heroes of Homer or in Virgil’s account of the fate of Laocoön and his sons.

With the re-ascent towards civilization that began after the Dark Ages, the estimation becomes at once much clearer and much easier. Almost none of the “serious” work that was written for a thousand or so years after the fall of the Roman Empire would today be taken seriously or even read for its quaintnesses. You might read an Anglo-Saxon Bestiary for philological reasons or in order to discover how much knowledge of natural history was possessed by tenth or eleventh century Anglo-Saxons. But you would hardly read it either for pleasure or to improve your knowledge of the habits of beasts or birds. Similarly you would not read the fourteenth century Travels of Mandeville to help your geography. Nor yet would you read Culpepper’s Herbal for its botany, nor Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to add to your knowledge of history. But there at once we come upon a snag. For it is quite possible to rea...