'An Old Man or Young Man Mad About Literature'

Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to provoke and attract attention – proves useful to the common reader. Take a sentence from Ford Madox Ford's final book, The March of Literature (1939): “The modern English language has never—or, at any rate, until the beginning of the present century—been a very good vehicle for prose.” 

Ridiculous, you might say, and I wouldn’t argue. Ford tries to clarify his meaning:

 

“To put it roughly, we might say that the great periods and cadences of the seventeenth century had, by the eighteenth, deteriorated into a sort of mechanical rhythm and that by the nineteenth century, in the avoidance of the sort of pomposity and the dry rhythm of the eighteenth century, the language became so timid and indefinite that it was impossible to use it for making any definite statement.”

 

As to the eighteenth (sticking strictly to English writers): Swift, Johnson, Gibbon, Sterne. And the nineteenth: Hazlitt, Carlyle, Darwin, George Eliot. For Ford, only in the 1890s when he was a young writer and befriending some of the writers he favors – Henry James, Joseph Conrad & Co. -- did English prose, in effect, mature. Ford is formulating a retrospective defense of Modernism. “It is to be remembered,” he writes, “that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”

 

I’ve often pondered this sentence and remain conflicted. I love good prose of many sorts, and that’s the point. There is no universal template for good non-poetic writing. No one would confuse the prose in The American Scene (Henry James) with Evelyn Waugh's in Labels (Evelyn Waugh). The trouble comes with Ford’s middle clause, “no more dependence on its contents.” Taken literally, it suggests that pretty words about nothing amount to something. Ford may be restating what one of his masters, Flaubert, said in a letter written ninety years earlier to his mistress Louise Colet (trans. Francis Steegmuller): “What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to  write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external . . .” Ford never wrote such a book. His novels are thick with particularities. He goes on:

 

“Between the death of Swift in 1745 . . . and, say, the day of writers like Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, almost no imaginative prose masterpieces saw the light and English prose exhibited almost none of that sort of super-light that marks the writing of Sir Thomas Browne, of [Izaak] Walton, of [1^st Earl of] Clarendon, or even of Pepys.”

 

Here is where Ford gets truly eccentric: “English, as we have said, is rather short in the item of great novels. It would, then, be almost a minor literature were it not for the prose writers whom we have been citing. They, it will be observed are none of them novelists. And, indeed, it was not until comparatively lately that the English novelist paid any attention whatever to his prose.”

 

Nonsense. In addition to some of the writers cited above, we can add Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Austen, Thackeray, Trollope. No, these were not “exquisite” writers of fiction – none was a Ronald Firbank or William H. Gass -- but all employed styles appropriate to their “content.” Ford concedes that Dickens “could be styled, for fugitive passages, a really great prose writer,” but none of them wrote like Flaubert. Ford writes:

 

“[T]he moment one becomes an impassioned student of letters—an old man or young man mad about literature—one perceives that English literature has one very great glory, a glory that of itself would suffice to let it be classed as a major literature . . . and that is the great series of works of which we have here been treating [Clarendon, the Scottish naturalist Thomas Edwards, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, et al.]. They recount incidents, habits of mind, or of insects or of birds, theories, memories. And the passion with which these records are made revealing the great, liberal personalities of the writers, makes them become under the almost unconscious pen great works of art.”

 

This is where “eccentric” becomes “useful.” Ford reminds us of forgotten writers and genres. The novel has so effectively dominated literature since the eighteenth century, it’s good to be reminded of alternative genres and forms, especially nonfiction. Ford suggests Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco, Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, George Borrow’s Bible in Spain, W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land that England Lost, Walton’s Complete Angler, Browne’s Urne-Burial and Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne – all charming books, some of them masterpieces. Ford describes them as “deathless.”

 

[The Ford passages can be found in Book II, Part 1, Chapter Four of The March of Literature (1939).]