Mr. Ford Takes his Stand
QUITE early in this sentimental journey, Mr. Ford takes a swipe at pedants ; later he does not " guarantee the accuracy of any of the statements made since we crossed the line. We are, thank Heaven, now in a region where with large breaths a man can be a man. It is only in Nordic territories that accuracy passes for a virtue." Almost at the end we are told (what we might have been left, with confidence, to find out for ourselves) that Mr. Ford is " not an economist or a scientific historian. . . . What I wrote would raise a howl . . . as what I ant writing will, from the economist, the scientific historian, and the people who interfere professionally in world affairs. They will say I know nothing about it. But really it is they who know nothing about anything. They have never sat on rocks over the Mediterranean and thought . . . and felt . . ." It was the dots that got me under, as the Americans say. I have sat on rocks over the Mediterranean. I have thought and felt (after my own debased fashion), but the ineffable something indicated here in dots was never vouchsafed to me. It goes without saying, therefore, that my criticisms can be written off as pedantic and ignorant.
Mr. Ford. in addition to being a distinguished novelist, is a southern agrarian, that is to say he is a disciple of those southern writers who want to restore the South to its old civilising role, wrest front it by northern tyranny during and after the War between the States. Many of these southern agrarians arc very able writers ; some are scholars, and their ease or cause is or was very fashionable a year or two ago in America. Did it not get a few kind words from Mr. Eliot ? But, as O. Henry noted, it was the synthetic southerner who was most likely to give the rebel yell and sing Dixie in public places. Mr. Ford Madox Ford is an Englishman, but no unreconstructed rebel has anything on him. His blood still boils at the thought that " there were plenty of women killed and worse by Sherman's licensed plunderers," a fact not generally accepted by pedants, and the thought of the tariff abominations of 1828, or of the low cunning of Abraham Lincoln, is almost as maddening. Mr. Ford is also very hostile to the Nordic race (which is hard on sonic Southerners who think that the Army of Northern Virginia was the purest Nordic force the world has ever seen). He dislikes Ilitler and what he calls xenophobia preens. It is odd, to go south to escape these things, to the south of the Ku Klux Klan and the Arkansas share-croppers who arc saved from dangerous thoughts by loggers of women. It is one thing to assert (as some of Mr. Ford's southern friends do) that all the numerous blots on the southern sctitcheon are due to reconstruction and the carpet- baggers. It is something else again to ignore them, as except for a not very clear reference to lynching, Mr. Ford does.
Like all Englishmen who don't really like America, Mr. Ford is very superior about New England, though if there is any place in America where his Rousseau-like directly- governed village exists, it is in New England. Mr. Ford
is also a distributist and has things of interest to say about that topic, as well-as about the Hauptmann trial, the Rossetti family; about either Engels or Aveling (it is not clear which, since the hero of the anecdote has to be both the co-author of the Communist Manifesto and Marx's son-in-law). As a 4, sentimental journey " this book has real attractions, as a philosophy of life or history it suffers from a deep indifference to what the pedantic world calls fact. Among the hosts of what I must mill errors it is hard to choose the richest. The vision of Jefferson sympathising with his fellow-southernet, Napoleon, and buying Louisiana because he liked the Maison Carree, has its attractions. So, too, has the ignorance of so enthusiastic a Jeffersonian of the reason why Jefferson's birthday is not commemorated. In addition to unbridgeable differences of opinion with the pedants, Mr. Ford is astonish- ingly careless about things he knows, so that we have Lee for Davis, Texas for Kansas and so on, slips that make one wonder whether it be possible that Mr. Ford really thinks that the Charleston at which Lincoln spoke was Charleston, South Carolina, and whether he knows (though he is a self- styled " Papist ") what the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is about, or realises that Delaware, about which he chats so cheerfully, is the bailiwick of those highly- successful "Latins," the Dupont de Nemours family, owners of Mr. Ford's pet aversion, cellophane. Nordic nonsense is terrible ; anti-Nordic nonsense isn't so bad, but perhaps I only feel that way because I share Mr. Ford's preference for the classic fields and peoples of the Mediterranean lands over the northern barbarians. But one device of my type of defender of the classical tradition seems unknown to Mr. Ford, the use of some handy collection of tags. So when I read the shibboleth not to be spoken by immigrants. !` Fuerunl fortes ante Agamemnon" (p. 63), I murmured (having looked it up), non tali auxilio nee defensorilms istis," applying the tag to more lost causes than that of the
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