The Hat-Case
The English Novel : From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad. By Ford Madox Ford. (Constable. 58.) YEARS ago (it must be twenty-five years) I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, as he then was, and he told
an amusing anecdote which has epitomized some of his work for me since. It was about a gentleman who had a hat-case. He left the hat-case on the platform of a continental railway station, and went round the corner for a moment, and when he came back the case was still there. But when he took it up, it seemed to his shocked sense lighter than air. Up it flew. It had been gutted from below, and the hat was gone. Just such a shock sometimes awaits readers of Mr. Ford's criticisms. Here, for example, is a hat-case, entitled The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, and presumably containing a hat. But lift it, and up it flies. We have been fooled, and since no one likes to be the victim of a practical joke, we are prone to complain that there is something wrong about Mr. Ford, something gravely "dicky," and to demand that a law shall be passed which shall prohibit for ever the leaving about of empty cases in public places. It is annoying, when one is an earnest seeker after truth and perhaps an examination candidate as well, to be told that ever since 1860 the Pilgrim's Progress and Madame Bovary have been among the four most popular books all the world over. It's untrue. They haven't been. And one's irritation is not diminished by being unable to say which have been. Anyhow, not those two. It's annoy- ing, again, to be told that history has altered owing to the disuse of Plutarch, that Conrad, James and Crane are the three chief influences in contemporary fiction, that English fiction and fiction all the world over are identical, that Bach and Holbein are the world's two greatest artists, Anthony Txollope also running ; that Babbitt was suggested by Pamela, that Our Lord and Tibullus used to be mentioned more fre- quently in conversation, and that Mr. Ford himself has never known anyone who has known Miss Virginia Woolf. Why, he dedicates this very work to a friend in common! Surely we can catch him slipping at last. But no, we cannot ; because there is no such person as Miss Virginia Woolf. She is Mrs. Woolf.
The• statement is strictly accurate ; two slips have made one slap, and this is annoying again. - The publishers, foreseeing our honourable scars, caution us upon the dust-cover that Mr. Ford is not so much writing criticism as "thinking aloud," and this certainly puts us wise if not exactly wiser. We are now astonished not when the hat-case is empty, but when it is full, and again and again, if one will but read him in this spirit, a gratifying weight tugs at one's arm. "The function of the Arts in the State—apart from the consideration of aesthetics—is so to aerate the mind of the taxpayer as to make him less dull a boy." How admir- ably this is put, and incidentally how it justifies the book itself ! For Mr. Ford does aerate us, and to repine because he is capricious or impertinent or because we disagree with him is wilfully to retreat into the depths of the Dunciad. I tested my own dullness over two passages. Not happening to like Scott, I read with joy : "Obviously even the Antiquary is worth consideration if one had the time." And happening to like Fielding I read with rage that "although Tom Jones contains an immense amount of rather nauseous special- pleading, the author does pack most of it away into solid wads of hypocrisy at the headings of Parts or Chapters." And having, beyond my likes and dislikes, the rudiments of a critical apparatus, I felt that both statements may be false in one universe and true in another, and that in Mr. Ford's universe they are true.
What is his universe ? It is not quite what he would have us think. It is composed of personal sensitiveness, of the quality that distinguishes him as a novelist, and that distin- guished him as an editor when in days long past he so bril- liantly conducted the English Review and so discerningly and generously helped his juniors. He himself would say that it is a more solid affair ; that he holds certain principles— novelists oughtn't to preach, they ought to concentrate on the story, they oughtn't to caricature, and so on—and every now and then he alludes to these principles in a commanding way. But if he held opposing principles, it would make no difference, for the reason that his is not a nature that rests on generalities. His merit lies in his swiftness. At moments he turns sad, dignified and dynastic, and assumes the air of the repository of artistic traditions, and at such moments one cannot help smiling. But he must excuse our smiles ; he has often enough had the laugh of us with his empty boxes, and he has written a fine little slap-dash book.
There is no dash and no slap about Dr. Ernest Baker's The History of the English Novel: Intellectual Realism, from Richardson to Sterne, and no fineness about it either. Of course, unlike naughty Mr. Ford, it delivers the goods. Here are the cases, labelled in sequence from Richardson to Sterne. The worst of it is one has no inclination to open them. For the book is dull, badly written, and conventional in its judg- ments despite its dalliance with modernity. It is, for instance, a convention to be arch over Richardson's life, so Dr. Baker duly arches. It is the present convention to detract from Sterne's detractors, so, with all their original insensitiveness, he detracts. His work may contain original research (I am not qualified to say), but it has none of the other merits of scholarship ; it cannot marshal facts plainly or discuss them philosophically, or give a straightforward account either of a novelist's life or of the contents of a novel :
"This brief summary of the events in Sterne's life bearing directly or indirectly on the genesis of the extraordinary book which he had launched upon tho world may from this point be still briefer. By the middle of 1761, four more volumes of Tristram Shandy had been published. Sterne's health was steadily growing worse. Ho was told that the only way to save his life was to betake himself to a warmer climate ; so in 1762 he went to Paris, in spite of difficulties due to our being at war with France."
That is a fair specimen of the style ; it inclines us neither to hear about Sterne nor to read Tristram Shandy, and in places it becomes unintelligible (e.g., in the seventh sentence on page 13, where, owing to incompetence over the use of relative pronouns things get into a sorry mess). Were the book less pretentious, one would not be severe, but it sets out to be a " history " not a manual, and it is the fourth of a series which is apparently trundling down the centuries to the present day. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the chief authors treated ; Amory and others are discussed, and there are many references to Cervantes, Marivaux, &c. But they and all their works remain dead. It may be annoying when there are no hats in the cases, but it is worse when there are no heads in the hats, and we return with renewed appreciation
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