LINK - Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor
37 Fitzrolt Square
u g.ni.r, were overserved, he could always be brought round by a
cabman and deposited in the upstairs bath' In the event, the drunkard
tended to be Swinburne, Fordie's godfather.
The front door was ornamented above with a funeral urn quite
large enough to smash life out of a luckless boy' And a frequent topic,
here at Ford Madox Brown's house, was whether the thing might in
fact one day topple. "I can still remember," writes Ford Madox Ford,
"as a very small boy, shuddering as I stood upon the door-step at the
thought that the great stone urn, lichened, soot-stained, and decorated
with a ram's head by way of handle' elevated only by what looked like a
square piece of stone of about the size and shape of a folio book, might
fall upon me and crush me entirely out of existence."
Madox Brown was Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer's maternal
grandfather. He sheltered Fordie, his brother Oliver, and Mrs.
Hueffer from 1889, when Francis Hueffer, Ford's father, died of a heart
attack. Fordie loved his grandfather with the unvexed emotion reserved
for grandparents, and the old man loved Fordie back in kind.
An older contemporary and fierce encourager of D. G. Rossetti,
Brown was himself a painter of more technique, if less originality, than
his Anglo-Italian colleague. Brown's work is exemplified by The Last of
England, painted in 1855 and hanging today in the City Museum and
Art Gallery of Birmingham. It depicts, in a tondo, the departure of
emigrants; English people gaze their last at English soil, or shake a fist,
or turn away; the day looks raw. A solemn good-looking woman and
man fill the foreground. She swaddles a baby inside her cape' He
broods deeply. They deserve a future, but look as though they have
If
none.
"As I remember him," Ford writes of his grandfather, "with a
square, white beard, with a ruddy complexion, and with thick white
hair parted in the middle and falling to above the tops of his ears,
Madox Brown exactly resembled the king of hearts in a pack of cards."
He was noted for a man-size temper and for generosity of heart' He
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"With a funeral urn in the centre of the entrv."
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Benjamin Taltor
The Last of Engtand
by Ford Madox Brown (i821-1893)' By courtesy of Birmingham
Museums and Art GallerY.
his life'
seems to have been crucial in pointing Ford the way to
,,Brought up in the backrooms and nurseries of Pre-Raphaelitism," a
He
boy l."u.rr.i that there were two species-artists, and the others.
be
enlearned that the world exists to produce a few of the former and
abide,"
cumbered with a lot of the latter. "In that belief I tranquilly
writes Ford.
Buthisrelationshiptoaestheticismismoreequivocalthanthe
half-humorous remark would suggest'
Parade's End
implies a critique of
Benjamin
Ta/or
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sensibility-sensibility as a way of life-and in so doing challenges a
cultural trend the backward current of which reaches to Fitzroy
Square. The debased aesthetes of Parade's End are either mercenary
(Edith Ethel and Macmaster) or else insane (Rev. Duchemin). Some Do
Not . . . , the first volume of the tetralogy, renders a world about to be
grievously transformed; to this circumstance, the sensibility as such
makes only corrupt or clownish responses.
Ford is in Parade's End contemplating the implications of a new
century, the one that began in August 1914. Like other writers of the
period, he sees "a parting of the ways," a "crack across the table of
history." This side of the fissure, the wisdom of Victorian grandfathers
stands mocked in its inadequacy to events. Parade's End overtly
celebrates a mythologized England of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. More quietly, it undertakes to indict the real England of the
nineteenth. Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop, a hero and
heroine too virtuous of mind and heart for the modernity they inhabit,
take a last look at the expired Victorian age, but without admiration.
Their sources of intellect and feeling lie entirely in a world that
antedates the rule of middle-class values. "Middle Class Morality?"
asks Valentine on Armistice Day, evoking the immense foreground to
war. "A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years!"
Christopher and Valentine certify themselves as the two best minds left
in England by their intuitive grasp of what has happened in terms of
the whole century preceding. They understand the catastrophe in
terms of the bourgeois culture, that is, the expedient culture, that England has become.
Parade's End is a patriotic book, and its patriotism is heartbroken.
"This is history," wrote another Englishman at the same moment. "One
England blots out another." And the new England dictates one tenet
above all others, both in war and out: the game is more than the players. "In such a world as this," Tietjens explains, "an idealist-or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist-must be stoned to death. He makes the
others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. ." Tietjens
is saintly, Anglican saintly, in his will to efface Tietjens. Throughout
the novel, he resolutely disinherits himself from a world in which
gamesmanship has superseded the very possibility of public virtue.
(This is the meaning of his refusal to inherit money or lands, and of his
exalting the mediocre Macmaster to the place of distinction that would
otherwise have been his own.) Tietjens everywhere in Parade's End
writes himself out of the future that belongs to a virtueless new team,
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Benjamin Taylor
the Sir Vincent Macmasters of the day. He is, as Sylvia puts it, "a man
disinclined to take his own part," though his reasons are certainly
beyond her ken.
Or anybody's in the novel, except Valentine's. What she and Tietjens together stand for "isn't any more in this world'" So they quit
modernity in favor of a thatched house in Sussex where they make their
frugal way of it: "They desired to live hard even if it deprived them of
the leisure in which to think high! She agreed with him that if a ruling
class loses its capacity to rule-or the desire! -it should abdicate from
its privileges and get underground." Now an antique furniture dealer,
Tietjens vends "the leavin's of Old England" to rich Americans. Valentine will presently give birth to a baby boy, Chrissie. And there they
are at the conclusion to Parade's End- the refugee threesome Ford first
beheld in a painting by his grandfather.
This novel is surely the best English account we have of the Great
War in all its implications, which point backward to the nineteenth
century as well as forward to us and our further prospect. In 1911 Ford
concluded his Memories and Impressionsby observing: "Life is very good
nowadays; but art is very bitter." Soon enough that great sooty stone
urn, the nineteenth century, lichen-encrusted and furnished with rams'
heads for handles, would come tumbling down. Life would get a lot less
good; and art would find new reasons for bitterness. But bitterness is
not the note of Parade's End. lNhat prevails instead is a sheer wonder at
history, the unleashed enterprise. And a prescient fear that history,
thus at large, will not be got back on its leash again.
Benjamin Taltlor
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