FORD MADOX FORD’S ROLE IN THE ROMANTICIZING OF THE BRITISH NOVEL by James Beresford Scott B.A., University of British Columbia, 1972 M.A., University of Toronto, 1974 A Dissertation Submitted In Partial Fulfillment ACCEPTED of T^e Re<3uirements For The Degree Of FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES doctor of PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English a - k k i We**accept this dissertation as conforming TWT1 / / ".... to the recruired standard Dr. C .DDoyle.l^upSr visor fDeoartment of English) Dr/ j/LouisV^ebarKtffiQiiEhr’ffSmber (English) Dr. D . S. jfhatcher, Department Member iEnglish) Dr. J. Mohey^ Outside^ Mem^er (History) Dr. pA.F. Arend, Outside Member (German) Dr. I.B. Nadel, External Examiner (English, UBC) ® JAMES BERESFORD SCOTT, 1992 University Of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. I . i Supervisor: Dr. Charles D. Doyle ABSTRACT Although it is now widely accepted that the Modern British novel is grounded in Romantic literary practice and ontological principles, Ford Madox Ford is often not regarded as a significant practitioner of (and proselytizer for) the new prose aesthetic that came into being near the start of the twentieth century. This dissertation argues that Ford very consciously strove to break away from the precepts that had informed the traditional novel, aiming instead for a non- didactic, autotelic art form that in many ways is akin to the anti-neoclassical art of the British High Romantic poets. Ford felt that the purpose of literature is to bring a reader into a keener apprehension of all that lies latent in the individual sell?— a capacity that he felt had atrophied in a rational, rule-abiding, industrialized culture. Impressed by the way that the French realists and naturalists disclosed the human condition, and fully aware of the descriptions of consciousness put forward by Pater, George Moore, Bergson, Wagner, Nietzsche, and William James, Ford worked to specify the strategies by which a novelist could realize his/her goal of making a reader apprehend that which can never be conveyed by direct statement. Ford felt that by heightening the individual's self-awareness, the "new novel" could effect an apocalyptic transvaluation of British society. Like his Romantic forebears, Ford felt that this increased breadth and intensity of individual consciousness can be realized only by means of a literary practice which is grounded in convention- breaking principles: exploration of the tension between social order and human compulsion; extended consideration of non-rational, especially unconscious, states of mind (such as dreams, telepathic experiences, sudden venting of repressed desire); description of "common" experiences; use of colloquial diction and disjunctive. tempora?ity; avoidance of narrative closure; use of a descriptive method (impressionism) that promotes non-" tical "vision"; advocacy of subjective, even solipsistic, definitions of truth; and criticism of positivist values. While the extent of Ford's influence on later writers is difficult to measure, he clearly was one of the pioneers of a distinctly new commitment to fiction as an art form whose purpose and guiding principles are romantic. ili Examiner^ Dr. C.D.'~boyle'^jB«pervi^oJi (Department of English) Dr. i m w u li Member (English) Dr. 0.sj. Thatcher, Department Member (English) Dr. J. Money, Outsi^jeuWSmb^r (History) Dr. A.F). Arend, Outside Member (German) Dr. I.B. Naael, External Examiner (English, UBC) iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Title P a g * ...............................................i A b s t r a c t ................................................ii Tab la of Contents........................................iv Introduction ........................................... 1 1 Probing tbs Depths of the Psyche: Ford and the Romantic View of the Unconscious..................... 26 2 The Romantic Tension in Ford's Novels: Unconscious Compulsions vs. Conscious Decision-Making ........ 58 3 Ford Madox Ford and "The Mystery That Comforteth": Romance as an Escape From Positivism................. 91 4 Impressionism and "Fine Unconsciousness": The Apocalyptic Mission of Ford's New Aesthetic .... 127 5 The Will vs. the Mill: Subjective Values in the New Republic.........................................156 6 Ford and the Germination of Organic P r o s e ......... 197 7 Ford and "The Language of Men": The Romantic Use of "Oral Prose" in the Modern N o v e l ................ 222 E p i l o g u e ............................................... 248 Works Consulted.........................................254 INTRODUCTION Of all the developments and transition points that can be identified in the history of British literature, one of the most striking (because the most sweeping) instances is the appearance of the modern novel near the beginning of the twentieth century. Virtually all of the significant achievements in the novel in the first quarter of this century were made by writers who were deliberately detaching themselves from the prose-writing traditions that had, during the preceding two centuries, become highly prescriptive, not only in terms of the moral values that the novel had to endorse but also in terms of the patterns of discourse that informed the genre. Of especial interest are the writers who pioneered this dissociation from the British prose tradition, who catalyzed the innovative approach to form and content which so distinguished the novels of Joyce and Woolf from those of Dickens and Thackeray. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and George Moore are rightly regarded as significant instigators of such a change late in the nineteenth century, for they transported across the English Channel many of the precepts that had informed Flaubert's realism and the M&dan school's naturalism. One figure whose contributions to the reformation of the British novel have only recently been appreciated is Ford Madox Ford. As with many instigators of change, his significance lies more in what he helped establish as a new theoretical basis than in 2 what he actually achieved artistically. Indeed, more than half his novels have been forgotten, but Ford nonetheless played a major role in defining and even legitimizing the direction that the new novel was to follow once it had abjured the values and strategies of composition tnat were characteristic of mainstream prose fiction of the nineteenth century. He cannot, to be sure, fairly be considered to have played a more significant role in promoting this new direction than did James, Conrad, or Moore, and yet much of what he advocated and practised was more starkly, even startlingly, non-traditional than anything written by the other three. Ford is remembered primarily for three works of fiction (The Fifth Queen trilogy, The GgQl Solfliir , and the Earaflels. End tetralogy), for his role in launching the English Review and t h e J cangatlanfclfi Rgyjgyi, and for tJ s close contact with Conrad (including collaboration on two novels) while Conrad was composing some of his best works. Many critical analyses of the genesis and subsequent development of the modern British novel refer to Ford, if at all, as a minor writer who seemingly just endorsed and imperfectly practised the innovative prose style that now is considered typical of modernism. Such a belief, however, downplays the influence ford had in shaping the content, style, and structure of modernist prose, and it ignores the substantial body of work Ford had done on behalf of what he called "the new novel." 3 He was, in fact, one of firat British-born novelists to argue that a novelist's goal should be the same as that which writers in other genres (notably the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes) set for themselves: to create an aesthetically self-sufficient work, freed from any moral or political purposes. For Ford, such a goal could only be achieved through rigorous attention to the specific stylistic and structural principles that inhere in the novel form, and in the late 1890's he and Conrad spent long hours analyzing the form in order to discern those principles by which one could create a novel which more closely approached tne condition of pure art. Such principles were the ones Ford used in evaluating novels in the numerous book reviews and literary commentaries he wrote in the first decade of the new century, and the necessity of promoting these principles impelled him to establish the English Review as the organ for new prose art. Because of the work carried out by Ford in establishing the theoretics basis for the new novel form, he may be regarded as a pioneer of British prose modernism; however, he may more rightly be referred to as the "Anglicizer" of the French post-naturalist novel, or as the "hybridizer" who grafted principles of Romantic poetry onto the stock of the traditional novel. Ford, indeed, was perhaps better grounded in the principles of late-nineteenth-century Continental and British aesthetic theory than were any of the more renowned 4 early modern British novelists. Ho was virtually steeped in the avant-garde, ttpater 1® bourgeois influence of the Pre- Raphaelites, Aesthetes, Decadents, Neoparnassians, and Rhymers, for he was the grandson of Ford Madox Brown, nephew of the Rosset is, cousin of Oscar Wilde, godson of Algernon Swinburne, and son of Francis Hueffer (the Times music critic). As a youth (or so Ford remembers it), he sat on the knee of Franz Liszt, listened to Richard Wagner talk at the dinner table, observed a drunken Swinburne extemporize poetry, debated art theory with the Garnett family, drank coffee in caf6s with Kropotkin and his anarchists, and (while he lived with the Rossettis after his mother's death) listened to innumerable discussions among the radical artists who congregated in the Rossetti house. Early in life, he became fascinated by the artistic accomplishments of Flaubert, Maupassant, Turgenev, and Stendhal, but his interests extended beyond the aesthetics of prose fiction, for he read widely in current British and Continental literature, philosophy, and social history.