Chapter I: Front Matter

THE
ENGLISH NOVEL

From the Earliest Days
to the Death of
Joseph Conrad

by
FORD MADOX FORD

LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO.
1930

PUBLISHED BY
_Constable & Company Limited_
_London W. C. 2_

BOMBAY
CALCUTTA MADRAS
LEIPZIG

_Oxford University Press_

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

To Hugh Walpole.

MY DEAR WALPOLE,--

This little book was intended at the time it was written solely for the consumption of students in the United States at a time when I had arrived at a decision to publish nothing more in the country of my birth. A curious set of circumstances all happening on the same day have made me change my decision, at least as to this book. In the first place I received in the morning the present publisher’s offer to publish the book; in the afternoon some kindly person gave me a copy of the _New York Herald’s_ Literary Supplement containing your far too eulogistic references to myself; and in the evening a Rhodes Scholar from one of the Oxford Colleges told me that in that place of education typewritten and then mimeographed copies of this work were--the book being unobtainable in England--being used by certain students as a textbook in their English classes. They were all, I understand, Rhodes Scholars.

I had by that time turned down the publisher’s offer. Indeed, I had thought that the publisher must be mad, for he must be as aware as I that a good average of English readers of my works has for many years been about four hundred. I do not mean to say that that is all that English editions of my books have sold, for there is a fashion in the United States of ordering the first editions (which are generally the London ones) of certain authors, those including my fortunate self. And the first edition of this book has appeared so long ago in the United States that that sale must be lost. But the thought of all those Rhodes Scholars having to take that trouble made me wish to make the matter easier for their devoted selves, and the reading of your words coming on top of so many generosities of yours towards me as writer made me determine to manifest some sense of my real gratitude towards yourself. And how could I do it better than by addressing to you a work, however small, on the subject of an art that you have for so long, so steadfastly, and so unswervingly pursued?

I have never felt so mortified with myself as when on the occasion of a public dinner given to us, in conjunction I think, in New York, you, speaking first, talked of my work with such enthusiasm and such enviable generosity--for to know how to be so generous is a thing for which one may well be envied!--that I was covered with confusion and quite literally had the tears in my eyes. I was indeed so affected as to be totally unable to make any adequate reply and must have seemed curmudgeonly in the extreme to our audience.

And then, subsequently during a tour of lectures at the English Classes of certain American Universities, I found that you had spoken of me already to them with the same magnificent generosity, so that I understood that it was your praise of my work that had actually secured me the invitation to deliver those lectures--why, then I conceived towards yourself a warmth of feeling of which you can be only too little aware and I far, far too little able to express. Why should you go out of your way to do these things? I have never done you any service; I have never in that city which for long now has been my spiritual home heard of any other English novelist going out of his way to speak a kind word for any other one, and, that city being the immense whispering gallery that it is, I have heard of many unkind sayings as to my works and much unkinder ones as to my person uttered there in public and private by visiting English novelists. But you just came there and ran about and said in innumerable places the dearest things--dearest to me; just, as the saying is, for the love of God. Because how can you retain enthusiasms for books who must have read so many?

I do not think that these things are too private between us to be spoken of. For in the weary business that is the writing of books the sudden discovery of generosities towards oneself by persons hardly personally known to one--it must be twenty-three years or so since, in the old _English Review_ days and a little after we infrequently met until we thus again in Gotham came together--such sudden discoveries of generosities are so refreshing against the dust and the haze of the road that is always uphill that their publication seems almost a duty. For how different might not have been the history of that which I am here tracing had such a sense of the co-operative thing that our art is, distinguished the long line of its practitioners from Cædmon to ... oh, to whom you will! Such a sense as must be yours....

The reason why I did not wish to publish this work in England was simply that, in that country, I have never found anyone to take the remotest interest in the subject and such occasional opuscules as I have there devoted to it have invariably been received with very bitter disfavour. Because it is obviously an impertinence in a novelist to insist that his art is an art or of service to the republic, and as not more than four hundred English read my novels, the craftsman’s notes of a person so ignored can have little or no interest. In the United States it is different. Even if I had no following there, the interest taken in the technical sides of any arts or processes is, in that country of intellectual curiosities, so keen, that I should without scruple have ventured on publishing for the benefit of students the notes that have occurred to me during the thirty-seven years in which I have been publishing novels. For I must be pretty nearly the doyen of English writers of the imaginative type--I mean of course in dates of publication, not in terms of age and of course not in terms of merit. And if, faint yet pursuing, I have been able to keep on finding American publishers during such a long space of time, there must be there some sort of a public that will take a little interest in the professional matters that so passionately have interested me. And I do not adopt an apologetic tone towards this work. I may be perfectly wrong in almost everything that I say. If I am, that is the end of me. But the great use of technical discussion is that it arouses interest in the subject discussed. I have had in my day a great number of disciples--mostly of course on the Western side of the Atlantic--and several of them have risen to positions of considerable prominence and are doing work of great beauty. But there is not one of them who to-day acts in any way according to the maxims that I enjoined on him or her. And that is how it should be, the new generation attaining its eminences by using the maxims of the generation preceding as its jumping-off posts. And if the older generation can get its craftsman’s maxims clearly expressed, the process of demolition is all the easier and more thorough.

So, my dear Walpole, I at least see it. And since the book is written and as if by _force majeure_ makes its appearance in our country, I do desire that its theories should secure as wide an attention as may be. So I have adopted the stratagem of attaching your name to it. Nevertheless, my gratitude is very profound, and it is in all sincerity that I inscribe myself

Your humble, obedient and
very thankful servant,
F. M. F.

This book was written in New York, on board the S.S. _Patria_, and
in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August,
1927. For the purpose of rendering it more easily understood by the
English reader I have made certain alterations in phrases, in Paris
during the last four days of 1929 and the first two of 1930.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I THE FUNCTION OF THE NOVEL IN THE MODERN WORLD 1

II TOWARDS DEFOE 29

III TOWARDS FLAUBERT 65

IV TO JOSEPH CONRAD 105

_L’ENVOI_: IN THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY 135