SOURCE: "Tietjens' Travels: Parade's End as Comedy," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 16, No. 2, April, 1970, pp. 85-95.

[In the following essay, Kennedy identifies comedic elements in Parade's End.]

One can easily see Tietjens as a model of integrity, of morality, of pre-Edwardian honour and Christian long-suffering; as an innocent who is the victim of "an old bitch gone in the teeth." The ease of such a vision may be an indication that it is the best, most correct reaction to Parade's End. One need not, certainly, be always looking for complications. Tietjens' story does appear to have a direct simplicity, and one cannot be too far wrong in saying that Ford approved more of Tietjens' integrity than he did of the "lachrymose polygamy" of such moderns as Rossetti and McMaster.

In contrast, though, to a view which sees Tietjens as a tragic victim of a decaying society, one must remember the immense comic spirit which informs the whole of the work. I do not disagree that Parade's End sounds a note of regret for the passing of a way of life which so emphasized public virtue. But surely, Ford's regret for Victorianism-Edwardianism is of the same type as Swift's "lament" over the fact that we cannot all be as reasonable as Houyhnhnms. Swift seems to say that it would of course be desirable if we could establish the reign of reason in the affairs of men. But, after all, look what happens to a man, Gulliver, when he attempts to become all reason and no body. He declines into misanthropy, avoiding his wife and cultivating his relationship with his horses. Ford seems to be saying something similar about the values summed up by the word "parade." Of course it would be nice if we could all be at "moral attention forever," but my dear fellow, it is just not in the nature of human beings to torment themselves that way.

To make a fetish of reason or to make a fetish of a code of honour, then, is contrary to the nature of man. If Ford looks with a touch of regret at the passing of a particular code, he looks much more actively towards the proper fulfilling of the passionate needs of men. In saying this I imply that Parade's End is ultimately comic and not tragic; that we are not meant to grieve at the protracted suffering caused Tietjens by a corrupt society. Rather we should laugh at and ultimately with him. We should also revel in those other feelings of release, freedom and clear vision that come with the best of comedy.

Of course, most readers have long since recognized that the "easy" view outlined above is not wholly correct and that there is much that is funny in Parade's End. No one fails to find Sir Vincent McMaster and his Egeria anything but funny, and there are the two famous scenes, breakfast with the mad divine, Duchemin, and the dinner during which Sylvia decorates Tietjens' dress tunic with her two chops and aspic. Writers like Carol Ohmann remind us that there is an element of the comic in Parade's End:

To forget the tone of his voice, to fail to note the absurd human behavior in many of the scenes it presents, and to overlook the fact that Ford's juxtapositions of episode are often funny as well as thematically significant, is to forget, as some critics have done, one of the most engaging and characteristic features of the Tietjens series. From beginning to end Parade's End is, in part, social comedy.

It may be inconsistent to suggest that the tone of voice of the novel is consistently comic while the tale itself is comic only in places and therefore, supposedly, tragic overall. There is an implication that Ford was not completely in control of his technique. But at least Mrs. Ohmann gives us a needed reminder about comedy in Parde's End, even though she sees comedy as merely relief from the more serious aspects of the book. We find a similar point of view in John A. Meixner's comment that Parade's End is "full of comic surprise." However, "Christopher is tragic, of course, but he is decidedly amusing, particularly when he is being very much the Yorkshireman as in Part One." Here one becomes even more suspicious; can a tragic hero be "decidedly amusing?" It is my belief that not only the voice and isolated incidents are comic, but that the very structure of Paade's End suggests that Ford was consciously employing the comic mode in his great novel about the shift from one world into another.

To be able to see Parade's End as comic, one must first see that the novel is not primarily a cry of pain about the end of "parade." In essence it is rather a celebration of the passing of a way of life no longer possible. If "parade" sums up the qualities and values of Victorian-Edwardian society, then Ford's point must be that that particular parade has ended in World War. Parade is a term used for the state of being on duty in military service. So the title directs our attention to the time when duty is over, when the war is ended, and new life can begin. Parade also implies an overt code of behaviour which one displays to indicate culture, cultivation. The noble, feudal atmosphere evoked by "parade" may indeed be one that had much appeal for Ford. One need not conclude, however, that this appealing atmosphere made Ford incapable of seeing that the parade of high manners, of social distinctions, had become so extreme, so much a hollow sham of one-upmanship, that it led to slaughter. So Parde's End plays the Last Post for parade, hope, glory, honour; but it also indicts the parade of a misdirected society and indicates a method by which a new hope can be realized. With "oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruptions and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel and louse-covered ape that was human society."

During the course of the tetralogy, Tietjens is able to extricate himself from the demands of a society turned so bestial and from a code which is revealed to be inhuman in its application. He goes "underground" and attains enough personal freedom to permit his establishing a "marriage" with Valentine and the pastoral resolution of the fourth novel. Mark Tietjens holds on to the old dignities, to the old values and refuses to accept the new world with its new ways. In so doing, he wills his own paralysis and spends the whole of The Last Post mute before his lover. By the end of the tetralogy, "parade" has been thoroughly exploded.

Parade's End then, is not necessarily a tragic story about loss of the Golden Age. Tietjens periodically hungers for the comfort of the past, for Bemerton, Herbert's parsonage, but in this he is very similar to the absurd McMaster who "was in search of the inspiration of the past." Tietjens learns to accept and to live in the present, even though he is still tormented by Mrs. de Bray Pape and her entourage. Tietjens is freed from what Northrop Frye would call "ritual bondage," and this release from bondage is one of the essentials of comedy. Frye says that the normal comic pattern is the movement from one type of society to another. The society in control at the beginning of the action is restrictive, repressive and humoristic. It must be overthrown by the young generation of lovers, by the representatives of Eros. The society in control at the beginning of Parade's End is obviously ripe for overthrow; its central representatives are Sir Vincent McMaster and Lord Edward Campion, K.C.M.G. Campion's relationship to Tietjens suggests the Oedipal situation common to comedy. Campion acts in loco parentis to Tietjens, advising him to set up some girl in a tobacco shop (advice which Tietjens has already given McMaster), but his real interest would seem to be in Tietjens' wife Sylvia. In the fourth novel we see Sylvia and Campion poised on the verge of elopement to India.

At first glance then, Tietjens and Valentine are the youthful lovers, who are thwarted in their attempt at an affair because of the strict Victorian code of behaviour. The point of interest here, though, is that Tietjens is both the young lover and the senex, the member of the repressive old order of society. He is both the promoter and the inhibitor of the comic action. As comic hero and comic villain he portrays the same inner conflict that troubles Edwardian society in its time of transition. Tietjens applies to himself a code of behaviour which he does not demand of his friends (witness his toleration of McMaster's erotic peccadilloes) and this inconsistency indicates his readiness for change. Tietjens' morality is an unimaginative version of dogmatic Tory-Christian correct behaviour for a gentleman, summed up best by his pronouncement that, "No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of divorce."

It is in the first of the novels that Christopher announces his decision to take a holiday from principles, and at the end of Part I of Some Do Not … we find him in a characteristic quandary over principles:

A long long time afterwards he said:

"Damn all principles!" And then;

"But one has to keep on going.… Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you're going east or north."

The knacker's cart lumbered round the corner.

Tietjens' little holiday from principles allows him to go comfortably for a ride in the horse cart with Valentine, finally to collide with the carelessly driven car of General Campion. The question of inconsistent or inadequate values is here tied closely to an incident of physical violence and the knacker's cart lumbers around the corner to collect the injured horse. The knacker's cart is also coming for the whole world in the form of war, as the inevitable concomitant of inconsistency and inadequacy of moral vision.

For Tietjens before the War, morality is a simple thing; it is a matter of opposing desire and restraint:

I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He'd no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn't. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn't have the second glass of whisky and soda.…

McMaster quite rightly objects to the equating of this mathematical self-restraint with morality. In fact, Tietjens' morality is not much different in kind from the "lachrymose polygamy," the "fumbling in placket-holes," the "sham sexual morality" of McMaster et al. Both are inadequate guides to the evaluation of human experience. McMaster and the rest of Edwardian society take a holiday from principles by slipping into hypocrisy about sexuality, all the while mumbling about honour. This holiday from principles is one of the motives for the explosion of society into violence and destruction. The other is the discovery that Tietjens' ethic of repression is inadequate and that the attempt to deny the animal in man results in a perverted release of human energy. When the natural man is denied, he becomes the wolf, tiger or louse-covered ape mentioned above.

The wound that Tietjens suffers in the War is highly appropriate for a man who has been repressing his instincts. Immediately that he and Valentine come to their mutual conclusion that they are the sort who do not, Tietjens rushes off into uniform and is blown up on the battlefield to return home in a state of semi-amnesia. His brain is half dead, "Without a proper blood supply.… So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone." This event is part of the destruction in Tietjens of the repressive habit; it is part of the process which will refine out of him the dogmatic Tory and free in him the erotically successful comic hero. That he loses his mind, his most prized asset, should not be regarded as tragic or pathetic. Of course, any suffering looked at too closely becomes unbearable. But we are not asked to look closely at Tietjens' private loss. Instead we are given the very funny picture of Tietjens laboriously trying to memorize the Encyclopaedia Britannica and being unable at one point to answer a question about Metternich because he had not yet reached the "M's." Suffering of this sort seems to be so deserved that it cannot be tragic.

For the early Tietjens, human relationships are practical, rational, predictable, diplomatic, functional, but never personal. When he decides to take Sylvia back after her affair with Perowne, he says," 'Yes, in principle I'm determined to. But I shall take three days to think out the details.' He seemed to have no feelings about the matter." His attitude here recalls the Houyhnhnms whose care for their children "proceedeth entirely from the Dictates of Reason" because they have no natural "Fondness for Their Colts or Foles." For Tietjens, while wearing his Tory mask, the upper mind must always control the lower; there must be, above all, no scenes; there must be no disruptions:

For the basis of Tietjens' emotional existence was a complete taciturnity—at any rate as to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.

As strictly as Tietjens denies his emotional self, however, it continues to build up subterranean pressures. During the golf-course incident, Tietjens is supremely cool in dealing with the disreputable golfers who chase Valentine and Gertie yelling, "Strip the bitch naked!… Uhg …Strip the bitch stark naked!". Tietjens stops the primitive emotions of the "city man" who stands "as if the bottom of his assured world, where all men desire in their hearts to bash women, had fallen out." The punishment envisioned for the two girls, to be stripped naked for having invaded the golf-course, could be suggested only in a work of comedy. As it turns out, Tietjens shares this primitive desire to "bash" women, but is completely unaware of it. There is a long passage which occurs when Tietjens is walking with Valentine in the country after Duchemin's breakfast, which is worth quoting at length. Tietjens is describing the "perfect" England:

"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. "'Land of Hope and Glory!'—F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major.… All absolutely correct! Double basses, 'cellos, all violins, all woodwind, all brass. Full grand organ, all stops, special vox humana and key-bugle effect.… Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew.…Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth; ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman's back. English midday midsummer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!" Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!

"Now I'm a bloody murderer!" Tietjens said. "Not gory! Green stained with vital fluid of innocent plant… And by God! Not a woman in the country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!" He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

Tietjens is certainly here being held up to the light of comic revelation. The perfect world that he crows about, is pushing him more and more into the extremes of violent self-expression indicated by the symbolic rape of the flowers. Ford declares the flowers female, but their phallic appearance might suggest what Tietjens is doing to his own sexuality by adhering to his repressive morality.

By the time we reach No More Paades, Tietjens would seem to have gained enough insight into himself to be able to judge his own sexual inaction. O Nine Morgan has just died in his arms and Tietjens muses:

But, damn it, he had never kissed her. So how did he know how she smelt! She was a little tranquil, golden spot. He himself must be a—eunuch. By temperament. That dead fellow down there must be one, physically. It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely.

One function of this passage is to make the association of sexual impotence and abstinence, with death. This association becomes a central theme of No More Parades as Tietjens discovers the meaning of death and as a correlative, discovers the necessity of sexuality and love for life. The passage also presents Tietjens' own value judgment, that the chivalric code by which he has attempted to live, has made him virtually a eunuch. His self-awareness is another step towards his deliverance.

It has long been noted that Ford makes much use of animal imagery. The particular use of images of animals in Parade's End is to express the psychological problems encountered by Victorian modes of behaviour which attempt to curb the animal nature of man. Valentine imagines her "fainting mind; her consenting limbs," only to be brought sharply back to "reality" by Tietjens' taciturn: "Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better." Valentine tries to recapture her sense of an aroused Tietjens and recalls him as a "raging stallion then!" But Tietjens' brushing her aside transforms him into a being "of crystal purity." The vitality of the stallion has been immobilized into the stasis of crystal.

We have another example of sexual paralysis in the figure of the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, who at one point seems to be dreaming of the freedom he could have as a stallion:

"Chaste!" He shouted. "Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion in the word …" He surveyed the opulent broadness of his table-cloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: "But chastity.…"

For Duchemin, sexual release can come only in obscenity, or in the sad ramblings on the theory of post coitum tristis, or in his references to Petronius' highly homosexual Satyricon. He is a gelding that will never gallop again.

Sylvia's situation is also seen in terms of imagery of horses:

"You know what it is to ride a horse for miles with too tight a curb-chain and its tongue cut almost in half … Well! Think of this mare's mouth sometimes! You've ridden me like that for seven years.…"

Because Tietjens rides Sylvia too hard, keeps too tight a rein on her passions, we might justifiably see him as a villain who has very little of the comic about him. In fact, it is in the story of Sylvia that the novel comes closest to tragedy, and perhaps closest also to pathos and sentimentality. One must remember, however, that it is not necessary for all events in a novel to be happy or funny for the whole to be comic in essence and structure. Ford can convey the pain of Sylvia's life within the context of a novel which does not lose sight of that which might bring a better world.

Having made that consideration, one can perhaps go further to show that Sylvia's suffering is not wholly Tietjens' responsibility. We know that she has had some liaison before their marriage and that Tietjens is tormented by the thought that he may not be the father of his son. Sylvia's response to sexuality and love has been dictated by an experience in her life before she met Tietjens. Sylvia had "been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake." Frightened by her mother (about the possibility of pregnancy) she seduced Tietjens in a railway car and "married him in Paris to be out of the way." After marriage she continued to have visions of the "distorted face of Drake" and she "knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death." Sylvia's sexual paralysis is an event, then, in which Tietjens is involved only after the fact.

The miserable memory would come, ghost-like, at any time, anywhere. She would see Drake's face, dark against the white things; she would feel the thin night-gown ripping off her shoulder; but most of all she would seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the longing for the brute who had mangled her, the dreadful pain of the mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him … She had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to experience again that dreadful feeling. And not with Drake.…

Sylvia's particular sexual disaster is that she has been forced into the rigidity of a "rape mentality." We can see Sylvia's castigations of Tietjens in light of the passage quoted above. Her charges against him are part of her need to be attacked again and again.

She says that Tietjens might have done something to bring them together if only he had "once in our lives said to me: 'You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it.… '" Tietjens refuses to take part in an emotional scene and replies, "That's, of course, true!" And when he says that, one must almost take back any defence of him. Sylvia goes on to indicate that she may be capable of developing genuine human responses:

"Oh, Christopher," she said, "don't carry on that old play acting. I shall never see you again, very likely, to speak to. You'll sleep with the Wannop girl to-night; you're going out to be killed tomorrow. Let's be straight for the next ten minutes or so."

Sylvia here breaks through her shell, while Tietjens does not; he continues to wear his mask of insane reserve and he does not sleep with the Wannop girl. If he is not directly responsible for Sylvia's plight, he is responsible for accentuating it. It is because, as we noted above, that he is a member of the old way, that he is one of the inhibitors of the comic action, that Tietjens can, in the early parts of the tetralogy, restrict the freeing of Eros.

The presence of Sylvia, then, need not be seen as detracting from the comic nature of Parde's End. Although her story does add to the melancholic effect of the record of the passing of a way of life, she also contributes to the comic action by her "pulling the strings of shower baths." In the dinner scene referred to earlier, she is a character in slapstick comedy, attempting to break through the armour of one of the enemies of Eros. The irony of her life is that she succeeds, at least partially. She keeps up the pressure on Tietjens which will eventually turn him into the successful lover of Valentine Wannop.

The freeing of Tietjens occurs primarily in the two middle novels, and it occurs as a physical discovery on Tietjens' part. Whereas in Some Do Not… our impression of him is that of a man of great intellect, we see him in No More Parades and A Man Could Stand Up, forcibly being reminded of the physical realities of a man's life. We have noted already the scene in which O Nine Morgan dies in Tietjens' arms. The sight of Morgan's blood becomes almost an obsession of Tietjens: "It astonished Tietjens to see that a human body could be so lavish of blood." It is at the same time that he begins to reject the concept of honour expressed in his regimental motto: "Anguish is better than dishonour. The devil it is!" The passage recalls an earlier one which presented to us the terms of Valentine's desire for Tietjens: "Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides."

As physical death becomes a reality for Tietjens, he moves from correct passivity into passionate activity. He begins to overcome his paralyzing complexes:

Now what the Hell was he? A sort of Hamlet of the Trenches! No, by God he was not.… He was perfectly ready for action. Ready to command a battalion. He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!

That "And worse!" reminds us that there is no escaping the tone of comic irony, even here, or perhaps particularly here, where Tietjens begins to show signs of looking dangerously like a hero. Even with the smiling intelligence of Ford in the background, Tietjens does achieve his independence by declaring that he and Valentine "would do what they wanted and take what they got for it!" Tietjens makes a claim for the freedom of the passionate individual as opposed to the dried-out dictates of misused authority, and a misconception of the nature of man:

What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When, then, a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute. To exist in his society was to live with brutes, like Gulliver amongst the Houyhnhnms!

The modernity of Tietjens' reflection can be seen by considering what Sartre and existentialism say about the nature of man: man is the free animal. But the comment about Gulliver is perhaps much more important. It is the Houyhnhnms that are equated with brutes. Those pretenders to reason and Augustan aloofness have become the brutes and therefore Gulliver's, and Tietjens', greatest error must be their denial of Yahoo characteristics; that is, the denial of the physical body and the passions. It is Gulliver who becomes misanthropic to the point of insanity, and Swift and Ford both seem to understand why.

Tietjens enters his new life in a scene which has overtones of a rebirth, indeed it is like the mythic birth of the hero. He emerges from the ground, having been buried by an explosion. The first explosion Tietjens experiences is an attack on his mind. The second explosion again serves to emphasize the body:

It assimilated his calves, his thighs. It imprisoned him above the waist. His arms being free, he resembled a man in a life-buoy. The earth moved him slowly. It was solidish.

The young Aranjuez is buried simultaneously and cries out: "Save me, Captain!" Tietjens replies: "I've got to save myself first!" This reply is in marked contrast to the statement made earlier about Tietjens: "He saved others: himself he could not save!" Tietjens has given up the sacrificial ideal embodied in his desire to be an Anglican Saint or even Christ. He is born into a world which recognizes the need for self-salvation, a world in which the needs of the body are as real as those of the soul: "It was a condemnation of a civilization that he, Tietjens, possessed of enormous physical strength, should never have needed to use it before."

The process of release for Tietjens takes place primarily in the second part of the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up. This novel is finely structured (as are the other three), the relatively short sections, Part I and Part III, which occur in London during and immediately after the marking of armistice, flank the last of the battle scenes at the front which we have just been considering. The emergence of the new man of passion is framed by the celebration of the beginning of a new world on the one hand, and on the other, the beginning of a new type of human relationship for Tietjens and Valentine.

Valentine feels herself to be in a "World Turned Upside Down." She seems to have made the same discovery of the physical world that Tietjens has: "The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values."

She joins in the spirit of physical and erotic liberation that inforns Armistice Day:

Undoubtedly what the Mistresses with the Head at their head had feared was that if they, Headmistresses, Mistresses, Masters, Pastors—by whom I was made etcetera!—should cease to be respected because saturnalia broke out on the sounding of a maroon the world would go to pieces! An awful thought! The Girls no longer sitting silent in the nonconformist hall while the Head addressed repressive speeches to them.…

Very clearly, the Head will no longer rule the Heart, and we begin to see the saturnalian world that is the end of the writer of comedy.

A Man Could Stand Up is quite properly concluded with a dance and with the "wedding" of Tietjens and Valentine. The couple is at the centre of a vast ritual dance:

They were prancing. The whole world round them was yelling and prancing round. They were the centre of unending roaring circles.

Tietjens, although at the centre of the circle, does not remain motionless as he used to do, but takes an active part. For Valentine he is no longer a threatening, raging stallion, nor is he the other type of horse, the cold, reasonable Houyhnhnm. He has instead become a helpful, friendly beast:

Tietjens was stretching out his two hands from the waist. It was incomprehensible. His right hand was behind her back, his left in her right hand. She was frightened. She was amazed. Did you ever! He was swaying slowly. The elephant! They were dancing!… On an elephant. A dear, meal-sack elephant. She was setting out on…

It is probably no accident that Ford chose the elephant, traditionally the animal with the enormous memory, as an emblem for the renewed Tietjens. Paade's End works towards a balance of desire and intellect and not towards the death of the mind.

The discussion thus far has been concerned only with the first three of the novels, and not extensively with The Last Post. My purpose is not to pass judgment on the quality of the last novel, although I would agree that it does seem a bit of a maverick given the tight structure of the first three. I am concerned only to show what were the structural and thematic preoccupations that Ford was working with. It is sufficient to say that in The Last Post we do not find that he abandons the comic mode. The Last Post is an extension of the comic argument of the first three books. It is certainly an entertaining and interesting book, which serves, at least, to show what happens to Mark Tietjens, who holds on to the old values. He is a "tired horse" who spends the space of the novel in paralysis and silence except for the last few pages in which he, in effect, gives his blessing to the new menage of Valentine and Christopher. He even becomes capable of a brief moment of genuine human feeling: "Never thou let thy barnie weep for they sharp tongue to thy goodman.…

The death of Mark Tietjens dramatically points out for us the wrong way to respond to the flux of reality. His defeat counterpoints the comic achievement of Christopher. One must be wary, however, of reading Parde's End as some sort of recipe book for the good life. Ford was strict in his doctrine that the novel must not descend into propaganda. He said that it is "obviously best if you can contrive to be without views at all; your business with the world is rendering, not alteration." It was with such a comment in mind that I undertook to write of the comic structure of Paade's End, for it is in consideration of form, of total vision, that one can find the paradoxical justification for another claim of Ford's, that he wanted to write a book "that should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars." Certainly Parde's End, could not end war by evoking in us a horror of battle. We are given almost no scenes of physical torment in war. The greatest suffering we witness is the pain of private lives gone wrong, and there the villain is a society which does not recognize the nature and needs of man. By watching the comic action, by seeing the effects of one way of life which enforces repression, and by seeing the gradual freeing of one worthy individual from his ritual bondage to worn out dogma, we are surely meant to follow the same process ourselves; that is, to undergo a freeing of human feelings and understanding which would ultimately build a better, more human world. It is by means of his comic vision of things that Ford hoped to make us see what the world could be. Tietjens sets out on his rickety bicycle, on the road towards a better life, and his name may remind us of another Christopher, the patron saint of all travellers.