SOURCE: "The Political Sense of Ford Madox Ford," in The New Republic, Vol. 134, No. 13, March 26, 1956, pp. 17-19.

[Walter is an American author and educator. In the following essay, he disputes the critical opinion that a well-crafted novel cannot be a political novel, citing Parade's End as an example of both.]

Ultimately, when critics write about Ford Madox Ford, they write about his technique, and since he is, if anything, a virtuoso of the well-made novel, it is appropriate that they insist on this side of his work. Still, in Paade's End, the Tietjens tetralogy (Some Do Not … ;No More Parades; A Man Could Stand Up—; The Last Post), he is also a political novelist.

This aspect is obscured by some of his admirers who make a fastidious effort to preserve the concept of the well-made novel from political defilement.

Facile conclusions have been drawn from this position, leading to a Manichaean view of the novel that conceives form and life as somehow antithetical and also implies a denigration of the concept of politics. The conception is not to be taken lightly, for, as Lionel Trilling has warned, "Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like."

The well-made novel and the political novel are not mutually exclusive genres, as some would have us believe. The vitality of the Tietjens cycle as a political novel is achieved by its formal excellence, and the politics of the tetralogy is an aspect as essential to an understanding of Ford's authorship as is his craft.

Throughout the tetralogy, Ford's art breathes life into the ancient political truth that the state is the soul writ large and the self is the republic in microcosm. History, in the Tietjens cycle, plays a dual role, providing an emotional milieu that infuses the characters with motives for their dramatic movement and serving as a backdrop against which their lives are acted out. The terrible irony of world politics contrasts the goals of Empire with the sufferings of the men in the line, Imperial destiny with stupid official behavior, and strategic logic with tactical exigency. The lives of the characters explore for us the relation between inner and outer chaos and show how the pathology of the self is conditioned by "the public events of a decade."

Christopher Tietjens, Ford's hero and the incarnation of the aristocratic ideal, encounters the effete institutions of post-Edwardian England, and that world, sick unto death, tries to destroy him. Hating him because he is a symbol of the very ideal they have betrayed, his own people, the recreant ruling class, are his fiercest harrower. He survives their onslaught, endures the First World War, and escapes underground, hinting that in another day aristocracy will rise again. On the one hand, through the mind of Tietjens we perceive the aristocratic ideal from the inside; on the other, we have an allegory of the disintegration of the English governing class.

In the aristocratic imagination, there are four royal roads to the sublime life: the saintly, the wise, the heroic and the bucolic. Spiritual archetypes, these patterns are not necessarily aristocratic—the saint may be beggar as well as pope; the sage, poor or rich; the hero, worker or knight; the tiller of soil, peasant or squire—but they are perennial forms in which the aristocratic ideal appears. Since Tietjens represents, to some degree, all four, his destiny corresponds to the fate of the ideal. He is saintly, but is persecuted for his sanctity; he is sagacious, but the war almost destroys his mind; he is heroic, but his military career turns into a fiasco and he is all but drummed out of the service; he returns to the soil, yet not to find some creative power but only to flee the world and get underground.

As Irving Howe has pointed out, the 19th-Century political novel ruminated over the latent chaos in institutional life and the menacing subversion or destruction of order which lurked beneath the smooth surface, whereas the 20th-Century political novel accepts the destruction of the old order as a fait accompli. In one way, Ford stands between the two, watching English society as it comes apart.

In Ford's earlier book, The Good Soldier, the narrator had confided that behind the mask of appearances, below the surface of conventions, there are "broken, tumultuous, agonized and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies." Later, after his experience in the war, Ford was impelled to develop this vision as it is reflected in the collective life.

Collective disorder brings chaos to all forms of private life, including the sexual life. The pathology of Duchemin, the mad clergyman whose demon makes him hurl Latin obscenities; Sylvia, whose sex hunger demands violence; Edith Ethel, whose polite adulteries disintegrate into hysteria; and the rumors that almost overwhelm Christopher are part of the syndrome. Christopher and Mark, whose monogamy is grounded on principle, have an immunity. Christopher's own passion for Valentine, hinting at an image of I'amour courtois, is saved by its being an anachronism.

Ford had given the key to the problem of sexual chaos in The Good Soldier. There the narrator had observed:

If everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contracts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

But if Christopher and Mark Tietjens stand for monogamy, the controlling irony again appears: not conventional but ideal monogamy. For Mark lives with his mistress whom he will not marry (until he is on his deathbed), whereas Christopher is married to a woman with whom he will not sleep and attached to another who is a mistress in idea only (until after Armistice Day). Monogamy must be based on principle, and principles are "like a map"—they let you know where you are. Especially in a world where there will be no more parades, no more hope, no more glory, no more respect.

Refusing to separate politics and morality, Tietjens pronounces heavy judgment on his class. It is proper, he reflects, that one's individual feelings be sacrificed to the necessities of a collective entity, but not if that entity is to be betrayed from above. The war convinces him that he must make a radical break with the world. In the army, he hopes to be out of it before the end of the war, for then, perhaps, he would be in time for the last train to the old feudal heaven. No longer is there a tidy universe—you'd think God would have arranged the war so Yorkshiremen could go to heaven with the other North Country fellows instead of with Cockneys and Portuguese. In the old days, you used to fight beside men from your own hamlet, led by the parson's son, but now the Feudal Spirit is broken and dying is a lonely affair.

The all but destructive effect of the war on the mind of Tietjens represents its effect on aristocracy and tradition itself. At one point, shell shock leaves him with a temporary memory loss, and he, who had once been an authority on almost everything and had despised books of reference, finds it necessary to read the entire Encyclopedia. His condition suggests Unamuno's formula: memory is to mind as tradition is to society. The dimension of time is highly significant for the Tietjens allegory, and Ford makes extensive use of the time-shift device to dramatize the interplay of time-memory-tradition.

The decline of the Tietjens family is the fate of the old governing class—the Good People who once ruled the nation and were responsible for its destiny. Their physical afflictions take on a larger meaning when one considers the ancient analogy between sickness in the body and injustice in the state. In the concluding book of the tetralogy, the abdication of the old ruling class is represented by the paralysis of Mark Tietjens. His immobility is the result of a stroke, but in his mind his silence is voluntary. Enraged by the behavior of his nation, he has vowed never to speak again. Thus, in the new world, aristocracy is impotent but secretly believes its condition self-imposed.

With the death of Mark, the passage of Groby to Christopher's papist son, the destruction of Groby Great Tree, and the escape of Christopher to the land near Bemerton parsonage, the ancient curse is lifted from the house of Tietjens and a new life begins for Christopher and Valentine. If a ruling class loses the capacity or the desire to rule, Tietjens had said, then "it should abdicate from its privileges and get underground." Frugality, temperance and industry regulate their lives as they live, without the convention of marriage, to remake "reality." Desiring to live hard, "even if it deprived them of the leisure in which to think high," and true to their anachronistic vision of the good life, they will be "jogging away to the end of time, leaving descendants to carry on the country without swank." Bemerton parsonage is the real England. Damn the Empire, it is England that matters, Tietjens had proclaimed, like a Cato denouncing orientalism, demanding a revival of the agrarian virtues and a return to the bucolic way of life.

The manner of his escape is a classical pattern of the aristocratic imagination. The pastoral idyll itself is protean and expressed by minds as diverse as Lao Tse, Theocritus, Rousseau, Jefferson and Tolstoy, but in its aristocratic form it is sometimes a reaction against chivalry that still retains the basic structure of the chivalric ideal. It is insufficient to tag this kind of agrarianism "romantic," for the chivalric romanticism of restraint is entirely different from its involution, the modern romanticism of impulse.

Even in times when the aristocratic view of life is the dominant image, the difference between ideal and practice cannot be concealed. Reality gives the lie to the illusions and pretensions of the chivalric view of society, and individual character determines the response to the shock of contradiction. Mockery is one way: in feudal times, the coarse satire of les fabliaux and the more polished raillery of a blase court. Another way is the escape to innocence: to flee the hypocritical preciosity of aristocratic life, one could go to the soil and take refuge in uncorrupted nature. In the modern world, this escape is the way chosen by Tietjens. However, he must flee not only his own decadent circle, but the whole dying world.

In his flight, he corresponds to the figure of the contrite noble, not aware of any personal guilt but of the culpa of his class. In many ways he is like the Slavophil narodnik, sensitive to social anxiety and apocalyptic dread, who proclaims that when the ruling class isolates itself and a gulf appears between it and the people, then society totters on the brink of the abyss. Although they are worlds apart in their traditions, there are nonetheless certain affinities between the impulse of Tietjens to return to the land and the desire of Count Tolstoy to live as a simple muzhik.

Feudalism survives underground with Tietjens, but in the world it is finished. After Armistice Day, the places of men are taken by strangers, their settlements occupied by "a vindictive and savage tribe." Since the moribund governing class had lost control of the state, a transfer of power was inevitable. Marie Leonie reads in the papers of "the deeds of assassins, highway robbers, of the subversive and the ignorant who everywhere seized the reins of power." Also, in the place of true nobility there are unscrupulous nouveaux. The world, without manners, would be a tiring place run by tiring people.

The feudal mysteries of power are reduced by the official secrets of the bureaucracy. To Christopher's Tory mind, the old ruling class is responsible for the change. The indiscretions of the ruling class appear to him equivalent to scenes made before the servants. It follows that when the lower classes grow accustomed to such scenes, aristocracy loses its aura of sanctity and the arcanum of power is invaded. The new masters, it is implied, without Tory noblesse, would have little regard for the real welfare of the lower classes.

The lower classes are shadowy figures, and their indistinctness may be attributed as much to Ford as to the mind of Tietjens. Ford lacked the vision of Henry James, whose feeling for aristocracy did not obscure his penetration of souls, regardless of class. In his admiration of James, he freely admitted that although he had lived among agricultural workers, his knowledge of them did not measure up to that of the Old Man. Since he lacked the latter's perception of the emotional life of the poor, his lower classes remain lay figures.

They are all villeins: either faithful servants or "dirty … and with the mystified eyes of the subject races." In the army, faced with the breakdown of feudal categories, Tietjens had struggled with his image of the Other Ranks, worrying over the men in his command, reassuring himself that they were not just populations but "each man with a backbone, knees, breeches, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a greengrocer's business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife." But in spite of his struggle to see them as real, they wear the faces of batmen and servants—underground figures and completely mysterious.

Some critics suggest that Tietjens represents a defender of the lower classes. On the contrary, he is merely a defender of their limits. It is true that noblesse breeds a tender regard for the tiller of soil, the shepherd, and the poor merchant, but only as long as their behavior conforms to the categories set up in the feudal mind. Behavior that exceeds these limits is interpreted as presumption, and, through it, villein becomes barbarian. In this mode of thought, the masses represent chaos—always a potential menace. The restraint of feudal conventions, it is assumed, gives them humanity.

The aristocratic mind withdraws from the terror of a world of changing forms; however, on an island of its own it can survive. In self-imposed exile, surrounded by faithful retainers (the "rocks" on which the "lighthouse" is built), Christopher and Valentine live their bucolic idyll, insulated from the world in ruins.

The war, like the industrial fog that had long hung over the countryside, had been only a symptom of a deadlier disease, and the perfidious nation merely a magnification of the untrue self. The premise of Parade's End is the same as that of The Good Soldier—that conventions are erected as restraints upon impulse—but it concludes that if the ruling class, the architect of morals, is itself not restrained, then it dies in the wreckage, its own house about its ears.

Yet, hidden in Yorkshire under the debris, Tietjens and Valentine are a new Adam and Eve, and Tietjens discloses his intransigent conviction that after a long, dark night of the collective soul, aristocracy (meaning true nobility, which is based on virtue) may be reborn. It is said that during the Deluge it was a Yorkshireman who stood on Mount Ararat with water up to his chin and shouted to Noah: It's bound to clear up!