SOURCE: "The Last Victorian Novel: Technique and Theme in Parade's End," in Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 18, No. 4, October, 1972, pp. 271-84.

[In the following essay, Heldman contends that the progression of the fiction techniques used in the four novels in Parade's End represents the transition from Victorian to modern writing.]

In a letter to Percival Hinton in 1931, Ford Madox Ford wrote: "I think the Good Soldier is my best book technically unless you read the Tietjens books as one novel in which case the whole design appears." The most complete description of that "whole design" had appeared in his 1925 dedication of No More Pardes to William Bird: "Some Do Not—of which this one is not so much a continuation as a reinforcement—showed you the Tory at home during war-time; this shows you the Tory going up the line. If I am vouchsafed health and intelligence for long enough I propose to show you the same man in the line and in the process of being reconstructed." Though Ford himself was later contradictory and inconsistent about whether Parade's End should be a trilogy or a tetralogy, critics now generally agree that it should be seen as a four-novel sequence and that The Lost Post, the final novel, is a necessary and appropriate conclusion to it.

Ford's version of the conception of the Tietjens novels suggests that he began with two distinct ideas. On the one hand, he wanted to take as his subject "the world as it culminated in the war." The subject was in fact to be the end of the Victorian age—that is, it was to be historical, social, and cultural. He wanted to see something done "on an immense scale," and in undertaking this project he wanted the novelist "in fact to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time." Set against this broad conception, however, was a distinctly modern concern—Ford's interest in how his late friend Arthur Marwood might have responded to witnessing the death of one civilization and the birth of another. Thus, the genesis of the series embodies two markedly different perspectives—the broadly public and the intensely personal—and the tension between the two suggests the general theme of the tetralogy as well as a broad range of fictional possibilities involving both the novelist's relationship to his characters and the particular methods by which the characters and their stories may be presented. Like Ford himself, Parade's End stands in two ages—the Victorian and the modern—and partakes of both; and, also like Ford, it moves from one to the other. Thematically the tetralogy dramatizes an historical and social movement, but it also reflects a literary movement as well. As has generally been noted, the technique of the tetralogy modulates as the series progresses. But what might be thought of as inconsistency in this regard seems to me to be more accurately seen as a technical complement to the substance and theme of the series as a whole. As the progression of the novels dramatizes the end of the Victorian age, so the changing technique of the series dramatizes the end of the Victorian novel and points toward the fictional techniques of the twentieth century.

Read as one novel, Parade's End is very much the Victorian large fiction. Its size, scope, and comprehensiveness in presenting a picture of an entire society is strikingly similar to the panorama of the Victorian world depicted in The Last Chronicle of Barset, Bleak House, or Middlemarch. The Victorian sense of the past is reflected in Christopher Tietjens' preoccupation with established tradition and his responsibilities within that tradition. At the same time, Tietjens' acute awareness of what is happening to his world—of the disparity between traditional values and the values practiced by his peers—is analogous to the Victorian collective self-consciousness about the present which led Trollope, Dickens, and George Eliot to "study" society in their novels. And the impulse of these Victorian novelists to depict the tension between the present and the past and to write their novels as histories of sweeping change is literally carried to its conclusion in Ford's interest in dramatizing the culmination of the Victorian world. Perhaps the most Victorian feature of Parde's End is the emphasis Ford places on the extent to which individual identity is or can be defined in relation to a community. As J. Hillis Miller observes [in The Form of Victorian Fiction, 1968], a character in a typical Victorian novel could not say, "I think, therefore I am." Instead, such a character would say, "I am related to others, therefore I am," or "I know myself in relation to others," or "I am conscious of myself as conscious of others." He finally comes to see himself in relation to the community which surrounds him. Integration with the community is at least possible. And whatever stability the character achieves at the end of the novel depends in part on his willingness to define his identity in terms of his relationship to the community of "others" who are the means of his self-knowledge.

More significantly, however, in Paade's End Christopher Tietjens moves from a vestigal sense of community to isolation. The process and the result make it an epitome of the experience of modern man and an archetypal modern novel. The tetralogy begins with Tietjens' assuming that identification with a community is still possible, proceeds to describe his growing awareness of the community's disappearance, and ends with his attempts to make a life for himself on his own terms rather than on outmoded loyalties. In Some Do Not … Tietjens remains doggedly committed to his obligations and responsibilities as an English gentleman. In No More Pardes he comes to realize that the traditional and established English community no longer exists except in what has become the hollow sham of ritual and empty ceremony. A Man Could Stand Up—culminates in Tietjens' decision to break with his allegiance to what is clearly now the dead past, and The Last Post leaves him standing alone with his private and personal values. The progression in Parde's End thus dramatizes the final decay and disappearance of a discemible community that an individual can identify with. This thematic movement in the tetralogy is informed and restated in the gradual modulation of the technique by which that movement is presented—particularly in the shifting points of view that Ford employs. Parde's End may be viewed as being written in four distinct points of view. The most public of these is the conventional omniscience in which the narrator comments, judges, evaluates, and speaks as a version of the community voice which characterizes the typical Victorian novel. A second distinctive point of view in Parde's End may be described as "dramatic" or "objective" narrative in which the narrator speaks in a relatively impersonal and descriptive voice. He is essentially a presenter of scenes, and though he is of course present, as a personality he is essentially silent. In addition, Ford also employs a third-person narrative of the thoughts of individual characters that may be thought of as "focused" narrative. This narrative is internal rather than external or detached, and primary emphasis is placed on the contents of characters' thoughts, presented either in coherent sentences or in fragmentary, associational patterns and usually in language approximating the language of the character. The sense of focused narrative is more descriptive than evaluative, and there is in it less of the impression of a commentator as such. It conveys the sense that we are being told about a mind, and the mind and not the telling is the focus of interest. The final major point of view in Psrade's End is the most internalized, most intensely personal of the four and may be thought of as "interior" narrative. In this case the narrator as presenter has disappeared entirely, and characters' thoughts are presented directly in the first person. More often than in focused narrative, interior narrative is presented in fragmentary and associational patterns. But in both, when the mind is occupied with responses to immediate sense perceptions, the narrative comes closest to a kind of pure impressionism which reflects the character's consciousness of the moment. Omniscient narrative is given widest and most frequent play in Some Do Not.… It is still very much evident, though somewhat less so, in No More Pardes. It is used even less frequently in A Man Could Stand Up—and only in rare instances and for essentially specialized purposes in The Last Post. Thus, the over-all movement of the tetralogy in placing less emphasis on omniscient narrative and more emphasis on dramatic, focused, and interior narrative is to move away from the broad, detached, public view of the Victorian novel and to throw increasingly more emphasis on the interaction between event and individual response. And in The Last Post, in which relatively few events take place (the novel covers a period of only about an hour on a single afternoon), the overwhelming bulk of emphasis is placed on the subjective responses of a few characters to the complex influences from both past and present which impinge upon them. In this inward movement, thematically and technically, Parade's End takes us not only into the twentieth century but into the twentieth-century novel as well.

Some Do Not … is the most technically complex of the four novels and serves not only as a model of the variety of narrative techniques Ford draws on throughout the tetralogy but also, in its over-all movement, foreshadows the gradual shift in perspective which takes place in the series as a whole. The novel opens with Tietjens and his friend Macmaster, public servants in the Imperial Department of Statistics, riding in a well-appointed railway car on their way to a weekend of golf at Rye. In the context of the tetralogy, they are in fact official public England riding comfortably and smoothly toward the chaos and disaster of World War I. This scene is the purest example of conventional omniscient narrative to be found in all of Parade's End. The narrator provides information about both Tietjens and Macmaster, looks into the character of each, tells us about the world they inhabit, and furnishes lengthy passages of dialogue to make the scene dramatically immediate. Except for the tone of the narrator's comments, the chapter might well have been lifted from George Eliot. But these comments establish Ford's presence throughout the scene as informed but detached and mildly ironic. When the narrator tells us that their "class administered the world," his overstatement emphasizes the complacent superiority of public England in 1912. Ford's voice reflects simultaneously a public attitude and an interpretation of that attitude. The narrator directs his attention alternately on Tietjens and Macmaster, and though much of his description is informational, it is liberally sprinkled with the kind of commentary which frequently reminds us that the judgments reflected are not likely to be the judgments of the characters themselves. When describing Macmaster's reaction to the experience of correcting the proofs of his first book, the narrator tells us: "He had expected a wallowing of pleasure—almost the only sensuous pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of your own shrewd pawkinesses, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet sober—that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that." The passage reflects Ford's ingenuity in juxtaposing the right word, for accuracy, and the wrong word, for irony. Since Macmaster is Scottish and lower class, he might well think privately of his own cleverness in the Scottish dialect word "pawkinesses," but he would hardly think of his indulgence in self-satisfaction as "a wallowing of pleasure." Similarly, when the narrator's attention is directed at Tietjens, he gives us what first appears to be an essentially objective description (or perhaps a description of Tietjens' awareness of himself) and then concludes with a touch to remind us of the judging presence different from the character. With regard to Tietjens the narrator says: "He was a Tory—and as he disliked changing his clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, hugely welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand—and thinking vaguely." Tietjens has enough self-awareness to recognize the logical disjunction between being a Tory and not caring to change clothes, but at this stage of his life he is too confident of his intellectual power to be able to consider himself capable of thinking vaguely. Though much of the chapter is presented in dialogue between Tietjens and Macmaster which suggests dramatic rather than omniscient narrative, comments such as these frequently remind us of the pervasive, though often silent, omniscient presence. The scene at Lobscheid in the following chapter, which introduces Sylvia, Mrs. Satterthwaite, and Father Consett, is presented in much the same technique as Chapter I, except that the omniscient narrative is limited principally to the first few pages, after which Ford shifts to an almost exclusively dramatic point of view limited to dialogue and the sparest, most objective kind of stage directions. The narrator introduces noticeably only once, when Sylvia enters, but his description of her includes just enough interpretation to indicate the omniscient and commenting voice rather than the objective one. In the middle of an otherwise routine description of Sylvia, we are told: "Her very oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a decade before that time." The judgment and temperament conveyed might be similar to Sylvia's, but the terms in which they are rendered are clearly not hers. As in Chapter I, the brief intrusion reminds us of an evaluating presence other than the character. Otherwise, the chapter moves cleanly and distinctly from the omniscient to the dramatic.

In Chapters III and IV of Part One, which concern Tietjens' and Macmaster's first day at Rye, Ford moves into the first of a number of time-shifts which he employs with increasing frequency in the tetralogy. Though it begins with the narrator's attention directed to Macmaster, the shift remains the narrator's rather than Macmaster's as evidenced by the occurrence of the narrator's comments within it. For example, the narrator's presence is suggested in the irony implicit in Macmaster's reaction to the location of Mr. Duchemin's church: "It was, in short, an ideal cure of souls for a wealthy clergyman of cultured tastes, for there was not so much as a peasant's cottage within a mile of it." And Macmaster's response to Mrs. Duchemin is almost a parody of Pre-Raphaelite sentiment: "Mrs. Duchemin bore the sunlight! Her dark complexion was clear; there was, over the cheekbones, a delicate suffusion of light carmine. Her jawbone was singularly clear-cut, to the pointed chin—like an alabaster, mediaeval saint's." Such instances as this illustrate the narrator's irony even when he appears to be presenting directly the thoughts of a character. And the fact that the attention shifts from Macmaster to Tietjens in the middle of the time-shift also points clearly to the control of perspective being retained by the narrator. The mild distortion of time in these chapters suggests perhaps the beginning of a disorientation in the community. Macmaster is almost a burlesque of sensibility. And the world of the gentleman golfer is being assaulted by vulgarity in the club house and suffragettes on the fairway. But at this point sufficient vestiges of order and decorum remain in the society for such departures to be viewed with the sanity and wit of the narrator's detached, public perspective.

The Duchemin breakfast scene gives Ford the opportunity to explore even more fully the possibilities of manipulation and flexibility he has tentatively investigated up to this point. After brief dramatic and omniscient passages, the chapter moves to the first significant occurrence of what I have called "focused" narrative, in which Valentine Wannop's and Tietjens' thoughts about each other are presented without the intervention of a commenting narrator. Tietjens is musing on the implications of his involvement on the golf course the day before with Valentine—a girl who is both a suffragette and a domestic servant:

It was all very well for his surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn't.… But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop was a tweeny maid. Say a lady's help, by nature. She was of good family, for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the year 1417—no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity.

This is obviously an instance of Tietjens' mind being mirrored rather than filtered through a mediating consciousness. The sympathy for the establishment, the concern for propriety and class, the sense of history, the awareness of some of the less heroic consequences of the Battle of Agincourt, the recollection of the experience of the previous day, and even the expert horseman's use of the word "throw" to describe birth—all are what we have been conditioned to expect as the products of Tietjens' personality. After the entrance of Mr. Duchemin, Ford as narrator emerges again, and though he stays away from noticeable intrusive comment, the quick shifts of focus from one character to another interspersed with dramatic narrative serve to point up the comedy in the nearly catastrophic breakfast and indicate that the narrator is clearly present, selecting and controlling the narrative focus. The effect is that Ford maintains a public perspective—in this case, a comic one reminiscent of Trollope—and at the same time anticipates his subsequent movement to an almost exclusively private vision.

The two final chapters of Part One of Some Do Not … foreshadow more clearly than the previous chapters the direction in which Ford moves in the tetralogy. Chapter VI opens with the omniscient narrator's presentation of the scene, but after the first paragraph the chapter moves directly into a focused narrative of Tietjens' responses. And almost immediately Ford shifts into the first real instance of interior narrative in the novel. Tietjens' mind is rendered directly: "'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 the narrative continues in this manner for three pages, with brief intrusions devoted to external interruptions, as Tietjens' mind ranges associationally over music, England, Tories, Valentine, and Macmaster, among other things. The musical metaphor is appropriate for the state of Tietjens' mind at the time. He privately rejoices with enthusiasm at his image of the England he still believes in, though events have already suggested that the foundations of the structure are disintegrating. The orderly chord progression, fully orchestrated and including the human voice, ending in a full resolution, reflects Tietjens' positive and even joyous loyalty to the community. And his reference to "Land of Hope and Glory" of course prefigures his subsequent reflections on the same song, in a different context and with strikingly different conclusions, in No More Parades. In the "dogcart" episode which ends Part One Ford restricts the narrative to third- and first-person focus on Tietjens—that is, to focused or interior narrative—combined with fragmentary dramatic narrative of external details to create an essentially impressionistic treatment of the interplay between event and individual response which culminates in the description of Tietjens' version of the dog-cart's collision with General Campion's car:

Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them, mathematically straight, just rising from the mist. He shouted, mad, the blood in his head. His shout was drowned by the scream of the horse; he had swung it to the left. The cart turned up, the horse emerged from the mist, head and shoulders, pawing. A stone seahorse from the fountain of Versailles! Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity; the girl looking at it, leaning slightly forward.

The incident dramatizes the larger situation in the society. Tietjens, the man of principle, emerges from the fog of his own present confusions and clashes head-on with the actual establishment represented by General Campion, who insists on driving his own car though he is manifestly incompetent to do so. And it foreshadows the conscious conflict that is later to develop in Tietjens' mind regarding his commitment to an essentially Victorian world view. Significantly, the scene is rendered as Tietjens' impressions. Thus the technique of the final chapter of Part One of Some Do Not ... , with its nearly exclusive focus on interior experience, anticipates in miniature the technique of The Last Post.

Part Two of Some Do Not … in effect repeats the variety and complexity of Part One in that it combines omniscient, dramatic, and focused narrative. The omniscient, commenting narrator is still very much present intermittently—for example, when Sylvia considers her relationship with Tietjens and when Valentine recalls the history of her involvement with Tietjens, Macmaster, and Mrs. Duchemin. As in Part One, however, Ford refrains from moving into interior narrative until the final chapter of Part Two when Tietjens recalls the moment in which he and Valentine had decided that they were the kind of people who did not become lover and mistress. Although the chapter opens with omniscient narrative, Ford shifts quickly into focus on Tietjens and then almost immediately into interior narrative.

If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman.… Damn it, he doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow … His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:

"Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury," and "Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!"

He said [the context clearly indicates to himself]:

"But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands didn't meet.… I don't believe I've shaken hands.… I don't believe I've touched the girl.. in my life.… Never once! … Not the hand-shaking sort … A nod! … A meeting and parting! … English, you know …"

The passage reflects the continuing debate in Tietjens' mindbetween what he wants and what he thinks he ought to do. At this point, however, the disparity between personal and public values is still a matter of private indecision. The remainder of the chapter records Tietjens' recollection of the parting. The episode appears to be conventional omniscient narrative, complete with comments and judgments, but in fact it occurs within the framework of Tietjens' reflections. In a subtle but significant and prophetic way, Tietjens has temporarily replaced the narrator. As in Part One, the movement is from the public to the private, and the thematic development is mirrored in the technical one.

No More Pardes takes Tietjens to France and, more importantly, to the conscious realization that the community to which he has been committed no longer exists. For the first time Tietjens can admit this openly. In a conversation with MacKechnie he says:

"At the beginning of the war, I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow.… What do you think he was doing … what the hell do you think he was doing? He was divising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can't say we were not prepared in one matter at least.… Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease: the band would play 'Land of Hope and Glory,' and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades.… Don't you see how symbolical it was: the band playing 'Land of Hope and Glory,' and then the adjutant saying There will be no more parades? … For there won't. There won't, there damn well won't.… No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country … Nor for the world, I dare say … None … Gone … No … more … parades!"

The novel itself dramatizes the fact that meaningful parades are gone. It is comparable to Some Do Not … in complexity, but the terms of that complexity are somewhat different. Tietjens is the focal point of Part One, Sylvia of Part Two, and Tietjens of Part Three. Ford still resorts to omniscient narrative from time to time throughout, but his principal emphasis is on the interplay between event and individual response reflected in the novel's reliance on dramatic, focused, or interior narrative. For example, the death of O Nine Morgan in Part One is presented initially as an event: "A man, brown, stiff, with a haughty parade step, burst into the light. He said with a high wooden voice: "Ere's another bloomin' casualty'." But then Ford moves into a focused narrative rendering Tietjens' actions, impressions, and associations interspersed with his perceptions of the comments of others in the scene. The emphasis is predominantly internal rather than external. A few pages later, the interplay between event and response is reflected still more markedly in a scene in which two thought processes are going on at once. Tietjens is interviewing Lieutenant Hotchkiss, the veterinarian.

The old lieutenant said:

"Hotchkiss …" And Tietjens exclaimed:

"Of course it's Hotchkiss … I've seen your name signing a testimonial to Pigg's Horse Embrocation.… Then if you don't want to take this draft up the line… Though I'd advise you to … It's merely a Cook's Tour to Hazebrouck … No, Bailleul … and the sergeant-major will march the men for you … And you will have been in the First Army Lines and able to tell all your friends you've been on active service at the real front.…"

His mind said to himself while his words went on …

"Then, good God, if Sylvia is actively paying attention to my career I shall be the laughingstock of the whole army. I was thinking that ten minutes ago! … What's to be done? What in God's name is to be done?" A black crape veil seemed to drop across his vision.… Liver …

A bit later a soldier's request for an overnight pass is juxtaposed against Tietjens' simultaneous preoccupation with Valentine, and in Part Two a similar combination of dramatic, focused, and interior narrative is used in the scene with Ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, Tietjens, and Sylvia, this time with the interior focus on Sylvia. The scene of Lady Sachse's reception recalls the Duchemin breakfast in Some Do Not. … In this instance, however, instead of being presented and controlled by an omniscient narrator, the scene occurs as Sylvia's recollection of it in a time-shift in which hers is the controlling mind and consists of events juxtaposed against her internal responses to them. The dramatic impact of such scenes is not in the event or the thought process but rather in their occurring simultaneously. The juxtapositions reflect the tension between the outer and inner life that continues throughout the novel and indicate not only the characters' growing sense of the disparity between the two but the force and validity of their private sense of reality. Part Three is presented almost completely in dramatic or focused narrative with only brief and occasional narrator's comments. But at the end of the final chapter Ford reemphasizes the tension between the public and private by returning abruptly to omniscient narrative. The confrontation between Tietjens and Campion culminating in the announcement of Tietjens' impending transfer to the front has been presented in a combination of dramatic, focused, and interior narrative, and it has been a deeply disturbing experience for both men. But when Campion, accompanied by Tietjens, conducts his traditional inspection of the cook-house, when he asks his traditional questions, and when he discovers the traditionally placed dirty jacket, Ford resumes his role as an omniscient narrator. In a striking demonstration of ironic power, he concludes No More Parades in his public voice with a description of men "on parade."

A Man Could Stand Up—dramatizes the separate decisions of Valentine and Tietjens to turn their back on traditional values, to commit themselves to each other regardless of the codes they had formerly subscribed to, and reunites them on Armistice Day. Both decide that they are now individuals who do. Technically, A Man Could Stand Up—is the simplest of the four novels, though it is intellectually and emotionally as complex as the others. Part One is focused entirely on Valentine and is presented entirely in a combination of focused and interior narrative. Though external events occur—the telephone conversation with Lady Macmaster, for example, and the interview with Miss Wanostrocht, the headmistress of the school where Valentine teaches—they are presented as perceptions of events rather than as externalized events themselves. Lady Macmaster's remarks on the phone are loaded with sibillant blasts which suggest the grotesqueness of public conduct when seen from the private perspective: "'His brothers.s.s got pneumonia, so his mistress.ss.ss even is unavailable to look after…,'" and when Valentine asks who is speaking, "She got back a title.… Lady someone or other… It might have been Blastus." Furthermore, the passage of time in Part One is retarded and associational rather than chronological; thus, while Valentine is listening to Miss Wanostrocht, her mind is preoccupied with the telephone conversation she finished ten minutes earlier. At this stage in the tetralogy Ford has moved completely into the private world. The same kind of close focus continues in Part Two, though here it is on Tietjens in the trenches. After he returns from observing the enemy lines before an expected offensive, his sergeant says to him: "'Then a man could stand hup on an 'ill.… You really mean to say, sir, that you think a man will be able to stand up on a bleedin' 'ill… You sir … You're a law hunto yourself'." As Tietjens mulls these ideas over, he slowly comes to realize that this is what peace means—to be able to stand up on a hill, to be a law unto himself, to live simply, privately, independently. He no longer feels the compulsion to live his life in conformity with the publicly, culturally sanctioned standards that were once valid, desirable, and even necessary for an ordered and responsible life. The public order that was once nurtured by those standards no longer exists. Indeed, there is no public order, no community with which a man can identify himself. All that remains is individual conscience, individual integrity, individual fulfillment, individual peace. Though the quantity of action and dialogue in Part Two suggests a partially dramatic presentation combined with focused and interior narrative, the emphasis is decidedly in the direction of the inner response rather than the action itself. The real drama, even in combat, now lies within the man. The intensely personal quality of the reunion between Tietjens and Valentine in Part Three is reflected in the fact that the experience is presented entirely in focused third-person narrative. External events are presented in what seems to be dramatic narrative, but the recurring emphasis on individual response suggests rather strongly that what we see is not an objective drama but a perceived one. And since this is a reunion, the focus on Valentine in Part One and on Tietjens in Part Two alternates from one to the other in Part Three.

The Last Post brings the increasing tension between public and private to a final disjunction. The central character of the novel is not Christopher Tietjens but his older brother Mark, who has determined that he will never speak and never move again. In his self-induced paralysis, he is the representative of the dying era, unwilling and unable to begin a new epoch with a fresh start. Christopher appears only briefly in the final pages. Mark is a mute; Christopher is in eclipse. The two men of principle and integrity who were once vital members of the old community order have consciously and deliberately turned away from the sham that community has become. Christopher, however, is trying to make a new life—to stand up on his private hill and be a law unto himself. Though he is physically absent, he is very much in the minds of those few characters whose thoughts make up the bulk of the novel. The public community in terms of which his character was defined in Some Do Not … has all but disappeared and has been replaced by the small domestic circle of his home in the Sussex hills. It would perhaps be most satisfying to be able to claim that the omniscient narrator does not appear at all in The Last Post, but such is not the case. Little in Ford and nothing in Parade's End is quite that simple. The narrator does appear, but only in limited ways and for limited purposes. He is used to introduce the new characters who appear for the first time in the series—Marie-Leonie, Gunning, Mrs. de Bray Pape, and Fittleworth. He is used briefly to set scenes and to describe limited actions. And he indulges in omniscient commentary about Sylvia alone or about Sylvia and Campion together. It is perhaps only chance but also perhaps significant that the only omniscient commentary as such in The Last Post is devoted to the only two major characters who still subscribe to and represent the public world on which Tietjens, Mark, Valentine, and Marie-Leonie have now turned their backs—the only two characters who are still trying to ride in the "perfectly appointed railway carriage." Otherwise the novel is devoted in separate parts to the thoughts and reflections of Marie-Leonie, Valentine, Sylvia (though only briefly), and Mark Tietjens. Outside of a few bits of action described objectively, whatever events transpire are seen through their eyes—the arrival of Sylvia's party, Sylvia's confrontation with Valentine, the return of Christopher. The bulk of the novel is presented in focused narrative—focused on one or the other of these four characters—in language, thought patterns, and tones that are appropriate to each character—Mark's Yorkshire independence, Marie-Leonie's preoccupations with domestic matters, Sylvia's bitterness, and Valentine's emotionalism. The content of each character's thoughts is equally fitting. Mark is primarily concerned with reconciling the inconsistencies of the past. Marie-Leonie assures herself that her choices in the past had been the right ones. Sylvia finally can admit to herself that her years-long struggle with Tietjens has been foolish and futile. And Valentine is concerned only with the present and the future—with her life with Tietjens and the life of the child she carries in her womb. The predominant emphasis in The Last Post then rests with individual needs, individual responses, and individual values. And Ford relies primarily on the technique which reflects those values. At the last post of one civilization and the beginning of another, the only reality is the reality of individual consciousness.

In length and scope Parde's End is very much the comprehensive fiction that is the Victorian novel. It ranges over all classes—poor, rich, intellectual, official, military, commercial, sophisticated, and simple. It moves from the golf links of Rye to the salons of London to the trenches of France. More important, it dramatizes the final decay and the disappearance of any discernible public community that an individual can identify with and leaves him trying to stand up on his private hill. As Christopher Tietjens becomes a twentieth-century man, Parade's End is a Victorian novel which becomes a modern novel, and in this becoming lies its essential modernity. The modulation of techniques by which Ford dramatizes this process effectively informs and supports the process itself. And the predominant technique of The Last Post seems a logical and necessary conclusion of this movement. In the shift of values from public to private and in his increasing reliance on focused and interior narrative, Ford may be seen as dramatizing both an historical phenomenon and a literary one—the movement of both society and the novel from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.