SOURCE: "Tietjens, the Great War, and England," in Ford Madox Ford's Novels: A Critical Study, University of Minnesota Press, 1962, pp. 190-256.

[Meixner is an American author and educator. In the following excerpt, he analyzes Some Do Not, the first of the four Tietjens novels, and asserts that Parade's End should be considered a trilogy with a sequel rather than a tetralogy.]

The four novels of the Tietjens series, although published separately, have in recent years been gathered together under the comprehensive title of Parade's End. But should Ford's work be considered, in fact, as a tetralogy? Or is it more accurately a trilogy, with The Last Post as sequel? Robie Macauley, in his introduction to Parade's End, has supported the first position, urging that the four should be considered as one book: "I think it can be comprehended in no other way.… Without The Last Post, the novel would have been sadly truncated." Acknowledging that the work could never "turn out" as an ordinary novel must, he asserts that the recapitulation and final statement of The Last Post are "indispensable." Support for Macauley's position, which he himself does not cite, may be found in the epistolary dedications to the books, in which Ford declares his structural intention. After observing, in the introduction to No More Parades, that his protagonist had been shown in the first volume at home during wartime and that in the second he is seen going up the line, he adds; "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 re-constructed." And in the dedicatory letter to the next book, Ford wrote that A Man Could Stand Up is "the third and penultimate" of the senes.

Nevertheless, despite Macauley's assessment and these observations from Ford, the sounder approach is to view the enterprise not as tetralogy but trilogy—with the fourth volume as a kind of after-thought, separate from the main design. For by the completion of A Man Could Stand Up, Ford, however he may have felt earlier, had clearly altered his intention. In his dedication to The Last Post, for example, we find him writing that if it were not for Isabel Patterson's "stern, contemptuous and almost virulent insistence" on knowing "what became of Tietjens," he never would "have conducted this chroniele to the stage it has now reached." Indeed, it is curious that his statement calling the third book the penultimate in the series is dated May 18, 1926, while the novel itself is not marked as finished until more than two months later, July 21. Still more decisive evidence that Ford considered the work a trilogy appears in a letter of 1930. In reply to a proposal that the Tietjens books be issued as an omnibus volume, Ford suggested the title, Parade's End (rejecting The Tietiens Saga as difficult, and liable to confusion with The Forsyte Saga), and added: "I strongly wish to omit Last Post from the edition. I do not like the book and have never liked it and always intended to end up with A Man Could Stand Up." Nor was this significant judgment expressed only privately. Three years later in It Wss the Nightingale Ford again indicated his view of the matter by referring several times to the Tietjens books as a "trilogy," and even quoting as its closing words: "On an elephant. A dear meal sack elephant. She was setting out.… "—the ending of A Man Could Stand Up.

To depart from Ford's final, definite judgment is unwise, particularly since the texts themselves support his verdict. As we have seen, the Tietjens cycle cannot be approached—even as a trilogy—as though it were conceived and executed as a perfect artistic whole, since commercial demands required that each volume stand separately. Nevertheless, between the first book and the end of the third there is a definite, clear unity of subject—the subject Ford himself said he had in mind—that of the "world which culminated in the war," presented through the focus of Christopher Tietjens, the central observer. Some Do Not begins symbolically in peacetime in a shiningly appointed railway car, and A Man Could Stand Up ends in a bare, stripped room on Armistice night among the damaged victims of the war. England itself has been stripped, and there will be no more parades. The over-all conception of the three books is gaunt, stark, and complete. After them, the action of The Last Post can only be considered an addendum, a fact signalized by Ford's removal of his central character from any prominent role. Unlike the first three volumes, the last, as Ford saw, does not come meaningfully under the banner of Parade's End To include it there is only to obscure the force and impact of the basic conception.

Nor is the fourth volume consistent in its fundamental method. The approach of the earlier novels is essentially realistic. Although their characters and events possess a meaning beyond themselves, the significance is implicit, hinted through the texture of actuality. The Last Post, on the other hand, is only nominally realistic, its particularity of character and event the merest coloring. Rather, its method is symbolic: the characters and the action overtly serving Ford's idea. Less individuals than forces, the characters are like allegorical figures in a pageant. Valentine is motherhood impending, Christopher huntsman and family protector, Sylvia (described in one passage as "it") a diabolic marble statue, Marie-Leonie domesticity, and Mark the presiding magician and deity (willing against Sylvia's influence). The Groby Great Tree, finally, is the highly conscious symbol of the curse upon the Tietjenses. The note of unreality, of a primarily symbolic world, is in fact struck at the opening by the extreme peculiarity of Mark's personal withdrawal. The Last Post is a novel plainly of another style altogether from the first three.

Beyond this point the case against including The Last Post in the main plan need not go. Ford's own assessment and the disunity of subject and method are decisive. Yet a further argument perhaps may be offered—based on a critical judgment. The book should be excluded finally because it violates the essential spirit and master mood not only of the first three volumes but of Ford himself.…

Ultimately, however, the issue of trilogy or tetralogy is academic. Whether entitled Parde's End and The Last Post or called Paade's End alone, the Tietjens cycle as a whole will not stand importantly to Ford's credit as a novelist. The true achievement of his Tietjens creations is the first volume, Some Do Not. The succeeding books will not last. Where Some Do Not is a magnificent and rich work of the novelist's imagination in almost all aspects—characterization, narrative suspense, authoritative atmosphere, and emotional power—the rest are thin productions which peter out the vein. The larger conception of the trilogy, in brief, is splendid, but it is not filled out.

And essentially this judgment is also Ford's, given covertly and without detail but unambiguously in It Was the Nightingale, where he comments that after Some Do Not his works had considerably deteriorated. The reason, he said, was an attack of writer's cramp. After the completion of the book he "began at St. Jean Cap Ferrat" (Some Do Not from earlier reference), the cramp became so severe he could not hold a pen. And so he took to using a typewriter—"to the considerable deterioration of my work"—and "then, worst of all, to dictating." The typewriter and the stenographer, Ford remarked, made him too fluid. "It is as if they waited for me to write and write I do. Whereas if I have to go to a table and face pretty considerable pain I wait until I have something to say and say it in the fewest possible words."

The failure of the novels after Some Do Not lies precisely where Ford has indicated: in their excessive fluidity. Because they are not composed with scrupulous care or by a fully engaged mind, the imaginative vitality established for the Tietjens world in the first book is mostly lost. In writing these volumes, Ford had ceased to be an artist. Documentation of this point can be brief, for the same faults characterize all three.

The unfortunate consequences of Ford's hurried carpentry are evident in a variety of ways, but probably the central casualty is his management of the interior monologue, which (unlike Some Do Not) dominates all three books. The device, particularly fashionable at the time of their composition, possesses decided advantages for developing the inner life of a character. Its weakness, however, which follows from its associative principle, is an inherent looseness of structure. Like free verse, its very freedom makes it all the more difficult to do well. The author must not only render successfully the illusion of a character's flowing stream of thought, but he must also contrive, without harming that illusion, to maintain interest and excitement and to advance his narrative. And neither of these ends does Ford achieve in the later books. Too facilely exploiting the liberties of his method, he inevitably has come away empty-handed. Far too often the details which he puts into a thought process are not there to build his character inwardly but to explain the events of the earlier books. And since the exposition required is elaborate, the process can only become deadening. Converted into a garrulous expository machine, the character thus has insufficient life of his own. Similarly, thoughts occurring originally in the mind of one character are often repeated later in exactly the same words in another's, without justification either in cause and effect or proximity—only in the needs of plot machinery. There is a tendency also to resort to a same few motives, the effect of which is to restrict the inner life of the characters. To Valentine, for example, Tietjens is always a bear, and the same tags of Latin and English poetry constantly reappear. Nor is any distinction made in the interior monologue between characters. Each sounds like every other, with the same tone, cadence, and recurrent mannerisms of speech—"Something like that," "oh, say—,". "call it"—which are in fact the mannerisms of Ford's personal voice as a memoirist.

As a result, the characterizations in the three volumes are on the whole thin and unsuccessful. If, earlier, Ford was highly praised for creating in his Tietjens world so many first-rate, imaginatively compelling characters, the praise was thoroughly earned. He has done precisely that, and triumphantly, as any reader of Some Do Not must allow. But after the first volume these great characters unfortunately narrow into dullish stereotypes. Christopher becomes merely a burdened stoical figure with almost absurd tendencies toward noblesse oblige. Losing her complexity and style, Sylvia is reduced to an incredibly vulgar (and extremely unpleasant) monster. The same flattening out may be seen in other of the characters who reappear, such as Valentine, General Campion, Edith Ethel, and Mrs. Wannop. Permanently set, they do not change or grow. Whether in appearance, behavior, or mental configuration, Ford ceases to observe them freshly. In the first volume, the fact of Christopher's erudition and intelligence is convincingly demonstrated in his conversation; in the later books this brilliance is merely asserted, by the easy device of having someone utter an admiring: "You do know everything!" Nor is the deterioration of Ford's splendid characters compensated for by the fullness with which new ones are created. Those introduced in the later volumes—Captain Mackensie, General O'Hara, Colonel Levin, the line captain, the men in the trenches, the peasant Gunning, Millicent de Bray Pape—remain counters. Only Marie-Leonie has genuine charm and surprise.

No less unhappy is the effect of the interior monologue on the narrative strength of these three books. Very little in them is deeply engaging because the method is basically a non-dramatic prison—much of the "action" occurring posthumously, so to speak, in the mind of a character. And since the focus is not on the conflict itself but on the character's thoughts about it, the few dramatic scenes which do take place tend to be muffled and oblique. The method as implemented also makes for an over-all linear impression, in pale contrast to the rich and various world of Some Do Not.

Finally we should consider still another important casualty of this easy fluidity: the prose. Lack of genuine care is revealed by numerous tests. The same words recur again and again in brief space. Paragraph three of No More Parades, for example, repeats hanging about four times; the next does the same with very annoying. And although such a device might be defended as a calculated intensity, a demanding art recognizes (as in The Good Soldier and Some Do Not) that it is more truly expressive not to dissipate verbal power by repetition. Certainly it is difficult to justify the technique's being used in two successive paragraphs. Ford plainly was exploiting an easy trick, not artfully creating.…

That the last three volumes of the Tietjens cycle are inferior to Ford at his best needs to be acknowledged. Yet it would be a serious error, of course, to dismiss them out of hand. They are not without their admirable qualities. And a somewhat detailed survey of these qualities will be worth our attention.

Probably the best of the three is No More Pardes. It is told with considerable skill and with an authentic power of feeling, especially in its depiction of the life of the army. Its finest section is at the beginning, at the wintry base depot, during which the complex pressures that weight upon Christopher are vividly created. The very first page strikes the note of the situation: inside Tietjens' sackcloth hut, with its blazing paraffin heater. The sound of shellfire is in the distance:

An immense tea-tray, august, its voice filling the black circle of the horizon, thundered to the ground. Numerous pieces of sheet-iron said, "Pack. Pack. Pack." In a minute the clay floor of the hut shook, the drums of ears were pressed inwards, solid noise showered about the universe, enormous echoes pushed these men—to the right, to the left, or down towards the tables, and crackling like that of flames among vast underwood became the settled condition of the night.

And gradually the men in Tietjens' charge are sorted out, each with his own nagging private claim and worry: the two Welsh miners squatting on their heels at the fire, one of them angry at Christopher for not allowing him leave to see his wife who, he senses, has taken up with another man; the Canadian sergeant-major uncertain whether he had packed his new pigskin wallet—the one he had wanted to look very smart with on parade; the deranged, brave officer who may disrupt Tietjens' urgent work at any moment; the other ranks filing by and making out their sometimes complicated wills to be read and signed by Christopher, who is already burdened with an enormous amount of paper work. And beyond the immediate scene is the heavy image in Tietjens' mind of why all these creatures were assembled, and where they are going:

He seemed to see his draft: two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four men he had had command of for over a couple of months.… He seemed to see them winding away over a great stretch of country, the head slowly settling down, as in the Zoo you will see an enormous serpent slowly sliding down into its water tank … Settling down out there, a long way away, up against that impassable barrier that stretched from the depths of the ground to the peak of heaven.…

Vivid too is the later episode in the hotel ballroom at Rouen, with the wicker furniture, the dimmed lights, the gramophone playing, and the bombing—all as chorus to Sylvia's passionate willing that Christopher submit to her desire for him. Well presented also is the closing section at the base depot, in which Tietjens and Campion have a final interview which emerges into trust. At its conclusion, the cook-houses are inspected, and a sense of military order is for the moment achieved, as seen in the passage which completes the book:

The general tapped with the heel of his crop on the locker-panel labelled PEPPER: the top, right-hand locker-panel. He said to the tubular, global-eyed white figure beside it: "Open that, will you, my man? …"

To Tietjens this was like the sudden bursting out of the regimental quick-step, as after a funeral with military honours the band and drums march away, back to barracks.

The most powerful incident in No More Parades, however, is the death of O Nine Morgan—the Welshman Christopher had protectively denied leave. "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.'" The streak of fatal injury to half his face and to his chest is depicted, and Tietjens is astonished that a human body could be so lavish of blood. As he bends over the figure—the heat from the brazier overpowering—Christopher hopes he will not get his hands covered with blood, "because blood is very sticky. It makes your fingers stick together impotently. But there might not be any blood in the darkness under the fellow's back where he was putting his hand. There was, however: it was very wet." The image is to recur again and again to Tietjens' mind, and beyond any other incident in these novels it catches Ford's deepest mood and vision. It is also a significant, appropriate echo of the episode with the injured horse in Some Do Not, which will be described later.

In A Man Could Stand Up, Ford's writing is again most compelling in the scenes involving the men and the effects of war. The episodes in the trenches, if not superlatively done (what Conrad would have made of such a setting!), are still interesting for their quiet, unheroic rendering of the details of such combat. There are one or two spectacular passages, of course—as the following virtuoso description, set under the theatrical lighting of the Verey flares:

Tietjens became like a solitary statue of the Bard of Avon, the shelf for his elbow being rather low. Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the wood-wind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horse-shoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra's crescendo is comic. Crescendo!… Crescendo! CRRRRRESC.… The Hero must becoming! He didn't!

Still like Shakespeare contemplating the creation of, say, Cordelia, Tietjens leaned against his shelf. From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home. When one jammed he took another. He found himself keeping up a fairly steady illumination.

The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun. He came over, all legs and arms going, like a catamount; struck the face of the parados, fell into the trench on the dead body, with his hands to his eyes, sprang up again and danced. With heavy deliberation Tietjens drew his great trench-knife rather than his revolver. Why? The butcher instinct? … The man's shoulders had come heavily on him as he had rebounded from the parados-face. He felt outraged. Watching that performing Hun he held the knife pointed and tried to think of the German for Hands Up. He imagined it to be Hoch die Haende! He looked for a nice spot in the Hun's side.

His excursion into a foreign tongue proved superogatory. The German threw his arm abroad, his—considerably mashed!—face to the sky.

Always dramatic, Cousin Fritz! Too dramatic, really.

He fell, crumbling, into his untidy boot. Nasty boots, all crumpled too, up the calves! But he didn't say Hoch der Kaiser, or Deutschland iiber alles, or anything valedictory.

Or in the more restrained image of no-man's land which Christopher sees from an observation post:

There were still the three wheels, a-tilt, attached to slanting axles, in a haze of disintegrated wire, that, be-dewed, made profuse patterns like frost on a window. There was their own apron—a perfect village!—of wire over which he looked. Fairly intact. The Germans had put up some of their own in front of the lost trenches, a quarter of a mile off, over the reposing untidinesses. In between there was a perfect maze: their own of the night before last. How the deuce had it not been all mashed to pieces by the last Hun barrage? Yet there were three frosty erections—like fairy sheds, halfway between the two lines. And, suspended in them, as there would have to be, three bundles of rags and what appeared to be a very large, squashed crow. How the devil had that fellow managed to get smashed into that shape? It was improbable. There was also—suspended, too, a tall melodramatic object, the head cast back to the sky. One arm raised in the attitude of, say, a Walter Scott Highland officer waving his men on. Waving a sword that wasn't there.… That was what wire did for you.

But passages like these are few. Ford's picture of the lines is, for the most part, a muted compound of reflections, relationships, and details. A listing may suggest its quality. It is made up of such matters as the anxiety of the troops about the wind: when it comes from the east, the Germans can use their poison gas, and will resume their offensive; and the Tommies' underlying fear of being driven into the North Sea. Of the sound of subterranean digging, and the voice that Christopher once hears from below his campbed: "Bringt dem Hauptmann eine Kerze." Of the spiritually broken commanding officer (whom Tietjens has replaced), the victim of a war which has lasted too long and destroyed too many of his friends. Of Christopher's concern, as he foresees the breaking up of trench warfare, that the men of his battalion know how to keep in communication with their neighboring units. Of such mundane but interesting matters as the variance in the nature of the trenches themselves, as the soil changes from red gravel to marl to pure alluvial soil and even bog; and what to do with the springs they traverse (Christopher has devised a unique siphon-drain). And such lyric details as the clear, sweet sound of a bugler in the near distance, playing: "I know a lady fair and kind / Was never face so pleased my mind." Or the astonishing fact of skylarks nesting on the battlefield. Or such touches of class comedy as Christopher's promise, in a moment of strong affection, to give each of his men a ticket for Drury Lane next Boxing Day, and the cheery reply: "Mike it the old Shoreditch Empire, sir, n we'll thenk you!"

The strengths of The Last Post, set in the post-war world, are of a different sort: mainly pastoral and domestic. The writing is imbued with Ford's love of country things: the pleased detailing of the great view of four counties from Mark's outdoor bed; the haygrass, and the raspberry canes by the hedgerows; the careful bottling of the cider; the ducks on the pond; the hedge-sparrow at the dripping set out for the tomtits; the collecting of the eggs in the henhouse. Attractive also is the detailed portrait of Marie-Leonie, her daily routine and verbal meanderings, which always end on the theme with which she has begun. And, unusual for Ford, but engaging, are the monologues in dialect form, of the peasant Gunning and the cabinet-maker Cramp. Thus, the "country reaction" to Marie-Leonie:

She was 'Er Ladyship, a good mark, a foreign Frenchy. That was bad. She was extraordinarily efficient about the house and garden and poultry-yard, a matter for mixed feelings. She was fair, not black-avised, a good mark; she was buxom, not skinny, like the real Quality. A bad mark because she was, then, not real Quality; but a qualifiedly good mark because if you 'as to 'ave Quality all about you in the 'ouse tis better not to 'ave real Quality.… But on the whole the general feeling was favourable because like themselves she was floridly blond. It made 'er 'uman like. Never you trust a dark woman and if you marries a dark man 'e will treat you bad. In the English countryside it is like that.

Beyond these quieter elements, there are several intense, if somewhat theatrical, confrontations between various characters, particularly Sylvia's with the pregnant Valentine. But most fascinating in The Last Post is the very conception of Mark's willed retreat from the world, and those two stunning moments at the end when he speaks aloud.

The decline of the later Tietjens novels is clear enough. Yet a provocative question remains: why? Such explanation is the task primarily of the biographer, of course, rather than the critic, whose business is to say whether the art-work is achieved or not. We may venture to guess, however, that between the completion of Some Do Not and the publication of No More Parades, some event occurred to crucially undermine Ford's self-confidence. To set oneself to write a great novel is to be, above all, audacious and supremely assured. Ford, as we know, always felt uncertain of his own great powers, and Stella Bowen and others have written of how setbacks could easily drain his self-belief. And for such a confidence-sapping event we do not need to look far, for in this period Ford was dealt not one but two hard personal blows. The first was Jessie Conrad's assault on him (in the December 4, 1924, issue of the Times Literary Supplement) for his book on her husband, in which Mrs. Conrad unjustly condemned him before the world (the account being quickly picked up in New York) as being, in effect, a liar and false pretender. This assault alone would have battered Ford's ego but it was not all. Earlier in the same year (January 19, 1924), Violet Hunt had reopened the whole unhappy past by writing a letter to the weekly Westminster referring to Ford as her husband and signing herself "Violet Hunt Hueffer"; and once again Mrs. Elsie Hueffer brought suit against Violet, the case coming up on February 10, 1925, two months after Mrs. Conrad's letter. If this were not enough, in the following year Violet Hunt published The Flurried Years (1926), an intimate account of her relation with Ford, the divorce scandal, and the several court hearings. The book was no doubt an act of aggression on Violet's part, who was almost surely stung at being identified with the vindictive Sylvia, as she writes in the memoir that people had done. So that at these various hostile acts, Ford, a reserved person who dreaded the exposure of his private life, may well have felt the heart go out of him. He himself, as we have seen, has ascribed the deterioration of his work to writer's cramp, but such an explanation inevitably must seem superficial. The influence of work conditions is subtle, but to the artist functioning as artist they are scarcely likely to be crushing unless there is a deeper cause. Surely it is not unreasonable to speculate that Ford's suddenly intensified physical difficulty after Some Do Not was a psychosomatic manifestation resulting from the jolts administered to his personal pride, that it was a symptom of the artistic abdication evident in the pages of the last three books rather than its cause.

One cannot but feel the loss to modern literature in the decline of the Tietjens books. Had they been continued on the scale and with the care and imagination with which they were begun, they would be among the largest, most impressive productions of twentieth-century fiction. As it is, they have the unfortunate tendency to leak away in the mind of the reader the impact of the characters who live with such vitality and excitement in the first volume. The world of letters and the arts, however, is full of such accidents, splendid conceptions well begun but left in fragment. Art, like every other human enterprise, is beset by chance, and the critic's task is to value not what might have been, but what has flowered. Regret, in short, should not blind us to the very real achievement of Some Do Not. And by itself the first novel goes very far toward fulfilling the ends of the larger conception. Of the vital incidents of the later books, it lacks only the picture of the Armistice night closing, which ultimately images Ford's theme of "Parade's End." The base-depot episode and Christopher's concern for his men are, in fact, very largely suggested in Some Do Not by his reflections during his visit to the War Office. And the theme that a man of disturbed private life cannot be a satisfactory officer and trustworthy member of society, which Campion impresses on Christopher in the later books, is actually dealt with in the first—in the conversation in which Campion calls him "a regular Dreyfus": "fellows like that unsettle society. You don't know where you are. You can't judge. They make you uncomfortable." A man like Dreyfus is worse than guilty—"the sort of fellow you couldn't believe in and yet couldn't prove anything against. The curse of the world.…" (To which, Christopher replies, as if in self-revelation: "Ah.") And the motif of the hard, frugal life of Christopher's desire, although developed more fully afterwards, also is introduced in the first volume. In a very real sense, in Some Do Not Ford has said all that he had to say—about his people and his theme.

A work of fiction distinguished by the breadth, richness, and variety of the world it has created and by the great emotional poignancy and power it has caught and expressed, Some Do Not can only be described as a masterpiece of the novel, excellent in each of the multitudinously demanding aspects of the form. And in the following pages, an attempt will be made to articulate something of the nature of its art and craft.

The theme of England lies at the roots of nearly all Ford's fictional works, but none of his other novels approaches Some Do Not in the range or depth with which the life of his native country is portrayed. Since Ford's intention was to show the impact on the nation of the Great War, its Englishness is hardly accidental: the British milieu required elaboration. It needed to be given the thick, complex feel of actuality—had, in James's phrase, to be "done." Thus the novel is rich with the peculiar motifs, amply developed, of English life: the role and character of the governing classes; the class structure and the demarcation between those "born" and those of undistinguished lineage; political struggles between Conservatives and Liberals; the pervasive dominance of Victorian sexual morality, and the diversity of English types: military man (Campion), banker (Lord Port Scatho), country squire and landowner (Christopher's father), politician (Waterhouse), industrialist (Paul Sandbach), arbiters of society (Lady Claudine and Glorvina), fashion leaders (Sylvia), and the presiders over aesthetic salons (Edith Ethel). Touched upon as well are such motifs as the typical Englishman's distrust of abstract thought; his fondness for his countryside, its birds and flowers; his love of cricket, golf, and animals; his poorly prepared food (Das Pillen-land, as Christopher reflects); and, particularly, his historical and literary heritage. Far more than any other novel of Ford's, too, its vocabulary draws on indigenously English words, including dialect and slang: higgler, coulter, lurcher, haulm, whin, hop oasts, horse-coper, tweeney, quiff, snaffle, squits, to cite a few.

This world of England is, however, undergoing radical change. Signs of the ferment are present in various cries for social reform: Waterhouse wants economic revisions, Port Scatho seeks to liberalize divorce laws, Valentine campaigns for the female vote, and her brother is ardently a Marxist. Yet these agitations are only symptoms of still deeper shifts in the arrangements of society. The fundamental change is, as it was in The Good Soldier, from a basically feudal order, which is rooted in agriculture and the life of the country, to the modern industrial system, founded on capital and centering itself in the giant city. And this movement by which one way of life in England is supplanted by another is, in the ultimate sense, the subject of Some Do Not.

It is through the careers of his principal characters that Ford chiefly gives expression to his theme. The richness and vitality with which he has endowed them, imaginatively and credibly uniting complex desire, particular personality and mythic type, has already been described in detail. We may now examine how, set in the context of the larger world, they also, in what happens to them, serve Ford as symbols of that world and give the novel its emotional power.

At the dramatic heart of Some Do Not is a deeply poignant love story, that of Christopher and Valentine; and the chief action of the novel is their affair, from first meeting through the growth of their passion to its final outcome. Paralleling their relationship, however, is another, in significant contrast, between Macmaster and Edith Ethel. In depicting the private worlds of both pairs of lovers, Ford has been remarkably successful, sensitively rendering their emotions at all stages with depth and imagination. He has also understood that in reality a love story never exists apart. Being social as well as private and physical, the relation between the sexes is inevitably implicated in the larger world of which the lovers are members—its values, wise and foolish, its habits and rituals, its fears and taboos. What men esteem in society abstractly, they desire concretely in their mates, for our lovers objectify what we love or lust after. So it is with these two couples, minor and major.

The Macmasters live according to appearances, skillfully adapting to the requirements of a corrupt, superficial society—climbers aiming to make successful, publicly honored careers, and ready in the process to discard acquaintances who are no longer useful, Valentine and Christopher among them. While their fellow countrymen at the front die by the thousands, their own concern is to increase their influence and prestige at home and to be the preservers, as Edith Ethel tremulously puts it, of what beauty remains. The hypocrisy of their lives is especially made clear by the course of their relationship. Although both prate of a higher, more delicate sensibility and morality, and Vincent approvingly quotes poetic lines by Rossetti urging the separation of lovers who may not love, ironically it is they, not the other couple, who are adulterous. When by chance their liaison is revealed, they are terrified, and the romantic Edith Ethel lashes savagely out at her lover in the manner and language of Billingsgate.

Christopher and Valentine, on the other hand, are unself-seeking personalities, direct, courageous, and loyal. Often critical of the state of society they find themselves in, they possess sufficient fortitude to persist in their course despite society's sanctions. Both are deeply affected by the carnage and stupidities of the war. Christopher, though a good soldier, is infuriated by the condition of the enlisted men and the treacherous self-aggrandizement of the authorities. Valentine, a pacifist, is simply moved by the mutilations piled on mutilations, deaths piled on deaths. In the working out of their own relationship, they are in ironic contrast with the Macmasters: "I stand for monogamy and chastity. And no talking about it," Christopher had said, scoffing at the "polysyllabic" mouthings of Rossetti and aesthetes like him. "Of course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it." Long acting on his principle of monogamy and chastity, Christopher decides, however, the day before his return to France, to ask Valentine to be his mistress, and wins her consent. But the fates decree otherwise. Between the afternoon of their compact and the night of their consummation, circumstances arising directly out of the social disorder of wartime conditions prevent it. And in the end, each is unwilling to mar the ideal of their mutual love and regard. Some, like the Macmasters, "do"; and some, like Christopher and Valentine, "do not."

The ultimate symbolic act occurs when Macmaster, wanting to impress his superiors, presents as his own one of Christopher's brilliant and prodigal mathematical formulations and is richly rewarded for his treachery by important promotions and illustrious honors. The incident and society's bounty comprise the final irony of the novel, dramatizing its larger meaning of social deterioration.

The effectiveness of the central action and the expressiveness of Ford's theme are still further enhanced by the elegant simplicity of the design in which he has embodied them—the classic form which E. M. Forster has likened to an hourglass. The characteristic shape of the hourglass comes, of course, from the manner in which the lines of its two equal and separate halves flow together at the center, cross, and seem to exchange their relative positions. Thus it is with the form of Some Do Not.

At the beginning, the shining star in the social firmament is Christopher Tietjens, well-born, secure, admired, and deferred to; and toward him Macmaster looks upward, ruefully acknowledging the truth of the words, "The Gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter by the portals: Some do not!" By the middle of the book the lines of relationship have begun to converge; and at the end they are reversed. Dishonored, vilified, and self-denied, Christopher wearily goes to his bed, prepared to leave in the morning for Waterloo Station and the war. Macmaster, on the other hand, is celebrating as reward for his statistical coup the bestowal of the knighthood he has long coveted.

Like the hourglass also, the novel is separated into two equal (142 and 144 pages respectively) and thoroughly demarcated halves, which in their contrast of time and setting splendidly serve to dramatize Ford's theme. Part One takes place in an England still undisrupted by the national disaster fate has in store for it. Although an impending war is hinted, the country is securely at peace. Its traditions, its values of honor and uprightness, and its social structure are still intact. It is England under the old dispensation. Appropriately, the scene of the action is almost completely rural, in the southeastern English countryside. Part Two, on the other hand, is set entirely in London in the midst of the war. The closely woven social fabric has been rent and frayed in numberless places. The youth of the nation are being bled abroad, and at home schemers press their selfish game. Backbiting, malicious gossip, and character assassination thrive. Rectitude and honesty in the military corps (Campion) and in finance (Port Scatho) have turned into the vindictive unscrupulousness of Major Drake and of Brownlie, Port Scatho's nephew, who covets Tietjens' wife and exploits the bank to ruin him. It is the new dispensation. To it from the old, time has flowed in the hourglass. The contrast between the two parts is thus the analogue of that between the two couples: where the Macmasters move in drawing rooms, the major pair find their most congenial home in pastoral England.

Although the society and atmosphere of each part are dominated by the ethos appropriate to it, the two worlds of the novel are not, of course, completely homogeneous. Signs of the rising forces intrude into Part One, for example, when two "city men" from London disrupt with raucous vulgarity the even tenor of the golf-course club house. The progress of the "unborn" Macmaster and the overly civilized, unrooted spirit of Sylvia also are indications of the emerging conditions. And the bold suffragettes' raid on the golf-playing cabinet minister is still another example.

The most striking invasion into the old order by the new occurs, however, at the close of Part One. In the first half of Some Do Not, the horse is, significantly, the means by which the characters are transported. In London, it is a hansom cab—"the only conveyance fit for a gentleman," says Christopher, who loves horses and is marvelously skilled with them; in the country, it is a fly and, notably, a horse-drawn dog-cart. A motor car never appears. Suddenly, however, at the end of the part, an uncontrolled automobile roars out of the dawn mist and mortally wounds the horse that is pulling Christopher and Valentine. Excitingly dramatic, the action also is intensely symbolic. The death blow is triple: physically to the animal by its supplanter, the motor car; and figuratively by the industrial order, of which the automobile is fact and sign, to the world in which the horse thrived, and also to the kind of men it produced. (The very name of chivalry, we should be reminded, derives from the horse.) At the very end, Christopher, sobbing with grief, waits beside the injured beast and, in the last line, the cart of the knacker—the merchant who trades in the carcasses of horses—lumbers into sight. The symbols are simple, natural, and fundamental, as valid in the real world as in the imaginative. The episode is the crux of the novel—the connecting place between the two bell-like compartments of the hourglass. In one exciting moment and image is summed up the theme and foreshadowed the new world which will dominate the second part about to open.

The form of the novel and the conflict between the two orders are, of course, not as sharply drawn as analysis here makes them. Some Do Not is a novel about human beings first of all, not an allegory of black and white. Nor does Ford line up his characters with deadly neatness on contrasting sides. Valentine, for example, is a suffragette and socialist; and the driver of the car which destroys the horse is, in fact, a figure of the old order, General Campion. (The fact that Campion, a man in a position of national leadership, is thoroughly incapable of controlling the machine, though he refuses to admit it, has no doubt its own point, however.) Nor are the major figures mere machined products of the cultures that produced them. Complex human beings, they share in other systems of triumph and defeat than those of a society they may or may not be in tune with. The lines of the hourglass, which form the basic pattern of development and meaning, are therefore counterpointed, and the novel enriched, by other conflicts. Thus, although Macmaster comes to a dominating social position, he is not free from shame before Christopher at the means of his triumph, or from the reader's contempt. Nor does Christopher as a man decline merely because the world that created him is deteriorating. That world may be gone, and his own position in it have become isolated and extreme, with stoicism as the only valid philosophy. But Christopher himself is not destroyed. Having an insides and will, he affirms his values despite the altered circumstances of society. Principles are necessary, he declares as he waits for the knacker's cart, for "Principles are like a skeleton map of a country—you know whether you're going east or north." Christopher's moral superiority, of clarity and principle, is symbolized in the final chapter of Part One. The mist which shrouds the dark countryside in vagueness is a rich symbol of the confusion in which all of England wanders, including the radical Valentine who moves on foot immersed in it. Only Christopher, perched up on the dog-cart, the mist extending level from his neck, his head (like Neptune's in the Aeneid) in the clear—only he has a view of objects in the distance and of the stars and the moon above.

Nor, in the end, is Christopher content merely to sit waiting for the knacker's cart. Living in a world which he dislikes and which is hostile to him, he yet must choose a course of action in it. Although this choice is not overtly dramatized in Some Do Not (as it is in the later volumes), it is symbolized, however, in the progress of his walk, in Part Two, with Mark and later with Valentine through the streets of London. Christopher's argosy starts at his rooms in Gray's Inn, which are dominated by the persecuting figure of Sylvia; proceeds through the urban, industrialized city; and ends with Valentine in the pastoral environs of St. James Park. The course of his walk takes him past the symbols of power and of careers in twentieth-century London: Fleet Street (the press), the Middle Temple (the law), Whitehall (government and the military). Only as he moves along the Embankment does his way leave the city masonry, and then the Thames is described as looking like "dirty silver" and the prospect called a "grim effect of landscape," as though Ford were accenting the dominance over the river of the industrial city. Firmly implied in the journey is Tietjens' rejection of the urban world and his decision to carve out a life with Valentine in a place of greenery and naturalness of growth.

The theme of Some Do Not and the characters and form which help give it expression have been considered; we now need to examine more closely the manner in which Ford has told his story. How, more specifically, has he given to it its qualities of richness and variety, of narrative excitement, and emotional force? What, in short, are his highly effective tools of composition?

The chief technical means which Ford has employed in Some Do Not are particularly appropriate for a work which combines in one both the novel of society and the novel of character. For the first, the public, a broad canvas is needed; for the second, the private analysis in depth. Within his design Ford has handsomely achieved his diverse ends. Through the over-all organization, the selection of point of view, and the use of the time-shift, he has knit together Space—of historical time, social types and milieu, and diverse settings—with Depth—of personality and rendered emotion. It is a work at the same time both extensive and concentrated.

The keystone of Ford's achievement is his arrangement of the action. Although exploring a large and various social world, he very skillfully has brought his material into tight dramatic unity by framing the action of each of the two halves into brief periods of time. Part One covers less than two days, while part Two, which takes place roughly ten years later, occurs within three hours (excluding the final epilogue-like chapter set ten hours afterward).

The first element which makes this flexibility possible is the point of view—the third person (an angle of vision all but inevitable for any large-canvased novel) and which Ford has not employed with such technical variety and richness of effect since the Fifth Queen books. As earlier, he does not restrict himself to any single mode of the third person. Sometimes he writes as the disengaged "omniscient" observer, placing his characters in their social time and place, and striking his "public" note; but this novelist's voice is mainly informational, without any Thackerayan "dear-reader" tone or moral comment. Chiefly it enables him to speed his narrative, setting a scene quickly and avoiding a disproportionate expository machinery. The novel thus begins: "The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage." And "omnisciently" the theme is elaborated:

Their class administered the world, not merely the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or foreign countries, they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices, or with letters to the Times, asking in regretful indignation: "Has the British This or That come to this!" Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of which so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, the Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade, or the personal reputations of deceased statesmen and men of letters.

At other times, he will become the detached observer, reporting the external behavior of his actors, their speeches, gestures, and deeds—an angle of vision usually reserved for high dramatic moments. On occasion Ford moves in the other direction, completely entering the consciousness of a character in order to present his inward reflections.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest … Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! ammer from the Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." (These charming local dialect names.) …

Passages of interior monologue, however, are comparatively rare.

Most often Ford blends the public and private, simultaneously presenting objective event and the subjective reflection of a particular character, the perspective being as though partly within and partly behind its focal character. Very appropriately to his "public" aims, Ford's focus changes frequently, and includes Valentine, Sylvia, Macmaster, Edith Ethel, Mark, and, of course, Christopher.

Ford's variable use of third-person modes thus greatly helps him in creating a universe that is both broadly social and intensely personal. The remarkable depth and richness of personality of his main characters is clearly made possible by his entrance into their awarenesses. The method enables Ford—in fact, requires him—to explore and objectify in detail their inner rationales, ambitions, motivations, temperaments, and longings; and the reader, in consequence, observes them intimately in their deepest selves. At the same time, and as importantly, the reader also sees them externally, through the eyes of the omniscient and observant author and of the other characters. The impressive reality, for example, with which Christopher and Macmaster are introduced in the opening chapter owes its success particularly to the shift in focus between the two men. Not being the prisoner of their own consciousness (or, even for that matter, of the author's), Ford's people thus take on a remarkably rounded, solid dimension and an enhanced independent life.

Similarly, Ford's method increases the actuality of his public, objective milieu. Seen variously, the world grows impressionistically richer. And since most of the external events of the novel are transmitted to the reader not objectively alone but also colored by a single consciousness which is deeply engrossed in them, they gain enormously in interest, urgency, and drama.

One of the most striking illustrations of the dramatic effects made possible by Ford's shift of focus from character to character is in the opening chapter of Part Two—the stunning revelation to the reader that the immensely learned, intellectually arrogant Christopher has lost his memory from shell-shock. Instead of presenting the information from the focal point of view of Christopher, as in the two preceding chapters, Ford chooses to render the scene through Sylvia's eyes. By sealing off Christopher's consciousness from the reader and presenting him from the outside, he thus wins the full impact of surprise when the condition is revealed. And by showing the effect of the news on the consciousness of Sylvia, the person least sympathetic to him, the episode is doubly enhanced. Her shock and pity are all the more effective a medium for transmitting a kindred shock and pity to the reader.

The second major tool of composition, the time-shift, is made possible by the first and is probably even more fundamental. By the very fact of entering into the consciousness of a character, the author may freely range wherever he wishes within it—including its roomiest domain, the memory. (As Ford himself has said: "we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.") More than any other element, the time-shift is the source of the technical originality and freshness of the novel, making possible in large measure its broad and deep social picture, its exciting narration, and its remarkable verisimilitude.

Although the action of Some Do Not is concentrated, as we have seen, into two brief periods, the use of the time-shift, in which Ford switches between the present and the past, allows him to extend far beyond these confines. The opening chapter provides an excellent example: the immediate scene is aboard a train carrying Christopher and Macmaster southward from London to Rye. During the journey Macmaster works on the proofs of his monograph and at one point the pair heatedly dispute the merits of its subject. But in the course of the chapter the scene and the time often change. The reader observes Macmaster effectively moving in cultivated drawing rooms; both men dealing with the head of their department; Christopher in a scene with his mother and in another with his father. The two friends are also observed in several past conversations, in different London rooms, and in a hansom cab which that morning had taken them to their office. Ford's canvas plainly is stretched spatially no less than chronologically. Like his variable point of view, the time-shift thus enables him, if in another way, to combine space and depth.

A fictional method which frequently turns backward risks the serious hazard of becoming static and dull. But in Ford's management of the time-shift in Some Do Not—however it might be with a number of his other novels—the narrative is made only more exciting.…

The success of the novel depends, however, on the masterful handling of tools other than point of view and time-shift. Of these, the most important involve the process by which the work moves through time—the relentlessness of its advance and the modulation of its effect. Principles of composition rather than devices, they cut across and in part draw on the other methods. Let us examine each in turn.

Like his other fine novels, Some Do Not beautifully illustrates the theory of progression d'effet. The novel moves purposefully forward in every word, growing faster and more intense as it proceeds. Every device or effect serves to advance the story and to develop the over-all plan. The movement of the mist chapter, for example, is not dictated principally by the requirements of exposition, as engrossing as that may be presented. The chief drama develops rather from the conflict within Christopher between his Yorkshireman's stolid observance of the proprieties and his desire to take a holiday from them. Although chronologically the action moves backward, emotionally it intensifies, bringing the lovers closer and closer together in feeling. Similarly in the opening chapter, Ford's division of the points of view between Christopher and Macmaster is not a mere tour de force of character presentation, the simple revelation of their different qualities through their contrasting responses to the same circumstances. Although the subject of their reflections overlaps, the progress of the action from the focus of Christopher to that of Macmaster is not in the slightest repetitive. Macmaster's thoughts further advance the situation. Even the division of the book into two separate parts enables Ford to satisfy the doctrine of progression d'effet that the narrative accelerate in speed and intensity as it advances. The very nature of the world of Part One is slower—an agrarian society at peace, while the world of Part Two is intrinsically faster and more agitated—urban, industrial, and torn by the emotions of war. Characteristically, Ford rounds out this onward, intensifying progress of his narrative with a quieter final chapter. A richly complex coda, it weaves together, by means of time-shift in the mind of Tietjens, all the various emotional strands of the book—its places, persons, and evocative lines of poetry, the social atmosphere of England and London, Macmaster's shamed betrayal, Christopher's love for Valentine and his self-denial—and so produces an understated, summatory close which is at once remarkably moving and aesthetically satisfying.

But the most fascinating example of Ford's sheer narrative finesse is his handling of the opening and closing of a tandem pair of chapters (Three and Four) in Part One. "At the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door," Chapter Three begins abruptly, "Tietjens started violently." In the ensuing conversation we learn only that it is night and that as a result of the day's events General Campion is indignant at Christopher. The rest of the chapter and of Four develops what had happened, the former concentrating on Macmaster and his remembrance of the day and the latter, through an adroit transition, focusing on Christopher within that day. Throughout the second chapter, Christopher is shown as intently trying not to reflect upon his impending reunion with Sylvia, seeking to lose himself in mathematical calculations and a game of solitaire; and the opening of its final paragraph returns to Macmaster's sudden entrance into the room and Tietjens' violent start—which is described as giving Christopher "a really terrible physical shock." "He nearly vomited; his brain reeled and the room fell about," and the paragraph continues to the chapter's end:

He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the time, paralysed both his body and his mind.

The extremity of Christopher's reaction plainly is at variance with his behavior described earlier at the opening of Chapter Three, for then Christopher had only been discomforted at being seen to start and immediately had entered into a long conversation with Macmaster. The inconsistency, however, is far from being a flaw; rather it is a remarkable stroke of narrative economy. The reader, as Ford knew, never feels any discrepancy. Not only do forty pages intervene between the two moments, but the very nature of the method of the time-shift does not require strict factual consistency. Less bound in its mode, closer to poetry, its aesthetic principle is much less "scientific" than the chronological novel; the consistency it demands is emotional. Thus, with masterly assurance Ford has made one instance of startle achieve two dramatic purposes—to launch with interest his backward-turning account of the day's events and to enforce emotionally upon the reader the intensity of the burdens pressing upon Christopher.

No less important than progression d'effet in Some Do Not is the principle of variety. Ford's continual modulation of the unfolding experience of the novel perpetually requickens its life by preventing a dulling sameness of effect. Variety, in short, serves to make the temporal movement of the narrative constantly new, fresh, and engaging. The elements of the novel which Ford varies for this purpose are many and are almost as complex in relation to one another as the variations of sound—pitch, volume, timbre, tempo—available to the musician. They include point of view; mood; personality; time: past and present, objective and subjective; modes of rendering experience: dramatic and novelistic, realist and impressionist; and rhythm and surprise, both of language and action.

The virtuoso powers with which Ford has modulated and renewed the life of Some Do Not may be understood more clearly through a closer look at a single section, which of necessity must be more than usually technical and detailed. The intense fifth chapter which presents the Duchemin breakfast episode, one of the big scenes of the novel, constitutes the crux of Part One, bringing together for the first time all four lovers. Its chief narrative end is to dramatize the growth and crystallization of the passion between Macmaster and Edith Ethel. Wishing to help Macmaster in his literary research, Mrs. Duchemin had arranged the meeting in the hope that her husband's insane state might pass unnoticed. Instead the Reverend Duchemin violently disrupts the social occasion by provocatively uttering sexually charged phrases, even attempting to reveal intimacies between himself and his wife. On discovering the conditions under which Mrs. Duchemin must live, Macmaster's sympathy for her grows still stronger and, after her husband is led away, the pair exchange pledges of devotion.

The action of the chapter is divided into four parts or "movements," formally separated from each other by the particular angle of vision adopted. The first movement (six pages), which sets the scene and presents a revealing conversation between the two old friends, Valentine and Edith Ethel, is told strictly from the objective point of view. The chief purposes of the section are to set the scene and to characterize, and objectify, the two women who have been presented up to this point only through the eyes of their respective lovers. The second movement (nine pages), which groups the various guests, seats them at the breakfast table, and introduces the explosion of the Reverend Duchemin's obscene words, is more complex in its handling of point of view. Omniscient and objective at the outset, it soon slides into Valentine's consciousness, for a longer time into Christopher's, and then by way of an adroit objective transition, enters the key awareness of Edith Ethel, where the focus remains, except for a brief but important return to Christopher, until the end of the unit. The third movement (five and a half pages) which begins a few minutes in time before the close of the second, concentrates on a single awareness, Macmaster's, as he seeks to manage the unruly Duchemin. The fourth movement (four pages), in which the lovers pledge their troth, combines the objective and focal points of view, alternating between the detached author and the separate inner reflections of the impassioned pair, who agree to meet again at dusk.

This continual shifting of the angle of vision within the chapter is of key importance in achieving the variety of effect, but other elements are also significantly varied. Fundamental are the shifts between realism and impressionism and the contrasts of mood and dramatic intensity. The opening movement, the conversation between Valentine and Edith Ethel, is itself markedly different in method from the pages preceding it—which had depicted the aftermath of Christopher's golfing day and his violent upset at Macmaster's sudden entrance. The method of the earlier episode was impressionistic in character (telescoping several hours and tending toward vaguely outlined detail); the new section, on the other hand, is realistic and dramatic (objective, following clock time, and with sharply defined particularity). The earlier mood had been tense and, in the end, profoundly disturbing; the beginning of the new chapter is relaxed, conversational and decorative in atmosphere, with the interest deriving mainly from a simple contrasting of two very different women. The turmoil to come is only slightly hinted: no more than Macmaster or Christopher has the reader been let in on the true condition of the husband.

As the first section of the chapter contrasts with the pages before, so it does also with those that follow. The opening of the second movement returns to the impressionistic, but this time from the omniscient, not focal, point of view. It is a method, as managed, highly appropriate to presenting the atmosphere of a situation in which various people are politely and superficially meeting each other for the first time. By combining omniscience and impressionism, Ford is able to create the illusion of the quick elapse of time in which nothing vital is happening. But soon, as Ford enters the minds of Valentine and Christopher and then moves toward Edith Ethel, the method changes again, becoming more objective and realistic. (With these alterations, it should be pointed out, the reader's sense of the movement of time also varies: having hurried along impressionistically, it slows to the stretched-out subjective time of consciousness; then, when completely objective, it quickens to regular clock time; soon, however, it will slow again to agitated consciousness, only to change tempo once more—a process which continues, giving life to the experience, throughout the chapter, and, in fact, the book.) Essentially social comedy, the first half of the second movement continues, like the first movement, with comparative quiet. Its drama and interest derive largely from the characters' underlying evaluation of each other revealed as the internal focus changes.

But the second half of the movement, which shifts into Edith Ethel's consciousness, marks a decided change—not only from realism to impressionism but, even more strikingly, in tension and mood. Part of the dramatic conflict in the episode is provided by the various obstacles, such as Mrs. Wannop and Christopher, that stand in the way of Mrs. Duchemin's having Macmaster for herself. More intensely dramatic, however, is her desperate wish that her new guests will not discover her husband's condition. Her fearful panic as the polite structure begins to collapse dominates the mood of this half and is the more frightening and disturbing because, although permitted within her mind, the reader does not know the source of her terror. The knowledge is finally acquired through an entry into Christopher's consciousness, shortly before the end of the section, at the same time that he himself perceives the truth. Not only has Ford varied his method again from realism to impressionism, but he has also varied the kind of impressionism itself. Unlike the earlier passage in which the gathering of the guests was presented vaguely, this instance in Edith Ethel's mind is personal and well chosen to intensify the experience.

Thoroughly different again are the mood, method, and dramatic tension of the third movement. From the blurred sensibility of an emotionally distraught personality, the focus shifts to an individual, Macmaster, in whom the cool, rational principle is uppermost. The method thus turns realistic again. At the very entrance of the Reverend Duchemin—who now for the first time is presented clearly to the reader (having been before a voice speaking from behind table flowers)—Macmaster had become suspicious and alerted. Only disciplined intellect, he recognized, could save the situation. The intense drama of the third part springs, therefore, from Macmaster's determination to enforce his will on the demented man, which he does through the adoption of a donnish tone and a scholarly challenging of the accuracy of the clergyman's Latin. At one point, when for the moment Macmaster turns aside to exchange passionate confidences with Edith Ethel, Duchemin slips from check and becomes disruptive again. Only physical violence—a discreet jab to the kidney by the clergyman's attendant upon Macmaster's orders—ends the disturbance.

The mood and tension of the final movement alters again, is quieter and more romantic. From coolly resourceful manager, Macmaster becomes the tremulous poetic lover. And the section ends impressionistically, in still another change of method, on a rococo wave of delicate sensibility between him and Edith Ethel which spiritually echoes the description of the exquisite decor with which the chapter began.

Thus by modulating these various elements, and still others (such as prose rhythm which would here require too elaborate an analysis), Ford perpetually enlivens his action. At times, two or more of these separate elements may operate in conjunction, as we have seen, but the particular combinations are continually altering.

Not only is Ford's skill in varying his experience masterful within his chapters but also from chapter to chapter. Consider as example the splendid modulation of Part One. The opening chapter, divided in focus between two key characters, Christopher and Macmaster, begins leisurely and operates mainly on the principle of time-shift. But Chapter Two, which moves to Sylvia, her mother, and Father Consett in Germany, is dramatic and strictly chronological. The third chapter, on the other hand, returns to the time-shift, almost entirely in the mind of Macmaster, and its beginning (Christopher's startle) is not leisurely but abrupt. The next change, to the objective and public, begins before the section ends and continues into the next, but in time Ford enters Christopher's consciousness—not in retrospect but during the day. The method thus becomes chronologically impressionistic. Only at the end of Chapter Four, when the startle incident is rounded out, is the time-shift employed. The contrasting organization of Chapter Five, the breakfast episode, we have already seen in detail: the time-shift is not used at all; the focus is on at least four characters, not one; and the experience is more social or public in nature than personal or private. (Still another variation is its leisurely beginning.) The management of Chapter Six is again modulated: Ford focuses on the consciousness of a single character throughout (except for a brief entry into Valentine's awareness) and returns, though not in medias res, to the time-shift. For the first time in such a case, the action is divided in the middle by a change of scene and time. As important is the variance of mood between Chapters Five and Six, the first being extremely intense and exciting, the second, for much of the way, pastoral, lyric, and relaxed. In the final Chapter Seven, the mist episode, the form changes once more. Although Christopher continues as focus, this time the action is launched abruptly in the midst of things. And again Ford's principle of organization is fresh: unlike the earlier abrupt ("startle") opening of Chapter Three, in which the action that followed took place entirely in the past, this time the narrative not only looks back but also dramatically moves forward at the same time.

The richness and variety of Some Do Not derives also from its diverse, thick texture and atmosphere. Its surface is vigorous with splendid detail.… Consider, as example, the revealing particularity of the quoted opening sentence of Macmaster's monograph—so rounded, judicious, and formally authoritative in tone, so calculated to impress:

Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it to-day.…

Or Christopher's long telegram to Sylvia, which is given an extra touch of reality—beyond its biting opening words, accept resumption yoke—by its real misprint in transmission, esoecially. Or again in the prose, which (though essentially "simple" in style) is given atmospheric effectiveness not only by the already mentioned anglicisms, but also by the occasional use of uncommon, richly suggestive words like tantalus, capercailzies, epergne, galantine, spikenard, glaucous, matutinal, pawkiness, tendential, fane, cockerel, dockleaf

One of Ford's two unmistakable masterpieces, Some Do Not inevitably demands comparison with his other, The Good Soldier. Written by the same novelist and sharing certain basic attitudes and themes, they are yet extraordinarily different works—in method, spirit, and the intensity and configuration of their emotion. Something of this contrast may perhaps be conveyed by observing that where The Good Soldier derives from the French tradition—it has, in fact, been called "the greatest French novel in English"—Some Do Not is, surprisingly, in the line of the English novel. Such classification should not, of course, be applied too strictly. It does not mean, as analysis makes clear, that the later work is wanting in the gallic concern with form which justifiably earned the earlier book John Rodker's description. What is indicated, rather, is that the pattern and experience of the novel has not been drawn with the excruciating tightness of The Good Soldier. Spacious and leisurely, the book is more easily accessible. It does not demand of the reader the very close attention required for the full understanding of The Good Soldier. Rather than the novel as poem, Some Do Not is the novel as novel. But the book also belongs in the native tradition because of its peculiarly English character and spirit—especially, its humor. For Some Do Not is a richly comic work—not in the ironic vein of The Good Soldier, which is a mordant, intellectual, French form of comedy, but in the warm English tradition of Fielding and Dickens.…

Which of Ford's two finest novels, we must ask finally, is the greater? Critical judgment will vary with varying criteria, and it will be further made uncertain by the thoroughly different natures of the two works. But ultimately the greater achievement does seem to be The Good Soldier. Some Do Not, for all its high art, is not an unflawed work. The second chapter of Part Two, dealing with the dishonoring of Tietjens' checks, is, for example, inferior to the rest of the novel—the one place where the persecution Christopher suffers seems unconvincing, its details excessively piled on and unobjectified. On occasion, too, Ford is carelessly inconsistent: Valentine's brother changes name from Edward to Gilbert; Christopher's brothers, Ernest and James, become Curly and Longshanks; and the day of the action in Part Two shifts in mid-course from Friday to Monday. (None of these inconsistencies is particularly obvious, however). A fastidious critic might observe also that the technical management of the second half is a trifle less subtle and various than the supremely artistic accomplishment of Part One—a value which only begins to assume aesthetic significance, however, after several readings. This novel, finally, is not quite as intensely piercing, intellectually or emotionally, as the earlier book. Meanings often lie deep in Some Do Not but the novel cannot equal The Good Soldier in its power to fascinate—to create the sense that the ultimate has not yet been reached, that meaning still lies beckoning within meaning to lure us on.

Readers who invoke other criteria than these no doubt will disagree. They may hold perhaps that no work of fiction should require more than one reading. Or, more seriously, that a novel should be a novel, not a poem. Or that character creation is nine tenths of the novelist's genius and that Some Do Not is filled with the more full-bodied cast. But however any individual verdict may go between this pair of superb works, one conclusion is clear: Ford has written two masterpieces which are successful, abundantly, in the two great traditions of the novel. He more than earned the right of being addressed as "Cher Maitre."