A BOLD LINE

Evening Star, Issue 21007, 22 January 1932, Page 11

A BOLD LINE

KING AND IRELAND THREAT TO ABDICATE A NOVELIST’S STORY No doubt we have a right to expect a novelist’s reminiscences to be more entertaining than the next man’s. Mr Ford Madox Ford calls his ‘ Return to Yesterday,’ an account of the years 1894-1914, “ this novel.” But in one of its episodes he takes unusual care in citing his authorities, - writes Montagu Slater, in, the ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ This is a passage in which he quotes the late Mr C. F. 6. Masterman as saying that in the Irish troubles of 1914 the King confronted the Liberal Cabinet with' the possibility of his abdication. The novelist is describing how one fine day in 1914 he bought a newspaper at Berwick-on-Tweed—“ a Liberal sheet of the more grandmotherly kind.”

“ It told that the Suffragettes were naughty, naughty girls and- that they must be stopped. It was very angry with the King over several pages. The King was acting but only just almost—unconstitutionally. He had asked the leaders of all the Irish parties to meet in a Round Table Conference at Buckingham Palace under his own presidency. “ I imagined I knew all about that. I had seen Masterman really angry for the first time in my life. He said that the King was impossible to get on with. He was as determined that the Irish question should be settled to the satisfaction of all his Irish subjects as his father had been to have the Entente Cordiale with France. The Cabinet was unanimously against the Buckingham Palace conference. It wanted to do nothing that could enhance the Royal prestige. The matter' had come to an absolute impasse. “ Finally, according to Masterman—and I made a note of his words immediately afterwards; it was the only note I ever made, but the occasion seemed very extraordinary—the King had said: ‘Very well, gentlemen. I am the richest commoner in England. If you wish me to abdicate I will abdicate, supposing that to be the wish of the country. But before that we will have a General Election, and I have not much doubt as to the results as between you and me.’ “I was immensely glad,” Mr Ford goes on. “ All my life I had been a passionate Home Ruler.” . . . But, then, it is his way to bring us up with these little jerks. TWO MACDONALDS.

Many years earlier another political rumour reached him. He had it from Frederick Harrison that in or about the year 1882 Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilko came to ask Harrison “if the times were not ripe for the declaration of the First British Republic, with Mr Chamberlain as President?”

In another passage ho introduces us to Mr MacDonald at the beginning of his political career. “ For me Mr MacDonald remains ‘ the ’ Journalist. The journalist must be able at the shortest notice and with the scantiest knowledge to identify himself with anybody or anything. This Mr MacDonald could do,” Ho goes on to tell of their first meeting: “ Mr MacDonald then turned his attention to the Left in general. I don’t know who were then his friends. He did not mention any. . . . There were no just men of Labour. They were all obtuse, venial, traitors, timeservers. ... It used to be said by the more violent that he attained his election to the Council of *che Labour Party by mistake. There was another ,T. p. MacDonald of the loud-voiced, horny-handed type, and the trade unionists when they voted for the present Prime Minister were said to have thought the other was the candidate. T daresay the story is not true, I dnresoy no political stories to unyonc s disadvantage arc true.”

Mr Ford’s characters take a huge delight in doing what is not expected of them. His Sir Bernard Shaw, lor instance, “broke up the City Socia,.st League because he drank champagne ” from one of Mrs Gwendolen Bishop’s shoes “on the premises of tlnyt body.” His Mrs Sidney Webb gazes at a Fabian horizon and murmurs (vague.y apropos of Mr Ford’s revolutionary cloth cap and Mr H. G. Wells’s sadly proletarian tendencies) “ Your friend Mr Wells thinks that he will get rid of us from the Fabian Society. He calls us the Old Gang. ( But he won’t. It takes gentlefolk to run 8k political bodv in England.” His literary people are no less entertaining. Mr Ford presents Conrad pre- ~ vented with difficulty from throwing Mr Lewis Hind downstairs. It was at “ a literary party.” As “ a great lady of the Court ” remarked to the host, “I wonder you give ’em. I shouldn’t, I once gave one, but it did not work. Yet one tries tb encourage . . . ah . . . these things!” KIPLING’S'CAR.

He presents the author of ‘The Twilight of the Gods’ hearing the result of the Oscar Wilde trial. 1 “ I was going up the steps of the , British Museum. On them 1 met. Dr Garnett, the Keeper of Printed Boons, a queer, very tall, lean, _ untidilybearded Yorkshire figure in its official frock coat and high hat. I gave lam the news. He looked for a moment away over the great yard of the • Museum, witu its pigeons and lamps and little lions on the railings.. Then he said; ‘ Then that means the death of English poetry for fifty years.’ ” He presents his relations, the proRaphaelites (at least most of them were) in a variety of festhe* tic and artistic roles: Theodore Watts Dunton in his wellknown characteristics; Henry James, Stephen Crane, and W. H. Hudson m their American-Kentish encampment. We are given specimens of Henry James’s conversation, in particular an account of how Kipling called on the , Master,” as these literary Americans used to call their greatest novelist, called on him in a, new 1,200-gumea car. Mr Kipling, in the rich phiaseology of Mr James, ‘ uttered words which have for himself no doubt a particular significance, but which to me convey almost literally nothing beyond their immediate sound. Mr Kipling said that the motor car was calculated to make the Englishman . . .’’—and again came the humorous gasp and the roll of the eyes “was calculated to make'the Englishman . . . think.” GALSWORTHY AND CONRAD. In another story a ship called the Torrens, witli a master of Polish and aristocratic descent, is sailing down the coast of Africa. On board “ was a young, blond, and smiling barrister. He was bound on legal business for the Cape Copper Mines, in which ho had a family interest. The two young men —Conrad was still in his thirties—confided each to the other that they had literary ambitions. In the starlit silence of the dog-watches Conrad descended to his cabin and fetched up the beginning of his manuscript. That young barrister, who seemed to Con-' rad to possess all the gifts of Fortunatus, must have been the first human being to read any of Gpnrad s manuscript—on a ship, in tho starlight, running down off the coast of Africa. . . . That fortunate being was the author ot ‘ The Silver Box.’ ” “Mr Galsworthy, I anticipate, will contradict it,” says Mr Ford, covering himself, but he will not spare enthusiasm on that account. Indeed, that is a commodity in which lus generosity never fails. He sees life in many colours. He always finds a story. “ There is really no other pursuit m life,” he says, ‘‘than to*find that cue geese must be swans.”.