The Spirit of The Good Soldier and The Spirit of the People

The Spirit of The Good Soldier and The Spirit of the People VINCENT J. CHENG University of Southern California THE GOOD SOLDIER IS FORD MADOX FORD'S enigmatic masterpiece .1 Most commentators, however, read it out of the larger context of Ford's life and other 80-odd books—especially his non-fiction. They usually take for granted that the narrator Dowell's scorn for Leonora's Catholicism and his admiration of Edward's Tory Anglicanism were Ford's own. This ignores the fact that Ford had converted to Catholicism and sent his children to Catholic convent-schools.2 Consequently, the religious dimensions of Ford's novels continue to be neglected or discounted—a surprising fact considering the key role religious issues and affiliations play in so many of the novels, including all the major ones: The Good Soldier, the Parade's End tetralogy, The Fifth Queen trilogy. Ford, who chose as a young man to join the Roman faith, often described himself as a "sentimental Tory and Roman Catholic," and all his life advocated medieval Catholic values (which Ezra Pound facetiously dubbed "Sánete Foi Catholique"3). While he was writing The Good Soldier, Ford wrote a friend that "in a Papist sort of way I am a tempestuously religious sort of person and I do not think any clearness of thought is possible unless one either is or has been intensely religious."4 Violet Hunt's The Desirable Alien paints Ford as a devout Catholic, attending Mass, visiting cathedrals in Germany, and inveighing against the wicked "Prots."5 While such a picture may be a bit dramatically exaggerated, it is in essence supported by Ford's own statements in both his fiction and non-fiction; these show that, however devout Ford may or may not have been, what he considered to be Catholic thought and Catholic ideals played an influential role in his ideas and writings. During the three-year span (1905-1908) in which Ford was writing his trilogy of Tudor romances {The Fifth Queen, Privy Seal, The Fifth Queen Crowned), he was concurrently writing a trilogy of non-fiction about modern English life: The Soul of London, The Heart of the Country, and The Spirit of the People (published jointly in America as England and the English). Though seldom read 303 CHENG: The Good Soldier and The Spirit op the People nowadays, these three volumes are Ford's best early nonfiction —entertaining, readable, and filled with interesting thoughts and observations. They are particularly significant in that they begin to reflect openly in his non-fiction the pro-Catholic sentiments already noticeable in his novels under the guise of historical fiction. Furthermore , in dealing with the relations between religion, repressed passion , behavior, and "good English form," these three volumes of nonfiction are also revealing and suggestive for the light they shed on Ford's later novels—most notably The Good Soldier, but also A Call, the Parade's End novels, and others. For those subsequent novels would be centrally based on these very relationships between the religious, the sexual, and the matter of "good" behavior. While all three of the books on England are suggestive, The Spirit of the People is especially revealing in terms of interpreting The Good Soldier, since it not only contains Ford's explicit opinions about some of the themes treated in that novel, but also some direct verbal echoes and the key anecdote which would inspire the novel. But before writing The Good Soldier, Ford would first test out these same themes in A Call (1910)—a novel which, in retrospect, seems almost a trial run for his masterpiece. The Spirit of the People and A Call together suggest the composite picture of England and the English which Ford would try to depict in The Good Soldier: a race admirable for its behavior and good form, but tragic in its consequent repression of emotions. In his account of London life in The Soul of London,6 Ford suggests that religion and behavior are connected by the issue of freedom of expression: The fascination of life in London is essentially its freedom. In society of the one type you may do very much...