do the right thing, he is torn between the inclinations of his heart and the confusing modern social mores that both condemn and condone his romantic actions. Unable to bear up under the strain, he finally tells Dowell, 'I must have a little rest, you know,' shortly before he commits suicide. Leonora -836- soon remarries. Nancy Rutherford, Ashburnham's ward and last love, suffers a mental collapse, and the uncertain Dowell, now convinced he is in love with Nancy, tends her in the same way he did Florence. But the strain of keeping up appearances may be too much for him, as well. As he remarks in an unconscious echo of Ashburnham, 'I am very tired of it all.' The mood evokes earlier novels of manners like Richardson's Clarissa, where the only escape from imprisoning convention is death.
Ford expands upon the fate of social atavism in the tetralogy Parade's End. Written over a span of five years, Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and The Last Post (1928) sum up how British society altered irrevocably during the Great War. In a sense, Parade's End is another of Ford's historical narratives, but it is written with the regret of someone whose world has become history. In his opening rendition of 'a perfectly appointed railway carriage,' Ford depicts the old order: fine leather, ornate seat patterns, and a ride, thinks the protagonist Christopher Tietjens, smooth as British giltedged securities. But in a telling physical detail, Ford also presents the old order's obliviousness: 'the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little.' Tietjens and his Tory society will be punished for their lack of forethought, even as they are praised for standing against debased modern values.
The story of Christopher Tietjens is more a movement than a plot, told as achronologically as The Good Soldier, though it slips in and out of many characters' minds. Yoked to his scheming, adulterous wife Sylvia, Tietjens bears his situation with a stoic fortitude that she and others find infuriating. Despite Sylvia's intrigues, his increasingly politicized job at the Imperial Department of Statistics, and the social affairs of the day, Tietjens preserves his eighteenth-century outlook, his Tory politics, and his encyclopedic mind. Like Edward Ashburnham, Tietjens quotes Swinburne, apt for the occasion but dead for the new era.
Novels of manners often have set pieces, representative of a certain social order or class, and Ford's breakfast scene at the Duchemins' ranks with Woolf's party at the Dalloways' or Forster's Marabar Caves expedition. The expansiveness of the setting and the distinguished list of generals, clergymen, and politicians attending are all the more poignant because they will soon be swept away in wartime. The propriety is emphasized by those who refuse to subscribe to it: the writer Mrs. Wannop, for example, whom Tietjens's father has supported for years and who Tietjens declares has written the only novel worth reading since -837- the eighteenth century. Her daughter Valentine is a classicist of the highest order, who has nonetheless worked as a scullery maid to maintain financial independence. As an active women's suffragist, she represents the best of progressivism without the moral decay of the politicians.
Both physically and socially, Tietjens bulks large and awkward. In a Woolfian passage, Mrs. Duchemin thinks: 'He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external!' But one of the consistent ironies in the plot is that Tietjens, so blunt and forthright, is misunderstood by everyone. Old General ffoliot thinks him a cad for deserting his wife, when the fault is Sylvia's. The rumors about Tietjens spread to the point where he loses his job and place in society. The scurrilous stories follow him even into the trenches, where he is reassigned despite his excellent performance because General Campion is sympathetic to Sylvia. These incidents illustrate the peculiar (and modernist) construction of social reality, where mere words have the repercussions of facts. At the same time, Ford's stream-of-consciousness technique emphasizes the undercurrents beneath the surface.
Tietjens remains steadfast in moral and intellectual outlook, holding off from sleeping with Valentine just before he goes off to war because, as the title of the second novel puts it, 'Some do not-,' and both he and Valentine are the type who practice restraint. Admittedly, at times this restraint reaches absurd proportions: when Tietjens's friend Macmaster hears that Sylvia has gone off with another man, Macmaster simply registers, 'Ah!' Tietjens's brother and father wrongly think the worst of Tietjens, an impression Tietjens does nothing to correct, though it drives his father to suicide (the same shamed act of Ford's protagonist George Heinemann in The Marsden Case, written just before the tetralogy). As Ford writes in his poem 'On Heaven':
This is deadly accurate social commentary disguised as poetry. In fact, the trait Fussell terms British phlegm is on show throughout -838- Ford's works. At its best, it is a type of valor of which discretion is the better part; at its worst, it is repression, leading to noncommunication and extreme suffering.
The war explodes much of this social repression, mixing the classes in the trenches, mingling pity with fear and mangled limbs. Ford, who spent time at the front and suffered the shell shock he gives his protagonist, perfectly captures the surreal horror of the experience. He also precisely marks the end of an era: 'There will be no more parades,' thinks Tietjens as he talks with General Campion, who has seen duty in India. 'No more Hope, no more Glory.' With the waning of imperialism comes the end of grandeur. Postwar England will offer a smaller, emptier existence, shown by the tiny, barren London flat he and Valentine move into after the war. An element of the absurd also marks this jumbled society, symbolized by the lunatic fringe of Tietjens's war comrades who crowd into Tietjens's flat.
Yet Tietjens manages to hold onto some vestige of the past, entering the antiques market with an American partner. Flouting social convention by living with Valentine and getting her pregnant, he renounces his Yorkshire heritage and refuses all help from his family. Only when his brother Mark, the embodiment of conservative England, becomes ill, does Tietjens return to Groby, the ancestral estate. Suffering from a seizure that has rendered him immobile, Mark in his condition sums up an entire era. As in The Good Soldier, paralysis is England's social disease. The new amoral, bored generation also cannot act, except to destroy tradition. When Sylvia persuades the new American tenant to chop down Groby Great Tree, the tallest cedar in England, she both emasculates the Tietjens men and destroys a great source of history. The wych elm in Howards End is a similar symbol, though Forster optimistically lets it stand. In any event, the two authors' hope for a new society is the same: Helen's baby in the fields, Valentine's 'tiny brain that worked deep within her womb.' Just before Mark dies at his 'last post,' he recalls a nursery song and so bequeaths the past to Valentine.
As Arthur Mizener notes, Ford's last novels, such as Henry for Hugh and The Rash Act, tend to emphasize technique at the expense of substance. They have the kind of clever reversals and plot devices that P. G. Wodehouse dealt in, but without the same lightness of touch. And just as Wodehouse tended to evoke a bygone era of England, Ford, like his fellow Edwardian Forster, found himself increasingly out of date. Faced with becoming an anachronism, Forster never completed another -839- novel; Ford, with a greater need for money and perhaps ego gratification, continued to write novels somewhat perfunctorily. His is an uneven but distinguished record. Some seventy years after Forster's and Ford's prime, society has changed inalterably, and books such as A Man Could Stand Up serve not just as drama but as historical commentary. The belated publication of Forster's Maurice delivered an intact slice of Edwardiana. But these works have not become curious period pieces, as have the novels of lesser writers, such as E. F. Benson or Ronald Firbank. These novels of manners transcend the genre by dealing in universal truths and in the end rejecting even these generalities for unsparing verities of character. As Forster says of Beethoven in Howards End, one can trust him because he bravely combines the splendor and the grimness of life and this is equally true of both Forster and Ford.Their stance remains ambivalent, urging change while defending against desecration. Perhaps this is why, as Hynes shrewdly observes, the Edwardian era was an age of reformers, not reforms. Still, if the historical character note of most Edwardians is nostalgia, these two manage to avoid sentimentality. One turns to both authors, in short, for their powers of discrimination.
