Ford Madox Ford

From It Was the Nightingale
I will make a personal confession. . . . It has been my fate to be mistaken for—or to be told that I resem-bled—three men that I particularly disliked resembling. . .. Whenever I have gone to public literary assemblies I have inevitably heard two or three people say: "Here's Gosse!" And two or three others would whisper: "Isn't that man like Oscar Wilde!" That I could just stomach though I should much have disliked to meet the fate of either of those writers. But when the late John Quin, the collector, said to me on our first meeting in Ezra's studio in the rue Notre Dame de Champs: "Hullo, George Moore, how well you are looking!" I had hard work to refrain from knocking him down. I think I should have knocked him down if he had not had the sense to see that I looked well . . . for George Moore! I had so often been taken for Mr. Moore or told that I resembled him that, by that time; it had be-come an obsession. There was nothing of that sort attaching to John Galsworthy. When you thought of him you thought of green fields in the cool, calm, bright weather of George Herbert. He had a sort of Greek aura as of perfect physical motion accompanying measured speculations in a halcyon atmosphere of eternal youth. . . . I at least have never got over the feeling that he was, as Conrad called him, "young Jack" and I cannot bring myself really to believe that he ever had any perturba-tions of the spirit though actually I have known him have—and indeed I have accompanied him through, some dark periods. And even at this moment I cannot
think of him as other than the Fortunate Youth—happy at once in the lines on which his life was laid and in the occasion of his death. For it is no sorrow to die amidst the still resounding acclamations of a whole planet—and in the same week as George Moore. You may have the feeling that however Fate may deal here-after with your name you are at least one of twin pillars that were the terminal stones—the portals of an age. I was some years younger than Galsworthy but he did not publish his first book until six years after I had published mine. In consequence, he being always unob-trusive and I overbearing, I got very early into the habit of considering him, and of treating him, as a much younger man. So that, when I read of his death it was almost as if I had lost a younger brother in the flower of his age. I first saw him in a sporting club. They told of him there a curious anecdote; the fame of it hung over him like a curious legend so that, though I was not introduced to him for several years, I was accustomed to speculate as to what sort of a fellow he could be. In those days he was the young man about town—at any rate to all appearances. He had eaten his dinners at the Middle Temple, which every young man of good position then had to do, so that he was an unpracticing barrister. He was moderate in everything, sedulous in the effort to pass unnoticed in the best places where young men about town shew themselves. He had a little bachelor establishment; kept a small stable; drank very moderately and dressed with the careful negligence that was then required of you. So he always appeared to be in harmony with his surroundings.