The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [130]
111. ‘Zum Befehl, Durchlaucht’: ‘At your command, Serene Highness’ (German).
112. it’s the business of a novelist… things clearly: recalls Joseph Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897): ‘My task… is, by the power of the written word to make you… see!’
113. Rakocsy March: composed by the Hungarian János Bihari (1764–1827) in c.1810.
114. all for love and the world well lost: All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1678) is a tragedy by John Dryden (1631–1700).
115. Bowery: a street, and by the 1880s a notoriously skid-row neighbourhood, of Lower Manhattan, New York City.
116. affaisement: depression or mental breakdown (French).
117. 117 Maenad: the Maenads were women inspired to frenzy by Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, son of Zeus and Semele.
118. Corpus Christi: in the western Christian Church the Feast of Corpus Christi (Latin: ‘Body of Christ’) is observed on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday in honour of the Real Presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. The chief feature of the Feast is the procession of the Blessed Sacrament.
119. Roehampton: the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, southwest London, was a prestigious boarding school with many of its girls being drawn from the great European Catholic families.
120. Fort William: a town in the Highlands region of Scotland at the head of Loch Linnhe and the foot of Ben Nevis.
121. Belgian Congo… hang humanity!’: the Congo Free State (now called the Democratic Republic of Congo) was established in the 1880s as the private holding of a group of European investors headed by Leopold II (1835–1909, King of the Belgians, 1865–1909). In 1908 it was annexed by Belgium after years of international outcry at the brutality which held sway in the territory (the population of the Congo Free State is said to have declined from between 20 and 30 million to just 8 million before Leopold II was forced to transfer his powers to the Belgian government). The Congo Free State is the setting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and this passage in The Good Soldier clearly picks up the humanitarian concerns of the earlier work.
122. Winchester: founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Winchester College in Hampshire is England’s oldest public school.
123. Sandhurst: a village in Berkshire and the location of the Royal Military Academy (1799).
124. Scott’s novels or the Chronicles of Froissart: Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a prolific novelist and poet. The chronicles of Jean Froissart (c.1337 – c.1410) record the chivalric exploits of English and French nobles in the 14th century. They were translated into English from French in 1523–5.
125. Bond Street… Lord’s: Bond Street is a premier shopping street in central London extending southwards from Oxford Street to Piccadilly through the exclusive district of Mayfair. Lord’s, a cricket ground in the St John’s Wood area of north London, has been the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club and the national headquarters of the game in England since the late 19th century.
126. Aldershot: in Hampshire is the chief garrison town and army training centre in the United Kingdom.
127. Glasmoyle: an imaginary place in Ireland.
128. the ’nineties… very bad for farming: with the exceptions of 1891 (when unusually heavy autumn rain ruined the next season’s corn crops) and 1894, every year from 1891 to 1900 was stricken by drought, and 1893 was especially bad. Moreover, from 1894, there was a disastrous decline in the value of domestic grain and a great increase in the volume of imported grain.
129. the big bank failure in 1907 or thereabouts: payment of cheques in currency was suspended in New York on 28 October 1907 and the suspension continued until the beginning of 1908. The crisis was precipitated by overspeculation by a group of American national banks.
130. a Vermont Democrat: the key point is that at this time Vermont was an overwhelmingly Republican