The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [2]
Nevertheless, while Ashburnham’s conduct as a husband leaves much to be desired, ‘along at least the lines of his public functions’ his goodness seems incontrovertible. Though his soldierly prowess is a thing of the past by 1904, he remains an altruistic ‘county magnate’ with a highly developed sense of noblesse oblige until the day he dies, granting ‘his tenants very high rebates’, allowing a hard-pressed man named Mumford to pay no rent at all, giving ‘an oldish horse to a young fellow called Selmes… [whose] father had been ruined by a fraudulent solicitor’, and, just before his death, spending two hundred pounds on the defence of ‘the daughter of one of his tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby’. Time and time again, from the beginning of the novel to the end, Ashburnham’s unwavering goodness and decency are amplified by Dowell:
He was, according to [his wife] Leonora, always remitting his tenants’ rents and giving the tenants to understand that the reduction would be permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards who came before his magisterial bench; he was always trying to put prostitutes into respectable places – and he was a perfect maniac about children.
Dowell goes on to tell us he has no idea ‘how many ill-used people [Ashburnham] did not pick up and provide with careers – Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down. All these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his duty – along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide prizes at cattle shows and anti-vivisection societies’. Ashburnham is even responsible for ‘a thousand little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors… on the Continent’, coming to the assistance, for example, of Hessian paupers and the Hotel Excelsior’s deserted head waiter. In fact, apart from his all-too-public lapse with the Kilsyte girl, ‘the public side of his record’ is spotless, as Dowell is ever ready to attest. He describes Ashburnham as ‘the cleanest-looking sort of chap; an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire’ and he is so unequivocal about the virtues of ‘Teddy Ashburnham’, and lists his merits and accomplishments so regularly, that his adulation of his friend is possibly the only consistent element of his story. Indeed, his reverence of the man who cuckolds him is hardly less ardent than that of Nancy Rufford, Ashburnham’s infatuated ward. ‘Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was – the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character?’ Dowell asks anxiously at one point. ‘It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable,’ he confesses at another.
Yet the more fulsomely Dowell praises Ashburnham and affirms that he possessed ‘all the virtues that are usually accounted English’ and that he believed ‘constancy was the finest of the virtues’, the more the reader feels inclined to respond to his words with puzzlement, if not amazement. As the novel unfolds, we become increasingly conscious of the discrepancy between Ashburnham’s almost saintly ‘public character’ and the shabbiness of his private life. It is true that Dowell regards himself as a poor judge of his fellow men, but this deficiency alone cannot fully explain the slippage between the paragon whom the narrator exalts and the libertine whose affairs he chronicles. Dowell represents Ashburnham as a ‘sentimentalist’ and an incurable romantic, but from a less sentimental viewpoint he is an incurable philanderer, ‘a rake impregnated with lachrymose sensibility’, as the Athenaeum’s critic put it in 1915.5 In his roles as feudal squire, county magistrate and cavalry officer,