On the Fatality of Sentimentalism: A Note on the Perils of Literature in The Good Soldier and The Panel

Introducing The Good Soldier & The Panel

First published in 1915, The Good Soldier is one of Ford Madox Ford’s most popular works, alongside Parade’s End (1924–8), whereas The Panel is one of his least known and studied works (1912). This study aims to prove that this comic novel—often described as such—shares many points of similarity with The Good Soldier, including a similar perspective on literature and its influence on one’s life.

The Good Soldier, subtitled A Tale of Passion, features the personal tragedy of seemingly perfect soldier Edward Ashburnham, his perfect marriage, and his many love affairs. The story is narrated by Edward’s friend John Dowell, who gradually recounts the numerous events of Edward’s ideal life. The Good Soldier is regarded as pioneering the scope of literary impressionism,¹ particularly in Ford’s employment of this device.² The story’s title was not Ford’s first choice; it was ironically suggested after the publisher’s dissatisfaction with the initially proposed title, The Saddest Story. The new title’s choice is crucial in understanding the novel’s primary aim, as will be clarified in this study.

The Panel was written three years before Ford completed The Good Soldier and was originally titled Ring for Nancy. This novel is primarily remembered for its caricature of a Henry James reader. In this sheer comedy—in the author’s own words—the protagonist is a dedicated admirer of author Henry James (1843–1916). He is named Edward, Teddy Brent, he is a Major and, as he himself says, “I am a reformed character” (Ford, Panel 8); a reformed character, consisting “in doing things that aren’t likely to be found out” (108).

Hence, The Good Soldier and The Panel feature protagonists who share the same name, status, and profession. Like Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, Teddy Brent is not only a capable soldier but also irresistible to women, as he states: “there seem to be ten or a dozen determined to go after me.” (127). This reminds the reader of how Dowell wondered about Edward, “what did they all [women] see in [Edward] . . . ” (Ford, Good Soldier 26). Another resemblance between the two works is the presence of similar characters, including the protagonists.

One of Teddy’s admirers is Mrs Kerr Howe, who is an authoress of sentimental novels; another is Flossie Delamare, an actress described as the “embodiment of quaint imbecility” (The Panel 35, 185), both of whom Teddy met in India. Similarly, Edward Ashburnham had also met two of his many love affairs, Mrs Basil and Maisie Maidan, in India. Like Mrs Basil, Mrs Kerr Howe has a husband, and like Maisie Basil, who Edward referred to as “a little rat” (Good Soldier 74), Flossie is once called by Teddy a “little rat”. Moreover, as Edward feels obliged to kiss a weeping servant girl because he felt he “had got to do something to comfort her” (150), Teddy believes it is “almost a duty to kiss a servant” (The Panel 108).

Furthermore, although Edward must send away Nancy Rufford, whom he truly loves, because of his marriage, Teddy is willing to honor his engagement with Olympia, even though he loves his own Nancy—yet he is also in love with Mrs Kerr Howe and Flossie, nonetheless: “There was Edward Brent Foster playing his part; amiably and in a voice that just moved her [Nancy Savylle’s] bones. And yet for half a dozen reasons he must have misery in his heart” (The Panel 210) vs. “l am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of it” (Good Soldier 173).

On the other hand, both Teddy and Edward are also really tired of love and of women, for Teddy states that he is, “Used up! I must have comfort, quiet!” (The Panel 93), and Edward’s last words were precisely, “So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know” (Good Soldier). It is true, however, that Edward and Teddy have different endings, as Teddy gets to stay with his Nancy while Edward commits suicide.

This study, therefore, points out that both works have too much in common for it to be a coincidence. These similarities are not diminished by the seemingly opposite titles of both works. Indeed, The Panel holds the subtitle “a sheer comedy,” while The Good Soldier was intended to be titled “the saddest story.” However, there appears to be an agreement among specialists that The Good Soldier is as much a comedy as a tragedy, which would bring it even closer to The Panel.

Studying the genre of The Good Soldier per se, Helen Garvey stated that the novel could be read as a mixture of comedy and tragedy (266). Her approach to this matter recalls that of David Eggenschwiler,³ Mark Schorer (“An Interpretation”),⁴ and Avrom Fleishman.⁵ Barry D. Bort⁶ first wrote about it, famously stating that The Good Soldier “is not a tragedy, but a savage comedy of manners (its material is suicide, madness, and unrealized happiness) in which people are unable to cope with the world because they have never learned to understand it” (201), adding that the comedy arises from the incongruity of things as “the characters want them to be and as they really are” (201).

By considering it a comedy instead of a tragedy, the purpose of The Good Soldier might change. Joseph Wiesenfarth argues that this is the saddest story because it depicts a story of human life, the purpose of which might be, nevertheless, to “shed light on the shape” of this human life (10). This author, therefore, posits that the design of Ford’s work suggests a concealed optimism (10).⁷ On another note, Garvey points out that “the effect of reading a traditional comedy is amusement and laughter, as the effect of reading a traditional tragedy is pity and fear for the plight of the protagonist” (266). If one reads this novel as a comedy whose aesthetic design relies on concealed optimism, the demands placed on the reader change and increase. In order to perceive the saddest story as a comedy, the reader must engage with the work and abandon any aprioristic expectations they might have. In doing so, the reader critically engages with the purpose of this work in particular but, more broadly, with the complexity of literature, genre, and ultimately of the reading process.

The Panel does not seem to pose this kind of question. This novel was written as a comedy and was labeled a comedy. As Olga Broomfield noted, this novel was unique among Ford’s works and was specifically designed to entertain a popular audience (90). However, its status as a comedy must not prevent the reader from reflecting on its intentions, for, like many comedies, The Panel appears to have a satirical purpose. That being said, one must begin by considering what both The Good Soldier and The Panel are laughing at.

The impact of literature

The answer to the former question depends on a better understanding of the sheer comedy The Panel and of the saddest story The Good Soldier. The Panel features a beautiful and noble heroine disguised as a servant, some silly religious individuals, a hypocritically puritanical Olympia Peabody—who is possessive and manipulative—who should marry the hero, and an old country house full of secret doors and sliding panels that every gothic fan would like to know and would have loved.

In fact, The Panel seems to satirize sincerity, religious hypocrisy, but most of all, the so-called pulp literature as gothic, yet primarily sentimental. This study argues that this is also part of the main aim of The Good Soldier. Considering the following examples from The Panel, one can understand how Gothic literature seems to reside in the characters’ minds and is included in their idea of fun:

Thus, one can see how the author seems to be mocking Gothic readers who expected to find the same events in reality as they did in the books they were so fond of. By considering this, one can begin to see Ford’s idea about the negative impact that literature could potentially have on real life. Indeed, The Panel points to this concern several times, which seems to matter so much to the novel that it engages in a lively debate over the quality and the state of the literature at that time:

Somehow, this concern with the quality of literature is justified by the novel discussing the impact of literature itself. The Panel seems to support the idea that literature has a structural effect on morals, manners and behaviors, being held responsible for regenerating people’s morals and intertwining them with itself:

As made clear in the examples above, literature is held responsible for improving the world and establishing morals. But it is also regarded as the reason why people act in a certain way. In that sense, literature is also held responsible for several events:

That literature does have an impact on real life and that, hence, it does hold some power in manners and, therefore, in society is pointed out clearly: “. . . your sort of literature has the same effect on your mind as mine has on mine?” (34) At this point, one cannot avoid dwelling on the author’s opinion regarding the place and the purpose of literature, for Ford made clear what he aimed to do as a novelist—an active agent in literature:

As Sara Haslam points out, Ford demonstrates here an “ambitious aim”, namely the attempt to “capture and to report the pluralities of a whole (and complex) age” (42). One might suppose this to be his main purpose as an author, and by doing so, one can better understand his position regarding the impact of literature as shown in The Panel. The author believed that literature affected those who read it and, that being so, it should make an extra effort to present itself soberly, offering images of real life instead of fanciful ones.

In this sense, Haslam states that, as a chronicler or historian of his time, Ford would wish to be an impressionist one, “living, suffering and writing in, creating many pictures of ‘his own time’” (42). In fact, Ford seemed to have no issue with the label impressionist; quite the contrary. In Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, he accepts that label and further explains what it means to him to be an impressionist and, ultimately, a novelist:

That being said, one can conclude that, when satirizing the role of literature in The Panel and assuming that it does have an impact in reality, the author was engaging the reader in a theoretical debate on literature and its purpose. For if Ford seems to laugh at the fancies of the gothic and sentimental novel, he also nods to what he considered “such great names as Emerson, Longfellow, Henry Ward Beecher and Nathaniel Hawthorne not to mention Walt Whitman, and Henrik Ibsen” (The Panel 246).

That this is an important subject for the author can be proven by the fact that it also seems to be present in The Good Soldier, though more subtly. In fact, Edward Ashburnham is described as such a perfect man that he might recall more a character from a book than someone from real life. For that reason, it is understandable that the characters “remembered a character in a book” (Good Soldier 157), as it is also plausible why “he made her pretty speeches out of books” (108).

Such a person as Edward is portrayed to be is supposed to live in a book, and that explains why “[h]e felt uncommonly bad . . . and he took it all to be love” (120–2), for that is exactly what happens in novels about love. On the other hand, Edward’s wife Leonora, who is not as well-read in novels as her husband, is said to devalue such feelings and their importance: “She had read few novels, so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound of wedding bells had never been very much presented to her” (179).

Thus, while scornfully commenting on Edward’s fondness for romantic novels, the narrator implies they possess an important and humanizing value, particularly concerning feelings such as love. If Edward’s fondness for novels results in such sentimentalism that leads him to engage in several love affairs, Leonora’s lack of novel reading renders her cold and plainly rational. More clearly, this interplay between literature and life in The Good Soldier is chiefly relevant in a passage where the main characters are reduced to their literary equivalents:

Edward and Leonora are described as a model, as too good to be true. Indeed, if readers take a deep look into these characters’ descriptions, they can be reminded of the depictions of some heroes and couples portrayed in novels:

Certainly, the novel indicates that it was all too good, and therefore not true, for Edward, though described as someone as perfect as shown above, was not perfect at all:

Now, one may ask why all this concern about literature and its impact is so important for this author. Or, as Roger Poole states, one may inquire why this novel engages in relations of parody or irony at the expense of the novels of the author’s contemporaries (392). To better understand this, the study will now turn to sentimentalism.

A note on the perils of sentimentalism

With this in mind, one is now able to turn to The Panel and see the perils of sentimental literature exposed in this novel. If one continues to assume that both works are somehow closely related, one can conclude that The Panel merely emphasizes what The Good Soldier makes subtle. Indeed, The Panel makes a clear point in signaling sentimentalism as something non-positive:

What the author intended to point out in The Panel regarding sentimental literature and its incompatibility with real life is obvious. However, The Panel merely makes clear what The Good Soldier exposes more subtly.

Upon realizing that Edward is about to commit suicide, Dowell states, “I wanted to say: ‘God bless you,’ for I am also a sentimentalist” (Good Soldier 162). To be sure, Dowell spends much of the novel adopting a certain perspective as a means to denounce Edward’s tendency toward sentimentalism (DeCoste 115): “Edward was the Normal man, but there was too much of the sentimentalist about him” (Good Soldier 166); “His sentimentalism required of him an attitude of Byronic⁸ gloom—as if his court had gone into half-mourning” (123).

This sentimentality seems to be an integral part of Edward’s character, but also some sort of occupation, for it is stated that “all good soldiers are sentimentalists” (40), an observation that may derive more from the idea of a good soldier than from the real-life good soldiers. Indeed, the narrator himself tells us that this is not a good feature, for sentimentalists seem to feel a little too much, which could, in some sort of way, be fatal: “In anyone less sentimental than Edward that would not have mattered. With Edward it was fatal” (120).

Indeed, Edward’s sentimentalism proved to be fatal since he ultimately ended his life, probably, as Broomfield states, “victim of his own generous emotions and of his sentimental view of life” (137). His fatal sentimentalism does not seem to be, however, as Schow said, “shallow” (203), for Edward seemed to both believe and live a sentimental life. In this context, his suicide can be discussed precisely as a consequence of his sentimentalism, just as Dowell seems to assume. This can also explain how Dowell himself reacts to Edward’s suicide. Garvey notes that his actions after learning about the event are not actions of sympathy, but instead “undermine and trivialize the emotional impact of the death itself” (296). This reaction can, however, be linked to Ford’s own vision of how to deal with such a matter and may be related to the fact that he creates, as stated by Hoffmann, a critical distance from this character (36), probably with the intention of portraying life as it is and therefore fulfilling its aesthetic impressionist purpose.

In the same vein, Edward’s sentimentalism can also be a plausible explanation for his way of conducting his romantic affairs. In fact, Dowell implies that when he excuses Edward from any form of libertinage: “I trust I have not, in talking of his liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine. He was not; he was a sentimentalist” (Good Soldier 58). Instead, one can consider Edward’s liabilities as a consequence of his sentimentalism and therefore, exclude any moral position from the equation. Indeed, Haslam asserts that, concerning the personal relationships in The Good Soldier, namely between Leonora, Edward and Florence, Ford had “no moral stance, but he is attempting to show how life is” (55), which seems to align with his disposition to write as a historian.

Hoffman believes that, by describing Edward as a sentimentalist, Dowell both praises and critiques him and even “elaborates upon the term “sentimentalist” to infantilize and effeminize Edward” (41) As Lid notes, Dowell appears to be unable to comprehend what women saw in Edward (53)—“what did they all [women] see in [Edward]” (Good Soldier 26)—, which may stem from his inability to grasp Edward’s sentimental way of loving:

By stating that Edward loved all things sentimentally—children, puppies, and the feeble—, Dowell seems to undermine his love for women and, consequently, women’s acceptance of his love. Simultaneously, Dowell appears to justify Edward’s behavior with a naïve interpretation or misinterpretation of literature, specifically sentimental literature.

Here, one can consider Lid’s⁹ comparison of Edward with Flaubert’s Emma Bovary.¹⁰ Both Edward and Emma derived their ideas of love from romantic and sentimental literature. They believed “in the Romantic illusion” (Lid 54) and, as this author states, “like Flaubert’s heroine, he corrupts those who love him.” This comparison seems to position Ford within a tradition of writers who crafted novels about their characters’ visions of romance. This tradition began with Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) in Don Quixote (1605) and continued with popular novels such as Madame Bovary, Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830), and À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913).

René Girard (1923–2015) wrote about this tradition in Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque (1961), where he famously exposed his theory on mimetic desire by discussing the works of Cervantes, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Stendhal (1783–1842), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), where he found that characters imitated a model.¹¹ In this context, by constructing Edward as a character who seeks to imitate a model, loving sentimentally as taught by the novels he reads, Ford can be placed within this tradition of novelists who wrote about visions of romance and who directly engaged in debates with other literary works.

Aesthetic Purpose

It is The Good Soldier’s Dowell who concludes, regarding Edward, that “there was too much of the sentimentalist about him and society does not need too many sentimentalists” (218). This statement confirms the author’s perspective regarding sentimentality and, more broadly, literature and its potential impact on real life. This position seems to be part of the author’s aesthetic purpose in both analyzed novels and is dependent, as stated before, on his role as an impressionist novelist, whose goal was to portray impressions of real life.

Paul Armstrong argues that Ford invented his own brand of impressionism (190), and Siobhan Chapman alludes to Ford’s belief that “the general effect of a novel must be the general effect that life makes on mankind”¹² (388). Similarly, DeCoste asserts that, being convinced that art must be “passionless,” Ford avoids an expressivist vision of creativity in order to emphasize “the need to objectify emotion, to seek an objective correlative to stir up readers’ passions” (105).

All critics seem to agree on the existence of a specific aesthetic purpose in the work of Ford Madox Ford. This purpose appears to be to become a historian of his time, an impressionist one, as Haslam puts it. His discussion of literature’s social and moral role and of its impact on life seems to be part of that equation, for its discussion and centrality in both The Good Soldier and The Panel highlight its importance and defining nature to the author, making it impossible for one to read these novels without considering what the implications behind so many references mean.

Edward’s sentimentality in The Good Soldier is a telling example of the importance of literature to the author, but The Panel showcases Teddy Brent’s admiration for Henry James as an even greater and revealing instance of this. Teddy Brent is “the youngest major in the British Army” due to his unique method of intellectual self-development, which consists of reading Henry James’ works: “I never call on anybody. I shut myself up. I work, I tell you. I read the complete works of Henry James. That’s why I am the youngest major in the British Army” (The Panel 11); “Do you mean to say that you haven’t got a single book of James’? . . . Never heard the name? . . . it was reading the books of James that made me the youngest major in the British Army” (15); “. . . from studying the works of Henry James . . . That’s why I’m the youngest major in the British Army” (32–3).

As previously stated, The Panel is a comedy with satirical purposes, and it is evident that Teddy’s insistence has a parodic intent. However, this does not seem to indicate that Ford was questioning James as he was inquiring into sentimentality in The Good Soldier. Indeed, Ford held a genuine admiration for Henry James and his works. In fact, Broomfield points out that James’s The Art of Fiction (1884) is one of the texts “from which Ford drew the outlines of his fictional theory” (9).

In The Art of Fiction, James articulates the very same idea upon which Ford himself seems to agree: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression” (60–61). Moreover, Ford himself praised Henry James and his use of impressionism in his own work, Henry James, a Critical Study (1915):

It is therefore clear that Ford’s admiration for James—whom he places alongside Shakespeare alone—leaves no room for the belief that he might be undermining him in The Panel as he appears to do with sentimentality in The Good Soldier. As Broomfield indicates, Ford believed the same as James did, “that the proper destiny of the novel was to become a form of art beautiful as a whole and in all its parts” (15). Thus, it is evident that his aesthetic purpose also relates to that.

Additionally, it is worth noting that in his dedicatory letter in The Good Soldier, Ford referred to his early works—of which The Panel can be considered a part—as pastiches (xviii). At the same time and in the same context, he stated that The Good Soldier was his best book (xviii) and the specific product of his main purpose:

Concluding remarks

It appears to be clear that both The Good Soldier and The Panel adhere to the idea that literature impacts the mind, the world, society, cultures, and people, and that it should, therefore, ennoble and improve the world. Ford’s aesthetic purpose as a novelist seems to be related to his desire to become the (impressionist) historian of a time, to draw pictures of truth, and to present impressions of life.

That was not an innovation on the part of Ford Madox Ford, but rather a well-debated theme. Plato (5/4th century AD),¹³ Dante (1265–1321),¹⁴ and many other writers, artists and thinkers considered and feared this as well, foreseeing and seeking to mitigate the potential dangers of art and of literature in their own works. For they all seemed to realize what Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) famously articulated in The Decay of Lying, that life, sometimes, in a certain way, imitates art: “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. . . . A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher” (10). This appears to be the reason why both The Good Soldier and The Panel suggest that indulging in the sentimentalism portrayed in some works of art can be fatal.

This study has sought to demonstrate that The Panel does so clearly. Indeed, its own title serves as an exposé of its main goal, the main panel being a well-known device in Gothic literature. However, this novel makes it even clearer by revealing Henry James’s reader, Teddy Brent, as a reformed character, his whole life being, in some way, regulated by sentimental literature and its devices. By narrating the comic story of Major Teddy Brent, the author uncovers the ridicule behind a sentimental approach to real life as depicted in literary works.

Regarding the more subtle The Good Soldier, one must return to the beginning, specifically, its title. For what is, indeed, a good soldier? When this question is asked, one may reflect on Greece and Rome, medieval chivalry, and even the world wars. At the same time, however, The Good Soldier’s reader will inevitably realize that he has no answer for why this novel carries such a title. After all, as stated by Sarah Henstra, the soldier in the story fails to embody the standards associated with soldiering (177).

In fact, there is not even a war per se in the novel, but only innuendos of it. Therefore, one must acknowledge the author’s irony in the choice of this second title once the first one, The Saddest Story, was vetoed. His reaction when he realized that his irony in suggesting such a title was amiss is exposed in the dedicatory letter of the book: “To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title” (xviii).

Moreover, The Good Soldier carries the subtitle “A Tale of Passion,” and the book’s irony lies in the fact that passionate situations are recounted by a narrator who, as stated by Schorer, is incapable of passion (“Good Novelist” 128).¹⁵ Nevertheless, should one suppose this novel was, indeed, a Tale of Passion? Subsequently, whose passion would it be and what kind of passion? For The Good Soldier’s narrator does not describe, even elusively, lovers’ passion. In fact, as stated by Poole, the book is formal and cool, insisting upon the conventional (421). By the end of the novel, as Schorer notes, the reader has forgotten the named good soldier (“An Interpretation” 131).

Finally, The Good Soldier describes a world that is without a moral point (Schorer, “Good Novelist” 131–2), unquestionably not the place for a good soldier. Furthermore, as stated by Poole, even after the opening portrait of Edward in his grand manner, the rest of the novel destroys that perfect image, and Edward is progressively shown as weak and ultimately, suicidal (396).

Hence, one can conclude that this is not a novel about a good soldier or about passion, but about the reader’s expectations of what a good soldier is and what passion is, and finally about the readers’ expectations regarding literature itself and its impact. For Edward was a sentimentalist and even though one would be tempted to believe that this is a good thing as a prelude to honor and loyalty, one ultimately discovers that it preludes instead foolishness and volubility.

Ford’s use of sentimentality in The Good Soldier and in The Panel is, therefore, a means to achieve a specific purpose that relates to his own ideas regarding literature and its ultimate purpose, which he seems to have reached with The Good Soldier:

Indeed, as already stated, with The Good Soldier Ford seems to have reached a peak in his career as a novelist, becoming in it the historian he sought to be. This novel was carefully planned and its use of literature places it in a long tradition of novels that explore the effects of romantic visions on readers. In this sense, it is no coincidence that Mr. John Rodker corrected “the finest novel in the English language” to “the finest French novel in the English language!”, for the French tradition in this scope cannot be ignored, as the previously mentioned works, such as Madame Bovary, Le Rouge et Le Noir or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu speak for it. All the novels in this tradition address the human vulnerability to imitate and copy a model rendered beautiful by art, exactly what Edward and Teddy, and ultimately, all the other characters in the novels analyzed here, do.

Ford’s inclusion of this debate in his novels and its centrality in them clearly shows that he considered it part of real life and, therefore, part of what he, as a historian and painter of impressions of life, should present to his readers. In conclusion, one can understand that by writing novels such as The Panel and The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford was engaging in a debate as old as time regarding the impact of literature and was encouraging his own readers to think critically about their own stereotypical and a priori ideas regarding literature and life, challenging them to be more than just sentimentalists themselves.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.