Paul Leicester Ford — The Man of Affairs and the Man of Letters
Long-suffering prominence, among its numerous woes, has at times to subject itself to snap-shot portraiture; but occasionally a friendly and amateurish zeal, seeking honest results, brings the person of note to the advantage of a long exposure, and then perchance educes finenesses and personalities neglected by the swifter method. I should like, if I may, to use the slower and truer means in a sketch of Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, who has of late, by reason of an unquestioned reputation, been compelled to stand from behind the vanguard of his books and show himself as a notability. In contrast therefore to various pen views which have presented Mr. Ford as all sorts and conditions of a man, it ought to be possible for a friendly candor to delineate his life and purposes without passing just limitations. Paraphrasing his own playfully bold title, I seek to portray “The True Mr. Ford,” entertaining the while that proportionate sense of demerit which I am sure restrained him as he limned the outlines of Washington.
The accrediting of unusual ability to heredity and environment alone fails to satisfy; for what we most wish to understand is the actual and not the probable resultant. Nevertheless it will never do to omit from the reckoning Mr. Ford’s innate tendencies and the slowly formed impulses made upon him and upon his equally remarkable brother, Worthington Chauncey Ford, by their father’s superb library, of which in a manner, but in a different degree, each is the incarnation. Puritan stock, absolutely pure, except where there is a crossing of the Huguenot on the paternal side—there is no choicer graft than that—a temperament stimulated by the nervous excitations of the cosmopolitan life of New York, and a scholarship sound yet unacademic and not held by the leash of college traditions—these, as I see them, are the factors, any of which taken from him would have made Mr. Ford quite other than he is. Yet the aggregate of such components most assuredly does not constitute his genius; for genius as distinguished from marked ability he undoubtedly possesses. It has before now been told that on his mother’s side he is the grandson of Professor Fowler of Amherst, the great-grandson of Noah Webster, and the grandson four times removed of President Charles Chauncey of Harvard College, and of Governor Bradford; and from this last worthy ancestor he comes honestly by his fondness for a manuscript. This is good blood to run through one’s veins, even in a remote generation. There is an added vigor from his mother, who, early expanded under favoring influences, had the native mental strength and moral sureness of a cultivated New England woman. His father, the late Gordon L. Ford, though known and honored as a successful lawyer and man of affairs, was, to those who had the closer knowledge of him, an idealist of the type which does not readily pursue other than the highest ends, and which cannot throw open the reserves of its nature.
There is then in his make-up a curious balance of conservative tendencies and a due share of remonstrance and even of headlong radicalism. To a superb mental equipment is to be added a physical constitution strong enough to have pulled him through an infancy and childhood full of peril and no doubt of suffering, and to have landed him in manhood’s estate with a vivacious and courageous disposition, a master of his fate. He is also endowed with an almost superhuman capacity for work. It may be that, conscious of hidden frailties of tenure, the impulse is within him to burn his candle of life fiercely; but I am disposed the rather to think that in his case this use of energy is mainly a question of superior “horse power”—he is able to work more than most of us, and therefore he does. But great capacity does not always so express itself; and it would be unjust, unless one chose to regard Mr. Ford as precocious in youth and phenomenal at all times, not to recognize that the fate which distributes gifts to mortals gave him Opportunity. Free, if he so wished, to follow his own devices and to take the joys of life without undue exertion, he was wise enough, at an age when most youth sows an unprofitable crop on stony ground, to plant in the fertile furrows which a farseeing father had sedulously made ready for him. As for education and the discipline of school life, so wholesome for the most of us, there was for him literally none of it. His nursery, his primary school, and his college all may be found within the four walls of his father’s library. The books held within the quiet residence in Clark Street, Brooklyn, must now be nearer 100,000 than 50,000 in number. They fill all parts of the large house fashioned in the manner of fifty years ago, but their headquarters are in the library proper, a room at the rear, over fifty feet square, and reached from the main floor by a short flight of steps. This room is well but not glaringly lighted by a lantern at the top, while the sides, with the exception of a few small windows of no great utility owing to the tallness of surrounding buildings, are fully taken up with books to the height of eight feet. The floor is covered in part by large rugs; the walls and ceilings are of serious tint; a fireplace is opposite the entrance; while sofas of most dissimilar pattern and meant seemingly to hold any burden but a human one, are placed “disposedly” about; chairs, easy but not seductive, are in plenty, but like the sofas give notice that here is a government not of men but of books—here there is no library built for the lust of the flesh and pride of the eye, but for books and for those who use them. I cannot suppose that those smitten of bibliophily would thrill over the Ford library, since it exists for the practical and virile, although it is, in parts, exceedingly choice. Roughly classified to suit the easy memories of the owners, it presents an appearance urbane and unprecise rather than military and commanding. At irregular intervals loom huge masses of books, pamphlets, papers, proof-sheets, and engravings in cataclysmic disorder and apparently suspended in mid-air like the coffin of the False Prophet, but in fact resting on tables well hidden by the superincumbent piles. In this room the father slowly accumulated this priceless treasure mostly illustrative of American history and its adjuncts, thereby gratifying his own accurate tastes and hoping, as we may suppose, that his children would ultimately profit by his foresight. Nor was he disappointed; for the two brothers, Paul and Worthington, drew their milk, historically speaking, from this exhaustless fount, and it is thus impossible to disconnect the labors and successes of these two unusual men from their association with this library. Not in books alone, but in many choice autograph letters, rare portraits and plates, and much unpublished material consists the value of the collection.
One who did not know Mr. Ford, on entering the room and beholding for the first time the Sierras of books, fronted by foot-hills and drumlins of unfinished work, sale catalogues, letters, and other detritus, might well suppose him to be the most careless of mortals. This would be to misjudge; for though no one else could fathom his methods, Mr. Ford turns readily to what he wants, and given the right haystack, finds his needle with astonishing ease. Like many another man of ability, he does not enslave himself to organization, but uses method only in proportion to direct needs.
The secret of his astonishing capacity for work and production is not far to seek. He is by nature and by predilection a man of affairs and of business. The accident of life has directed his energies toward books and letters. But he is not a literary man in the sense that he is to be identified with a class, for in the best sense he is déclassé. So far as there may be genius burning within him, it must express itself during moments of inspiration; but the between-times are not spent in dreams or vain imaginings, but in an almost relentless absorption in some historical or editorial task, requiring fidelity and energy rather than fitful moods.
I do not now discern what at one time I feared that I might—carelessness, or an effect of haste, in the large mass of results to which this author has already put his name. On the contrary it seems to me that more and more he tends toward painstaking care, and there is good reason to predict that his best and possibly most brilliant work is yet to come. Regarding one work, since published, he has told me that, having already pushed a long way toward the end and finding that the affair went slowly, of a sudden it was borne in upon him that he was on the wrong track. In a moment he swept 30,000 words of manuscript into his basket and started anew and with a good heart. A great organizing capacity, a power of maintained effort, and a willingness to take unstinted trouble, render the large volume of his achievements as acceptable as the small bulk of another’s work. Faults I think Mr. Ford has had, and still has, but it would be proper even for the nicest criticism to discover a sure advance in the quality of his style. Personally I have never been able to explain satisfactorily the success of his most popular book, “The Honorable Peter Stirling.” It is almost without a “literary” quip or term or phrase; the politics present a stiff dose to novel readers, a class too satiated with an unvarying diet not to crave spicier viands than those served to them by the love motive of Mr. Ford’s story. Why then has this proved to be one of the three stories of the past two years and more? I do not know, unless it be that Mr. Ford, who is no egotist and not exclusive in his sympathies, reflects in this book a genuine if unsentimental faith in human nature of every degree. To such a faith humanity is always responsive. He did not come crying in the wilderness with acrimony and fanaticism, but gave the prototype of a gentleman of the heart and not of long ancestry—a pure man in all things, even in metropolitan politics, who stamped on evil, not shrank from it. There was a cry for a politician who could be something to the “boys” besides a prig, and Mr. Ford, haud inexpertus, produced him. It was bread and not a stone, and the democracy, rampant yet not unclean, heard him gladly.
I have no purpose here to rehearse the merits of Mr. Ford’s various writings. Current criticism certainly has him in its eye as a conspicuous figure, and if he meets opposition he is not likely to suffer neglect. Meanwhile another source of his success and of his popularity seems to me to lie in his perfect intellectual and moral normality. Great as is the volume of his work, it is sound throughout. He strikes no shrill or wayward note; the social order is always considered. He deals with the sound fruit of human life, and assumes that good nature, honest love, money-making, clean and enjoyable existence are not only possibilities but everyday realities. The success of “The Story of an Untold Love” shows how ready people are for an observance of all the commandments rather than for a breach of one. It is with novels as with plays—cleanliness “goes.”
Mr. Ford’s large abilities, aided by fortunate inheritance, have been used not for the ends of mere scholarship and to humor preciosity and a love of what is fantastic and occasional, but to recognize common wants and aspirations; yet at the same time he evinces an idealism tempered by no little terrestrial wisdom and experience. Imagination plays a larger part in his work—and I am here speaking of his creative work—than appears at first sight. In “Peter Stirling” he has managed to give to an immense metropolitan life an effect of homogeneity and interrelation. The large and evanescent effects of a great city are tempting themes, but those who try to catch and hold the impression for the uses of a novel seldom succeed in giving more than fine details. Our genre painters of fiction have been admirable in this matter: but to make one pattern of the huge confusion requires a knowledge vouchsafed only to him who has acquired by daily contact the largest and most vital experiences. The immensity of financial transactions, the intricate shrewdness of politicians, aside from their corruptions, the nice checks and balances of a higher social life must necessarily escape the eye of the literary artist mainly because they lie beyond his ken.
Cerebrally Mr. Ford is multiparous. He can be busy with a play, a story, a biography, and with editing some historical work during the same interval of time—the real marvel of it all being that, when these come to publication, the world, which is said to know clearly what it wants, accepts the results with apparent satisfaction. The power of driving a quadriga of new books around the popular arena amid no little applause, is due, I think, to qualities not inherent in the literary mind as such, but implying a wider mental grasp.
A spirit of restlessness takes hold upon Mr. Ford when he is hardest at work, and he shifts at pleasure from one to another of his several desks or tables. I should imagine that the curiosity hunter of the future, who might wish to possess the desk at which or the chair on which the author of “Peter Stirling” sat when he penned that book, might comfortably fill a storage-warehouse van with his new-found joys. Like most good fellows who write, Mr. Ford knows the value of the night and often works to best advantage when honest folk have been long abed. It is a pleasure to think of the occasionally fortunate person who writes when he wants to, not when he must, though I do not think it would be difficult for so conscientious a worker as Mr. Ford to get up friction at shortest notice and as occasion might require.
While it has been my purpose to refrain scrupulously from ministering to that curiosity which cares less for the essential qualities, and the intellectual methods of a character prominently before the world, than for intrusive detail concerning personal caprices of taste and modes of living, I shall not be content if I do not say that as a personality Mr. Ford is as extraordinary as in his achievement. He is alive to every issue of the day and of the hour. He is brilliant at conversation, and perhaps even more brilliant at controversy, for I can imagine no opposing argument so bristling with facts as to prevent his making a cavalry charge on a whole table of unsympathetic hearers. Life is at its keenest pitch when one is privileged to hear his urgent voice, with no little command withal in its notes, and to see the invincible clearness and dominance in his black-brown eyes.
This spirit of fearlessness, chastened as it is by an attitude of real toleration and open-mindedness, colors Mr. Ford’s personal sympathies. Believing as he does that every man must eventually work out his own salvation and that present well-being may justly be sacrificed to future growth, it would be impossible for him to choose any channel for the expression of his personal loyalty other than that which should strengthen and develop. It is no strange thing, then, that those who seek his aid and counsel find him most helpful through a power of stimulation which enhances instead of detracts from the sense of self-reliance.
Lindsay Swift.
[Since the foregoing was written, Mr. Paul Leicester Ford has died, being shot through the heart by his brother Malcolm, who it is only charitable to believe was temporarily insane. Mr. Ford had his best years before him. He recently married, moved into a fine house built to suit his own needs near Central Park, and his plans were mapped out years in advance. He was engaged on a novel at the time of his death, but had done so little on it that there is no possibility of its ever seeing the light of print.—Editors.]