Mr. Crawford has made a success at play-writing as well as at novel writing. His “In the Palace of the King,” which has been played so successfully by Miss Viola Allen, was a play before he turned it into a novel, and he has recently written a drama founded on a new version of the story of Francesca and Paola, which Madame Sarah Bernhardt has produced with great success.
William Bond.
PAUL LEICESTER FORD
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.