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.]