W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY J. D. BERESFORD and KENNETH R I C H M O N n By J.. D. BERESFORD House-Mates The Wonder These Lynnekers The Early History of Jacob Stahl A Candidate for Truth The Invisible Event The House in Demetrius Road by j. d. beresford and kenneth richmond W. E. Ford: A Biography GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK p-om aftencii Ak'Ctcix atthca(^oj'l5byan unhnoa-n (itUM W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY J. d: beresford AND KENNETH RICHMOND NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY ^s.00-^^^ ^^<<.'^^^^•^ <> COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY m 30 13, J PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A479316 PREFATORY NOTE A DEAwiNG in Mrs. Ford^s possession, represent- ing Ford at about the age of fifteen, has been deliberately chosen in preference to later photo- graphs for the frontispiece of this book. This pic- ture of the boy will have a novel interest for most of those who knew and admired the man ; but there is another reason for the choice. The drawing has in it the spirit of Ford's personality and charac- ter; the photographs have not. The authors have to thank Mrs. Ford for her kindness in revising the work before publication, and in affording material help as regards the col- lation of facts ; at the same time they wish to take all responsibility in matters of conjecture and in- terpretation, inseparable from any but a coldly formal biography, but not fitly to be presented as though based upon Mrs. Ford's authority. It has not fallen within the scope of this book to present Ford's system of thought as a coherent whole, but it is hoped that this may be attempted in a later volume; the co-operation is cordially invited of those who at any time belonged to his circle, and any letters bearing definitely upon his position as a thinker will be welcomed. These may be sent care of the publishers. Any letters in Ford's own writing will be copied and carefully returned. CONTENTS PART I: A PERSONAL IMPRESSION BY J. D. BERESFORD CHAPTER PAGE 1 11 II 22 III 36 PART II: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY BY KENNETH RICHMOND IV 55 V 77 VI 103 VII 129 VIII 161 IX 202 X 231 PART III: A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY BY J. D. BERESFORD XI 265 PART ONE A PERSONAL IMPRESSION PART ONE A PERSONAL IMPRESSION CHAPTER I If we wanted an excuse for publishing this life of W. E. Ford, I should look for it in the fact that biography is in the main didactic, a fact that helps to explain the usual choice of a subject who has succeeded in life. Success in this connection, how- ever, has a somewhat limited meaning, and im- plies the making of a mark in public life or the accomphshment of some achievement in the plib- lic service — the invention of the Davy lamp, for example. The more obvious reason for this choice of subject is that the book receives a preliminary advertisement. There is a demand for the lives of notable men, simply because they were notable. But I submit that the moral purpose of biography underlies the demand also. As in the old Sunday- school books, the clear indication remains promi- nent: ^^See what comes of being good!" or to adapt the lesson to present conditions: '^See what comes of being clever ! ' ' Nevertheless, when only the cleverness that leads to commercial sue- 1« W. E. FORD cess is the biographer's field of study, he is still under the influence of the old tradition, and takes care to omit the suggestion that his subject was an unprincipled swindler. If the truth is alto- gether too obvious, he dwells on the gentleness of his relations in private life. It has become almost a convention that the financier who controls the money-market and wreaks death and destitution without a moment's consideration, is in private life a devoted husband and father. I cannot re- call a single instance of a biography that depicted the reverse attitude; but the life of a man who brought happiness to the many and was a per- fect beast in his own home, would make very in- teresting reading. An exception to the ^^ success" rule, and one that upholds my present contention, is to be found in the demand for the lives of men who were in no way celebrated but were unquestionably ^'good.'' The lives of missionaries and obscure ministers mostly find a sale that justifies publica- tion. Some deep instinct in mankind looks for and finds satisfaction in salvation by morality; and the contemplation of that salvation achieved by another, either affords us a temporary relief from the terrible strain of being good ourselves, or soothes us with the certainty that we, too, shall eventually profit by our renunciations. (It is worth while to note, incidentally, that the form of ''goodness" held up for example in works of this type is nearly always negative ; that is to say, by renunciation. John Knox and his like had more A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 13 influence on the English Prayer-book and the Eng- lish character, than all the mystics.) The third general category of biography — the life of the creative artist — achieves the ethical only by omission. And when a man is confronted with the task of depicting the life of, say, Fran- gois Villon or Paul Verlaine, the ethical motive has to be ignored, save by the implication that Verlaine, for example, might have been a still better poet if he had been a better man. Never- theless, the trace of the tradition remains in any biography that is not, quite frankly, a chronique scandaleuse. We know perfectly well, now, that William Godwin was a dreadful rascal, but we do not know it from reading Mr. Kegan Paul's life of him. Yes, even in the biographies of the cre- ative artists, the great attempt is always implicit — often, of course, by the antithetical method of '^Oh! what a pity.'' We may content ourselves with the reflection that the idle apprentice gets to the devil all right, though he may have written great poetry or great music on the way. All this prelude is by way of justification for an experiment in writing the life of a man who was completely unknown to the general public, and who died in Japan, not in the effort to illum- inate the heathen, but rather to find illumination for himself. The name of William Elphinstone Ford will evoke no response in the minds of news- paper readers. He published no book, he was not an explorer, nor an inventor, nor a politician, he was connected with no religious society, and his 14 W. E. FORD one real experiment in education was, from the outside point of view, a failure. And yet Mr. Richmond and I are agreed that Ford had a rare genius, and that even the little we may be able to record of his life and principles has a peculiar value at the present time, and will have a still greater value a few years hence. We have, in fact, the prevailing excuse that this sketch of Ford's life is in the best and widest sense of the word — didactic. We sincerely believe that his theories of education and conduct are worthy of the closest attention. Nevertheless, to be quite honest, the inducement* that led me to accept a share in this book when my friend Kenneth Richmond suggested the ex- periment, was not atforded by the considerations I have just advanced. Those came later, when my collaborator and I had seriously to consider the possibility of our book being published. In the first place, I was tempted by a recognition of the fact that Ford's theories seemed already to be spreading abroad. In art, in fiction, in philos- ophy, in sociology, and even in such sciences as psychology, I was being constantly confronted with a half- grasped assumption that I recognised as having some sort of relation with the specula- tions of Ford. To a certain extent this has no doubt arisen from my own attitude of expectation. I have found the thing I looked for, and perhaps exag- gerated the significance of the indications. But I am convinced that when every allowance has A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 15 been made for my personal prejudice, sufficient evidence remains to prove that civilisation is mov- ing towards the development of a new expression in religion. Briefly and very indefinitely stated, this change is from a negative to a positive attitude towards God; from a morality that depends upon repres- sion to one that depends upon the liberation of impulse. I can weU imagine that the captious will at once expostulate that this principle is as old as his- tory; that it has been attempted in practice and has led to nothing but licence, debauchery and collapse. Further, that it is the ^'excuse'' of every artist — an amoral creature by hypothesis — and was the foundation of Nietzsche's cruel and subversive philosophy. My single reply to these objections practically covers the whole ground. It rests upon the as- sertion that by the liberation of impulse or free expression, Ford intended not the impulses and expressions of animal desires, but those of what he calls the ^^ primitive urge behind life.'' And this differentiation becomes important when we realise that he regarded that urge as invariably tending towards development, even if such devel- opment might not, under present conditions, be generally recognised as '^goodness" in the sense of conventional morality. In effect he had a higher opinion of the universal content than had Nietzsche. Ford, himself, was the exponent of a naturally moral tendency, and he had faith in 16 W. E. FORD the virtue of his own impulses as the delivery of an essentially beneficial urge. He might perhaps have defined his aim as the will to expression ; he would certainly not have defined it as the will to power. But if he had gone still further and accepted the definition of goodness commonly assumed by the churches, his principle would still have dif- fered radically from theirs. For the practice of all present day religions is founded on the com- mandments beginning "thou shalt not/' treating God as lawgiver and judge, a creature swift to anger and to condemnation. And Ford intuitively rejected a process of virtue that advanced by elimination; as though "goodness" were a liquor that must be endlessly strained and refined. He preferred in all his analogies some figure that presented the thought of encouragement and growth ; and I think that by developing ' ' free ex- pression," he may have meant that we should concentrate our energies on the delivery of the finer impulses rather than on the suppression of the baser. I say he may have intended this, but I have been greatly handicapped by the fact that I have no written material of his, not so much as a single note. For all my exposition, I have had to depend on my memory of a few discussions between us (one of them lasted for five hours), and I find it exceedingly difficult, now, to sepa- rate my own contribution to his theory of life. Ford was so apparently ductible in argument. He had a wonderful gift for making one state A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 17 his own point of view. If he had been more dogmatic, my present task would have been an easier one. . . . But I am afraid that I am laying too much stress on philosophy in this introduction, foras- much as the greater part of the book — all Mr. Richmond's contribution, in fact — will hardly touch on that development of Ford's thought. Without question Ford's first claim to attention is as a pioneer in education, and I do not wish for a moment to put that claim in the background. At the same time I feel that I am not a reliable exponent of the educational theory and method which are elucidated in some detail by Mr. Rich- mond in chapters iv.-x. My hesitation in this is due to a realisation that while I have had no experience that qualifies me to give an opinion, I am an ardent enthusiast for the principles Ford endeavoured to put into practice. And as your professional educationist has little tolerance for lay enthusiasm, I am particularly anxious not to prejudice him from the outset by a discussion of technicalities which might betray my ignorance. Nevertheless, education enters the province that I have made my own in this experimental biogra- phy; and in that connection I feel entitled to ex- press a general opinion that involves no discus- sion of detail. For I see that any hope for a practical exposi- tion of Ford's philosophy will be found in the schoolroom. Few adults are teachable, but most children. And I believe that many enlightened 18 W. E. FORD educationists are beginning to grasp the truth that the road to knowledge is not by the way ot memorising facts, but by the understandmg and relation of facts. The obvious difficulty which as Mr. Richmond shows, confronts the pioneer ot this theory, is the argument that a truly synthetic education does not fit a child to enter the com- mercial and competitive conditions of modem life There may be practical means of overcom- ing'this difficulty. I leave that to the expert. But my own hope is founded on the behef that the children of the new race will alter the conditions. If we have faith in Ford's theories of education, philosophy and morals, we must be courageous enough to risk the immediate financial success of the younger generations. Before I leave this introduction, I want to make two further comments; and the first is with reference to the great European War. Ford died before August, 1914, and I have, therefore, no direct opinion of his with regard to it; but i think his probable attitude can be quite deh- nitely inferred. . Personally, I regard this war as evidencing the final failure of the Christian principle of sup- pression. How far that principle derives from Christ and not from the embroideries of the theo- logian, I have no time to discuss. The one ab- surd iustification for fighting which has been ad- vanced by the churches, rests on the text, I came to bring not peace but a sword,'' a statement con- flicting so intolerably with Christ's general doc- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 19 trine, that we can only suppose it to have been either an interpolation by a later hand, or, as seems more probable, a prophecy and not an af- firmation of purpose. In any case the quotation of this one text is obviously futile as a defence. It cannot be separated from the body of Christ's teaching. And I maintain that the man who at- tempts to justify his attitude as a militant with his attitude towards Christianity, is incapable of intellectual or spiritual honesty. If he believes that England was bound in honour to intervene in the first place, to carry on the struggle by every means in her power, and finally to continue it un- til she is able to dictate the terms of peace, then let that man be honest enough to admit that the ethic of Christianity is not applicable to present conditions. That conclusion, as I have said, is m}" own, but I know that Ford would have agreed with me. I believe that this war was necessary, and I believe that it will be beneficial to mankind as a whole. It has arisen, all modern wars have arisen, from individual and national inhibitions. Sup- pression and concealment are the common tools of all diplomacy. Race hatreds and jealousies arise only from misunderstandings and cowardice. Everywhere the influence of the old principle of thrusting down evil rather than encouraging good, has led to morbid desires and national hys- teria. And beyond a certain point, the national body must rid itself of these morbid secretions or go mad. Germany had reached her limit of en- 20 W. E. FORD durance, and her hysteria has found an expression in her hatred of England — the forced, unnatural expression of the thwarted. Nevertheless, there is a hope that this war will act as a purge that will enable Europe for a time to see more clearly. Already there is a faintly discernible movement towards a greater honesty; towards liberation. But only by the education of children on new lines will this slight gain be made good. If we are in future to teach the fundamental ethic of Christianity, it must be restated. It is useless for us to love our enemies, if we must first learn to hate ourselves. If the Pharisee's self-righteous- ness was false, so also was the self-abasement of the publican. . . . My second comment is an anticipation of the conventional test that will surely be applied to Ford. If he was such a great man, the critic will say, how is it that he had no influence on his con- temporaries! My reply is, firstly, that he had considerable influence on his immediate circle — as this little endeavour to interpret him ought to denionstrate. And, secondly, that this influence was restricted simply because he had no craze for publicity. For while he was singularly free from any affectation of modesty, he had none of the convinced self -righteousness of the propagandist. He lived his own philosophy by simply being him- self — an uncommonly hard, perhaps an impos- sible, task for any public man in modern condi- tions. Possibly W. E. Gladstone came as near the ideal as any prominent statesman of recent years. A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 21 In conclusion, I relinquish, with a sigh of dis- satisfaction, this task of trying to present Ford. I feel that I have failed to render him with any- thing approaching justice; and I console myself with the reflection that Mr. Richmond's chapters on education are a real contribution to knowl- edge. We have candidly admitted, Richmond and I, that this book is an experiment, and that we are none too pleased with the form it has taken. But while Ford's philosophy may need endless elaboration, his educational theory and practice are, we feel assured, the methods of the future — let us hope of the immediate future. CHAPTER II I FiKST met Ford on the evening of the 22nd of June, 1897. He, like myself, had taken advantage of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations to escape from London ; but his purpose and mine had little in common. I was working in an architect's office in Moor- gate Street at that time; and as pageants and processions have never interested me (I lived for eighteen consecutive years in London without see- ing a Lord Mayor's Show), I had profited by the holiday to go up the river for three days with a friend from the office, and his brother, a sailor in the merchant service. After a damp, depressing Sunday that was impossible for boating, we had a very good holiday. By a fluke we saw the Queen leave Windsor on Monday morning — we had gone up into the town to buy provisions — and on the day of the procession we had a long jolly day sail- ing down from Bray to Halliford, which had been our point of departure. My two companions were returning to town that night, but they advised me to stay down at Shepperton. My friend from the office was always very thoughtful for me, and he was afraid that there might be great crowds in the street to see the illuminations, and that I, with my game leg, might find some difficulty in 22 A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 23 getting' back to my lodgings near King's Cross. So I stayed the night at the Railway Hotel at Shepperton — a queer little inn kept by a Swiss named Aubert. And it was there that I met Ford. He was the only other visitor, and according to the etiquette of the Auberts (I stayed there many times afterwards) he had a right to the use of the dark little sitting-room by virtue of the fact of his prior arrival. I was introduced by permission, chiefly on the ground, I fancy, that this was a special occasion. The common meet- ing place of the inn's visitors was a little parlour behind the bar. It must have been nearly nine o'clock when I was introduced to Ford by Mrs. Aubert, who was English and phlegmatic, although she always wore an air of being slightly offended, even by the most reasonable, not to say profitable, re- quest. I was probably presented as ^^ another gentleman"; and her ^4f you wouldn't mind 'is 'aving supper in 'ere," was spoken, no doubt, with her usual effect of faint resentment. To me, she had spoken of the occupant of the sit- ting-room as if he had been the great Panjan- drum himself. I had felt that my intrusion was quite unwarranted, until I in turn figured as ^'another gentleman" with suggested rights and dignities. The lamp was lighted — it was dark in that room at midday; either the Swiss or the English influ- ence insisted on two pairs of curtains and a lace 24 W. E. FORD muslin blind for the insufficient window — and as Ford got up when I was presented, his face was in the shadow of the painted cardboard lamp- shade when he answered. I thought him a little morose. He mumbled something that I did not catch. I was twenty-four then, and had much the same illusions with regard to chance meetings that H. G. Wells has described as those of Mr. Polly. I looked forward to them romantically, but unlike Mr. Polly I saw my own part as fur- nishing the effective element of surprise. I based my dreaming on that episode described by Bor- row in The Bible in Spain; and in my adaptation of the incident, I imaginatively tramped England in corduroys and hobnails, and astounded some travelling scholar by an erudition greater than his own. I must add, however, that my erudition was non-existent — I invented that. And my first impressions of Ford, and our ear- lier conversation that night, were slightly preju- diced by this attitude of mine. I was only an ar- chitect's assistant on a salary of £2, 10s. a week, and I wanted to pretend that I was something more than that. After Mrs. Aubert had gone to get my inevi- table bacon and eggs, I started a man-of-the-world conversation with a criticism of her manner. Ford was not responsive. I was an egregious young ass; and he was shy with casual strangers, and must from the outset have been prepared for boredom. The effect of his polite replies, how- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 25 ever, produced a result he had not designed. I have always been very sensitive to criticism. Any one can shut me up in conversation. Un- derneath that romantic desire to shine in any society, I carry the knowledge of my own inca- pacity; a knowledge that I have ever candidly faced and admitted in the secret colloquies of myself and my own mind. And Ford, who was also a sensitive creature of another type, dis- cerned my hurt when I suddenly lapsed into a shamed silence ; and he sought to repair his fault by beginning to talk. I did not see at the time how that opening of an acquaintance displayed an essential dif- ference between him and me. We were both shy and sensitive, but my eyes were turned inwards, his outwards. When he did not respond, I began to criticise my own feebleness; and if our posi- tions had been reversed, I should never have dis- cerned, as he did, the reason for the silence that threatened to fall upon us. Again, where I should have reflected the inferred attitude of my com- pany, he retained his individuality, and sought to examine the character of those with whom he was confronted. His sympathies never influenced him, as my sympathies influence me, to act a part. He began to talk about the river, and I re- sponded to that. I know the river well, and my replies at first were, I suspect, largely topograph- ical — another boast of knowledge. But presently he touched me to hesitating confidences. There were thinocs I had felt about the Thames that I 26 W. E. FORD could never confess to any of my friends in the office ; things that I had no language to explain to them or, indeed, to any one. And Ford's genius, in some wonderful way, perceived the beginnings of those perceptions in me. He touched, by way of opening, on the history of the river, of the old encampment at Sinodun Hill, for instance; and then dared to expose the sensitive skin of my romantic temperament by asking me if I had ever seen the mysteries that descend upon the ^^ depths of water stilled at even.'' My reply was inadequate. I knew, but I had no words to tell my knowledge. I was confused because I realised my inability to describe my emotions. And I was horribly handicapped by my desire to prove that I was capable of appre- ciating his suggestions. The line from The Blessed Damozel was unknown to me, although from his delivery I recognised it as a quotation. Nevertheless, I began to expand. I described an adventure I and two other men had had at Sutton Courtney, when after a long day of rain and wind, we had crept up the backwater at sun- set to find a camping ground, and had come won- derfully upon an old mill, and floated into an en- ceinte of high resonant walls that filled us with a fear of our own whispering voices. I put the story into clumsy, colloquial phrases that conveyed nothing of the place nor of my own feelings; but Ford understood. And from that we came to a discussion of liter- ature, spoiled at first by the remains of my ro- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 27 mantic desire to appear well-read. I tried to make the best of the little reading I had, but it was hopelessly inadequate, and when I found my- self referring all his openings to my limited au- thorities, I honestly shifted my ground and con- fessed my lack of education. Ford had put me almost at my ease by then. The confession was not a new one, but it had often taken the form of a boast. Chronologi- cally it ran: Four years at a dame's school; a year and a half at Oundle under Mungo Park; four months at home with occasional lessons from a neighbouring parson who was trying to educate his own son ; one term at a private school in Nor- folk; and finally, four terms at the King's School, Peterborough, before, at sixteen, I began the first approach to architecture by studying building construction at the Peterborough Art School. As a matter of fact I was not yet seventeen when my first set of articles was signed with the Diocesan Surveyor, whose offices at Stamford — eight miles from my home — I visited three times a week for nearly two years. It was a fair subject for boast, that haphazard education, calculated to develop nothing so much as the habit of slacking. I al- ways left my listener to draw his own inference ; but my usual attitude of ^^Here I am" was, on this occasion, perhaps, a trifle plaintive. I may have been uncertain whether my point of arrival was not the too obvious result of my lack of training. Ford overlooked the effect. He was interested in the cause and began to question me. And if 28 W. E. FORD I was somewhat eager for the final verdict, for some assurance that I had emerged creditably from this welter of various disciplines, I was flat- tered by his interest, and proud to answer his questions with a readiness that displayed my own criticism of the scholastic methods I had suffered. The verdict never came. In place of that, he opened my eyes to possibilities I had never then considered. His suggestions came to me then in the guise of a revelation ; not because he threw them off with any air of being sent to lighten my darkness, but because my mind was ready to take his point of view. I was suddenly hungry for this new food, although I had not before been aware of any ap- petite. It is difficult now to separate the particular suggestions he made that night from the com- pleter argument I heard him set out in later con- versations ; but certain of his simpler theses must have been touched upon at our first meeting. In- deed, it seems to me that I can recall precisely the tones of his clear, gentle voice, a little muffled by the apparatus of hangings in that dark sitting- room — even the fireplace was elaborately hung and curtained. We had finished supper and he was sitting on the sofa, his face a little in the shadow. And, to me, the voice was the mouth- piece of an oracle that amazingly delivered the stifled knowledge of my subconscious thought. No doubt the rendering is characteristically my own, and Richmond, who was Ford 's disciple in a A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 29 sense that I never conld be, will perhaps object that my translation has lost the spirit of the orig- inal. Nevertheless, I do not think that my per- versions and remodellings will seriously misrep- resent Ford's general attitude. If they do, I com- mend a study of Richmond's chapters as more likely to display the inwardness of these theories than my own personal reactions to what ap- peared, most hopefully at the time, as a new doc- trine; even the radical openings of Froebel and Herbart were quite unknown to me at the age of twenty-four. For Ford began, at first tentatively, and after- wards with an increased precision, to put before me the possibility that my scattered education had saved me from many of the intellectual vices which might have arisen from the discipline of a single dogmatic method. He suggested that all my various new starts and uncompleted exercises had been preparing me to accept knowledge, while they had mercifully left me without prejudice in favour of a specialised course. He made me real- ise that the structure of knowledge is ever the same, that Euclid is a preparation for the study of botany, or Greek inflections for the writing of English prose. He used a physical analogy to il- lustrate that thesis under my hesitating recogni- tion, and gave me a picture of a finely trained muscular system, quick and adaptable ; a tool com- petent for any specialisation, if specialisation were ultimately the goal of a particular education. I grasped that figure with the objection that 30 W. E. FORD my mind had not been trained in all its parts, that there were functions which had been wholly neglected, and he met me with the quiet reply that he was not maintaining a case for the hap- hazard, but merely for a principle more nearly approached in my case than it would have been if I had stayed seven years at a typical public school of the period. ''You had some kind of chance," he said— a sentence that stuck in my memory. It came to me as a revelation, just then, that there were other forms of ^ cleverness besides the ability to discuss the classics. I had always admired sound schol- arship; I do still; but Ford confirmed the hope that scholarship was not the beginning and end of wisdom. Before I met him that hope had been a vague thing which sometimes took the appro- priate form of an anchor, but at other times wore the semblance of a snare, the pitiful excuse of one who knew all too surely that scholarship could never be within his reach. My ''chance," as I inferred from Ford's fur- ther conversation, lay in my undestroyed capacity for synthesis. I — he took me merely as an in- stance — could still approach knowledge without bias. What I had learned in spite of my training had provided me with a basis. My little Latin and less Greek were enough to furnish me with a better touchstone than that I should have had if I had concentrated on them to the neglect of all thosfe other branches of knowledge. I remember that he turned aside to dismiss that A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 31 metaphor. ' ^ You have avoided one danger, ' ' was the gist of his speech, '^the danger of regarding one particular subject as the root and trunk of all learning. But one can't think of knowledge as a tree,'' he went on; ''it would be a very queer kind of tree, wouldn't it, with a different sort of fruit on every branch! And all of them spring- ing, according to the classicists, from the single root and trunk of the dead languages." I forget, now, the detail of his enlargement, and even whether he found another metaphor to take the place of the one he had discarded. What I recall seems, in the light of subsequent illumi- nations, to have been very elementary stuff in- deed, nothing more than a disposal, before my re- ceptive but untrained eyes, of principles that even the modern academic admits with a petulant re- luctance. Nevertheless, they were principles that at once roused my ignorant enthusiasm, and I re- ceived them as new-found truths that would pres- ently revolutionise the whole system of educa- tion. It was a revelation to me that school sub- jects should not be studied in sealed compart- ments; that ''history" and "geography" might go hand in hand, and that they were the basis of economics, or that the story of Caesar's cam- paigns might be made a vital link of connection between Mediterranean history and the history of continental Europe. (It is, indeed, a shameful fact that I could not then have indicated France, Belgium, Switzerland or Germany in any organic relation to the Gallic wars. I wonder if your ave- 32 W. E. FORD rage Eton boy is much better informed at the present day?) All the substance of that night's conversation has gone back, now, into the dull store of accepted things. It may be that I have not Ford 's gift for keeping bright the structure of belief. He ap- proached me on our first meeting with the keen- ness of the recent discoverer; yet even then, his material must have been far from new to him. I, in his place, should have been wearied with the necessity for stating axioms, annoyed by the fool- ish unreadiness of my listener. But that was a gift of his. His problem never lost freshness ; he found new interest in the reflections of each new listener. For him each pupil was a fresh disclo- sure of the eternal miracle. We were coming within sight of that aspect of him when Mrs. Aubert finally drove us up to bed. He had been talking of the preparation of a mind to accept instruction, and then he looked at me with a faintly whimsical smile as if for the first time he touched upon some subject just precious enough to make him a little self-conscious. ''You only have to help a boy to dig the stufP up," he said, "help him to remember, you know." And his inflection t>i the word remember told me that he used it in a sense I was able to recognise. I had read Plato's Dialogues in an English trans- lation, and the "Meno" had left a distinct im- pression on my mind. My use of that little piece of erudition, however, chilled our closing rela- tions. Perhaps I had a sense of recovered stand- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 33 ing, or I may have realised that I had offered no positive contribution to the conversation for a long time. But I need not dwell on my interrup- tion, and I have long since abandoned my argu- ment against Socrates' theory of latent knowl- edge. Ford did not take up my weak little chal- lenge of materialism. No one knew better than he did, how great a waste of time it is to argue with an obstinate or momentarily elated oppo- nent. No ^'remembering'' comes that way. We should certainly have recovered our un- derstanding, if it had not been for Mrs. Aubert, but after a casual interruption at half-past ten to remind us that this was their closing time, she came in again a few minutes before eleven and asked us frankly if we were not going to bed. I was inclined to resent her interference, but Ford quietly submitted. I carried to bed with me a disturbing doubt as to whether he had not been relieved by our land- lady's interruption. My eternal self -depreciation suggested that despite his appearance of interest he had, in fact, been bored by my company. I saw myself, painfully, as the young ass who had begun by attempting a ridiculous boast of knowl- edge. That doubt, however, did not dominate me. If I remembered my attempted effect of scholarship with uneasiness, I was still warm with an appre- ciation of Ford's contribution to the conversation, and glad to remember that I had achieved an ul- timate honesty. And I gave Ford place, that 34 W. E. FORD night, on my list of heroes ; that list of mine which never records more than one name at a time. There have been so many whom I have known and revered for months or, in some cases, for years. They begin, as Ford began, by appearing so astonishingly greater than myself. And they maintain their place, until I come to criticism, until by some slow reaction of thought or attitude I find the comparison between their abilities and my own does not invariably yield so great a bal- ance in their favour. But I dare not examine that complex characteristic of mine, it demands a greater consideration than I can give it in this place. I mention it only because it is a necessary test of my earlier relations with Ford. In this case the beginnings of hero-worship are reasonably obvious, if we assume in the postulant the temperament that inclines him to accept new doctrines. And although, as a matter of mere chronology, Ford was my senior by no more than three years, he was curiously older than I was. He certainly looked more than twenty-seven when I first met him. He was wearing a beard at that time, and that gave him, in my eyes, the dignity and prestige of a full-grown man — a prestige of which I have never become aware in myself. (At forty-four I am invariably surprised when some youngster of twenty-five or so evidences any sign of respect for my years.) But mere appearance counts for very little, and I recognised very soon' the many points of Ford^s superiority to myself. He had travelled, he had read, he knew something. A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 35 about life. Up to the time of his death, I was never quite his contemporary. And so, since I had a vacancy just then, I in- stated Ford as hero ; and if I am to be honest in giving my impressions of him, I must admit that in those earlier years he seemed to me to tower. CHAPTEE III I SEEM to have put a halo round that first meet- ing with Ford; and now that I come to reflect on the later relations between us, I am a little handi- capped by a very natural desire to retain that glory, at least in the form of a permanent nimbus for my hero. I perfectly understand at this mo- ment why the biographer should so often appear as a lopsided optimist. The desire I mentioned urges me to glorify my subject because it affords me the opportunity of making something; and that particular form of creation is easier by far than understanding. If I were writing this book alone, — a task for which I have no qualifications — ^I should certainly romanticise Ford, and end by presenting a consistent, and possibly an ad- mirable portrait of an imaginary creature who bore a generic resemblance to the original, but would hardly be recognised by his friends. As it is, I am only contributing a few chapters to Mr. Richmond's work, and he will, I know, be ruth- less in his criticism. I submit that my task is a hard one for the mere novelist ; and claim a special measure of toleration on that account. Lastly — to end an apology that has been wrung from me by an hour of unprofitable contemplation, spent in staring with growing despondency at a sheet of 36 A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 37 paper bearing the repulsive heading ^^ Chapter III.'' and nothing more — I must insist on one, as it seems to me, almost insuperable difficulty. In a novel the characters are invariably simplified. The most complex character in fiction is more reasonable and consistent than the average mem- ber of one's daily acquaintance. And in planning and working out a novel, one can satisfactorily invent reasons and explanations. In a biography one is permitted to suppress but not to invent. The stumbling-block that led to my hour 's waste of time and this subsequent apology, is my com- plete inability to account, in any way convincingly, for the fact that after our Jubilee night at Halli- ford, I did not meet Ford again for three years ; and met him then by the merest accident. I knew that it must seem, to put it mildly, highly improb- able that I should not have written to him. I had, indeed, promised to write and fix an appointment with him in the City, and I wore the envelope on which his address was scribbled, until the pen- cilled writing was an almost undecipherable blur. There is only one explanation possible — I was like that in those days. I had conceived an enthusiasm for Ford; and every time that, in my enforced evacuations of rubbish, I came across that par- ticular envelope (I used to stuff letters in my pockets until the lining went), I wrote to him long, rather literary letters — in my mind. None of them was ever put on paper. That was one of my particular weaknesses. I have criminally shirked the payment of a debt I honestly longed 38 W. E. FORD to settle, because I could not summon resolution to do the thing at the moment. And, in the same way, I have deliberately walked past the door of a shop to which I had come in order to buy some- thing I, perhaps, urgently required. At the last moment, it seemed to me that to-morrow would do better for my purchase. After these instances it will, I hope, be just comprehensible that I put otf my letter to Ford indefinitely. But, Destiny — for no particular purpose that I can trace — ^planned with a delicate accuracy that I should meet Ford in London Wall during my lunch time, some three years or so after our first meeting — an accident that so far affected my life to a just appreciable extent. The year of that second meeting was, I know, 1900, because we discussed the Boer War a few days later ; and the peculiar phase of that struggle, my certainty that it was summer, and that, for reasons which will appear later, it could not have been the summer of 1901, afford evidence to ^x the date fairly ac- curately. Ford had a beautiful lady with him when we met in London Wall. I was not introduced, but she considerably distracted my attention. And as Eichmond is reasonably certain that the lady must have been Miss Worthington, it may be in- teresting to record a brief impression of my one glimpse of her. She was tall, taller than Ford, and fair ; and her features had the wonderful ef- fect of being chiselled or modelled with the care- ful art of a realist sculptor — the effect which is A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 39 hardly ever found in the pretty women of the lower and middle classes in England. I certainly took her for an aristocrat, and worshipped her image for a time. She took not the least notice of me, I remember ; no doubt she resented my in- terruption of her conversation with Ford. I should probably not have recognised him if he had not hailed me by name. He had shaved his beard and moustache, and he looked younger than my acquaintance of three years before. He instantly remembered me, and, moreover, all the circumstances of our first meeting. ^'You prom- ised to write,'' he reminded me. ^^I suppose you lost my address?" And that remark led to one of the real situa- tions which one can use in fiction, inasmuch as my characteristic inability to tell the easy untruth on such occasions was quite a factor in my further intimacy with Ford. My stammering reply to the effect that I still had his address in my pocket, that I had meant and wanted to write, and that I had been, as usual, a ^^ rotten slacker," quick- ened his interest in me to the point of making an appointment at the Cafe Nero in the Wool Ex- change, for the following day. I chose the ren- dezvous. And he told me there that my rather elaborate honesty and self-condemnation had piqued his curiosity. Nevertheless, our friendship ripened very slowly. I met him three or four times in the next nine months, always at the same place ; and I was intensely interested in him, but I regarded him as 40 W. E. FORD a rather superior being, and felt that it was not for me to suggest such further intimacies as, say, a long evening's conversation at his rooms or mine. Then in the summer of 1901, I entered upon what I now recognise as the second phase of my life. The development of the phase was gradual, but the change of interests and associations was instant; and drastic enough in certain ways to throw my acquaintance with Ford momentarily into the background. I did not forget him, but I forgot to meet him. Also my employer moved his offices from Moorgate Street to Bedford Square in the spring of that year, and my as- sociations with Ford were, save for our first meet- ing, all connected with the great underground cafe in the Wool Exchange building. I must, however, note one strange anomaly by the way. When I was in the City, as I have said, I met Ford by chance in London Wall, although I rarely went down that street and he was there by the merest accident. Now, during the whole of 1902 Ford was living within half a mile of the office in which I was working, constantly passed it and spent a great part of his time in the British Museum, which I, in my turn, passed at least twice every day in my walk from my room in Montague Street to my office in Bedford Square. And yet, during those twelve months, I never once caught sight of him. The facts of life are so improbable. The causes that led to our next meeting were not, strictly speaking, fortuitous. I had remem- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 41 bered his Bloomsbury address all this time, al- though I had neither written to him nor been to see him. My lack of enterprise in this case, how- ever, is quite expHcable. I had an exigeante * ' in- terest" that occupied all my spare time. But I have come to a period of my own life that even now, after a lapse of more than eleven years, I recall with very considerable distaste. I do not propose to enter into that history; but I may explain that I left my job as an architect's assistant at the end of September, 1903, and joined the New York Life Insurance Company as an agent; that I was married for the first time in November of the same year and went to live in a flat in Buckingham Gate; and that early in 1904, in a desperate search for probable ^* cases," I re- membered Ford and wrote to him on the off chance of finding in him a willing and insurable risk. The address found him, as he had returned then to his old rooms in Bloomsbury. I suppose I mentioned my object in writing to him; I am sure that I did not insure him. I was always too bitterly ashamed of my occupation to press even the most likely ''case" among my acquaintances. I have been drawn into these apparently irrele- vant details of autobiography by my attempt to recover a true sense of my early relations with Ford; the phase that lasted, almost unchanged, until the winter of 1911-1912, when he was home again in Golden Square after spending six months in India. During all this period we met infre- quently. There were enormous intervals due to 42 W. E. FORD the adventures of the various life which beset me when I, finally, broke away from the shackles of my office routine. But whenever we did meet my attitude towards him remained that of pupil to master — an attitude that I learned later was the real obstacle between us. In those days I failed completely to understand him. I put him too high, and never once realised that my reverence irked and a little dismayed him. And so I have found it impossible to explain my impressions of that time without first laying stress on my own weakness. For it was not Ford whom I knew, but my own thought of him; and my thought was a false one. I used to go to him for advice, as a pious spinster goes to her parish priest; and like the spinster, I was always at- tempting to win admiration by a confession of weakness. I was the victim of that common ro- mantic ideal which seeks to create the illusion of absolutes. Conscious of my own inabilities, I tried to find in Ford the absolute strength and wis- dom, in order that I might shift the responsibility of my life to his ordinance. I went to him for ad- vice, and if he had given me a rule I should have obeyed it. I remember very vividly the last instance of those visits to my lay confessional ; a visit made at a time when things were going very badly in- deed with me. Ford was married then and liv- ing at his school in Holland Park. I think I must have written to him and made an appointment. I know that after a few minutes in the drawing- A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 43 room he took me upstairs to his own study. I have always had an idea that Mrs. Ford did not like me.^ I certainly never made any of my con- fessions in her presence, and assmned — with good justification, I believe — that they were never re- ported to her by Ford himself. My financial and marital complications were rapidly becoming disastrous, and I put them be- fore Ford in the tentative, half-despairing man- ner that was symptomatic of my condition just then ; finding a salve, even while I complained, in his quick, sympathetic interest. But when I came to a pause, he got up and began to pace the little length of his study. He had decided to make an end of these old relations between us, not for any selfish reason, but simply because he believed that I might still save my life from wreck. And his first sentence put the whole situation before me in the fewest possible words. ' ' You must be God, ' ' he said. ^ ' / can 't. ' ' But I was not quick enough to grasp the full significance of that, and the explanation that fol- lowed was, in one sense, of quite peculiar inter- est. For he told me, some four years later, that during the elaboration of that simple, intuitive statement of his, he approached for the first time the primitive conception of that philosophy which I hope, however imperfectly, to indicate in a fur- ther chapter. No doubt my memory of his first exposition is confused now with many subsequent conversa- * Mrs. Ford denies this. — K. K. 44 W. E. FORD tions, but I remember the effect that his talk had upon me, and it seems worth while to attempt some reproduction of his advice. He began by censuring my inhibitions. I was all for sacrifice at that time. I had made a mis- take in my first marriage, and my single idea was not so much to make the best of it as to penalise myself for having been a fool. I believed that I was being a little splendid by patiently suffering the effects of my folly. Ford told me that I was denying God; that every time I suppressed my inclination to resent the lash, I was weakening a natural impulse. And the effect of that, he said, was even worse for my wife than it was for myself; since I encouraged her natural cruelty, when by resistance, by a free expression of my impulsive reactions, I might stimulate in her a free response to other com- plexes. She could not be ^ ^ all-cruel, ^ ' he said, the thing was unthinkable ; but by my feeble submis- sions I was developing that side of her character out of all proportion. Then he went on to urge that what I regarded as a fine ideal of self-sacrifice might be, in ef- fect, nothing more than a sop for my moral cow- ardice. Would it not need a greater effort on my part, he asked, to go boldly home and admit to my wife that I no longer loved her? Would it not need more courage, more self-control, to speak the whole truth, than it would to endure my pres- ent misery with a show of meekness? If you A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 45 really want to sacrifice yourself, choose the hard- est way, was the summary of his argument. I believe that talk of his was the beginning of many things for him, but while he was speaking he had no thought for anything but me. As his manner was on those occasions, he constantly looked up at me quickly, earnestly, and yet with an air that was a trifle abstracted, as if his physi- cal approach of sight was no more than a mechani- cal aid to his spiritual approach. He used to find some inner contact with one in those more earnest moments of his. He reached out and entered one 's mind. And he read me so clearly and effectively on this particular occasion, that he was able to build a philosophy out of the experience gained by his instant's surrender to another personality. He reached my thought and then stood back to prescribe for me. At the last, he completed his effort by giving me something of his own confidence. He told me that he believed I should '^ come through." The phrase remained with me, for I made it a watch- word ; although with a quick turn that was a trifle whimsical, he went on at once : ^' If it is ourselves that come through, and not the universal behind us?'' I cannot pretend to remember his precise words but the intention is that which he conveyed to my mind. He went on to question how far this complex that we recognise as our personality may be merely a means for the expression of some universal that continually seeks to be delivered. I went home wonderfully conscious that I was 46 W. E. FORD an agent for the deliverance of eternal truth ; and if the purpose of my endeavour failed grievously when the exhilaration of new knowledge had spent itself in conflict with the insistent realities of my condition, I had, as it were, opened another line of communication with God. To that extent Ford influenced my life, and justified my belief in the Destiny which planned our first two meetings with such fastidious un- concern. But after I had received the intended stimulus, Destiny shrugged its shoulders and left me, so far as Ford was concerned, to take any further initiative on my own account. We did not meet again for four years, and dur- ing the interval I had entered upon my ^' third phase, ^' the phase that still endures. It was in November, 1911, that I got a letter from Ford, sent on by my publishers, congratulat- ing me on my book. The Hampdenshire Won- der. I have kept that letter, and it now lies open before me, but I cannot very well quote it in full. When Ford found occasion for praise, his enthusiasm shone out with no shadow of qualifi- cation. Also, there was an element of pleased sur- prise in this particular expression of his — he must have been more than a little astonished at the evidence of my having ''come through" so soon. Nevertheless, because no one but Ford ever saw and stated definitely my half -realised purpose in writing The Hampdenshire Wonder, I will copy out just that part of his eulogy which made me glad to have made the attempt. A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 47 **It has got there completely so far as I am concerned/' he wrote. ^*In detail it satisfies in- numerable instincts, mathematical, metaphysical, psychological, and so on . . . and in general it does what very few books have done — Stevenson 's Jekyll and Hyde is one — abstracts one of the fun- damental antinomies of human life, drives the paradox to the extreme conceivable limit without loss of the necessary degree of credibility, and — leaves the moral to be inferred. The practical re- sult is material for fruitful thought, and we can't thank a man for any better gift." A little further down he completes my own feel- ing of purpose, by congratulating me on **a cer- tain sense of half contact with the illimitable/' that I had somehow managed to achieve in the book he was praising. If I had never met Ford and had had no other letter from him than this one, I should have known that he had a rare gift of understanding. It may be, of course, that in the old days of our in- tercourse he realised something in me of which I myself was quite unaware, and so saw through the book to the author. But if that be the explana- tion it still credits him with a most unusual power of insight, inasmuch as no one else believed in me during that ^'second phase." We met several times that winter in Golden Square, and twice he came up to our tiny flat in Willesden Lane. We had suddenly become equals and could talk. For Ford, himself, could talk as an equal with any man, from the most 48 W. E. FORD brutal uneducated to the ripest philosopher, and it was only such as I, and as my antithesis the com- placent overbearing, who set up the obstacle of difference. It will be evident from this brief account of my relations with Ford how little I knew of his per- sonal history. All that far more interesting mat- ter will be set out by Mr. Kichmond, who knew the man and his habits of thought so intimately. But what I have been attempting is to prelude the historical, mobile account of Ford's life with an impression that would be relatively reflective and static. When I began my contribution I intended to describe Ford as I would describe a character in a novel ; I thought that I would try to make a pic- ture of him by setting down his characteristic tricks of phrase and gesture, and perhaps work in a suggestive anecdote or two. When I had actually begun my task, I realised that this was not my part of the collaboration, it was Eich- mond's. And now it seems to me that I have written much of myself and very little of Ford. The reflex must be found in a consideration of op- posites ; in the thought of a man who was not in- trospective; and was not concerned with the ef- fect of life upon himself, but with his hope to affect life. All writers of fiction are to some extent charla- tans, and most of them are aware of the fact. In- trospection inevitably leads to self-consciousness and hypocrisy. The antithesis is found in the man who does not examine his own motives ; and A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 49 Ford came nearer to the ideal in this kind than any one I have ever met. I told him, once — only a few weeks before he left England on his fateful journey to Japan — that he completely begged the question of his own character; that he was an a priorist in living. He thought that over for a couple of seconds before he replied, and then said, ^*Yes, I dare say that's true. I certainly know less of myself than I do of many of my friends. I don 't find myself interesting. ' ' And for that reason, although he found the whole of the rest of life quite absorbingly interesting, be would never have made a novelist or a writer of philosophy. For a man must be on the friendliest terms with himself before he can make the ab- stract which is necessary to both these avocations. Ford did not deal in crystallisations. He had no inclination for that integration of the various through the alembic of his own microcosm. He kept his vision of life fluid, and many people blamed him as lacking in consideration. His whole tendency was synthetic. And that process I have described, with no intention of preserving an ac- curate chemical analogy, as * ^ crystallisation, ' ' ne- cessitates separation, analysis. Indeed, I think that his treatment of me on that last occasion of our unequal contact in ther parts of penitent and confessor, is, on the whole, respectably typical of his method with life. An- other man in his place would have tested my case on his own character. He would have asked him- self, "What should I do in such circumstances?'' 50 W. E. FORD Ford's only criterion was what lie knew of my disposition and abilities. He tried to project him- self into my mind, and I feel that he almost won- derfully succeeded. One result of that characteristic of his was that a majority of his casual acquaintances regarded Ford as rather an egotist. He was, as a matter of fact, a selfless rather than an unselfish man. He was so unselfconscious, both in giving and taking, that I cannot imagine him deliberately sacrific- ing himself to give pleasure. The mere act of de- liberation would imply in that case the choice and acceptance of a part, and he never postured. It was, so to speak, almost an accident that he gave pleasure rather than pain to his friends; it hap- pened that his essential attitude was one of inter- est rather than one of criticism. And my last excuse for the manner of this chap- ter may rest on the fact that I have tried to show what kind of man — as a single instance among many kinds — could engage and hold his interest. I feel an urgent desire to praise him for not wearying of me. I believe that his comprehension of me is a splendid testimonial for his abilities as an educationist and a sociologist. For the rest, I have spoken of his other claims to a wide attention both in my first chapter and in the collocation of various notes I made on the broader scheme of philosophy he was just begin- ning, to outline when he died. In the latter, more especially, will be found much that is a clue to his general character. I leave it to Mr. Richmond to A PERSONAL IMPRESSION 51 give a completer study of Ford's life, and hope that that study will not contradict my statement in any important particular. Nevertheless, if an- other reading should show him in other, and ap- parently almost irreconcilable, aspects, the fact will only serve to prove that my estimate is a true one. Ford's ^^selflessness" will bear many translations. PART TWO A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY PART TWO A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY CHAPTER IV The biographer of a famous or notorious charac- ter has to deal with an advantage and a disadvan- tage combined. The advantage is that he starts in rapport with the reader over a certain popular conception of his subject; the disadvantage is that this is always more or less of a misconception, since the public man who does not wear a mask of set intention is always fitted with a mask by the public. And it is a risky undertaking, as Beresford has hinted, to lift the mask. As I set myself to write down the main details of Ford's life, I am glad that there is no popular picture of him, no accepted set of flat, easy generalisations about his character and his point of view, such as a biographer is usually obliged partly to qualify, partly to dramatise. But I am more than glad to have Beresford 's picture instead — ^not the com- posite photograph of a public impression, mud- dled and fluffy at the edges as composite photo- graphs are, but a single impression of Ford as he appeared to a single friend. Not too much of a 55 56 W. E. FORD friend, either; Beresford can look at Ford from a sufficient distance to see ronnd him. I cannot; Ford is part of me and will remain so, and I can bring myself to use my closer acquaintance with him only to set down, very objectively, the facts of his unpretentious career. The young man of twenty-seven whom Beres- ford encountered on that Diamond Jubilee even- ing at Shepperton owed something of the dis- tinctive quality with which he always impressed an acquaintance, to an upbringing that by force of circumstances had been in many ways unusual, and could not have failed to give him an outlook and a mould of thought different from those of the average young Englishman. He owed still more to the character and influence of his father. Paul Ford was by choice and temperament a scientist ; by profession he was a consulting engineer who specialised in mining work. This calling took him much abroad, and his young wife chose to accom- pany him upon his longer travels. To judge by Ford's account of his father's description of her, and by a photograph that he has shown me, his mother was a woman of great beauty, little physique, and high spirit. She had broken off an engagement de convenance at the eleventh hour to elope with Paul Ford, and had at once gone with him to South America, where he had many months' work to do. By the time they were ready to return to England the birth of their child was imminent, and was eagerly looked forward to as the crowniug of their romance; they decided to A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 57 await the event at Valparaiso. Here William Ford was born at the cost of his mother's life. Paul Ford had at first to overcome a resentful hatred for his baby, but he came later to focus upon the growing child all his affections and ambitions. He had been greatly interested, even before the prospect of fatherhood had given the matter personal significance, in the methods of paternal training by which Karl Witte in Ger- many, and John Stuart Mill and Lord Kelvin in Britain, had become not youthful prodigies so much as youths with an exceptionally fine start in the handicap of life; and he and his wife had taken especial pains, during the months preceding William's birth, to discover the secret enshrouded in the elder Witte 's unsatisfactory writings.^ It may be that this consistent thinking about educa- tion exercised a pre-natal influence upon William Ford, and accounts in some degree for the innate faculty for teaching which he was to possess; but much also was due to his recollection of his father's methods in teaching him. The child ac- companied Paul Ford upon most of his travels, and his young perceptions were exercised over a very exceptional range of childish experience — far too wide a range for the budding intelligence, if his father had not continually enticed him to track down simple generalisations through all the diversity of detail. * Witte 's book is prolix and desultory ; a recent edition in English has been cleverly edited and compressed by Mr. Addington Bruce. {The Education of Karl Witte-. Harrap, 1915.) 58 W. E. FORD I often wish I could have known Ford as a child. I have seen letters that his father wrote to him at school, answering some childish question, or, more often, pointing the way to the boy^s own discovery of the answer ; and they give a reflected picture of the young Ford as the most naively engaging of young philosophers. Paul Ford had felt bound to try the reluctant experiment of sending him to school. The first attempt failed promptly. A preparatory school of some repute proved to be infected with perversion, and the boy ran away in disgusted alarm, taking refuge (his father was abroad) with a soldier uncle. This worthy was merely scandalised at the indiscipline of such a flight, and received Paul Ford's cabled interdic- tion of his son's return to the school with the gloomiest misgivings. Ford's chief reminiscence of the weeks that ensued before his father's re- turn concerns the horror of his uncle on discover- ing his ignorance of the Shorter Catechism — a horror intensified by his frank criticism of this compilation when it was brought to his notice. Paul Ford was later accused by his brother of *^ turning a nice kid into a damned young prig"; the nice kid had this arraignment verbatim from his father as a warning to be more considerate in his conversations with military uncles and their like. The opinion should be adjoined, for fair con- trast, of the retired bishop ^ who prepared Ford for confirmation a year or so later. (Paul Ford ^Dr. Ogilvie. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 59 always obeyed to the letter, so far as he could conceive them, the wishes of his dead wife.) The ex-bishop, himself a bit of a naturalist in the roomy, discursive manner often affected by the Victorian cleric, was greatly pleased by the boy's readiness to connect spiritual teaching with nat- ural fact, and was so delighted over a childish analogy between prayer and electrical induction, that he might almost be said to have passed his candidate upon the strength of that alone. Before this event another school had been given a three terms' trial. Here Ford was untroubled, not unhappy, but — ^bored. His mind, by now so thoroughly awake, found little to work upon; he lost way, intellectually, and also came back to his father with so many barriers of conventional schoolboy reticence to be patiently removed before their rare comradeship could be reinstated, that Paul Ford eventually decided that schools were, in his case at least, a mistake. *^ Mental and physical tanneries" he called them — for, besides obfuscation of mind, his boy had had to endure the usual irrelevant flagellations. The majority of schoolmasters have learnt better since those days in the matter of bodily if not of intellectual mishandling. It would not be true to say that Ford grew up to young manhood simply and singly the product of his father's training. Paul Ford seems to have been by instinct a believer in self-developed voli- tion rather than imposed habit as the basis of character, and the stages of the boy's adolescence 60 W. E. FORD were marked by steps of progressive liberation from leading-strings. He became more and more self -educating. There was a time when he became conscious that interesting and lucrative work was being refused because the surroundings — a min- ing camp in Arizona — would not have been edify- ing for a growing boy ; he felt himself a clog, and made some self-accusing remark to that effect. ^*It^s all right, old man,'* said his father, ^* you 're gradually taking yourself off my hands.'' In a sense, too, the boy's increasing emancipation of mind appears to have been due to the father's growing uncertainty in prescribing for him. With an engineer's precision of mind Paul Ford hated to act without a clear plan, and he refused to im- pose his will or his views arbitrarily unless he could back them up by a clean-cut, rational ex- planation. For much the same reason Ford's acquisition of book-learning at this time was oddly casual, al- most incidental. The actual teaching that he had from his father was erratic, irregular and dis- cursive, though very much alive. Its unquestion- able success in making him not only an eager but a patient and a thorough student of any subject that he took up is hard to explain. Perhaps the example of Paul Ford's masterly thoroughness over his own work had its influence. But it seems also that while he always left the boy to do his own spadework on his own responsibility, he took every care to see him provided first with an effi- cient spade. Knowing himself to be very rusty in A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 61 Greek, lie engaged a tutor to give William a thor- ough grounding — and then, dissatisfied with the result, himself made a rapid study of Greek grammar, applied to it a scientific classification of his own devising, and devoted the period of a sea-voyage to the intensive culture of his son's acquaintance with language-structure in general, as compared with Greek in particular. A year later, at the age of seventeen, Ford could read a Greek play with ease and appreciation.^ I can recall no other very definite detail from Ford's description of his father's teaching. The whole process was not so much a formulated sys- tem, with distinct points of method that could be classified under so many heads, as the natural, organic outcome of a unique personal relationship. The open, easy comradeship of the two was the basic fact, and with this assured they could afford to take an empiric line in matters of detail. Of Paul Ford's more general influence upon the char- acter and the later tendencies of his son, there are two quite definite things to be said which, I think, partly explain two of Ford's fundamental charac- teristics as a man. One of these was his curious view of personal ambition. His father was intensely ambitious for him, and they talked much of possible careers. But with his scientific sincerity and his consider- able knowledge of the world's ways, Paul Ford * This is an isolated case, but it goes to support the contention of some educators that the boy who begins Greek at twelve gets no further in five years than the point that can be reached in a year by the boy who begins at sixteen. 62 W. E. FORD could not but emphasize the large if varying degrees of humbug that are necessary for most kinds of professional succe&s ; and he would dwell, as a corollary, upon the mental clouding, mud- dling, and sophistication that he declared to be necessary (and to be duly effected in schools) to prevent this general atmosphere of humbug from disquieting the intellectual and moral conscience. * ^ You need a thoroughly muddled conscience to be an honest business man, nowadays," he would say as he looked through some engineering con- tract upon which his advice had been asked. Clear vision, he maintained, combined with even a mod- erate sense of social responsibility, definitely dis- qualified its possessor for success under the com- petitive system. (Later, Ford always held that the competitive system in Western civilisation has outlived its usefulness.) It was only natural that the boy should grow up with a high and an ac- cumulating potential of ambition, but with an in- creasing tendency to mistrust the usual outlets; and that he should eventually emerge with a philosophy of ambition far removed from that which is conventionally sanctioned — upheld and protected, indeed — ^by the common instinct for mutual defence among self-seekers in a self-seek- ing world. The second of Ford's characteristics that I trace back to a source in the influence of his father's personality is his unusual outlook upon the phenomena of trouble, pain, and grief. Paul Ford's sorrow for the wife whom he had lost A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 63 never grew less. He hid it with courage and cheerfulness, but in such an intimacy as was theirs, his son could not but be conscious of a deeply underlying sense of tragedy. William Ford as I knew him seemed possessed of some inexplicable solvent for grief, his own or that of others, though he never explained — I do not think he could have explained — what its nature was. William was to go to Cambridge. His father purposed to keep him till he was twenty, knowing that it was easier for a boy to take his own line in undergraduate life if he were a little older than most ^^men^' of his year. But when William was nineteen Paul Ford, then in Central Russia with his son, was struck down by plague and died in three days. The boy was stunned. He has de- scribed himself as feeling no passion of sorrow, either at the time or during the dreary and soli- tary trans-continental journey home, but rather as being conscious of a supreme struggle going on within himself against fatalism and hopeless- ness. Only in dreams, he has told me, he would break down, waking to find his pillow wet with tears. Once he dreamed that he was his father, weeping upon his mother's grave; and the dream for some obscure reason brought him great com- fort. His going to Cambridge was first postponed and finally prevented by financial troubles. The trusted family solicitor who had the handling of Paul Ford's estate, being himself at a climax of long accumulating difficulties, risked the money in 64 W. E. FORD unsafe securities, lost the greater part of it, and barely escaped bankruptcy and prosecution — partly through Ford's eagerness for a comprom- ise that would give the man (with his accounts, for the future, under supervision) another chance. Ford was left with the prospect of forty pounds a year on his majority, and the hope that this amount might increase with the gradual straight- ening out of the crooked business. His military uncle, retired by this time and on half pay, was in no position to play Providence; but he bestirred himself to obtain for Ford the of- fer of a clerkship in the bank where he had for long kept a modest account, and further proposed that his nephew should live with him. This plan put Ford in a difficult position. It was prompted by sentiment, and by the sense of duty of his only surviving relation, rather than by spontaneous inclination; the old Major tried but failed to dis- guise his fears that the disarrangement of his set ways would amount to an upheaval; and Ford himself was sure that neither he nor his uncle would be happy. On the other hand, the senti- mental factor was strong in a boy of nineteen, who was reluctant to meet a generous proposal with a clumsy refusal that must needs give pain ; he felt confident of his ability to adapt himself, although against the grain, to his uncle's indu- rated outlook; and he was feeling very lonely, and in a mood to welcome the most cross-grained companionship, the least vital link with the life that had been shattered for him, rather than none A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 65 at all. Also, it was security that was offered to him, a bulwark of a kind against adversity, as compared with the rather desperate adventure of trying to establish his own footing at a moment when sickness of heart somewhat obscured the venturous spirit natural to his temperament and to his time of life. I have often admired Ford, the grown man whom I knew, at one crisis or another of his life, but I am not sure that my admiration does not go out most heartily to the youth whom I never knew, except in terms of the man's half -humorous, self-quizzical reminiscences in the course of an evening's talk — the youth who decided to take his grief with him out into the world, and to prove in himself alone the value of the equipment with which his dead father had provided him. He was of course staying with his uncle at the time, and the announcement of his decision led to an interminable discussion that stood for him, in later life, as the prototype of all useless argu- ment. If there was one thing that he always hated it was unreasoning obstinacy, but this he found to be his sole anchor. His uncle asked again and again for an explanation of his reasons, and each time ignored every point of the explanation as it was patiently re-elaborated. He stated and re- stated his own view without rationale and without variation, ever and again coming back to the same opening — ^^But, my dear boy, what reason can you have . . . f It became a crude contest of wills, and Ford won. It is to the Major's credit 66 W. E. FORD that he bore no malice; he remained upon affec- tionate, if never upon intimate, terms with his nephew until his death. Ford became an assistant master in a private school at which I was a pupil — this was the ger- minal beginning of my acquaintance with him. Having no degree, nor even public school creden- tials, he commanded a salary of £45 a year. Talk- ing to me of this time, in after years, he could not say how far his choice of a profession was the result of an instinct, how far due to lack of al- ternatives. The instinct must have been present, to judge by the remarkable talent for teaching that he displayed from the very first. He has told me that as a schoolboy he continually found himself criticising and taking mental notes to the tune of ^^When I'm a man, I won't teach like that,'' and this might suggest the notion that he had even then some unconscious premonition of his future ; but since to be a man meant, for the boy Ford, to be a man like his father, it is likely that his boyish mind had only compared his master's teaching unfavourably with his father's, and drew the nat- ural conclusion as to which type of educating grown-up he would prefer to become. At all events he knew well enough how not to handle a class, and avoided all the usual pitfalls ; we youngsters placed him at once as a man who knew his business, apart from the fact that a lessoji with him was as refreshing as a spring in the desert. For his method, and especially for his rare grasp of the art of subject-presentation A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 67 (an art of whose existence, even, a majority of schoolmasters remain unaware), he must have been largely indebted to his father; he has told me that his first depression at our stifling inca- pacity for the simplest process of thought, and at the flat, stale tedium that flavoured the school as a whole, was overcome chiefly by a fierce pietas that made him burn to prove, if only to himself, the rightness and the communicability of his father's conception of knowledge as a privilege and a joy. His instinct was not long in showing him the way to make us share his vision. When I cast my mind back to the experience of being taught by him, in those early days when his method as a teacher was almost wholly a matter of instinct, it seems to me little wonder that later experience and self -training made him an excep- tional exponent of the art of education. In the first lesson of a term's course he usually gave us little to do but listen, unless one or other of us let his attention wander, when Ford would recall the truant with a beckoning question. Lean- ing over his desk, his eyes unveiled and looking, it seemed, through the wall behind us into some clear distance, he would map out the line of work upon which we were going to embark. He held out no baits : ^ ^ You '11 find that part fairly stiff, ' ' was often his comment after outlining an attrac- tive section of his programme. When we, in imagination, were already engaged upon the de- tailed struggles that he had promised us, he would begin to open up vistas. At this point, our subject 68 W. E. FORD led into regions of history, at that, into a world of scientific miracles ; its development had been a long, exciting business of human exploration and discovery; gradually a sense grew upon us of its place and value in the sum total of thought and knowledge. Then — we felt the moment coming — he would push himself back from his desk and begin a slow, measured walk between the window and the black- board. There is no possibility of describing one's childish memory what it was that he said as he walked. He spoke as though to himself, creating no deliberate glamour, searching for simple words in which to clothe his conviction that some trite school subject had its note to sound in the music of the spheres. At its simplest it was, as a whole, hopelessly above our heads ; as method, the later Ford would have condemned it out of hand; but we listened for all we were worth, piecing to- gether what we could. It seemed for the moment the most desirable thing in heaven or earth to be able, some day, to see arithmetic or geography as Ford saw it. And later in the term, when some ^'fairly stiff part'' of the work stood up, stark and inexorable, to be tackled, we went for it with little beguiling or driving. It was all part of the big business — Ford's phrase, to us, for the cosmic scheme — and if we stuck or shirked at times, a casual-seeming word or two from him would recall the wide vision and the childish impulse towards its realisation. His actual treatment and illustration of details A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 69 were always concrete and objective; we learned from him to turn the closest and most unremitting scrutiny upon facts and things; but in the last analysis it was always an abstraction with which he made us fall in love. His wide knowledge fas- cinated us ; but whenever any of us had come hot- foot upon some fresh question, our distinctive de- sire was to find out what Ford thought about it, rather than what he knew. Theory never came from his hands in heavy lumps, but sprang straight into flight, to be followed eagerly to the limit of our vision. And it was never as his own theory that he insisted upon it. ** Here's an idea; see it fly ! ' ' was his attitude. Many of the people who have been disappointed in him personally, feeling that he never gave fully of his personality, but always withdrew elusively from human con- tacts, have never seen the meaning of his positive passion for truth. We youngsters realised it, in our childish way. He propped a truth upon his own authority, his own reputation with us, for the first moment only ; the next moment he had left it hovering before its flight in the air before us, and had joined us as a spectator. Perhaps the most distinct picture that he leaves in a schoolboy's memory is of his expression, half anxious, half whimsical, when he had failed to get an idea to soar at all for our slow-moving little minds. He was like an elder boy trying to fly for us a kite that persisted in diving back to earth. He would stand baffled for seconds, then he would be at us again with one ingenious device after 70 W. E. FORD another to make the thing rise. ^ ' Look here ; this is a silly instance of what I mean, ' * he would begin — and proceed to tack on the wildest illustration, often wild to the verge of absurdity. He seldom failed to get his kite up by one expedient or another. He seemed to have no methods of discipline; the need did not arise. There was no time to rag in his form, and no scope for idleness or stupidity. The latter failing he simply declined to recognise. If you could not understand a thing one way, he would put it to you in another. He seemed to have come to a private intellectual understanding with each of us alike, and we realised dimly that every point had its individual aspect for each one of us. While he was engaged in penetrating some particular density of Smith minor *s, the rest of us were engrossed to discover what new light upon the subject would accrue in the process. If he was keen to give us an idea of the unity of all theory, he also made us conscious of the many-sidedness of all fact. Ideas flocked too thickly in his class- room for crime and punishment to find breathing space. It was different when we passed on to the thin droning of another master; then it was paper pellets that furtively and inevitably thronged the air, and impositions were rife. The head-master, knowing that he had a tyro on his hands, would come in at times and listen to Ford^s teaching with vague disapproval. On one occasion he broke in upon a lesson in which Ford was inciting us, in a common effort, to express a A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 71 simple story in French, and stood the class out in a row to demonstrate how French should be taught. Ford waited in polite boredom for the infliction to cease. ^ ' What is the definite article ? ' ' asked the headmaster. None of us could tell him. ^^They must learn the simple elements first/' he threw over his shoulder to Ford, and then to us, ^^The definite article is le — la — les. Repeat it.'' **LEK — LAK — LAY," wc chorussed. ^^ Genitive, du — de la — des. Repeat that." ^'doo — dlak — day." * ^ Dative, au — a la — anx. Repeat that. " * ^ o — alar — o." ^^Now repeat all three cases with me." He led the chorus, and we followed him: '^ler — lar lay; DOO DLAR DAY; O ALAR O. " '^Vcry good; now again." We gave the encore. ^^Now by yourselves." We obliged, each with a suflB- cient approximation to the nine mysterious and unexplained sounds to pass muster in the crowd. * ^ There ! " He turned to Ford. * ^ Now they know that." The incident symbolised much for Ford. Incidentally the memory" of it gave him a phrase that he often used in talking to me, in later years — * ^ doodarday knowledge. ' ' He recalled a priceless bit of criticism by this head-master, when the latter was lecturing him in private upon his shortcomings. **You must teach them facts — teach them facts. Teaching as you do it, is only putting ideas into the boys' heads." Ford remained in this school for a year, and then resigned the post, feeling that he had reached a point from which, in those surroundings, he could get no further forward. It was character- 72 W. E. FORD istic of him that he sought another mastership without having asked for a reference from his late chief, although that gentleman's opinion had been largely modified by Ford's popularity with the boys and the impression, consequent and subse- quent, that was made upon the parents. Indeed, I can remember his speaking quite feelingly to my own father of the gap left by Ford's depart- ure, and there can have been no fear that his testimonial would have been other than friendly. Also, almost any testimonial would have been bet- ter, commercially, than none. I once heard Ford's view of the matter by accident, when we had been talking about old times at the school. ^^What sort of a reference did Marshall give you?" I asked. *^ Never asked him for one," said Ford. ^'Why not?" ^^Well . . . you see, he would have given me a better one than I could possibly have given him." The fine shade is typical of a number of Ford's actions and inactions. I sometimes won- der whether, without any deliberate intention, he did not at times inflict a subtle Nemesis upon those who had disappointed liim. I seem to recall a cer- tain wistfulness in old Marshall's tone when he spoke of Ford afterwards. . . . Did the fact that his testimonial had not been asked for rankle quietly in his mind? I am almost disposed to hope so. The lack of a reference did not deter Ford from applying for a senior mastership in another school, or prevent his getting it. Apparently his new head-master liked his letter of application, in- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 73 terviewed him and approved of his ideas on edu- cation, and asked no further question. I know little of his life here except that he was happy, very much more free to teach as he chose, and considerably better off. A small boy of eleven or twelve at the time, I wrote him one or two round- hand letters, and lost his answers, of which I can only recall that they were friendly, whimsical, and very refreshing to read in an ink-stained, dusty-smelling classroom. The habit of travel which Ford had acquired from his life with his father could now be indulged to some extent during school holidays. The holi- days during his year at Marshall's had to be spent, for economic reasons, with his military uncle, whom Ford regarded with amused, respect- ful gratitude, and who regarded Ford with affec- tionate despair. Ford now spent little time with the old colonel, to their mutual relief, but went instead on inexpensive trips to Bruges and Nor- mandy. But these were scarcely satisfying after his wider- ranging experiences with his father; also they were never, in practice, inexpensive enough, and had to be atoned for by severe pinch- ing. It happened that I needed coaching, one Easter holidays in my fourteenth year, for a pub- lic school scholarship, and the question of a tutor was in the air. I pleaded that Ford might be approached, and successfully. Ford, to whom the invitation happened to be highly opportune finan- cially (a Christmas in Heidelberg had reduced him to two suits, one very shiny), replied that he was 74 W. E. FORD quite unqualified for the task, being neither a pub- lic school man nor a practised coach, and could of- fer nothing more convincing than his own opinion that he could teach me anything that was needed. I remember the anxiety with which I watched the letter, in Ford's small, neatly spaced handwriting, undergo its breakfast-table scrutiny. To my joy the verdict was favourable. Ford came ; and on the same day the appearance of a minor infectious complaint made it advisable that I should go away from home — to be quaran- tined might mean that I could not go up for ex- amination. It happened that I could not con- veniently be sent away with him to any relative or friend. Ford had always a certain quiet, un- offending assurance in idealing with a contre- temps of this sort; it was a small matter, but I do not believe many men would have put forward to strangers the suggestion which he offered — that he and I should go upon a walking tour, with teaching on and by the way. Nor would every man have made the suggestion seem the most nat- ural thing in the world. At all events we set out, and walked and talked for three weeks in the Lake District. I find it hard to say what it was, exactly, that he taught me during this time. He spoke strictly, while we tramped, or sat in the stuffy sitting-rooms of North country inns, about Latin and Greek grammar, quadratic equations, Angevin kings or French genders ; but I think the chief thing that I learned was a certain sense of command over subjects that were in themselves A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 75 comparatively silly and meaningless — petty con- cerns, in the handling of which Ford seemed able to communicate to me a kind of authoritativeness. I know that when the ordeal came I went through it without a tremor, and found myself writing my papers like a tradesman parcelling up goods from a well-arranged stock; and the arrangement had been Ford's doing. I won that scholarship in virtue of an attitude of mind. Ford's principle as an examination coach, I afterwards learned, was a cynical one; he held that examinations are of little use as tests of general ability — that they test, in fact, nothing much but the ability to pass examinations, an isolated faculty of no very high value or significance. He did not coach by giving dodges or tips, but by getting the available con- tents of a pupil's mind into a particular artificial order and arrangement, suitable not for genuine thought, but for the easy handling and sorting out of the pellets of fact for which examiners chiefly make requisition. A wholesome contempt for the entire business was, perhaps, not the least valu- able part of the equipment that he supplied. This, Ford's first experiment in coaching, chanced to be something of a turning-point in his manner of life, quite apart from teaching. Our walking tour gave him the idea that it is worth while to travel at home as well as abroad; and it was not long before he had set himself to the discovery of England. He loved places as places, but his insatiable passion, which became an important influence in his later life, was for 76 W. E. FORD understanding the minds of different types of men. He studied men as though he were giving himself the training that a statesman ought to undergo. He came to know the common English- man, the worker, in most of his typical varieties, so well that he could not talk about the working classes for five minutes to any ordinary member of the upper or professional class without convinc- ing him that he. Ford, was talking nonsense, in plain contradiction of the facts that a man can read in his newspaper any day of the week. It was not that he suggested any social theory which ran against his interlocutor's politics; in the ordi- nary modern sense of the word ** polities'' Ford had none ; but his knowledge bridged a gap which few genteel people can even imagine as bridged without real mental discomfort. Consequently he seldom let himself be drawn into talk with the well-to-do about *^the masses." His understand- ing of them remained a personal hobby that he could share with few. CHAPTER V Two explanations are due to the reader before I write of the next period in Ford's life. The first concerns my source of information with regard to a peculiarly intimate phase of his experience. I have given myself the task of setting down, as simply as possible, everything without exception that seems really typical of Ford as I knew him. I do not think that an honest biography can be written otherwise. But in reading a biography I have often been conscious of a scruple, when the book came within touch of the ultimate pene- tralia of the subject — a sense that the biographer must have overstepped some boundary, not of reticence so much as of confidence, in saying or hinting so much ; and with this sense there comes a reluctance to read further without some explicit or implicit assurance that one's peering is, as it were, authorised, and that one is not an accessory after the fact, conniving for curiosity's sake in the writer's immodest tweaking aside of curtains. The difficulty is obvious when one becomes the writer; it would be a clumsy interruption to the flow of the story to be always giving chapter and verse in proof of loyalty to a friend's confidence; but the fact remains of the reader's potential dis- comfort when the subject of a biography seems to 77 78 W. E. FORD be laid out upon the dissecting-table. To avoid a series of self-defensive paragraphs throughout this chapter, I propose to state, once and for all, my reasons for believing that Ford would have passed an even closer description of his experience as a lover than I can base upon the things that he told me. As we talked, and as he dropped out, one by one, detail after detail of his own story, he con- tinually recurred to a fundamental desire that others might only know, through clear statement, what he himself had learned with such slow diffi- culty through an ignorant process of trial and error. ^ ' I wish I were a novelist, ' ' he would say, and would go on to speak of the manner in which he would construct a novel upon the basis of his past experience — a novel that should be a plea for frankness, for straight dealing in that market of the emotions to which a man and a woman recipro- cally commit themselves, on approval, when once they have tacitly admitted that love may be the outcome of nearer acquaintance. Also, he had no pleasure in reticence for its own sake, often maintaining that human relation- ships would develop along very much happier lines if only we could all be persuaded to keep no cards up our sleeves. My second difficulty, it will be guessed, is in writing about the object of Ford's predilection. It does not matter that recognition, among a cer- tain smallish circle of friends and acquaintances, is inevitable, for there is no reason why it should A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 79 be in any degree discomforting unless to the mind that makes reticence a fetish. (And this type of mind, I must confess, I think it a plain duty as well as a delight to shock.) Outside this circle, my alteration of the name will sufficiently cover the tracks. It was through his contact with working men that Ford first became really conscious of woman as a natural force. Hitherto he had taken women for granted, and indeed had seen but little of them. Having grown up motherless and sister- less, without even an aunt to stand for femininity among his youthful conceptions, it was perhaps natural that he should have almost ignored the phenomenon for so long. If he had been made of more quickly inflammable material in the amatory sense, he might well have stumbled into initiation, in his ignorance, upon the lowest of planes; he always declared that here fortune must have been on his side. It was curious that his first con- fused inkling of vital aspects with regard to one half of humanity should have come through his interest in the cruder strata of the other half — through the blunt talk of men in a wharf side inn or a booth at an agricultural fair. He described such talk as affecting him, whether it was characterised by a beery jocularity or by a rough semi-articulate earnestness, with an odd sense of paradox. Woman was, alternatively, a hoarse joke, a terror, a prop and stay, a whirl- wind of words, a Silence. Within it all, the strong synthetic faculty in Ford's mind seemed to dis- 80 W. E. FORD cern, subconsciously at first, a picture of a woman's world, seen darkly in the very smoky glass from which the men transmitted these con- tradictory reflections. His general impression was that women stood for something that he had not yet begun to realise, something vaguely funda- mental that was treated by crude masculinity with a kind of ribald respect. There must be, he began to infer, a whole hemisphere, hidden from him hitherto like the other side of the moon, of women's interests, women's share in the uphold- ing of society — woman's outlook. Upper middle- class life, so far as he had seen it in being and as a whole, had successfully concealed from him that any such complex could co-exist with the world of masculine thought and organisation. He had thought of woman, before, as a remote and a com- fortably undefined variant of man: an adjunct, biologically necessary, and economically valuable in the maintenance of domestic functions, to be classed as such without further intellectual bother. He now began to envisage the feminine hemi- sphere as a dimly lit but an essential reality; and thence he gradually came to the realisation that the masculine and the feminine outlook had no dividing boundary but were coterminous, dif- ferent indeed but not separate — intricately, in- dissolubly interrelated. Thus his interest in man, abstract and then con- crete, led him inevitably to an interest in woman ; abstract at first, and then . . . concrete. In a sense it is true that be brought to first love the A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 81 spirit of a detached inquirer ; but not in the sense in which detachment means bloodlessness, or mor- bid introspection, or over-analysis. He had the true instinct to empty himself of experience in order to know experience ; he emerged into the sun- bathed world of first love as a chicken comes out of its shell. But his intellect was very much part of the chicken. Mary Worthington (as I shall call her) was a girl to whom slumming was a new hobby in a world that consisted very largely of the raw mate- rial for new hobbies. Tall, slight, fair, and ex- pensive-looking, she came as Lady Bountiful to a home in Bermondsey where Ford, pipe in mouth, was lending the woman of the house a hand with the mangle, and discut/sing with her the husband's chance of finding the job that he had gone out to look for. The husband was a friend whom he had picked up the day before, a ne'er-do-weel who, having broken his wife 's arm in the course of the drunken fit that had brought about his most re- cent dismissal, would on this day have been con- tritely helping with the wreck's washing if Ford had not hounded him out in quest of work alid taken his place at the wheel. Ford was explained to Mary Worthington as *^a young friend of me 'usband's,'' and had to explain himself further, on interrogation, as being not out of work too, but on a holiday. His tone and manner must have belied the appearance and costume that he affected for these occasions, for it followed, the mangling 82 W. E. FORD being finished, that Miss Worthington quite wel- comed Ford's tentative readiness to accompany her down the street. They began, naturally, to talk of working-class problems, and Mary, a novice in such matters, questioned and listened eagerly as Ford produced his views. Always keen to talk dowTi to the roots of a subject in the company of any one with whom he felt sympathetic, he must have been at his best in this conversation. Mary, chiefly impressed at first by his lucidity of statement, quickly caught the glow of his enthusiasm, and give light for light by enveloping him in that softly luminous atmo- sphere of appreciation in which thought unfolds and blossoms into language unafraid. He was an engaging mystery to her — some young socialist poet, she thought him, an extreme product of that working-class education of which she had vaguely heard at home. She had not got past the sugges- tion of the artisan about his clothes, and the sug- gestion gave the secure sense of a gulf across which romantic interest could play quite uncom- mitted. Ford, engrossed in his thesis, was more or less conscious of a new vibration, a subtly elec- trical thrill. He was of the type that enters into personal relations through fundamentals rather than by way of small surface steps toward inti- macy ; and there was something novel in the qual- ity of his listener's attention, a certain delicate allurement that beckoned on his words, an un- spoken assurance that nothing need lie too near his heart for speech. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 83 A crucial moment came when they discovered that they had walked nearly to Knightsbridge, and that the Worthingtons ' house was close at hand. There was a pause at a corner, a pretext of a few final questions, a spinning out of the replies, while each w^as consolidating the rapidly formed decision that this must not be the end. . . . They agreed, both of them half shamefacedly, upon an hour the following day when both would be likely to revisit the lady of the mangle. It was important, as they very rightly reassured one another, to know as soon as possible whether the husband had or had not managed to find work — and, if he had not, to collaborate at once in put- ting to the test their value as whole-hearted vo- taries of the poor and the dishonoured. The man had not found work; he was a speci- men too deeply sunken to find anything, unless by chance, without the aid of others, his superiors either in virtue of vitality or of social handicap in the race of life. His case, and that of his wife and children, made a very pretty problem for Ford and Mary Worthington to solve, and on the whole they solved it cleanly. But its solution was a long business — any one who has touched social problems in the concrete, even with the most ama- teurish hand, will know how long — and in the pro- cess they raised a very different problem for themselves, an enigma that was to prove too hard for final solution of any kind. Ford had fallen in love, of course, with Mary Worthington, if we are to consider it crudely ; but 84 W. E. FORD the phrase ^ ' to fall in love ' ' admits of many vary- ing interpretations, and I think, if I am to state my own view of his condition with a bluntness equal to that of the conventional admission, that there was a sense in which he was never in lov0 with her at all, nor she with him. He suffered agonies ; but they were not agonies of desire, and they led to no crucial determination. On the other hand, he undoubtedly found Mary indispensable, as she found him, for the sake of some unique cur- rent that could flow only through their associa- tion. Ford, his status now confessed — ^no ro- mantic, self-educated artisan, but, even worse, perhaps, to the moneyed mind, a mere upper-mid- dle-class straggler — became an occasional, a very occasional caller who disguised the shabbiness of his best suit in the darker corners of the preten- tious Worthington drawing-room. The two met far oftener — the Worthingtons would have been deeply scandalised if they had known — as coad- jutors in promoting the welfare of the down- trodden. (No doubt they met for the sake of meeting; but it should be recorded that several other ** cases'' are still voluble in their appreci- ation of the sympathy so uncommonly practical, so effectively helpful, that gave them a fresh and an actually progressive start in life.) Mary Worthington had played with flirtation m her time, and had become bored with it. She had never encountered a deep personal emotion before, and she played with it, in herself, as a cat plays with a mouse — or as a mouse might sur- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 85 render itself to a game of hide-and-seek with a cat. With Ford's emotions as distinct from her own she did not play, but rather commiserated them and him. At this time they quite wished that they could marry, but the thing was clearly preposterous. Sir Joshua Worthington had tens of thousands a year, and no intention of sharing them in any proportion with needy aspirants to his daughter's hand. Ford had, by now, £200 or £250. Mary had expensive tastes . . . and none was to prove more expensive, as a matter of spir- itual economics, than her taste for Ford. She could neither accept him wholly nor give him up. They hung fire interminably. If Ford had been able to play the impetuous suitor whole-heartedly, things might have been different. But he held a curious theory — his be- lief in it was lifelong, and I have an idea, though he never told me so, that it originated with Paul Ford — that no such thing as a one-sided love could exist, and that the ultimate test for the re- ality and permanence of a passion lies in the per- fection of its mutuality. An endless number of unhappy marriages, he would maintain, come of engagements that either the man or the woman has forced on, relying on a single, individual flood-tide of the emotions to float a vessel, in which two must live, over all the shallows of life. It was not that one loved more and the other less, and that the less was bound to stultify the more ; the often-accepted doctrine would then be equally tenable that the less-lovins: could ^4earn to love" 86 W. E. FORD the more-loving — that the greater passion would raise the lesser to its own level. By Ford's the- ory there was no greater passion, but only a pas- sion that was temporarily more vehement ; greater in momentary pressure, but less in ultimate vol- ume. Ford was always, if he was anything, an advocate of the liberation rather than the repres- sion of natural impulse, but when sex came into question he carried this principle into a further region than that of the plain issue between self- expression and self- restriction. ^'The sex-motif,'' he once wrote to me, "was essential to the or- chestration of life millions of years, probably, be- fore man appeared upon the earth. It is so fun- damental that we, who in a sophisticated civili- sation have lost control of fundamentals, have yet to take jolly good care that it doesn't run away with us unawares. We mustn't shove it under^ — things that are shoved under go rotten, and fes- ter below the surface—but we have got to see that when it comes up it sfian't come up with a rush that sweeps us (and others besides us) off our civilised feet." There can be no doubt that Ford deliberately refused to force the pace with Mary Worthing- ton. His own desire was strong at times — and there was also the convention by which only the man may give even the slightest explicit intima- tion that desire exists. But he refrained, not only because he knew that her emotion was slighter or more inhibited than his own, but also because he was assured that no passionate im- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 87 pulse of his own was justified or justifiable un- less it evoked, spontaneously, without any letting loose of flood-gates on his part, an equal prelim- inary response on hers. Desire, besides, was not for either of them the beginning and the end of the matter. They de- siderated a complete union of mind and outlook — not a sameness but a correlation, a perfection of give-and-take. And there were subjects on which give-and-take was distressingly imperfect. In this respect they had met, at first, under very favourable auspices. Mary had been brought up in a family atmosphere of gold-cased Toryism, and had encountered Ford over a question of the practical application of social theory — a trouble- some region of thought from which the gold-cas- ing had efficiently shielded her hitherto. As re- gards Bermondsey her mind had been virgin ground; she had not learned the comfortable Cal- vinism that is convinced of the pre-ordained un- der-doggishness of the under-dog, or she would not have gone a-slumming in so ingenuous a hope of ameliorating its lot. Consequently Ford's the- ory, combined with the visible and unqualified suc- cess of Ford's practice, had appealed to her as common sense idealism of quite unquestionable excellence, and she became the convert-at-sight of a social doctrine at which gilded Tories, Man- chester Liberals, and Marxian Socialists would have turned up their noses with a rare unanimity. Ford's later dictum, ''a man is worth what he wills," was the real root of the lesson that Mary 88 W. E. FORD so readily learned from him; and no system of government or of social organisation has yet been put forward that adequately answers the demands of such a principle. But Mary took the notion in her stride, quite naturally, on account of its ob- vious Tightness, oblivious of the fact that it up- set the foundations of her upbringing. None the less, those foundations were upset; and when other points arose, upon which Ford's convictions and her carefully ingrained preju- dices were at variance, she had a feeling that he had almost stolen a march upon her by establish- ing in her mind his own sense that human values were absolute, not relative. They disagreed la- mentably about the rights and wrongs of the Boer War, and she felt, throughout the controversy upon which that minor tragedy led them reluc- tantly to engage, that he had rather unfairly made out his case for the Boers in advance, when he had made it plain to her too willing compre- hension that the British worker was both misun- derstood and exploited, and then reviled and op- pressed if he ever resented the misunderstanding or rebelled against the exploitation. Her case against the Boers rested upon no such theoretic grounds. They were rebels and traitors— -Sir Joshua, her father, had carried repetition on this point to the level of hypnotic conviction. They were Enemies of Our Empire. They were dirty brutes who didn't wash. (Ford unwisely ven- tured the witticism that their real opponents were mining prospectuses that wouldn't wash either — A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 89 one says such things in moments of heat.) The natural result of such a discussion was mere dead- lock. Their mutuality, on this question, became a mutuality of pained surprise, with the phrase, '^Oh, why can't you understand ...?'' as its dominant motive. ( No one, of course, was dream- ing, then, of an ultimate reconciliation between Boer and Briton.) The Boer War was typical of their subjects of disagreement. Like most people, Mary was ready to rejoice in the sweeping tide of patriotic en- thusiasm that surged over England at the time, and instinctively hostile to the appearance of any critical breakwater. When Ford spoke, in terms that suggested the diagnosis of a disease, of the muddy waves of slum wastrels that rolled rioting over London when news came of some barely averted fiasco at the front, she was saddened and bewildered. It seemed to her literally disgrace- ful, it seemed to manifest some fatal kink in Ford's character that he could fail to be at one with the general sentiment. There were occa- sions, she felt — and there are many people who feel as she did — when no one has a right to hold an individual opinion. There were also generic subjects to which per- sonal, distinctive views seemed to her to be mis- applied. The foremost of these, as may easily be guessed, was religion. Ford was beginning at this time an attempt to achieve clarity of mind as regards the meaning and the usefulness of church doctrine. Characteristically, he saw the conflict 90 W. E. FORD between a spiritual and a material interpretation of life as a mere waste of time ; he wanted to ar- rive at a unity — to see how the material expresses the spiritual, and how the spiritual justifies the material. Mary had learned to keep the two as- pects in watertight compartments, and by ac- quired instinct she was uneasily mistrustful of any tampering with the partition. Her church- loyalty demanded that the spiritual should dis- claim all need of support from the material, should regard any association, indeed, in the light of a contamination; he, hot upon the track of his thesis, would fail to notice her distress as he main- tained not only that materialism was contaminat- ing only in so far as it became divorced from its' correlative and corrective, the spiritual outlook (on this point alone they might have found a basis of agreement), but also, and the more in- sistently for her opposition, that the spiritual outlook could have neither vitality nor breadth till it had condescended to tussle with the grossest and grimiest facts of man's material existence. In Ford's view, no comfort of the soul was worth more than the cushioned comfort of a sofa until the nearest slum had been accounted for; just as no explanation of bodily things was worth look- ing at that did not take into account their sym- bolic, even their sacramental, aspect as crude and imperfect manifestations of something spiritual. From religion, and from sacramentalism — the main stumbling-block of all religious discussion — they fell very naturally into an interminable ar- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 91 gument about marriage. It is difficult to realise how this couple, in many respects so ill-assorted, found it so easy, as to them it appears to have been, to talk freely and openly about marriage and about the awkward problems of sex that any frank discussion of marriage inevitably drags into court. I can only explain that Ford was, upon this subject, a rather exceptional being. He could talk to boys about sex in a way that made the, whole business seem as simple and straightforward as walking across a road; and I can imagine that he could have talked about sex to a girl in much the same irresistibly ingenuous tone. And there is also the fact that on this point he and Mary met in a common ingenuousness — she had been shielded from sex as from slumdom, and brought to the one as fresh and natural a mind as to the other. At all events they contrived to' agree about sex — very much in the abstract, of course — far more distinctly than the really nice- minded would think allowable, while maintaining an unalterable antagonism upon the question of marriage. (It must be explained that the mere word ^^ marriage" had no terrors for them personally. The possibility of their getting married was by this time quite a commonplace between them, and if once their various disagreements had been com- pletely and satisfactorily resolved, they would have sought out their officiating parson and would have had the knot tied without even a momentary qualm.) 92 W. E. FORD Naturally, it was their puzzled contemplation of the married lives of the poor that first set them talking about marriage in general. The attitude of their Bermondsey friend, the lady of the man- gle, towards her dreadful husband — an attitude of disillusion indeed, but stoic rather than cyni- cal — became a nucleus for one part of their dis- cussion. There must be something about mar- riage, they decided — about the definite burning of boats that it involved, all the more definite for the poor, who have no subconscious thought of di- vorce as a possible way of retreat in the last ex- tremity — something of extraordinary efficacy in leading people to make the best of one another, cutting underneath the irritations and petulan- cies that so often bring a friendship or an unfet- tered union to an end. Their disagreement was about the nature of this something. Mary was sure that it was the element of compulsion that settled the matter. Any two people, she would say, can keep together up to a certain point; be- yond this point, whether they reach it sooner or later, their interests, their ways or their views of life, have to clash. Here the sheer imperative of the marriage contract says its say; and the im- petus of its absolute declaration, ^^You must go on with it,'' tides the disputants over these in- evitable shoals into the quieter and deeper waters of mutual acceptance and toleration. The word tolera,tion was to Ford, in such a connection, like a red rag to a bull. He would have none of it. Tolerance was a fine thing between enemies, an A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 93 admirable half-way house for those who, tempted to hatred, preferred the magnanimous alternative of giving credit for sincerity to opponents with whom they confessed to a misunderstanding. But it was not the attitude for people who loved, or professed to love. Marriage, for these, was not to be a compelling tie for the reluctant, but a splendid declaration of mutual liberty for the willing — a mutual declaration of independence in interdependence that should commit a man and a woman, not to acquiescence in an outside authority that strapped them, as it were, together, but to their realised and expressed confidence in an in- ner authority, common to them both, that could be relied upon to dissolve their inevitable differences of idea into a common unity of purpose. Ford in fact believed, as Mary complained, that marriage, the ceremony and the contract, *^ didn't really do anything'' in the sense of forcibly fixing a spiritual relationship in a state of permanence, or of supplying a compelling spiritual motive from without for the tiding-over of a period of stress. He held that its influence from without was solely on the side of respectability and cor- rectitude — ^powerful, useful, but not spiritual forces. Its spiritual significance lay wholly in the degree to which it was the symbol and the expression of an inner feeling, a nucleus of ex- pressed purpose upon which thought could focus and around which all the vague sentiments, emo- tions, and aspirations that come and pass in a 94 W. E. FORD more fleeting relationship might cluster and co- ordinate. This notion of a mental nucleus had a great deal to do with Ford^s view of sex and of physical passion. ^'It is fatal/' he wrote to me on another occasion, *^to let one's thought dwell upon these physical urgencies ; the more you are an educated, civilised creature, the more fatal it is — a devel- oped imagination brings up such terrific reinforce- ments ! And it is just as fatal to determine, in a merely negative spirit, not to think about them: blank inhibition (if — if it succeeds) only drives the thing underground. The equally difficult ef- fort of will implied in ^thinking about something else' is at least harmless (again, if it succeeds) ; but it merely shelves the difficulty from one time to the next, and I am not sure that it doesn't end by overcrowding the shelf to toppling-point. My own remedy is, as usual, co-ordination. Never let yourself look at the business as if it were an iso- lated phenomenon. Think about 'something else' — think about everything else — but think about other tilings as they are affected by the sex diffi- culty. That's the way to get that confounded Voice of Nature into a proper frame of mind about its relative importance and unimportance. Make it realise that it was always meant to be the servant, never the autocrat of Life. ..." And I have gathered that Ford talked to Mary Worthington, not in so frank a strain but to the same more generalised effect, about that perpet- ual bother of sex which so afflicts the unacknowl- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 95 edged underlives of civilised people. Their dis- cussion of marriage, first from tlie spiritual, then from the social, point of view, had to come down — such was their mutual sincerity — to the material bedrock of physical fact. But Ford, while insist- ing through all delicacy of treatment upon the sheer realities, kept clear his main principle of co-ordination. And, in the interests of co-ordina- tion, and of his principle that sex must somehow be brought into proportion with the other demands of Nature and of civilisation, he was strong in his insistence that the mental nucleus provided by the human convention of marriage was incalcula- bly effective in making passion a relative, not an absolute factor in the life of man. The marriage- ideal makes it an essential that people should take other things equally into account. It brings everything in — necessary adaptabilities in mat- ters of temper — the financial element — questions of habit and idiosyncrasy — all these matters, each with its place and purpose, come in to qualify the single, sheer animal obsession which sex can only too easily become if it is regarded for itself alone. I remember that Ford said once, in conversation, ^ ' Sex has become top-heavy in civilised life. Mar- riage is the only efficient ballast that has been dis- covered so far.'* Their own friendship, for all the fundamental disagreements by which it was fretted, certainly had much the quality of a well-nucleated mar- riage of minds. Their quite extraordinary free- doms of discussion — freedoms, too, whose setting 96 W. E. FORD was the vibrant atmosphere of their strong mu- tual attraction — can have been possible only in virtue of that ^^co-ordination'' of which Ford spoke. It became, I know, so settled a habit of thought between them that they could talk of one thing in terms of another, without any uttered arrangement or definition of symbols, not vaguely but with the simplest lucidity and directness. And it was in a glow of happiness that they came to- gether in such talk, rejoicing in the electrical leap of feeling and understanding that thrilled every interchange. Their happiness, indeed, must have been singularly perfect and poetic at times. But there was another side to the picture. Besides their frank joy in ranging the wide expanse of thought and feeling that was theirs in common, there was the ever-recurrent moment of inevitable trespass into the region of their ineluctable dif- ferences. And the differences, too, had their co- ordination, their sensitive nucleus — but sensitive for pain, not for joy. The keen edge of mutual insight had to cut both ways. The friendship was bi-nuclear, and one of the nuclei — hurt. Nothing could be laughed away as a trivial disagreement, not worth troubling about; at the dropping of a pebble the whole flock of their differences rose, darkening the sun. In attempting to give the true story of Ford's experience, with the hope of eliciting some hint of its influence upon his life and his outlook, I ought not to shirk the analysis of certain periods of black agony through which he passed. I feel A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 97 that their recognition is vital to the full under- standing of the man. But my pen hesitates as though it were a scalpel held in an inexpert hand above sentient flesh. No one can know the degree of suffering that underlay that difficult venture along an untrodden path. The heights of spirit- ual intimacy, of luminous delight beyond words, had a splendour of which Ford's broken gleams of reminiscence have given me an ever-memorable glimpse ; but he hid the depths of frustration, the abyss of love eager and denied, the tragedy of those who can lose their hearts but cannot lose their heads. Here I must respect his so unusual secretiveness. The tragedy can be expressed very fully and completely in fewer words than it would take to outline, in detail, its lowest tide- mark. Ford and Mary Worthington lost love because they had indulged in the dream of a re- lation beyond the compass of present humanity — something too near the love of angels to be ap- proached without a lamentable singeing of mortal wings. But Ford was not to know this for the truth until several long years had passed. My clearest mental picture of the pair at this time has for background a country lane that winds through cropped hazel-groves gleaming freshly with the sweet, virginal colouring of spring flow- ers — a scene that Ford revisited with me many years later, ^ ' scanning its beauties with an absent gaze'' that told of a vivid train of reawakened memories. He gave me his memories, in an odd, dreamy way, as though he were remembering 98 W. E. FORD aloud, that evening as we smoked and watched the fading afterglow of sunset after supper at a vil- lage inn. It was on this occasion that he spoke most feelingly of his desire that it were possible, somehow, so to set out the story of his bygone experience that a few others might know and un- derstand. A sense of beauties past and foregone — inevitably foregone, because they had been of their nature uncapturable — had hold of him that evening; and he longed that one or two besides himself might realise not the beauty alone, the perilous beauty of such a first love as his, but also the infinite trouble, the unmanageable com- plex of mere mortal incertitude and worry that comes of a love-ideal left too much in the air, a love-story in which hero and heroine alike are at the mercy of the clouds and winds that are ap- pointed to make sport of those who choose to abandon their footing upon solid earth. ^ It was a romantically-minded elder married sis- ter of Mary's, aided and abetted by a husband with literary interests and unconventional views of propriety (I can touch upon their unashamed complicity, now that Sir Joshua Worthington has gone whither this book cannot follow him, with- out bringing opprobrium upon their heads — and they must forgive me this summary specification of their amiable selves), who provided opportu- nity for the long walks and discussions in a coun- tryside lit by spring. Mary came down from Lon- * This reference of Ford 's, which I have endeavored to para- phrase, was to Goethe 's poem Grenzen der MenschJieit. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 99 don and stayed with them, and Ford had rooms near by, and thence the two carried out what might be described as a series of small celibate elopements, walking expeditions of a day, two days, three or four days. The sister, trusting Ford's unmistakable balance and Mary's ''nice- ness," or perhaps with an instinctive judgment for the fact that they were too much set upon a fastidious perfection to snatch at the improvident moment, feared no sudden sensuous culmination, though she longed sympathetically for the psycho- logical culmination that should decide them de- liberately to marry in despite of obstacles. Her husband encouraged her rather to welcome than to dread the slight risk of a compromising scan- dal; he was frankly impatient for developments, and told Ford in the course of a semi-avuncular talk that any occurrence capable of shaking them up and inducing them to get a move on would meet with his highest approval. He only put into direct and matter-of-fact language the first ele- ments of an idea that was by now very strongly present in their own minds. They were distressed, and perhaps a little wearied in spirit over the failure hitherto of their long-continued etfort to come to terms; and they rejoiced at the developing prospect that now un- folded itself before them of a freedom, an elbow- room in time hitherto unattainable, which might give them a real chance of explaining themselves to one another, of achieving at last the long-de- siderated fusion of their poignant difficulties. 100 W. E. FORD Long days in the clear, crystalline open air of spring; long, open talks, and long, open silences under the deepening sky that seemed to enlarge its vault inimitably for the reception of cosmic confidences ; long twilights, when they would meet to watch the brightening of stars until the hour arrived for them to part again and return for the night to their discreetly separate lodgings; it all seemed to promise an opportunity, a liberation that might lead to anything and everything. The opportunity was in truth magnificent; but they miscalculated the force that had held and was bound to hold them apart. Nature, even in spring, could not heal the cleft between two minds that thought oppositely about the purposes of life. None the less they strove unknowingly for a complete reconciliation. The tide of spring's im- pulse was strong in them, and ever and again they would struggle, as they tramped and talked, for the consummation of thought and feeling that should make everything clear in a strife so keen as to be literally exhausting. But each time their castle, half built in the air, would collapse; their mental individualities would fall back from one another, retracted, resentful, hostile, while their talk took refuge in an atmosphere of half-hu- morous mutual condolence. Their problem changed its footing with the ad- mission of failure that worked its way at last into the place of command. Before, the question had been whether they could not go the whole way to- gether, from a unique friendship to as unique a A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 101 passion; now they had their answer, for the time at least, and were faced by a new uncertainty. There they were ; their relation was none the less in being for its failure of becoming ; and its being, its apparent state of permanent suspension, re- fused to be translated into a matter for quiet ac- ceptance. It was a perpetual ache. They decided to part for a time, to ''break off the non-engage- ment, ' ^ as Ford put it, and go their separate ways in search, perhaps of enlightenment, at any rate of the peace of mind that they could never achieve together. My real intimacy with Ford began shortly after this decision had been ratified. I had just left school, and was to travel for six months before going to Oxford; Ford had already determined to leave Buckley's, and willingly accepted the post of my cicerone^ offered at so opportune a mo- ment. I knew nothing of Mary Worthington at this time, nor did I know, what I was later to learn, that Ford, at thirty-two, had come to a point in life at which he was heavily assailed by a sense of failure and of personal meaningiessness. He had done nothing, he felt, achieved nothing; his personality was in vacuo. He had moods of hor- rible depression when he saw himself as a hollow and purposeless thing in a world of mocking un- realities. Yet at this very time he stood to me for aU that was strong and hopeful and vital in thought. If I could have read his inner question- ings then, I should have been as much amazed 102 W. E. FORD as though I had seen him turn into some one else before my eyes. It must have been that as he fought out his own battle against pessimism, he imparted to me the gains of every local success and, for the main issue, radiated the courage that was determined to fight its way out of darkness, not the tense anxiety and disquiet which made that courage necessary. CHAPTER VI Our plan was to go to Teneriffe for January and February of 1903, perhaps visiting one or two other of the Canaries in the course of our stay; then to get some kind of a boat to take us to Cape Juby on the West African mainland, and to work our way in leisurely style around and eastwards along North Africa ; and then, crossing the Medit- erranean to Sicily, to travel northwards through Italy as gradually as the rise of the season's tem- perature might allow, finally crossing the Maloja Pass into the Engadine, to try our hands at climb- ing (it is his hands that the novice uses), and to enjoy that climax of the Alpine flowers that comes just before midsummer. It was a pretty scheme, but circumstance and our own choice were to find us an even better one. We spent a fortnight in TenerifPe, of which the first ten days devoted themselves, belatedly, we were told, to showing us what sub-tropical rain can do. When we were not sleeping, eating, or going for walks of conscience under a steady ver- tical pelt that was like an English thunder-shower of the heaviest, not only doubled in volume but in- definitely prolonged, we sat in a cool verandah bordering the open patio of our hotel and read and talked discursively. I think, looking back 103 104 W. E. FORD upon those days, that we both were quietly revel- ling in a sense of release and relaxation. For me, the change from the exigencies of school was ce- lestial. I read FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam for the first time, and Ford grinned with appreciative sympathy over my raptures. The very rain, a nuisance from the sight-seeing tourist's point of view, seemed to me a blessed dispensation that gave elbow-room to long-starved thoughts and emotions. Also, it stood to me for the washing away of many useless accretions, knobby and semi-vitrified, that I had brought out with me as part of the inevitable impedimenta of the public schoolboy. I was to learn later on that Ford was as glad of that perpetual downpour as I was, and also for his own personal reason. It seemed to him to dissolve the haunting trouble that so persistently besieged his mind, the trouble of his broken relations with Mary Worthington, and to symbolise in the rushing cascades and the ever-ris- ing torrents to which it gave birth the sweeping away of the inevitable sorrow of frustrated love, the washing clean of a new world that awaited the interpretation of an observer newly cleansed in spirit. Teneritfe was indeed, when the rain stopped, a new world. We crossed the island on foot, and re- joiced over the world-famous view from Hum- boldt's Corner; and we climbed the Peak from Villa Orotava, where (to mingle small things with' great) Ford had a recalcitrant tooth stopped by a Spanish dentist, and returned wishing the A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 105 dentist had been left-handed, since his left hand had smelt of garlic alone, while his right hand, which he chiefly employed, smelt not only of gar- lic bnt of bad cigars as well. The Peak of Tene-> riffe has the habit of spreading out an mnbrella of cloud, during a few hours from midday on- wards, along the plane of a ridge that encircles, craterwise, its topmost cone; and as we ate our sandwiches upon the summit — itself a smallish crater, of which we had perched ourselves upon the highest tooth in its serration — the dazzling cloud-canopy grew and solidified in whiteness some three thousand feet below us, until we might have been sitting islanded upon that brownish- black sugarloaf of lava rock, surrounded by a sea of which the cloud-stratum merged almost imper- ceptibly, at its tenuous edges, into the actual ocean ten thousand feet below it. ^^Well,'' said Ford, **here we are out of the world at last!'' and his words had a ring that I can interpret now as the expression of his first sense of full escape since *'the world'' had laid hold upon him. Then, I only registered his remark (such was my egoism) as a sympathetic recognition of my own sense of a new and a magnificently picturesque freedom from scholastic ties. We were not to stay long in Teneriife. The day after our return from Orotava to Santa Cruz, Ford came into conflict with a Spaniard whom he found beating a small girl in a by-street. There was a tussle, and the man drew a knife, which Ford at length succeeded in wrenching from him 106 W. E. FORD and throwing away ; this accomplished, he let his sufficiently bruised and dejected adversary go. I think that this contemptuous clemency, even more than a rankling sense of defeat, roused the re- venge-obsession that proved to have taken hold upon the bully, who made such a nuisance of him- self in the character of a lurking peril, that we de- cided to go elsewhere rather than be bothered either with the incessant watchfulness that be- came the price of Ford^s continued existence un- stabbed (there were two rather comically abortive attempts) or with the unknown complications and delays of the Santa Cruz equivalent for police- court procedure that would have been necessary to bring the offender to book. Also, Ford was far from defending his intervention in the first in- stance, claiming that he had interfered solely through the workings of an obscure British in- stinct on behalf of a child who quite possibly, ac- cording to Santa Cruz standards, had dared and merited her punishment by some too effective chain of Canary-Spanish insults. **I dare say he's just as right in wanting to knife me as I was in punching his jaw," said Ford as he summed up the case; and in leaving Santa Cruz he left any final judgment of the main issue not to go by default, but to resolve itself in terms of relative values. We had intended in any case to see some of the less-visited islands of the group, and after a visit to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, interesting to us scientifically but unproductive of biographical in- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 107 cident, we found ourselves at Palma, ^ and in an environment that was literally to open up a new chapter of existence for Ford. It is my business to suppress detail that would be appropriate only in a book of travels, and I am trying to look back upon the peacefully crowded months of our sub- jection to the spell of this fortunate island with a view to selecting the pictures and the incidents that best typify the side of Ford and of Ford's later outlook which was then in the making; and, as a rule for my general guidance, I am relying upon the plan of giving chief place to the things that Ford in his later maturity chiefly remem- bered in conversation, or referred to in the midst of a discussion for illustration of the argument that he wished to put forward. By this criterion our first view of the possibili- ties of Palma, both scenic and, as it afterwards proved, sociological, certainly calls for an attempt at description. We had climbed on mule-back, for endless hours it seemed, to the crest of the pass that provides difficult communication — a mere foot-track — between the side of the island that faces East and trades through Teneriffe with Europe, and the side that faces West and trades largely with Cuba. We did not then know that the west-looking side was in this sense nearer to lands distant by the breadth of the Atlantic than to the Palma of the eastern slopes, and it was with *Not to be confused with Las Palmas, an island as tourist- ridden as Teneriffe; still less, of course, with the town that is the capital of Majorca. 108 W. E. FORD an impulse of aesthetic rather than geographical exaggeration that Ford exclaimed as we topped the ridge, *^I say! This is another universe, you know ! ' ' A glory of sunset colouring bathed in gold the grey and brown weathering of the volcanic crags whose tumbled masses formed the first precipi- tous slope beneath us. A few hundred feet down began a belt of the magnificent Canary pines, dwindling from the nearest monarch, visibly gi- gantic, to a distant featheriness of dark green shot with the red-gold of sunlit stems and branches, beyond which the single giants that had strayed from the belt a little way into the shelving plain below might have been the tiniest of dwarf trees. The plain, a long sweep down to the coast, was sheeted with almond blossom. All around, the Atlantic basked and gleamed inimit- ably, shading off at the high, indefinable horizon into the vibrating opalescence of the sky's mar- gin, an opalescence that cleared into deepening blue above, and warmed through palest yellow to full orange as it neared the sun. After a long pause to take in the marvel of it all, and to watch the afterglow creep up, richer gold than ever, we started downwards, deeply moved, scarcely heeding the feats of equilibrium by which our mules negotiated the sudden turns and drops of the rocky path. (We had soon learnt that they knew best how to pick their way, wisely disregarding any inexpert attempt at guidance.) I remember questioning whether Palma could pos- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 109 sibly live up to the first impression that it had given us. Ford turned to our muleteer with a remark in his fluent Spanish upon the beauty of the island. The man replied with a grave smile that it was '^ quiet,'' ^ but that here men were happy. ''I can believe it/' said Ford to him, and *^that sounds good enough!" to me. The dusk came up and met us as we entered the pine-belt, and the sound of shod hoofs upon bare rock was quieted by a carpeting of pine- needles, and presently out of the darkening silence we were overtaken by lights and voices, and a party of women carriers, basket on head, came swinging bare-footed down the difficult path with little torches of resinous pine-splinters in their hands. Erect and supple, warm-skinned and clear- eyed, they made a very gracious picture in the flickering glow that spaced them out against the dusky forest as our party halted to greet them and to take light from them for torches of our own. Ford fell into talk with them and the mule- teer as we went on together, still, I think, fol- lowing up our half -uttered train of thought about a place that should unite with its beauty of as- pect a correlative beauty of human character. I missed the greater part of the talk (my Spanish was still in the elementary stage) ; but I could hear at least the open frankness of their tones, and when at length the women took a by-path, * I should translate his quieto as ' * beautiful " if it were not for the pero (''but") that succeeded it. It is thus that we in the country use the word ''quiet" to warn the urban visitor not to expect variety entertainments. 110 W. E. FORD calling out good-nights, Ford drew to my side ra- diant with enthusiasm. ^'That^s the sort of per- son to be ! " was his exordium, and he went on to dwell upon the blessings of the unsophisticated life. Doubtless these jolly people had their own sophistications (they had : we were yet to see the ladies of Palma on a Sunday, their figures con- strained into black dresses of a parodied Euro- pean cut, their natural tan obliterated with rice- powder) ; but these things could be nothing to th^ fundamental genuineness of their lives. The^ looked at you and spoke to you like children, but like wise, mature children, and with an instinctive, unconscious poetry of gesture and utterance. They were humanity with its feet on the real earth. ^ ^ We 're going to learn a lot in this place, ' ' Ford summed it up. I felt sceptical — I also felt tired, for we had been thirty-six hours awake — and inclined to refer his enthusiasm to a purely aesthetic cause; but he had simply made a jump to the truth, as was his way. The people of Palma were uniquely natural; though when I woke the next morning in the primitive inn that we had made our pied-a-terre to find a dozen of them in my bedroom admiring and discussing such clothes as I had unpacked and scattered over- night, my eighteen-year-old prudery was disposed to think that naturalness could be carried too far. But Ford, looking in, was delighted with the inci- dent, and expounded my wardrobe to my callers with great freshness and zest before they with- drew, politely wishing us good morning. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 111 From the little inn at El Paso we began to make exploration of Western Palma. The island con- sists of the inner and the outer slopes of a very large, long-extinct volcano, ^ and we had come to it chiefly in order to follow up von Buch ^s theory of volcanic origins — a fine piece of large-scale objective work that Ford had planned for the wid- ening of my scientific horizon; but he now post- poned the study of the crater, which was to have been our first objective, for the sake of the more vital education that we should acquire together (as he put it) by looking into the nature of a hu- man society that promised something like a reve- lation of human values. We talked with our stalwart innkeeper, a mine of information and of wise commentary upon lo- cal affairs, always keen to exchange with us de- tails and aspects of our respective civilisations (he decided in the end, when Ford had overcome the reluctance of his courtesy, that he preferred his own — though he confessed to a child-like long- ing to see a railway train or a motor car, modern miracles, to him, of equal incredibility) ; we talked * Geography of Palma. — Cut a pear in half and put one half upon a plate with the cut surface downwards and the stalk end pointing south. At the top scoop out a conical hole nearly as deep as the thickness of the half -pear and a little wider than half the pear's breadth. On the south-western side cut a ravine that allows the juice to drain from the bottom of the hole on to the plate. The hole represents the crater of Palma, broken down on its south- west side, and the juice the river that flows through the break to the sea; and if you carved the rest of the half pear into ridges and minor ravines, leaving a steep main ridge from the crater to the southernmost point, you would have a very fair rough representa- tion of the island in exaggerated relief. 112 W. E. FORD with a marvellously wrinkled old woman who wove silk, pure cocoon silk of the rarest quality, upon a hand-loom generations older than herself, and she told us much — but not her opinion of ma- chine-looms, for she persisted in regarding them as an imaginative joke of Ford's; we talked with a grizzled goatherd among the crags who, when fairly launched upon a description of the ways of goats that had all the quality of a Georgic, broke off at sight of Ford's intent face to turn to me, with a wave of his hand towards Ford, and utter the single word ^^Hermoso!'' ^ in a tone as heart- felt as it was unaffected (I admired the equally frank composure with which Ford received and put aside the high compliment), before the nar- rative about his goats resumed its course. We made one open and friendly acquaintanceship af- ter another around the countryside, and more than confirmed our muleteer's opinion. Here, in- deed, men could be very happy. I asked Ford what he thought was the matter with them all. **Well, to begin with," he said, *^ there are no poor here^ — and no rich." We went in search of rich folk, and tramped down through banana groves to Tazacorte, the coast town where we were told that wealthy mer- chants lived. They had heard from afar, by the immemorial wireless communicaton of the Canary people — a whistling code that seems to have at- * Untranslatable; but, roughly, something between our words * ' handsome ' ' and ' * beautiful. ' ' The derivation from Hermes gives the best clue to a further meaning. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 113 tained an extraordinary perfection of expressive- ness — that the notorious English visitors were coming, and we descended the steep chimney of a by-street, to find a black-coated deputation awaiting us, courtly and amicable, in the market square. Apparently they had been at pains to discover, from some linguist among them, the cor- rect English salutation; the phrase was not ex- actly right, but they bowed and said ''Good-bye" with an intonation which reassured us that it was welcome, not prompt valediction, that they in- tended. They contended for the privilege of en- tertaining the strangers, and the victor regaled us with a luncheon of remarkable liberality and interest, and brought out for the occasion a bottle of Canary wine that had a venerable delicacy of flavour. Here, unmistakably, was our typical rich man of Palma; and the task of drawing him out was no test of Ford's skill in this direction. He took a simple-minded pleasure in laying bare to us all the schemes and subtleties of a captain of industry ; and then he took us round his estate and his fruit-packing sheds to show us his work and his workers in the concrete. We inspected criti- cally and exhaustively, as though our kindly host had been our bitterest enemy. When we got home Ford declared that his search for any sign of unhappiness or discontent in western Palma was at an end. It was time, he said, for us to go about our geological business, investigate the crater, and try meanwhile to di- 114 W. E. FORD gest the inoompreliensible phenomenon presented by an entirely happy race of people. Our landlord took into his own hands the ar- rangements for our camp in the C alder a,^ and found out through that extraordinary facility of communication by word of mouth which always astonishes the traveller in regions where no other communication, exists (in this case, surely, the Canary code of whistling signals could not have been employed) that we should be welcome to the use of certain eligible caves, sometimes tenanted by goatherds, which opened upon a large and a not too accessible ledge below the steepest of the crater-wall, within reach of a spring. Here he proposed to send us a mule daily (it would be the best part of a day's journey there and back) with fresh milk and provisions. A friendly alter- cation arose between him and Ford over this plan. We were paying ten pesetas a day (about 7s.) for taking up the whole of the small accommodation of the inn; and we had found that Don Antonio's idea of an inclusive charge precluded our offering a halfpenny for any extra requirements — even for the handsome brass candlesticks that he bought for us when we wanted more light of an evening — without grieving him deeply. Now he main- tained with the tenacity of a Shylock that the con- tract must still hold good. Mule-hire, the only expensive necessity in the island (for mules have * Crater. I detest a description of travel that is peppered with avoidable foreign terms, but I must be allowed this word (which we always used for the wonderful place) if only for its cadence. The accent falls, of course, upon the long e. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 115 to be imported) would come to 71/2 pesetas a day; and on the remainder he claimed the right to fur- nish us with camp equipments and provisions, also keeping our rooms inviolate till our return. All Ford's resources of dialectic were in vain; Don Antonio stood there on his bond. We could only determine to take it out of him when the time came to make him a parting present. We had thought of the Caldera as a geological object-lesson; we found it a wonderland. As we rode up the great sinuous ravine that leads to it the crags towered higher and higher, till as we rounded the final bend their steep slopes parted, scissor-wise, to reveal the distant ridge of the enormous bowl. Then we turned to mount the left-hand slope of the ravine by a winding path that denied a further view, till at long last we came out upon a ledge in the Caldera itself, some five thousand feet up. The encircling rim, nine miles across, was another two thousand feet above, and the dark cliffs rose to it ever more precipi- tously ; below us sloped less steeply a vast ridged amphitheatre of pine forest that broke into green valleys far below. The sun was nearing the west- ern cliff-edge that almost overhung us as we wound along the track, and when at length we had unloaded and, the mules dismissed, had made our simple preparations for the evening, the crater was filled with the luminous golden haze that heralded the sunset. The atmospheric colour deepened and brightened till the cliffs at the fur- thest edge might have been carved out of new, 116 W. E. FORD shimmering bronze. Suddenly, deep violet shadow struck the forest depths below us, and spread down, down to the bottom and then slowly up the further side, engulfing the gold in mystery. At last the distant, burnished ridge stood out alone beneath a sky of vibrating blue, and above a cavernous hemisphere of purple twilight ; and we watched the still-ascending shadow till the last peak (it shone like a planet) had been swallowed up, and the Caldera lay in a dream of grey dusk beneath the dome of sapphire that deepened over- head. Our human needs of supper and the warmth of a camp fire seemed petty, as Ford remarked, after so stupendous a sight, and the ruddy blaze of our fire and its glow upon neighbouring rocks and tree-trunks, disturbing a thousand flickering shadow^s, suggested a tremulous attempt in minia- ture to emulate the glory that we had seen. It was natural that Ford's talk should tend, as he put it, towards a justification of man's doings in the face of Nature, and, more particularly, to- wards an effort for comprehension of our Palma friends' innate happiness. ^^ Happiness is our first justification for living." I remember that he premised, *4f it isn't our last." I must paraphrase Ford, if I am to attempt a rendering of his thesis that evening, as closely as my memory will serve me after a thirteen years' interval. ^' Let's suppose something," he said (this was always a favourite gambit of his), **and see how it works." His supposition was A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 117 that natural beauty works upon the mind of man, when nothing is present to pull the mind out of harmony with it, like a kind of moral magnetism, continually and imperceptibly drawing thought and action into kinship with itself. To my common- place query whether people bom and brought up in surroundings of the most inspiring beauty did not grow up insensitive to them through sheer habituation, he answered, ^^Let^s suppose that they appreciate them unconsciously, just as a man who has always been truthful and brave, let us say, goes on caring for truth and is continually showing courage in its defence without a moment's consciousness that he's doing anything out of the way. Now then — take the saying, *^It is more blessed to give than to receive.'* That isn't morals, it's aesthetics. We all understand it to mean that it's finer — it's more beautiful. And here we have these people who have got a sense of beauty — so we're supposing — and they carry it out, simply and naturally. They prefer Give to Get as a matter of taste. Well, Give happens to be a very much better working philosophy of life, when every one carries it out at once as they do ; and the result is sound economics and general contentment. And contented people can spare an eye for the beautiful — and there we are back at the beginning of the circle." I set him off again by bringing to light a doubt that had been underlying my own appreciation of the delightful Palma temperament. They surely could not be in any way progressive; one could 118 W. E. FORD not see them mounting to any higher level of mind, or producing a literature or an art; they seemed fated to go round and round in the circle of which he had spoken, happy, but always on the same unaltering plane of happiness. Nine-tenths of them, for instance, were illiterate and seemed likely to remain so. Ford agreed that happiness in a closed circle was a vain thing, and then lit up with a new idea — I paraphrase him again : ' ^ The circle's only a foundation, a basis. These people have got the right basis of happiness. But you can't see the fun of it unless it's a basis they can build upon to raise themselves. Well, look here; suppose the circle is really a spiral — at each cir- cuit they find themselves a bit higher up than before. If so, it's a spiral that must rise jolly slowly, I grant you. But what are the things that twist people's circle of happiness upwards! Your mind jumps to literature and art as the visible signs of a rise in the scale, with reading and writ- ing for a first beginning. Education's the force that sets the spiral mounting at a respectable angle; but education's no earthly use until you've got a sound circle of happiness to start from. When your life just zig-zags about aimlessly from one discontent into another, it 's no particular fun to have education twisting you up and letting you down again. That's what happens to us civilised Europeans, for the most part; we've got the edu- cation, of a kind, but not the sound basis of life for it to work from. These people have got the basis, but not the education." A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 119 I asked him what he meant by education, and he gave me a definition that impressed me enough to make me write it down afterwards. * ' One gen- eration takes pains to shape its experience into a ladder by which the next can climb — that's all.*' And he went on to abandon his metaphor of a spiral of progress for a figure in which each gen- eration made its own circle of happiness and achievement, and raised from it ladders by which the next could climb to another and a higher circle. The resulting structure we call a civilisa- tion; and when either the base is faulty or the successive circles become increasingly distorted, the civilisation topples. The civilisation of the Athenians depended upon slavery; that was the fatal kink in their basic ^^ circle of happiness." Roman civilisation, better based (Ford intensely admired the early Romans), became twisted out of recognition when Rome became a parasite upon conquered provinces. European civilisation . . . well, Europe had a good deal to learn from places like Palma and Palestine before it could consider itself in any way safe. Palma was a working model, not of human life at its highest and finest, but of humanity upon a sound primary basis. On this partial conclusion we let the problem rest, and turned to the question of bed-making upon a basis of hay left by the goatherds in our caves. The hay proved a deliciously aromatic mattress, and the stars in the night sky at the cave's mouth were magnificent, though we should not have watched them for so long if that hay had been less 120 W. E. FORD full of entomological interest. Ford declared, next morning, that fleas had formed a complete circle of happiness around his waist — of course upon the debased, parasitic level of Get, not Give. The projected geological work claimed our days, and we studied the Caldera mth fair thorough- ness, clambering, hammering, measuring, calculat- ing ; and it was only at intervals, and, as he liked to put it, for fun, that Ford recurred to the simple main principle which had emerged of its own ac- cord from his supple handling of our discussion. It has always seemed to me fundamental, as the groundwork of any philosophy of life whether for the individual or for a society. Happiness, for any creature above the level of pulex irritans, is found, ultimately, only in giving; and real giving is possible only to those who possess happiness, since in the last analysis happiness is the only gift that there is. This Ford called a ^'virtuous circle." I remember wondering, naively enough, why so clear and simple a first principle had not become translated by now into universal human practice. Ford, smiling at the colossal dimen- sions of the question, gave as a grain of explana- tion that a virtuous circle was always mistrusted and decried — ^'sour grapes, you know'' — by people who couldn't see their own way into it. I recall from another talk, following upon the ar- rival of our mule-boy with a mail that brought disquieting news from home, that a misgiving of mine rose to expression whether Ford were not giving to happiness too basic a position in human A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 121 life as it has to be lived. I had been taught to attach a certain dignity to suffering; and there was the question of the stimulus of unhappiness — the phrase ^^ divine discontent'^ lurked some- where at the back of my mind. Ford jumped at once, not to a modification but to an extension of his thesis. Discontent is good when it is the straining out after a happiness that can be seen but cannot yet be reached, and the standard of this high discontent is raised upon the standard of happiness that has preceded it. Discontent without the underlying belief in joy is stagnant, a breeder of diseases. And the dignity of suffer- ing depends upon its being borne with joy, or with the grim variant of joy that is called fortitude. It is the pre-existing standard and quality of happiness that determines the dignity. There is no beauty in suffering itself, but only in the human spirit that is too great to be submerged by it. I am setting down very clumsily the few things that I can recall with any clearness of Ford's philosophising as we roamed the Caldera, or talked in the twilight after the daily miracle — it never grew less miraculous — of the Caldera sun- set. I miss his freshness of simile and illustra- tion; and I can never hope to make words express the way in which his face would light up with the development of an idea, the radiation that came from him of pure joy in an intellectual quest. The equality in which he let me stand to him was a continual marvel. He made nothing of the im- 122 W. E. FORD maturity of an opinion or a criticism, and never dreamed of using his skill to make a mere debat- ing point in favour of his argument at the mo- ment. With a theory in the full flood of exposi- tion he would pause to take up an objection due as much to slowness of wit as to the sight of any flaw in his statement, and would examine and reinterpret it with all his power of sympathetic understanding, finally working it, transformed, into the structure of his own thesis. He gave me a most inspiring sense that I really participated in and brought material to the building. It is when I came to reconstruct that I find out how far he was beyond me all the time. One day we took a holiday from volcanic origins and went down through the pine-belt and the lower ravines to the bottom of the Caldera. We could see from our ledge that there was a house down by the stream — the tiniest of dolls' houses it looked — and we had seen human specks crawl- ing about the green slopes around it; and the many fig-trees around the spot, bare of leaves at this season, and each a tangle of grey branches that looked from so far above like a small, fixed puff of pale blue smoke, told of deliberate plant- ing. We inferred a farmstead, and took no food with us. A longer descent than we had looked for, lengthened by the necessity of climbing again and again out of one ravine that persistently led US' off our line and into another that repeated the misguiding, brought us sweltering and famished to the door of the farmhouse well on into the A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 123 afternoon. Our knocking brought out a crumple- faced old woman, octogenarian at least, but of remarkable sprightliness. She knew all about us, and was full of regrets that w^e had not sent warn- ing of our distinguished visit — our mule-boy could have passed on the word, she said. As it was, the young folk were out at work, beyond call, and alas ! she had no meal to offer that the Senores could touch. Ford explained that we were in a condition to touch anything eatable, and she brought out amid a shower of apologies, diversified by gleams of laughter over the thought of the Senores eating anything so plebeian, gofiOj which is maize-meal, half-malted, and dried figs — ^little black, knobby things satisfyingly resistent to the hungry jaw. Gofio puzzled us — ^we had each our little heap of the brownish, coarse flour. Our hostess instructed us to eat it, dry with fingers and thumb. Now the native eats gofio in small pinches at a time, and for a sufficient reason ; the stufiF turns glutin- ous in the mouth, absorbing moisture with the avidity of quicklime, and a small teaspoonful taxes one's salivary glands to the utmost. Ford and I hungrily took sizeable mouthfuls and were bereft of speech for many minutes, while the old lady crowed with merriment at our industrious mouth- ings. **Lord, that's a tiring food!" gasped Ford, when at length he was able to gasp again. My re- sponse was interrupted by an uncontrollable peal of laughter from the old lady. It was the first time she had heard a foreign language, and it 124 W. E. FORD struck her as the funniest thing in the world. Ford realised that this was the reason of her mirth, and only made it worse by explaining the fact, still in English, to me. **But I don't under- stand! I don't understand!" the old lady pro- tested, and went off into fresh peals of laughter. When she had recovered a little we began, by way of homoeopathic treatment, to give her single words for things. *^ Plate," we said, pointing. ^*Fig." ^*Hat." It was no use. The only answer was ^^Yo no comprendel^' and another peal. She found it so glorious a joke that we made no fur- ther attempt to spoil it by elucidation. Having disposed of the rest of our gofio — ^it is excellent stuff when you go the right way to work with it — and munched our figs, we evoked the Comic Spirit again by wanting to pay for our entertainment. ^* Money! For go fitoV^^ Really her glance seemed to say, the famed Senores Ingleses were proving the most comical of people ! Her eyes still twinkled with amusement as we said good-bye. Ford was delighted with the whole in- cident, and declared that the old woman's laugh- ter was shaking down and settling many things in his mind. It was ridiculous to go about ten- dering bits of money for the small human services that are far sweeter if they are left as gifts. **It isn't paying, it's tipping," he said; and went on to speak of tips as part of the machinery that bolsters up our sham superiorities. Other people * * * A little gofio. ' ' The Canary people carry the Spanish love for the diminutive ^'-ito" to any extreme. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 125 in Palma had obviously thought us mannerless for certain offers of money, and we had wondered where they drew the dividing line, beyond which payment became an offence; Ford saw now that they draw it where payment took on the nature of a tip. Free people don't tip one another. And difference of language, when you came to think of it, was funny enough for anything. We could not see the joke of it with the perfect fresh- ness of mind that the old woman had brought to bear, but we could see the same joke on a smaller scale when two people of the same tongue but of different thought fell into a discussion — ^it was the stock humorous resource of writers of light comedy. A great part of the comedy of life, as of its tragedy, came of mutual cross-purposes, and only humour prevented these from being all tragedy. Suppose, now, that we had known no Spanish, and had failed to make the old woman understand that we were hungry! She would have had a monopoly of the humorous view of the situation. Ford went on whimsically to re- construct a lost chapter in the story of the Tower of Babel: when the confusion of tongues began, half the builders grew hot and angry about it and threw bricks at one another, while the other half were too weak with laughter to get on with the work. And humanity consists of the descendants of those two groups — by now somewhat inter- mixed, though the pure strain emerges now and then. Seeing him in such a mood for the drawing of 126 W. E. FORD morals I demanded an interpretation of gofio. There was no difficulty about that. Gofio, obvi- ously, was the analogue of information — facts — the kind of stuff they teach you at school. A pinch at a time that one could moisten and mas- ticate was good and nutritious ; ladled out by the spoonful it was dust and ashes in the mouth. This, of course, led to a discussion of education that lasted until long after we had got back to our cave-home. But I am reserving the attempt to reproduce Ford^s views on education for an- other chapter. By this time we had long abandoned our plan for a spring journey through North Africa and Italy. At first we had thought that we were only postponing this phase of our projected tour to the latest reasonable date; but even then Palma had hold of us, and soon we knew that we should be wasting something more than the tourist's op- portunity to see, and afterwards to say that he has seen, an interesting diversity of places, if we failed to soak in as much of Palma as our utmost time-limit would allow. When we returned in April to El Paso and to Don Antonio's inn, after six weeks in the Caldera, it was to stay there until nearly the end of May, seeing more of our old friends — '^old" to us in our character of returned adventurers — reviving and revising earlier im- pressions and testing them for false tints of rose now that the first blush of enthusiasm had worn off, rather than breaking fresh ground. El Paso A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 127 stood every test that we could apply. It was a very delightful place to come back to. What was it, in brief, that Ford ^* soaked in" during the whole of this time? The central im- pression of the place and its people seems to me as definite as the meaning of a movement in a Beethoven symphony, and as indefinable. There was a unique harmony between natural beauty and fundamental human values. . . . I think the formula that Ford threw off, that first evening in the Caldera, is as explanatory as any that can be conveyed in words. He had seen human life revolving in its natural orbit. He had realised the full circle, the perfect round of which only the broken arcs — arcs of a larger circle, how- ever, which has yet to find its completion — are to be found in the complex civilisation of Europe. He had seen happiness as a norm of man's exist- ence, and he had seen, springing from the soil of happiness, *Hhe deep desire to give and give again" that shows most nobly, it is true, as a character of the troubled spirit, but only when that spirit has made happiness its inner founda- tion. He brought from Palma a certain tranquil- lity that was proof against many of the doubts and despairs by which we are beset. Always deeply concerned for humanity, he never found his idealism disappointed into a doubt of human potentialities. He had known a reality that gave a permanent foundation to the ideal, and it made him fearless in facing realities that seemed to contradict the ideal. And with a firm footing 128 W. E. FORD upon this reality lie was to reach upward and grasp a conception of individual life that made him a force among those with whom and for whom he worked, and an enigma to those whom he passed upon his way. From his time in Palma onwards Ford was his own man. CHAPTER VII Nothing could have been in more acute contrast with Ford's deep impression of Palma than his next experience of a human society — the *^ soci- ety," in the shallower sense of the word, of a big cosmopolitan hotel, the centre of a fashion- able resort in Switzerland. We came to St. Mo- ritz by the quickest route — via London — arriving in the first week of June, a month before the first assembling of the folk whose holiday movements are recorded in public print ; for a full month the wonders of a Swiss midsummer were our chief concern; but this period seemed in later perspec- tive to have been only a preparation — the setting of majestic scenery for the entrance of characters absurdly incongruous. Our first friend at St. Moritz, Wieland the guide, a great brown bear of a man with the in- stincts of a child, was another matter. We iden- tified him directly we had him among his moun- tains as a true Swiss exponent of the Palma spirit. Ford was delighted with a remark of his when we were on the way to our first real climb — the Piz Julier. Starting at three in the morn- ing we had driven, half asleep, some distance up the road that skirts the southern slopes of the mountain on its way to the Julier Pass. Ford 129 130 W. E, FORD and I dozed on the back seat of the aged landau. Wieland, massively huddled upon the seat facing us, with his back to the driver, suddenly stretched himself, yawned, and pointed to the distance be- hind us. *^Kommt die stolzie ^ Bernina heraus,*' he observed. We looked back. The Engadine valley lay in blue-grey twilight that brightened to the clear azure of piled-up snow-peaks beyond, against a deep ultramarine sky still twinkling with stars. The summit of the ^^ proud Bernina" had just caught the first shaft of the rising sun, and stood out in clear, full rose-pink of wonder- ful purity. The unconscious poetry of Wieland's phrase exactly described the mountain's rose- crowned dignity. Incedit vera dea. Afterwards, as we talked, Ford asserted Wie- land's absolute human superiority, upon his own ground, to any of the climbers whom he escorted. He was their minister, and a minister who knew the mysteries that he served. All the members of the Alpine Club put together could not have mustered the three-o 'clock-in-the-morning cour- age to utter, if they could have thought of it, a phrase about a mountain's soul that he threw off between a yawn and a chuckle. He was there; his clients were ephemeral. The very fact that he was there, incidentally, to risk his life for them if they got into difficulties made his superiority finally impregnable. He would do it with such magnificent unconcern — for its own sake rather than for theirs. He would save a life (it was not * I must render the pretty Swiss variant of the German final e. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 131 he who told us that he had saved three on one occasion, at the expense of a permanent rope- mark round his waist) as he would salute the proud Bernina, Avithout the complicated trouble that we call a motive. **I say," Ford suddenly interrupted himself, ^4sn't a conscious motive always the result of a mental conflict 1 ' ' He mused, staring as though he had stumbled upon a significant train of thought. (We were resting, after a day's climb with Wie- land, on a terrace that looked down upon the St. Moritz Lake). Then he went on to argue that a conscious motive must always be an imperfect motive, an impulse not assured enough to do with- out deliberate justification; not the less valuable for that, but, from the very fact of its being con- scious, a mere crude approximation, a stepping- stone, to the true motivation that is unconscious (^ inspired," Ford put it) and gets things done purely for their own sake, or for the sake of the spiritual need that is fulfilled in the doing. This is to summarise very briefly the gist of a rambling talk, the talk in which a man, physically tired, lets his mind and his tongue run on as they will, without any such ^* conscious motive'' as Ford was himself, as he talked, beginning to ana- lyse. Perhaps he analysed the better — the more intuitively — for the tiredness that gave him full excuse for letting his thought roam at ease; I remember a sense that subtle undercurrents of meaning flowed unregarded beneath the surface of his discursive, casual statement, and I have 132 W. E. FORD since recalled that half -hour again and again to explain a side of Ford^s outlook and of his char- acter which left many people bewildered. He was to form decisions and to act upon them with such ** magnificent unconcern *' — to borrow the phrase that he himself used of Wieland's matter- of-fact heroism. But it was later on that this element in his nature manifested itself; that con- versation seemed at the moment isolated, the curi- ous, irrelevant, vital offshoot of an active brain half -bemused by the fatigue of his quiescent body. Philosophy, climbing (with a sub-interest in glacial action), and a delight that was not exclu- sively botanical in the June efflorescence of the Alps were the chief features of the tutorial scheme that Ford had in mind for my time in Switzerland. The end of June was to have been the end of my six months abroad, but when the final week drew near I wrote home to beg for an extension and was granted two months' further leave. I have often felt irrationally glad that I thus forwarded, unknowingly, a train of circum- stance which put a great work and a great happi- ness within Ford's reach. If he had left Switz- erland in June he would have been most unlikely ever to have met the Wisharts. The July irruption of tourists drawn from the most fashionable strata filled us with despair. We thought at first of flight and of concealing the disgrace of our quiet tastes in humbler sur- roundings, but Ford's final verdict — again fate- ful — was that we had better see it through. We A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 133 were out for realities ; in Palma we had seen one kind of social reality, and at St. Moritz we had the opportunity to see another kind, at the oppo- site extreme. Artificiality, he maintained, must be counted among the realities if you are taking civilised people into the reckoning. There were people who did little but play golf, where the flowers had been mown away to make a course, under the gaze of the snow-peaks ; there were people who danced by night and talked the scandal of European capitals by day; there were people who talked Art, read poetry, and played upon the excellent grand piano in the hotel draw- ing-room (one elderly Viennese lady played Beet- hoven with exactly the beauty of touch and phras- ing that is appropriate to the lighter passages of Mozart) ; there were people — these we liked best — who had come to be jolly, and were jolly; but there was no one who fitted the Switzerland that we had begun to realise. And as Ford said. Why should they? None of them belonged to Wieland^s universe, or could pass through it seeing with Wieland's eyes, for the single reason that they did not want to ; and those whose attitude frankly confessed their lack of desire for the real Switz- erland were infinitely better company than those who thought it incumbent upon them to yearn by moonlight or to gush by day whenever they could remember to do so. Mr. Wishart came to us one day, in the crowded dining-room of the hotel, like a breath of fresh air. There was no table vacant, and the head 134 W. E. FORD waiter brought him to ours with the audible as- surance that we were pleasant gentlemen. He explained in the crisp accent of the cultivated Scotsman that he had walked over from Pontre- sina to prospect for further easy climbs, befitting an elderly man, \\dth the idea of spending a few days at St. Moritz later on for their accomplish- ment. By way of a sample, Ford and I took him up the little Piz Nair — a mere afternoon stroll that gives a wonderful view — and as we mounted the easy path Ford fell into talk with him at once. His shrew^d, terse openness had taken Ford^s fancy from the start, and he for his part fell an immediate victim to Ford. As we came down again he invited us to walk back to Pontresina and dine with him en famille, and we accepted. The family proved to be his daughter Margaret and two sons, one older than she was, the other — an Edinburgh undergraduate — a few years younger. Mr. Wishart had been a widower for some years. The talk at dinner con- sisted chiefly in a relation of the doings of the trio during their father^s absence; they had been exploring odd corners of the Morteratsch glacier, and the eldest son, an engineer, was impressed by Ford's knowledge of glacial action, and was soon bombarding him with knotty questions. After dinner we had coffee out of doors, and the conver- sation becanie more discursive and general. I oi:^ght to be able to record some small, significant exchange of words, or at least the passing of a glance that lingered on its way, between Ford and A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 135 Margaret Wishart; but I was immersed with her younger brother in Scottish public school shop — we were both Edinburgh Academicals — and had no premonition of a biographer's duty. I only remember that Ford and Mr. Wishart, perhaps catching an echo of our gossip about Academy masters and boys, began a discussion of public school education and then of education as a. whole. Miss Wishart, I think, played a listening part; her elder brother, not greatly interested, present- ly fell out and made a third in the Edinburgh talk. But the picture of Ford and the two Wish- arts, father and daughter, sitting a few yards from us, silhouetted against the hazy distance of twilight, has remained with me as something sig- nificant — no doubt in virtue of events that were to follow. Ford and I walked back to St. Moritz in the moonlight, charged with the task of finding a week's accommodation there for the Wishart fam- ily. Ford became articulate in praise of Mr. Wishart, who was one of the rare people, he said, who seem really to know what they are after — the kind of man to see instinctively what is worth doing, and, having seen, to do it as a matter of course. They came over a few days later, to a pension not far from our hotel, and for the time we were practically attached to their party. The final grouping of the evening at Pontresina tended to persist: Mr. Wishart could not see too much of Ford, and Miss Wishart accompanied them upon 186 W. E. FORD the unadventurous climbs that her father affected, while the two brothers, both experienced climb- ers, very kindly took me under their care for some more difficult work. I am afraid my gratitude was not so whole-hearted as it might have been. I missed my Ford. The more exciting the expe- dition, the flatter it seemed without his participa- tion and his commentary. I became irrationally jealous, not of Mr. Wishart, the real monopolist, but of his daughter, the comparatively passive agent, and looked out sulkily for signs of Ford's preoccupation with her, or hers with him. I must confess to feeling a sense of property in him. After all, he was my tutor. Ford, meanwhile, was glad that I should climb with men who really knew the business, and in the evenings tried to draw me out over the events of the day, puzzled no doubt by the taciturnity of my unconfessed re- sentment. Miss Wishart divined the reason of my huffishness, though not its apprehensive focus upon herself, and tried once or twice to thaw me by talking sympathetically of Ford and of the debt that I must owe to him. I can see, now, how spontaneously gracious was the attempt; but the perversity of a jealous mind could see nothing in her overtures but a preliminary to pumping me about Ford, and the appeal of her quiet charm was distorted into a subtle form of attack against which I steeled myself. It was with an unholy joy that I saw the fam- ily leave at last for home, Mr. Wishart reaffirm- ing to Ford a cordial invitation (a crowning of- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 137 fence!) to go and stay with them when we should return. My temperamental foolishness did not long outlast their departure, but faded through a slight awkwardness — I was used to freedoms of self-revelations with Ford, but this was beyond my eighteen-year-old powers of confession — into oblivion. None the less I had lost my chance of realising the first vague inception of an educa- tional scheme that Ford and Mr. Wishart had been concocting, a scheme that Mr. Wishart 's practical idealism was already half prepared to set in motion; for Ford, seeing that to mention the name of Wishart was to find me inexplicably glum and unreceptive, refrained from talking about the project of which his mind must then have been very full, and I only learnt of it later, when it was complete. The fast-dwindling remainder of our time of travel was tinged with a slight flavour of this bur- ied awkwardness, though the sullen temper that had been its cause had evaporated. In any case, I should have hated the feeling that my unique monopoly of Ford's mind was drawing daily nearer to its term ; and the Wishart incursion had pointed the grievance by exemplifying the readi- ness of an outside world to claim him. Ford sensed the existence of the hollow that was form- ing in me, with its dull, anticipatory ache that kept rising to the conscious surface, submerging the desire to make our last days the j oiliest and the best of all; and I was grateful that no con- vention of artificial modesty made him do me the 138 W. E. FORD injustice of pretending that the approaching end of an enjoyable time abroad was all my trouble. The common observance of professing oneself im- potent to evoke love had no meaning for him, though I believe he thought all the less, as a rule, of the impression he was making; he concealed no vanity in the matter because he had none to conceal. At this time he met, with extraordinary understanding and lightness of touch, my shy, clumsy efforts to show some final evidence of de- votion, my eagerness to lose no grain of meaning in the least thing that he said. He gave me the only real solace I could have for the growing in- dependence of our separation by accepting frank- ly and naturally the small signs of affection and indebtedness that I tried to convey. I do not know the words that would render the quality of that serene, undemonstrative response, but its quiet spontaneity made a world's difference. He met the Wisharts, I believe, soon after our return. Events that have no bearing upon these reminiscences of his thoughts and doings kept me alike from an Oxford career and from any fuller acquaintance with his movements than an occa- sional interchange of letters could supply; and of his letters (I did not keep them) I recall little that accounts for the important autumn of 1903. Its importance lies in two facts that I learnt from him later on. Mr. Wishart made a definite pro- posal of financing a school that Ford should run upon his own lines; and my odd, instinctive ap- prehension of Miss Wishart 's significance in A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 139 Ford's life began to be justified. Jealousy, like other atavistic and reprehensible instincts of the human mind, sometimes jumps to a true intuition. The two facts — I draw now upon my later knowl- edge — placed Ford in a dilemma. He wanted the school passionately; the opening pointed to the realisation of a cherished dream; and he viewed the attraction that was growing with a fine nat- uralness between himself and Miss Wishart as a matter of high privilege and promise ; but in this he could not feel himself a free man. He was bound to Mary Worthington by a subtle code of honour in uncertainty. And as yet she had not responded to the letter that had announced his return to England. He decided that there was nothing for it but to temporise until he could be more sure of his bearings. At the least, he could avoid making Miss Wishart unhappy — he already saw that her happiness or unhappiness was near to being definitely thrown into the scale, having no equipment of artificial self-deprecation to blindfold him to the fact. He fell back upon a sufficient truth, and told Mr. Wishart that he could not take on the management of a school until he had dug more deeply than hitherto into the records of past educational work. It was wholly true that he felt a need to study the writ- ings and the experiences of men like Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel before embarking, as they did, upon an individual venture in education. But it was also true that he needed to get away and breathe — and wait. I do not know in what terms 14.0 W. E. FORD he told Miss Wishart about that waiting, but there was some understanding that he was to find out something more than his real attitude towards ed- ucation. For Mr. Wishart, the plan for a school was in abeyance until the following autumn — the autumn of 1904 — but by then the school was to be started, if, by then. Ford should find himself psy- chologically equal to the task. So Ford took rooms in Bloomsbury, and, with a reader's ticket for the library of the British Museum as his talis- man, he diligently explored the life-stories of great educators in the past and — waited, with his own life-story in the balance. Mary Worthington wrote from her married sis- ter's house in the country, and Ford went down to see her there. They found all their old lines of communication still open ; Ford recalled to him- self Browning's wildly apt metaphor of the brok- en stick, **How fresh the splinters keep and fine — Only a touch and we combine ! ' ' And of splinters in the more palpable sense there seemed to be fewer than before their separation. Their old, deeply underlying difference was there, as much as ever — probably it was deeper and wider than ever; but the regard that they turned upon it had mellowed, somehow. They could dif- fer without mental exacerbation. Each could ac- cept the other's point of view as an inalienable fact, if not as truth. It is a moot question whether it is possible to be A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 141 **in love'' with two people at the same moment. But — to make a brief digression, for clearness, into a region of abstract personalities^ — when A, loving B, meets and is attracted to C, there must be at least a momentary wavering of the balance before it tips decisively in one direction or the other. Perhaps it was in such a moment that Ford met Mary Worthington again ; at all events their meeting left him in two minds, and he could not be sure which of the two was veritably his own mind. The elements of the difficulty were hard to disentangle. Mary Worthington was his tried friend, his partner by unspoken compact in a relation that was peculiarly their own, a rela- tion that must inevitably be broken if he gave himself whole-heartedly to another. **I'm a nat- ural monogamist, you know," he said to me in talking of this time; I had questioned whether a true marriage could not co-exist with a unique friendship such as was his with Mary Worthing- ton, and he was explaining for my benefit^ — I was in some need of his experience and guidance — the instinct that had then swayed him, as he had since thought it out. His point was that the ** unique friendship," this kind of intellectual-spiritual re- lation, must necessarily be at war with the mar- riage relation, must needs, as he put it, ^^ break the full circle" that the marriage relation has to es- tablish. The married *^ circle of happiness" can- not be complete if one of the parties has to fly off at a tangent to secure an essential spiritual expression and satisfaction outside. m W. E. FORD Ford's problem, in its simplest terms and as concerning his own happiness alone, was whether he could bear to leave Mary Worthington and all that their relation had meant to him, and, if he could, whether he would then be able to bring a whole personality, full and unpartitioned, to Margaret Wishart. But the problem was not in its simplest terms, and did not concern his own hap- piness alone. He had not consciously determined how he felt towards Miss Wishart; in escaping for the time out of the influence of their growing in- timacy he had acted upon a hidden impulse of which the only conscious elucidation was his de- sire to be loyal to that other compact. I think it would be true to say that in the first development of his friendship with Miss Wishart he had seen, like a distant light that may or may not be the light of home windows, the potentiality of a com- plete and rounded happiness; and that he fled precipitately from the vision lest it should draw him further before he had made out clearly whether the old attachment were his true home or only the guest-house that had given him rare hospitality by the way. It was not solely his own happiness that was in question, but he was impelled to make the so- lution of the triple complex, so far as his own action was concerned, solely his own problem. His flight from Miss Wishart had been to save her peace of mind, if her underthought should have begun to take the same direction as his own, from becoming further imperilled. He had waited A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 143 to put liis relation with Mary Worthington again and finally to the test on its own ground, with any question of an alternative Miss Wishart left aside. If the test failed, if the long-standing bar- rier held, and he and Mary Worthington were not wholly for one another, he would go free — free and lonely, if the other light should prove to have been only a will-o'-the-wisp. I have spoken of Ford's belief in the reciproc- ity of human affection — his conviction that that part of an attachment only is real which is re- turned, and that a one-sided emotion is mere mir- age, springing from the self-deception of those who are in love with love, and project their gen- eral idea to enhalo a particular person. I see every reason to agree with Ford's conviction that but for this belief, which he and Mar}^ Worthing- ton shared, they would have married, and either made one another exceedingly unhappy or settled down to the dull truce that is the end of so many romantic-seeming unions. Their deep psychical attachment, so oddly lacking in certain essential links, ran an unusual course; but in type it may be far from unusual. How many attachments may there not be that end (end, literally) in mar- riage? Ford's experience opens up a wide but an obscure field of thought. As civilisation and the life of the mind develop, the different planes of intimacy upon which men and women can meet multiply endlessly. Comparatively few of these hold out promise for a complete union of lives; but the primaeval mate-seeking instinct snatches 144 W. E. FORD at such intimacies to impose upon them its single interpretation. Ford and Mary Worthington had this experience in full and poignant measure, and struggled through it, with a sort of blind honesty, to the only true conclusion. How many, in like case, succumb to the easy, false conclusion f As a matter of psychological clarity, I am sorry not to know exactly how it was, and in what terms, that the two reached their decision that they were not for each other; but as Ford's friend I am glad that the curtain has to be rung down before the concluding scene. It was his wish that his experience might do something to elucidate a dif- ficult problem, but it is right that the laying bare of that experience should be qualified by a certain concluding privacy. He and Mary Worthington talked together twice, and parted; and that ends — for me, upon a note of not unwelcome reticence — the story of their unique association. Ford's later analysis of the abstract problem remains. I have often thought over that notion of his, that there are on the one hand a thousand possible intimacies between man and woman, the product of recent civilised developments of thought and consciousness; and, on the other hand, the primordial sex instinct always ready to impose its own egoism and to turn good friend- ships into bad love affairs. Ford had an idea that this might go far to explain the undue pro- portion of unhappy or unsatisfactory marriages that we see around us. What might be the right issue of these intellectual and psychical attrac- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 145 tions, he could not say. They ought not to end in marriage, if the essential something else were not present; they could seldom continue indefi- nitely upon their own basis, except on condition of celibacy — and then discontent would super- vene. Ford could only leave the ultimate solution to the future. For an immediate solution, he saw hope in the gradual growth of a better mutual understanding between the sexes, so that at least men and women were coming to realise more clearly and consciously where they stood in rela- tion to one another, and to realise that not every magnetism spells marriage. This balm of philosophic explanation came later; it did not soothe Ford's present hurt. He must have suffered, and suffered for a time ex- cruciatingly, under a sense of intolerable loss — the loss of his old, unrealisable dream and of the realised comradeship that had meant so much to him. He knew it was a comradeship that could never be revived. The way was first opened for me to hear of all this long episode, so vital in the story of Ford's experience, by one of those queer, untoward acci- dents that often wind up an actual story upon a note of anti-climax. Six months after Ford's parting with Mary Worthington — when (to an- ticipate a little) the arrangements for his school were in full train, and I, to my delight, had been invited to come and take part, as his pupil in the art of education — I heard the first breath of a malignantly garbled scandal that had been set 146 W. E. FORD afloat. I infer the malignity from the form into which the tale, finally disentangled and partially run to earth, ended by resolving itself. The story that first roused my indignant incredulity was dif- ferent enough. In this, as reported to my family by a friend who was ^* alarmed to hear^' of my proposed re-association with Ford, Mary Worth- ington had actually been translated into an apoc- ryphal farmer's daughter, deflowered by Ford under promise of marriage, and deserted. This was too absurdly out of character for even a mo- mentary spasm of doubt, and I carried my wrath and the crazy legend hot-foot to Ford, to know what he could make of the business. As an incip- ient headmaster he had of course everything to lose if such a rumour had a chance of spreading. Ford was as bewildered as I, and inclined merely to be amused. His amusement changed to the only consuming anger that I ever knew him to show as it came out (I will not dwell upon the unsavoury process of digging and sifting) that the original lie, before it underwent the comedy of change incident to underground currency, had concerned those last two interviews at the house of Mary Worthington 's sister. It was instructive study in the ways of Rumour. One friend, more loyal than wise, had declared that Mary had been ^' badly treated.'' (Miss Worthington, I believe, had never countenanced any such notion on her own behalf.) Another, a victim of the hysterical jealousy that it is kindest to consider pathologi- cal, had seized the slightly ambiguous phrase and A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 147 built upon it, knowing nothing of Ford except his name, an imaginary scandal that should settle Mary Worthington's reputation once and for all. Thence the story proliferated into a score of equally delectable reincarnations. In several it was not Ford, but one acquaintance or another of the Worthingtons ' who was implicated. Ford was impelled, however, to go and thrash the whole matter out with Sir Joshua Worthington, and thus at lengi;h to get to the bottom of it. Natur- ally, he had to enter upon a complex of explana- tions with regard to past innocent secrecies ; there were words, but the two ended by parting upon respectful if scarcely upon cordial terms. Ford did not try to see Mary Worthington again. The one small seed of actuality from which the ugly absurdity had grown, the impression that Mary Worthington had in fact been '^ badly treat- ed," stuck in Ford's mind. ^^They really did think I had been faithless and ruthless," he said, speak- ing of the Worthingtons ' attitude tow^ards the full story that had now been told of the friendship and its termination. I was angry over the bare idea at the time, but it is difficult, on reflection, not to see their point of view. As they saw it, Ford had been clandestinely engaged to Mary Worthington, or semi-engaged, which w^as worse (they never came near to under- standing what the rare relation had actually been, and could only decide that any alliance so peril- ously intimate that went unratified by even a se- cret engagement was incomprehensible to the 148 W. E. FORD verge of the disreputable), and after allowing her to waste her freshest years in these intangible fet- ters had sheered off irresponsibly at the moment that seemed good to him. His apologia was not to be stated in terms that they conld comprehend, but he did his best; and they seem to have con- cluded that he was genuine but incurably wrong- headed. Sir Joshua read him a lecture upon the heedless selfishness into which he had betrayed himself. There was a certain inequitable justice in the indictment. Through the years of his comrade- ship with Mary Worthington, Ford had steadily and in part consciously disregarded the Worth- ington standard. He had always acted simply upon his instinctive conception of what was right in itself. Such a mode of life has its drawbacks, and half the business of life is to determine whether these drawbacks are worth taking into account. Any one who falls into the habit of lis- tening for an inner voice and acting in accord- ance with its promptings, not in conformity with an accepted, all-adequate rule of thumb, must needs appear selfish at times to those who are out of the secret. In this the gentlest seeker for sincerity must share the burden of Nietzsche's trampling superman. Ford's school came into being in the autumn of 1904. Mr. Wishart had at first wanted it to be a boarding-school, for the sake of keeping Ford's influence and method of discipline unbroken, but A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 149 at length lie came round to Ford's strong opinion in favour of a day school. I was asked to many of their discussions, so that when I should come to take my minor share in the work I might be well grounded in the substance of their conclu- sions ; and I remember one talk in particular that brought out Ford's root objection to the board- ing-school system. He traced to it two effective brakes upon the vital progress of upper- and mid- dle-class people, attributing indeed to these two factors much of the obvious failure of the secure classes to justify their favourable handicap in life by producing either a high average of intelligence or a consistent standard of social goodwill. The first he spoke of as a ^* cleavage between the gen- erations" that divorces the thought and will of the young from that of their elders, and makes each of an endless number of families a house di- vided against itself. Going back to the genesis of each family unit, he said that people generally marry with some ideal, however inarticulate, in their minds — some dim notion that they are start- ing a vital chain of events springing from the glow of high emotion that, for all its human uni- versality, is so uniquely and wonderfully their very own. The coming of children extends and intensifies the feeling. People when they have young children, for whom they desire all that is best in life, have an impulse towards the truest human values. They want to live finely, to create a free, joyous atmosphere in which the young lives may grow up. This may be no more than 150 W. E. FORD a vague instinct, but it is one of the deeply rooted instincts that have come through long evolution, and it uniquely expresses an essential aspect of the human spirit's urge towards perfection. The next step for the family unit and, Ford main- tained, a step without which there can be no true realisation of this high impulse, is to attain con- scious expression of its ideal through interaction between the minds, the wills, and the characters of parents and children. Only by a continually growing reciprocity could the unit become inte- grated, a thing of meaning and purpose, a true centre of radiation. And just as children reach the age when conscious reciprocity begins to be possible, they are uprooted and sent aw^ay for transplantation into the artificial soil of a board- ing-school community. At the best they keep a few roots still alive for brief, periodical retrans- plantation in the home soil ; for the most part the distinctively home-seeking roots shrivel and be- come atrophied. Children home for the holidays are usually visitors, not vital intimates, in a home that is itself quickly becoming atrophied because in losing its young life it has lost its raison d'etre.'^ The older generation stiffens, in thought and impulse, more than the advance of physical age would warrant; the new pursues its own paths, unaided by experience that has missed its natural season of mellowness ; and when the new ' ^ Ford did not use an ar^ment which experience seems to con- firm — that when there are younger children still at home, the elder brother or sister home for the holidays displays a far less im- penetrable coating of school-imposed reserve. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 151 generation comes to the founding of its own homes, in the same rosy light of hope and expec- tation that inspired its predecessor, there is no conscious home-ideal for the foundation, no body of remembered knowledge and understanding of home life upon which to base the new venture. Ford saw in this round of causation quite half the reason (the muddle of our social economics providing the other half) for the total incompe- tence of many homes to give children any up- bringing worth the name. The whole business, he said, had got into such a vicious circle that there was little wonder if a few upper-middle- class theorists had begun to condemn the institu- tion of the home root and branch. The second educational brake was in a way the reflex of the first. People among whom the arti- ficial cleavage between the generations had be- come a matter of custom and acceptance for lack of any other vision, whose power to give a home education to their children had become paralysed by the operation of the vicious circle, naturally regarded teachers and schools — and even nurses and nursery governesses — as a means for getting rid of a responsibility that they were impotent to fulfil. It was as entirely right that the teacher should be called in to supplement the parental function as that the bootmaker should be called in to carry out the parental wish that children should have boots; but the trouble was that the parent tended to delegate the whole responsibility to the teacher, and so to the teaching profession, 152 W. E. FORD which proceeded inevitably to evolve a stiff and cramping professional code of training — even as the bootmaking profession, uncontrolled by pa- rental enlightenment, provided stiff and heavy boots that mined children's feet, and the poise and grace of their movements.^ Such was always the way with professions not kept in touch with intelligent expression of the needs that they ex- isted to supply. The professional educator might complain of the commercial parent who demanded — almost the only parental demand crude and sim- ple enough to become articulate, as things are — a business training rather than general culture for his son; but the professional educator himself was already providing far less of general culture than of another and an unwanted business train- ing — a training in the business of passing exami- nations, of ^ ^ qualifying, ' ' if for anything beyond, for nothing better than a mere trade in scholar- ships, including the trade of schoolmastering for the next generation upon the same lines. This was another vicious circle, from which true cul- ture and scholarship had always to break away at a tangent, in virtue of the enthusiasm or the intellectual honesty of individuals, always in op- position and sometimes in painful opposition to the constraint of the system. Nothing better could be expected ; again a lack of reciprocity was at the root of the trouble — reci- ^The more general spread among doctors of a knowledge of orthopaedics had begun by now to induce something approaching ''parental enlightenment" in this respect. The "good strong school boot" was always one of Ford's bugbears. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 153 procity between educator and parent, between school and home. Homes that lost touch with their children, and so failed to fulfil their function as homes, could not aifect the artificial and far more technical machinery of schools ; parents who did not know their children's natures could not explain to their servants the schoolmasters what they wanted to have done with those natures. All that they could do was to let the business side, and then exercise the human prerogative of grum- bling- at the result. Ford was far from believing that by setting up a day school in Holland Road, he could demon- strate in action the ideal reciprocity between parent and teacher. Having analysed for us his view of the problem up to this point, he told his patron very definitely that he expected to achieve little in the way of parental co-operation. (Mr. Wishart had by now entirely agreed to the day- school plan.) The average parent would simply lack the impulse; and without the impulse. Ford declared, little could be done. He could only leave the channels open, welcome every inquiry and every sign of interest on the part of any parent, and take every opportunity of talking over some small co-ordination of school and home methods. But there would be a much greater chance of unconscious reciprocity through the children themselves. Ford launched into one of his electrical analogies. As hanging pithballs dart to and fro between two surfaces that carry different electrical charges, bearing each its small 154 W. E. FORD charge across the intervening gap, gradually equalising the potential between the two, so the children would carry ideas from school to home and from home back to school, and thus home and school would react upon one another unconscious- ly and inevitably, in so far as there was vitality in either. ^ ^You're an insatiable man,'* said Mr. Wishart drily, and turned to me to explain: *^He's for educating the parents too — that's all about it.'' Ford admitted the accusation cheerfully, say- ing that no education was of much value that had not that effect. Every new generation was an Aeneas that had to carry the old along or to leave it helpless behind. Miss Wishart, who had been listening to the discussion in silence, remarked that at any rate she was glad that the school was not to be a boarding-school. A boarding-school, she said, was just an artificial orphanage. Ford had at this time a shyness, a certain tender diffidence, in di- rect talk with her, and said nothing, but he flashed a quick glance of appreciation for the felicitous simplicity of this brief formula for his thesis. These preliminary discussions were concerned, for the most part, with questions of organisation and method that will find their place when I come to write of the school in being. Miss Wishart, when she was present, spoke little, and generally with the effect of putting some carefully elabo- rated theory of Ford's under the test of its sim- plest human application, as though she had been A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 155 afraid of being carried away by bis power of statement and tbe force of bis conviction. Tbere was an occasion, during tbe time in wbicb tbe first broad lines of tbe scbeme were being laid down, wben Ford confessed to a strong leaning towards co-education. He bad been reading many argu- ments, be said, botb for and against tbe idea of teacbing boys and girls togetber, and bad been quite unable to make out bow all tbe trouble arose over a very simple matter. Tbe plan of sbepberd- ing cbildren into separate sex-berds was, and al- ways bad been as far as bistorj^ recorded, tbe symptom of an unbealtby standard in regard to sex. It was obviously tbe normal and natural tbing tbat boys and girls sbould be brougbt up in association witb one anotber; as tbings were, tliey grew up in an ignorance of eacb otber's ways and tbougbts, of wbicb tbe results were always tiresome and often tragic; segregation was tbe oddity, an oddity tbat a few civilisations, includ- ing our own, bad learned to take for granted. In tbe same way tbe Mabomedan world bad learned to take for granted tbe entire segregation of women, an equally absurd and convenient simpli- fication of a vital problem. Tbe only practical question was tbis: Had our standards, actually, fallen so low tbat tbe bealtbiness of cbildbood could not be trusted to put tbe fact of sex in its proper place? Or was it only tbat our native carelessness bad allowed a monastic precedent to become indurated and to gatber accretions of cus- tom and dignity till it took on tbe airs of a natural 156 W. E. FORD law! Ford inclined to the latter view. In so far as fear of the sex motive in children came in to support the custom of segregation, it must be a chimerical fear, rooted in the upside-down argu- ment — or the bare, unargued supposition — that because sex was a potentially dangerous power, therefore the sexes had better be trained as for- eigners to one another. ' ' You might just as well say, ' ' Ford illustrated, ' ' if you found that grown- up Bengalis and Hindus had a way of flying at one another's throats when they met, that there- fore Hindu and Bengali children ought always to be educated in separate schools.'' Mr. Wishart, like the majority of Scots people, had no instinctive prejudice against co-education, but he questioned the fitness of this racial anal- ogy. In the case of the hypothetical Indian diffi- culty, he said, it would be a question of getting the children to like instead of hating one another ; in the case of boys and girls the whole supposed danger was of their liking one another too much. But Ford maintained that ^ diking" was exactly what had to be learned in both cases. The more girls and boys could find their reciprocity in lik- ing one another, the less they would bother them- selves with premature and imitative experiments in loving. And the sweeping, uncontrollable pas- sion, he said, that gets people into trouble later on, was considerably more akin to hatred than to liking. He turned to Miss Wishart, who had been play- ing Brahms to us after lunch before the talk had A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 157 begun, to compare liking to the technique of mu- sic, and passion to its inspiration. When you know at sight how to finger and phrase a passage, the inspiration of music flows through you in pure joy; the less you are at home with your instru- ment, the more the inspiration worries and tears at you, and the more you plunge into mistakes — crashing discords that you hate yourself for hav- ing produced the moment you hear them. ^'You're wanting a kind of school of love, Mr. Ford, ' * Miss Wishart commented. That, she went on to imply, seemed to be going a long way. * ^ A grounding in the elements, ' ' Ford laughed, and began to speak of the many-sided mutuality of interests that could and ought to grow up be- tween girls and boys if romantic love, when it came in due course, was to find true and happy expression. Mr. Wishart was not so sure about Ford's ^^due course.'' Would not Nature, in the guise of Ro- mance, assert itself too soon! Was it not saner and safer to keep young people's sex on one side till its time had come? Very likely it would be. Ford agreed, if it could be done ; but he himself would as soon undertake to put babies' heads on one side till they were ready to think with them. Developing sex was the inevitable companion of adolescence in any case; the only question was how its development would proceed most naturally and unconsciously. He had no experience, of course; but his instinct was that free association over all the correlative 158 W. E. FORD interests of young life was the natural way. ' ' ^ Mr. Wishart was inclined to agree with the in- stinct, hut to go cautiously in the matter of its immediate application to practice. If Ford was right, he said, we had to consider people who had got themselves into another of Ford's vicious cir- cles. ''At this rate, it's not surprising if civilisa- tion's a hity dizzy," he remarked, parenthetically. If hoys and girls ought to he educated so as to develop their main interests in common, then parents who had not heen so educated themselves would be very slow to realise the fact. Most peo- ple were naturally and perhaps mercifully blind to chances of development that they had lost through deficiencies in their mode of education. And there was prejudice to be considered — the habit that Ford had mentioned of taking separate education for granted. He suggested that Ford should feel his own feet in the matter by degrees, and at the same time avoid alienating the ordinary parent (''it's those that we have to get," he said. "No school is going to live on the enlightened ones alone") — ^by starting with a boy's school that admitted girls to its youngest class. No one could object nowadays, with boy-and-girl kindergartens everywhere for precedent; and then there would be no reason why boys and girls should not go on together to the next class in the usual course ; and if the experiment seemed a success they could ^ My own experiences of co-educational and of separate schools, and what I know of the experience of others, have convinced me that in actual fact sex-consciousness appears far more readily among boys or girls who are herded apart. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 159 let co-education spread upwards through the school. You could reform anything, Mr. Wishart contended, as soon as you could discover a method of reforming it gradually. Ford, with his inveterate habit of referring ev- erything to fundamentals, owed a great deal to the Scottish practicality that went hand in hand with Mr. Wishart 's idealism. Ford could be prac- tical enough when he was faced with practical de- tail, as was to be shown by his work as a head- master; but in tracing the main lines of a pro- ject, as in these preliminary discussions, he tend- ed to broaden every issue beyond the practical field. In part it was the natural bias of his essen- tially philosophical mind; in part, also, he knew that Mr. Wishart (and, I will dare to say. Miss Wishart as well) liked to see the gates of a sub- ject thrown wide, and that he could rely upon them to draw the light of his generalisations into focus upon the practical issue. Upon one practical point Ford was firm in ap- plying his philosophical theory of reciprocity. He insisted that the school must pay its way or go under. Mr. Wishart had planned at first for a capital outlay to start the undertaking, with an allowance of income to cover rent and certain other fixed expenses, and a reserve in case of emergencies. Ford would hear of nothing but the initial outlay. Once the school was established, he said, his business would be to try to make it indispensable for at least as many parents as would suffice to keep it going. In any of the lib- 160 W. E. FORD era! professions financial reward for the work given was a crude and nnsatisfactory symbol of reciprocity between the worker and the worked- for, but it was the symbol that found gen- eral acceptance. What people would not at pres- ent pay for (he restated Ruskin's dictum, with a difference) they ought not at present to have. The work of the school, to carry the moral sup- port of the parents, must rest upon their finan- cial support; one can only carry people along by starting from where they are, not from where one would like them to be, and, roughly, the point from which they are prepared to start is the point at which they are ready to pay the fare. A pri- vate subsidy, he was sure, would only tempt him to drift out of the necessary reciprocal touch witli the parents by giving, for his own satisfaction, more than they could understand or appreciate. *^But isn't there something rather fine,'' Miss Wishart put in, * * about giving people bread when they ask for a stone?" **Yes — ^bread," said Ford. **But not jam as well — ^not till they have learned to digest and to demand the bread." CHAPTER VIII A VISITOR to Ford 's school was always impressed, favourably or otherwise, by its unpreteiitiousness. Notliing was on show; nothing expressed insist- ence upon the scholastic atmosphere. The house in Holland Road gave the impression of being a house before it was a school-house; the rooms were rooms first and class-rooms second. The little community was a household first and fore- most, and then a household specialised, but spe- cialised as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, for the business of teaching. Ford recognised that his refusal to let desks drive out tables and chairs, or maps oust pictures from the walls, made the place look amateurish in the eyes of many parents, even as his system of teaching seemed casual and discursive to any one who did not trouble to realise the broad and sys- tematic plans upon which it was based. His views upon desks and wall-maps were of a piece with his view of education in general. I remember his explaining these views to a conscientious mother who had made something of a study of modern class-room apparatus, and was as much scandal- ised to see a class sitting on chairs and working at tables as if she had seen the children encour- aged to eat Irish stew with their fingers. Desks, 161 162 W. E. FORD he said, cramped a cliild into one position. If the desk could be, and was, adjusted to the child's measurements with scientific accuracy, the one position that was allowed for was a right one; if not, it was a wrong one. But no child could stay in one position, right or wrong, for more than a minute, and the ideal one-position desk re- quired an ideal one-position child not yet invent- ed. With a table and a chair any number of slight changes of position were possible, and a child could be taught, as he ought to be taught, what positions were not good for his bodily well- being, and for what reasons. Ford's attitude towards this detail of physical education typifies his treatment of mental and moral education. He disliked harness and blink- ers for children, believing rather in giving them the opportunity and the means for self -guidance. To his mind, rigid rules of work and of behaviour were as useless — and as ugly — as rigid desks. Other educators have had the same idea, but have substituted slackness for rule. Ford was among the more thoughtful ones who have realised that there is no freedom without self-rule; and that self-rule has to be taught. His objection to wall-maps as a permanent school-room decoration was precisely the reason for which many teachers like to keep them hung up: that they help children to fix the shape of countries in their minds unconsciously and auto- matically. Ford considered that a map lies to a child who merely stares at it : it leads him to think A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 163 of countries in terms of flat space only, as abstrac- tions without reality. He wanted to teach what a country is and what happens in it before bring- ing in an abstract diagram of its shape; and to lead up to keen and intelligent map-reading he wanted to teach how lands are explored and sur- veyed, as well as how they have been formed by Nature. I am tempted to go on and explain how he linked up stories of exploration with histor>^ teaching, surveying with geometry, and physical geography both with world-history and with nat- ural science; Ford's educational system had all its parts so closely inter-connected that I cannot touch it at a single point — like this point of the absence of wall-maps — without being dra^Ti into a consideration of the whole. To look under the surface of his method was to see the natural con- nections between diverse ideas spreading and link- ing up in every direction. This was why his pupils remembered what they were taught. They had ever}i:hing else to remember it by. But this was also why his scheme appeared unsystematic to people accustomed to keep ideas in watertight compartments, and to bring out only one at a time. The visitor looked for \dsible scholastic ma- chinery; and there was none to be seen. The in- visible mechanism was the type of mental life by which the school subsisted. Mr. Wishart, while fully appreciative of Ford's ideal, was concerned from a business point of view at his disregard for visible evidence of the 164 W. E. FORD nature of the schooPs work. Ford, he said, was hiding his light under a bushel. It seems to me, in retrospect, that the school might have become famous, instead of being appreciated only by an enthusiastic few, if a way could have been found to show more tangible results of what was being done. But no one was inventive enough to sug- gest exhibits which, while genuinely representing the work of a class, would be obvious and strik- ing enough to impress a visitor ignorant of edu- cational method. Only Ford could have done this, and Ford had no wish to do anything of the kind. He said that he wanted our classes to do their work for its own sake, not in order to impress stupid people. I think he was glad, at the back of his mind, to keep off the kind of parent who is always wanting to *^see results*' — to pull the plant up and see how it is growing. His idea of a partnership between school and home in the up- bringing of a child demanded parents who would enter into the school's interests without having the school turned into a show. Certainly the un- derstanding that existed from the first, and grew fuller as time went on, between the school and the keenest of the parents, was a unique and an excellent thing ; but many of the parents dropped the attempt to understand Ford's work at a very early stage. It is one thing to teach children to think; it is quite another to induce thought in grown-up people who have firmly established in themselves the habit of avoiding thought. Ford's system, as it was, was suited to an aristocracy of A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 165 thoughtful and responsible parents. To have made it democratic he would have had to make concessions — to lower the thought of the school, in some degree, towards the level of thought pre- vailing in the average home. And Ford would never hear of the *^ democratic'' view that neces- sitates levelling down. The Wisharts had many friends in London whose interest was easily engaged in a scheme for an ideal education. Some of these sent their children to the school, several from a considerable distance ; others, in turn, interested their friends, passing on Ford's prospectus and syllabus — a closely-written digest of his scheme of teaching which was an educational eye-opener for those who troubled to read it. The nucleus of the school's clientele — eight families, sending ten children, if I remember rightly — ^was of Mr. and Miss Wishart's forming. Seven more children, our seven youngest, came from the immediate neighbourhood, where a printed announcement of the school's inception had been circulated by post. Although we had had hopes of starting upon a larger scale than this, Ford was not ill satisfied with a total of seventeen children for the first term. We shared the teaching with a Swiss lady, Mme. Ajidree, who had done much work at Neu- chatel in the educational tradition of Pestalozzi and Froebel; besides teaching the small kinder- garten class exceedingly well, she held the office of matron, and came into daily collision, over ev- 166 W. E. FORD ery conceivable matter of opinion, with the moth- ers or nurses who convoyed the children to and from the school. Ford, called in as arbitrator in many of these disputes, had his powers of di- plomacy severely tested. In addition I, as a nov- ice in the art of teaching, was dependent upon his direction at every turn. Perhaps it was as well that he had not larger numbers to cope with in first encountering the realities of headmaster- ship — though a small community is in some ways more difficult to govern than a large one. At any rate, the parents of a small school show little compunction in taking up the headmaster's time, and Ford had plenty of opportunity to gauge the main difficulty in establishing a part- nership between school and home. There was a local materfamilias, well endowed with that ma- jestic something which is called a presence, whom I will call Mrs. A. Besides a presence, she had the voice and articulation of one whose mind is made up on all points, and her statements to Ford were for all the world to hear. She began by expressing the hope that he had a strong personality. A strong personality, she assured him, was essential for a schoolmaster. Ford said that he hoped to develop some signs of personality in the children. *^ Children have no personality," said Mrs. A. (I was thankful that Mme. Andree was not present to pour a torrent of wrath upon this flat negation of Froebel's chief principle.) Ford suggested that perhaps it was the fault of their upbringing if they had not. But A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 167 Mrs. A. had disposed of that subject, and now wished to let Ford know that her boy, then aged six, would in time have to make his own way in the world. Ford remarked that if the child were learning to think during the next few years he would be doing as well for his future career as possible. *^ There's altogether too much thinking,'' said Mrs. A. (whom I hope my memory reports with fair accuracy — nothing but direct statement can suggest the decision of her pronouncement). ^*When it's a question of a scholarship or a place in some business, the thing will be, What does he know?" Having thus settled that point, she told Ford that the boy had enough play at home, and that she expected him to work at school; that he was very naughty at home, and was being sent to school to learn discipline ; and that he was one of those children that can be led, but cannot be driven. Mrs. A. proved quite immune to Ford's idea of parental co-operation, but she became a staunch supporter of the school as she noted the results in her own boy's case of a method of teaching which she consistently fought at each successive point. But having issued her instructions she paid little more attention to Ford that term, pre- ferring a good honest nose-to-nose argument with Mme. Andree over every detail of Froebel's sys- tem of educative play. Both ladies said their say, often simultaneously, and were satisfied ; and 168 W. E. FORD meanwhile the education of Jack A. proceeded, to their equal contentment. As representing another type of parent equally inaccessible to Ford's co-operation ideal, I have a fairly distinct recollection of a mother who may be called Mrs. B. She stood in awe of Ford from the first, overpowered by her recognition of some- thing in him which she inadequately described as his ^^ cleverness.'' She came to me as to a less lu- minous body — shining with the milder, reflected light — and said that she was sure Mr. Ford was a wonderfully clever teacher, but that she did hope he had a strong personality. (The opening was already familiar to me; it is one of the two principal remarks by which the teaching profes- sion recognises the inept parent.) She was afraid that her little boy had rather a weak nature. He was so easily led into mischief by older children. (Charlie B. proved to be an original-minded young monkey who never joined a group, whether for good or for mischievous fun, without leading it.) He needed, she said, a strong hand over him, to influence him in the right direction. I had sufficiently absorbed Ford's principles to offer a tentative suggestion that perhaps the child need- ed to be taught how to keep a controlling hand upon himself. Mrs. B. feared that he was of too weak a nature ever to learn this. She placed implicit confidence in Mr. Ford. If only his per- .sonality was strong enough to overcome the weak- ness of her boy's character. . . . She broke off, leaving me to imagine what the intensity of her A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 169 gratitude would be. But she recovered herself to add that Charlie was one of those children who can be led but cannot be driven. When I reported my interview with Mrs. B. to Ford, he said at once that he had little hope of her from the co-operative point of view. She was the kind of person, he said, who offers nothing — not even what there is to offers — and quietly, humbly, expects everything. None the less, Mrs. B. proved a ^^good" parent, from the schooPs point of view. She at least sent us her two young- er children as soon as each was old enough. But she never knew what was done with them. Her enthusiasm for Ford^s scheme rested upon a blind devotion. I remember Ford alluding, two or three times in the course of that first term, to the two catch phrases that ring so inevitably upon a teacher's ear. ^^ These people have got hold of the right end of the stick at last, ' ' he once said. * ' No child can be driven, effectually; leading is the only way.'' But they got no further, as he put it on another occasion, than the very tip of the stick's right end. They would make it out that the stick itself was the good old-fashioned ^^rod" of our forefathers in a new incarnation — that for coer- cion by beating we could only substitute coercion by a mysterious thing called personality, in its essence a kind of hypnotism. This, Ford main- tained, was a step downward, not upward, from the *^rod." The dominance of the thick stick at least left a child free to rebel in secret ; the dom- 170 W. E. FORD inance of a personality invaded even the secret recesses of Ms soul, and left him no freedom at all. ^^TheyVe got the right end of the wrong stick, in fact," he concluded. Leading, not driv- ing, was the right way for education ; but it must not be a leading of the blindfolded. It would give a better idea of the teacher's business, Ford thought, to say not that he has to lead the way, but that he has to point the way. Children have to be taught to see clearly what the pointing fin- ger indicates ; but to reach the spot indicated they must not be led there in blindness, but encouraged to see and feel their way to it, and to strengthen their mental and spiritual sinews by a struggle of their own to climb to the ideal that has been made clear to them. **Only we've got to be jolly sure," Ford added, ^Hhat we don't point to anything quite out of their reach. Then they fall backwards and get disheartened. ' ' The seventeen children were taught in two classes, of which the higher was subdivided again for certain subjects. Their ages ranged from six to twelve; a few boys of thirteen and fourteen would have been sent to us, but Ford had decided to take none over twelve to begin with, intending to build up the middle and upper forms of the school chiefly of those who should rise, properly grounded in the elements of his system, from the lower. It was not only that he wanted to make sure in this way that a coherent sequence of meth- od should eventually run through the school; he A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 171 also hoped for the support of parents who would have seen the point of his method in the earlier stages, and would realise that he knew what he Avas about when it came to the later stages. The kindergarten opened as a little group of four boys and three girls, all in their sixth or seventh year; new arrivals, dropping in casually during the term, increased the number to a dozen. Here Mme. Andree taught with the practised pa- tience and suavity which she reserved for her dealings with children, clamouring to Ford every now and again for the apparatus prescribed by the Froebel Society. Ford, who always held that no teacher should be more dependent upon ready- made apparatus than was absolutely necessary, encouraged her to invent, and to get her children to invent, every kind of home-made substitute for the Froebel *^ gifts," thus logically carrying on FroebePs own principle of drawing out the origi- native activity of children. He took the kindergarten himself for a daily lesson known as '^Questions," which consisted nominally in his explaining in turn as many prob- lems as the children had time to propound to him, but really in his showing them how to hunt down the answers for themselves with as little help as possible. He always allowed three questions from the same child upon the same subject, pro- vided they could be put in the form of What I How? and Why?— in that order. What, Jack A. would ask, were the men doing in the road out- side ? Evidence was forthcoming from the differ- 172 W. E. FORD ent observations of the children who had watched them : they were laying gas-pipes ; and there fol- lowed attempts on the children's part to explain what coal-gas is. (Ford, of course, gave no sci- entific explanation at this stage — that wonld come years later — but only encouraged description and definition of what the children had observed.) Next, how was gas made? Jack A. had to rest content, in the present stage of his understand- ing, with an elementary and partial examination of this query; but more could be said about the way in which gas is distributed to houses. There was a pause : the questioner did not want to waste the last of his three opportunities to lead the quest. Then — '^Why can't you see the gas when it isn't alight r' Ford lit a cigarette (not, by the way, his usual practice in school hours), and blowing a puff of smoke round the gas-jet, turned it on. *^You can, now," he said, as the escaping gas swept the smoke upwards. ** Can't you?" The class as- sented, all but Jack, who was keen to push his question home. *^No, you can't — you only see the smoke go up!" he said, and blushed with pride when Ford told him that he was quite right — and that he would not be able to understand why you can see through some things, and cannot see other things at all, until he had learned a great deal more about the what and the how of things. This elementary foundation-laying for an or- derly habit of thought was by no means directed towards satisfying the young and inquiring mind A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 173 upon all points ; its immediate lesson was, rather, that there is only a partial answer to most ques- tions, and that the completer answer needs more knowledge and more practice in thinking. Visi- tors who came in to hear Ford give a lesson often thought him ^ inconclusive, ^ ' when his aim was to make children begin to realise that all knowl- edge is inconclusive, and would lose its eternal attraction if it were not. His later work with older children always had the same quality, and gave the same sense that the class was a single organism reaching out, grasping and holding what it was able to grasp, but always with an eager eye upon something beyond, not yet grasped, but presently to be seized upon and made a hand- hold in the further climb among the mountain ridge of knowledge. No marks or prizes were given in Ford's school. They would have seemed irrelevant. Eegarded as concrete recognition of a child's advance, they would have meant little to children who thought less of the small things that they had done than of the splendid things that they wanted to do; regarded as a stimulus to competition they would have meant nothing to children who never thought about beating each other, but only about beating themselves. Among the ten children, that first term, who were above the kindergarten age — our Form I., divided for the two more formal subjects of gram- mar and mathematics into Forms la and lb — there was no idea of precedence from the start. 174 W. E. FORD la gave itself no airs because it knew an intransi- tive from a copulative verb or could solve a prob- lem in simple proportion; somebody in Ih was always likely to redress the balance when the two divisions united into a homogeneous Form I. for history or composition. The essence of the mat- ter is that Ford studied to bring out the some- thing unique and irreplaceable that exists in ev- ery individual child. His children learned to re- spect this something in one another; and they learned self-respect by the same process. This is a biography of Ford, not a treatise up- on his educational method, but a few notes upon that method are essential because his teaching was, at this period, by far the greater part of his life. The time-table of our little Form I. really gives the whole of his system in embryo. When Forms II., III., IV., and V. came into being as time went on, their time-tables were essentially the same, only the parts of Ford's system had budded and branched into an increasing diversity of connected ''subjects.'' The day began with a scripture lesson. Ford regarded the Bible as a history — the history of a people, viewed from the single standpoint of goodness. He taught that in the Bible you find everything tested by the question. Is it right? — a question often asked crudely and answered clumsily, but always insist- ently asked. As he taught it, the Bible was the story of the development of a sense of right. With this main line of thought he connected every kind of incident and illustration from history and A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 175 from everyday life with which the children were familiar. He taught no creed, considering this to be the business of parents and priests; but he taught simply and clearly what is and has been believed by different people, and what good has come of their beliefs. Later, with older children, he explained other beliefs as well as those of the Bible. He did not so much ^Heach a religion" as bring out the connection of all religion with thought and life, and its influence for good or evil according as it is nobly or degradedly conceived. The next lesson on the morning list was gram- mar. Ford taught the structure of language as a single science, beginning with the structure of English, then comparing English with French, and connecting both, later on, with the more exact structure of Latin. He wasted no time in having the same laws of language taught separately and under different names as English, French, and Latin grammar; and as regards differences of structure between languages he avoided the end- less mistakes that children make through con- fusing the rules of one language with those of another by setting out these differences of rule parallel to one another, as it were, in the chil- dren's minds. He used no text-books, but taught children how to reconstruct the rules of grammar for themselves by analysing passages that had been read beforehand — often passages that had been read in other lessons. He made grammar interesting, first, because he used the fact that children always like to pick things to pieces and 176 W. E. FORD see how they are made, and second, because he chose passages that were interesting or beautiful in themselves, and showed how their quality de- pended upon their structure. Mathematics he taught as one science from the first, and throughout the later development of the school. To teach arithmetic, geometry, and alge- bra in separate lessons was in his view as wasteful of time, and as misleading, as to teach the structures of different languages separately. And here again he continually drew material from other lessons. The ^^ made-up" problem — such as the useless ascertainment of the number of days in which A can do an unspecified piece of work — had no place in his teaching. Actual material for problem work was drawn from the facts and fig- ures of the geography and natural science les- sons and from doings in real life with which the children had some acquaintance ; and they learned to state their problems for themselves as well as to solve them. Problem work was his foundation for mathematical teaching ; practical mathematics came before theoretical. At any rate he was so far justified that his older pupils eventually showed greater keenness for pure mathematics, and better sense in the handling of theory, than is often found in the rank and file of advanced mathematical students. After the Swedish drill and mid-morning break •that came after the mathematical lesson, there fol- lowed a period devoted to history and geography. Ford did not merge the two subjects entirely into A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 177 one, but he taught them in very close connection with one another. He thought it absurd to talk about the activities of man without constant rela- tion to the environment of man; and, since he taught the detailed history of individual nations only within a general framework of world-history, he naturally referred at every turn to that histori- cal geography which explains many of man's op- portunities and vicissitudes upon this planet. The aspect of geography which is really a branch of physical science he kept in connection with the work done in the science lessons ; the mathematics of geography, as we have seen, were carried for- ward to be worked out in the mathematical lesson. The biographical and literary sides of histoiy were connected with the lessons in literature and composition next to be noted. The aspects of history which relate to modern civics and polities came into touch with another lesson to be de- scribed later on. The literature and composition period — the last in the morning's time-table — was concerned pri- marily with the art of language, as the grammar period was primarily concerned with the science of language. Here the children studied models of language rightly and artistically used, English, French, and, at a later stage, Latin, and practised their immature style by endeavoring to summar- ise, restate or imitate the written word of masters in the literary craft. Ford chose his models both for their intrinsic literary value and for their relation to any of the other lessons that the 178 W. E. FORD Form was learning at the time. The great his- torians, the great scientists, the great statesmen were called in evidence of his teachings in history, science or politics, as well as the great poets in prose or verse, the perfection of whose phrasing was later to be put under the grammatical micro- scope. The children's own compositions, how- ever, were not only in reproduction or imitation of models ; Ford cared more than anything to de- velop originality. But the original essays written in this lesson were usually written around mate- rial or ideas derived from other lessons : one essay would be about a character lately studied in his- tory, another upon the literary or poetic aspect of some fact of natural science, a third upon a problem of everyday life that had been brought out in the last lesson in civics. The literature les- son, more than any (unless it were the scripture lesson), brought all Ford's teaching into a com- mon, human focus. (I am necessarily straying far beyond the scope of our first term's work, and of the childish lim- itations of Form I., in this attempt at a crude summary of Ford's time-table. But there is scarcely a point of method that I have indicated — though the statement may seem surprising — which Ford did not apply during that first term, in simple and elementary ways, to the actual and effective teaching of Form I., a Form of ten and eleven-year olds. It was part of Ford's genius as a teacher to be able to present large schemes in embryonic shape, and to bring the germs of A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 179 mature ideas into touch with immature minds.) The afternoon time-table varied more for the different days of the week. The first period, a comfortably lengthy one, was given on two days to natural science, largely experimental, on two to drawing and painting, and on two to hand- work of various kinds. On the two latter after- noons there were games — a field had been taken west of Shepherd's Bush. Ford was never a good player of games — he never had enough practice — ^but he was an excellent coach. On the other four days Form I. went on to French reading and conversation with Mme. Andree, while Ford took the kindergarten in '^Questions.'' There fol- lowed lessons in reading aloud, recitation or act- ing — incidents drawn from history or other studies being often dramatised by the children; and Miss Wishart came in to give a bi-weekly singing lesson with Ford's assistance. A volume might be written about Ford's teach- ing of science. The principal thing and the sim- plest thing to be said about it is that he taught science as a whole and as an outlook upon life.^ Form I. began with elementary nature study, connected with the arithmetic, geography, and drawing lessons — and to mention these con- nections is to make it clear that ^^ nature study," ^ I have outlined an adaptation of the scheme, omitting many features that could not be adopted in most schools without a revolution in method, in an article entitled ''School Science: the Synthetic Method," Tvhich appeared in The Times Educational Supplement of 3rd December 1912, and was the subject of a leading article in The Times of the same date. 180 W. E. FORD in Ford's hands, was not only the study of seed- lings and tadpoles. I will take a single instance from a time when Form II. had come into being, a few terms later on. The children's lessons in world-geography had reached a stage in which the formation of land and the wearing-down of rock into soil had been discussed, and different types of countryside and their vegetable products were being considered. Ford and I wrote to friends in different parts of England and obtained samples of different types of soil. These went to the laboratory, where the children of Form II., working in pairs, and each pair analysing one sample, proceeded to separate and weigh the con- stituents of the different soils — clay, sand, lime, organic matter, and so forth — and to note down in what quantity each constituent was present. The notes from this lesson were used as mate- rial for the next mathematical lesson. Form II. was then at work upon proportion and per- centages, and to work and table the percentage composition of the different soils was an appro- priate exercise. In the next science lesson the remainder of each sample was put into an earthen- ware pan, and each pan was sown with the same number of the same typical seeds ; thereafter, the pans of soil were given strictly equal treatment in the matter of moisture, warmth and light; the seedlings were then measured at intervals and drawn (of course in the drawing lesson) to show how each appeared to like its quarters. Finally, all the records and notes were brought together A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 181 in a composition lesson, and the members of Form II. wrote up their account of the whole proceed- ing. This is a particularly plain and obvious example of Ford's method in teaching elementary science. Its defect as an instance is that it is too simple; most of the illustrations of his procedure that could be cited would give a much fuller idea of the meaning that science had for him and for those whom he taught. But to follow any of the threads that were more intricately woven into the fabric of his teaching, would be to make his teaching the sole theme for the remainder of this book; if I pull at any really important thread of thought in his educational system, it is to find that half a dozen other threads follow, and that these in turn are followed by a score of fresh filaments, all essential to the texture. If I were to touch, for further instance, upon his treatment of the much-laboured topic of flower-fertilisation as a study conducive to eugenic realisations, I should be compelled to disentangle at great length all the slight, fugitive, but carefully thought-out and in- terrelated tendencies in his teaching towards a rational outlook upon the subject of sex. Whether Ford was explaining, with careful frankness, some crude phrase in the Old Testament, or touching upon the moral of Greek and Roman decadence, or describing the pollination of flowers, he had an ultimate aim in mind ; towards this all his gradual allusions converged. He wanted to lead children towards a right and a natural understanding of 182 W. E. FORD sex — ^not to a mere acquaintance, often dangerous by itself, with natural facts, but to an under- standing that would gradually put fact into its proper relation with feeling, and lead the later emotions of adolescence outward, not inward — into the world of ideals and of the creative imag- ination, not into the sensuous imaginings of con- strained, inward-looking youth. But this, though only a single point of Ford^s scientific method in its wider aspect, is one that concerns his educa- tional methodology rather than his biography. It is time to turn from Ford's system regarded as a training for the mind, and to speak of its relation to the training of will and character — not that the two aspects can be separated, except as a matter of convenience in description. It was an essential point in Ford's theory of education that all training is character-training, either good or bad, and that the teaching which isolates mind- training during any part of the school day is not merely neglecting the character during that time but actively spoiling it. This is not to say that he was continually harping upon morals. He be- lieved in leading children to seek the truth of things for its own sake — in developing their in- tellectual conscience; and he believed that this conscience is destroyed by any teaching that is merely a mental gymnastic and nothing more. I remember his stating this view to me in some such terms as these : It is part of our business in education to aim at making the world as we see it more like the world as we think it ought to be. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 183 There are two obvious defects in tlie world as we see it : ignorance, and nnreadiness to apply what knowledge there is. The remedy for the first is a wider spread of knowledge, and this is often thought to be the only province of education. But it is of no use to spread knowledge which mil only be vitiated by the second defect. People who know what to do and are not doing it have a sore spot in their under-consciousness — a region of funda- mental insincerity and uneasiness. Take the case of the slums, he said. We all know enough by now to have made sure that slums ought to be abolished, not only as a matter of human decency, but as a matter of social health and prosperity. But we don^t get it done. Ask any individual why this is, and the answer will be that we can't see how to set about it. But it is the will, not the way, that is really wanting — or rather the turning of the will into an effective channel. Every one cares about abolishing pov- erty except a minority of profiteering ruffians who care about nothing but making money; and even these have begun to see, from the purely commer- cial point of view, that the poverty and ill-health of employees is a drag upon business. The trou- ble is that we keep our knowledge and our pity and even our commercial wisdom in one pocket, and our will in another. We have never had any real practice in keeping our knowledge and our will in touch with one another. And when it comes to action — such as fixing a rate of wages, or running up a new block of tenements in Ber- 184 W. E. FORD mondsey — sheer, blind inertia keeps up as close to the bad old way as possible. Both public opin- ion and the law are far ahead of our practice ; but sweating goes on, and surveyors are still squared to pass evasions of the building regulations. Ford's working out of this instance was typical of his method in two ways. He saw the direction of social evolution as depending, always, upon the direction in which the pressure of individual wills was turned. In the case of poverty and slum life, the pressure that kept them in exist- ence was blind. The more enlightened will — which exists all right, he maintained — was unable to function because it existed only in the air, and had never been taught its business ; and the blind, primitive will had its way. When this state of things was allowed to go on for long enough, revolution supervened in a healthy society, or decay in an unhealthy one. Revolution was the desperate cure for evolution that had taken a downward curve. The only other cure was to enable the enlightened will of man to exercise its natural upward pressure — to harness the balloon to the car, as Ford put it. Unharnessed, the most enlightened exponents of social theory were only drifting gas-bags. This idea of a detached and useless enlightenment was fundamental to Ford's explanation of our failure to live up to our ideals. This explanation was the first typical point in his treatment of the slum instance ; it related the particular problem to a wide general tendency. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 185 The second stage was to work out the particular means for dealing with the tendency. Ford was not one of the educators who think that education is the only reforming power in the world ; rather, he saw it as one mode of expression for the gen- eral will to reform; but the particular " harness '' by which he had chosen to contribute his own share of reforming pressure was the machinery of school-work, and he believed that that machin- ery could do something to make enlightened good- will more effectual in life than it usually is. The cry, ^'The evil that I would not, that I do," he declared to be the cry of the miseducated through the ages, most naturally voiced by Paul the con- vert to Christianity, who in his youth had been brought up a Pharisee. Ford was convinced that no teaching could be effectual for the future which did not enable a child to exert and to express his own will at every turn. All the great educational prophets, and Froebel the most notably of them all, have in- sisted upon the need of enlisting a child's will on behalf of learning; Ford, I believe, was the only practitioner in education who clearly worked out the further need of developing a child's will not only that he may learn the better, but in order that what he learns may have effect in his after life. This of course is an aim, an ideal, of all good educators; but I have heard of none but Ford whose method gave systematic expression to the aim. To begin with, he taught children, as do all good 186 W. E. FORD teachers, to have a philosophy of their own ; he led them to think over and discuss the root principles of every topic that came up for consideration in school, so far as they could work them out. Even the kindergarten, in ^^ Questions, '* learned to for- mulate its simple little conclusions. He gave the fullest scope and help to the natural keenness of children to get as near to the absolute truth of everything as they can, and he encouraged both their will to discover truth and their ambition to excel themselves, by leading them to realise how partial and imperfect was the truth that they had so far discovered — and how infinitely wide a field still lay open, even before the wisest, for further discovery. But he did not stop at thus eliciting principles from fact. He never carried theory into the upper air of philosophy and left it there. He always brought the principle back to earth again and applied it to the facts and problems of everyday life. Thus, as his youngest pupils be- gan by learning to use the sequence of questions. What? — How! — Why! as the natural order of in- quiry when one is in pursuit of knowledge, so, as they grew older, they learned to use the sequence, Knowledge — Principle — Application. They were encouraged in their natural tendency to keep these three elements distinct and in their proper order : they had first to get at all the available facts and arrange them in true relation to one another; then, and only then, to begin talking about the principle governing the relations between the group of facts ; and lastly, to apply the principle A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 187 to some practical problem — if possible, a problem concerning their own everyday life, and, if pos- sible, a problem which they could solve in action, not only in theory. Thus Ford aimed at building up a habit of mind through which will can function: the sound habit of a mind that, first, will not rest content till it has all the available facts marshalled and arranged without partiality ; second, \vill not look at the facts alone, but will insist upon looking through them to discover a principle: third, hav- ing found a principle, will not remain content with that satisfaction, but will be uneasy until it has found a right application for the principle. This is somewhat theoretical; let me give an example of the working of the plan in elementary school-room practice. I will choose one from my own work upon Ford's model, to show how far his plan was workable under a 'prentice hand. Form III. was considering the government of Greek city-states in the course of their study of elemen- tary world-history. (This was before a Fourth Form had come into being, and eighteen months or so after the school had started; the average age of Form III. was about thirteen.) We had collected the facts about Greek city-state govern- ment, chiefly from Mr. Warde Fowler's book on the subject, in relation to the small and manage- able numbers which the states had to deal with, to the Greek education and love of clear thinking, and to the fact that slavery was part of the Greek 188 W. E. FORD social order. Then came the search for simple principles. Slavery, at any rate, was wrong ; that point had been worked out in an earlier history lesson. Bultj what of the comparatively humane slavery prac- tised by the Greeks I A child suggested that this was better than a cruel slavery, but not as good as freedom for everybody. Wasn't a humanely treated slave better off than a badly treated free- man? Some one gained kudos by observing that the masters could be just as slack whether the slaves were well treated or not. Slavery, in fact, led to ^^ slackness'' — almost the last word in child- ish condemnation — in any case, and slackness meant the deterioration of a people. Slavery was bad, but Greek slavery was not as bad as it might have been because other things were good. Greek education was good; every one thought it worth while to know things and to think about them, so every one could help a bit in thinking for the good of the city. But also every one could help because there were few enough people for any one to be heard who had something important to say. It was because of good education that other people would be ready to listen; but also there must be few enough of them for all to hear. The special principle seemed to be, then, that small groups of people could govern themselves better than big groups. Large nations — in those times at any rate — ^had to be governed from behind their backs by autocrats. This crude and simple conclusion A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 189 was subtle enough for the children at that stage ; later on it would be carried further. Next came the search for an application. Do small groups govern themselves nowadays, in England? The first answer was No: we are all governed by Parliament. But weren^t there small groups within the nation! The children could know little as yet about our muddle-headed at- tempts at local self-government, but one sugges- tion was forthcoming: parishes. Was parish life much like city-state life? Not much, apparently. We arrived at the conclusion that the chief busi- ness of a parish was to look after the poor, and that it was a good plan for small groups of peo- ple to look after their own poor — the circum- stances would be better understood. But who pays attention to what the parish is doing? The chil- dren did not know, but they decided that every one ought to. At this moment an idea occurred to one of the children. The different things that were made in the handwork classes of the school were sold twice in the year — admiring parents, relations, and friends of the manufacturers were the buy- ers, but Ford saw to it that the goods were worth their price — for the benefit of Dr. Barnardo's Homes. Wouldn't it be better — this was the idea — if we paid some attention to the doings of our own parish by devoting the profits of the school sales of work to parochial charity? The rest of Form III. was somewhat scandalised. Dr. Bar- nardo's was regarded as a school institution; we 190 W. E. FORD took pride in the occasional reports that were sent to us of the progress of waifs sent out to Canada through our munificence. What was mere paro- chialism compared with this ! Parochialism, how- ever, gained some ground in later discussion, after school; and at the next history lesson there was a brief question time before entering upon the main business of the House, and it was agreed that the problem of local as against centralised charity should be referred to Ford. Ford discussed the matter in all due solemnity with the members of Form III. and their history master, who together formed a deputation after morning school. He pointed out that the paro- chialists of Form III. were quite right — one ought to help in local affairs; but that the others were quite right too — one must not neglect the wider issues, in a big nation like this. He suggested that the school workshop should divide the income from its produce between Dr. Bamardo's and some local charity; and from that time forward this was the arrangement, to the mutual satisfac- tion of every one concerned. (Ford, I happen to know, not wishing Dr. Bamardo^s Homes to suf- fer by losing the half of a school subscription, made up the deficit himself, but of this the chil- dren in Form III. knew nothing.) This application, by the children themselves, of a principle drawn from facts long centuries dis- tant, was perhaps far-fetched ; it was only natural that it- should be. But it would be difficult to deny that in attempting, however childishly, to apply A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 191 the principle of interest in local affairs to their own time and place, they gained a better realisa- tion of the human meaning of a city-state ; or that their potential value as English citizens was de- veloped by their childish effort to revalue the les- son of ancient Greece. It is easier to laugh at the solemnities of childish idealism than to train that idealism, in its natural, crude spontaneity, so that it may eventually bear fruit in the world of realities. But it is very greatly worth while to watch the early genesis of a child's impulse to- wards social goodwill, and to try to help a little in enabling the impulse to grow towards its ma- turer expression. Ford was equally keen on small beginnings in the details of character-training, and on small be- ginnings that should be positive, not negative. He believed that faults of character are both magni- fied and ingrained by perpetual '^don't's.'' Ly- ing, for instance, attains the dignity of a crime for many children; and since few people try to understand the psychology of a childish lie, often an inevitable reflex action due to the clumsiness of grown-up questioning, the criminal charge is often a thing of pure unreason to a child. The deliberate lie, on the other hand, often goes un- detected. Small wonder that many children come to regard lying as a game of chance! Ford al- ways explained to a child that any fool can tell a lie; it is the easy, unenterprising thing to do — mere ^^ slackness.'' The clever thing, he would 19^ W. E. FORD point out, is to tell the truth so as to make oneself understood; any one can tell a lie so as to be be- lieved at the moment. But a child seldom lied to Ford. The defensive lie, perhaps the commonest agent in undermining the childish sense of truth, was hardly ever set up against him. While he encouraged children to try to make themselves understood, he did his part by being ready to understand. I remember his saying that a child lies in self-defence for two reasons : he has done something wrong, and knows it, and his civilised self, which has now recovered control, resents being identified with the more primitive self which committed the blunder ; also, there is allied to his revulsion from the wrong- doing self a sense of impending calamity — of grown-up reprobation all ready to overwhelm both his selves in a common retribution. In this distorted moment, the truth about the misde- meanor becomes the lever that, if touched, would let loose the flood; and fear of grown-up misun- derstanding makes the civilised self of the child cower down with his primitive self under the easy protection of a lie. The fear is not in its essence a fear of punishment, Ford insisted, though this is often linked with it ; it is a fear of opprobrium, largely blind and instinctive. Vestiges of the same vague, subconscious fear occasionally make grown-up people tell small purposeless lies with- out being aware of them until the words are spoken. A great part of Ford's secret as a successful A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 193 trainer of character was that he had found out how to ally himself with the higher will of a child against the lower. In this particular case of the defensive lie, the child who came to Ford with some misdemeanor upon his conscience, knew that his more civilised self, already in revolt against the tyranny of the primitive criminal in him, would find a friend ready to help and explain. It was easy to tell the truth to Ford, because he would see it as the truth and as a thing to be rea- soned about, not as an abhorrent evil to be made a text for moral reprobation. The keynote of Ford's attitude towards the young misdemean- ant was always, ^' Let's see how we can put this right.'' The consequence of wrongdoing was not punishment, but an attempt at reparation, and though the reparation might be difficult, it was willingly undertaken when it was decreed by Ford. This was not the result of Ford's personal in- fluence — of his ^ ' strong personality, ' ' in the com- mon parental phrase — it w^as the result of his hav- ing taken trouble to study the .nature of children, and to gain their trust by gradual degrees through showing that he wanted to understand them, not to condemn. In the particular instance of defen- sive lying, he made the lie impossible, because he had developed a method to that end. He once gave me some hints on the subject. Above all things, he said, one must keep quiet and deliber- ate. Any sign of fuss or irritation raises the child's primitive fear of opprobrium. Go slowly: take time to think ; you will need it yourself, and 194 W. E. FORD also the child needs the opportunity to think he- fore he speaks, so that he may not commit himself rashly to a sudden untruth. Also — ^here Ford was emphatic — ^look out for the signs that a hasty lie is coming: the drop of the eyes, the catch of the breath that tell of mistrust and of a sudden res- olution to risk the defensive fiction. That is the moment to interrupt and to talk quietly and rea- soningly. The actual utterance of the untruth must be warded otf : once it is uttered, pride will come in to prevent its withdrawal. At this point I asked whether the catch of the. breath might not equally indicate a sudden reso- lution on the child's part to tell the truth — to make a clean breast of it. Ford was illuminating — as he always was upon a matter of practical detail, no less than of general theory. ^' Watch his eyes,'' he said. If a child looks down at the outset, he is going to lie, though he may look up at you again, when the untruth is prepared, with an appearance of the most engaging simplicity. The child who is going to tell the truth looks up first, if only for a moment: he may gaze at his boots afterwards as he stammers out his halting explanations, but the one preliminary glance up- wards has declared his sincerity. I must say that I have never known this test to fail. To speak more generally of Ford's scheme of character-training, he believed strongly in mak- ing children conscious of the primitive barbarian that still lurks in civilised humanity, as well as of their higher nature that has to master the barbar- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 195 ian element. He believed that most moral train- ing is lopsided — it dwells upon ideals and rules of conduct without explaining to a child the dif- ficulties in his own nature that he will have to encounter in applying them. The natural, healthy barbarian in a child is usually treated upon the principle of letting sleeping dogs lie: though some outlet, merely physical as a rule, is allowed for the exercise of ^ ^ animal spirits, ' ' in order that these may remain temporarily quiescent in the times between. The fact that the ethics of prim- itive man — *^a scratching, yelling, grabbing, en- vying individualist, ' ' as Ford once described him — are only partially submerged in childhood, is a fact of human natural history which he refused to neglect in the training of character. The usual way, he said, is blindly to suppress the barbarian spirit — to express oneself, often quite insincerely, as shocked and horrified whenever it emerges, and hastily to push it under again by a show of moral indignation ; and this is as great a mistake as blindly to allow it free play. Ford drew from his own short experience as a schoolboy, as well as from his keen and intuitive observation of children, a truth which most of us can verify from our recollections of childhood, and perhaps in some degree from our adult expe- rience : that children, and in some vlegree grown- ups as well, have an uneasy sense at the back of their mind of being the most appalling moral hum- bugs in relation to the superior moral standards of those around them. This, Ford was sure, is 196 W. E. FORD altogether a bad thing. It leads either to mor- bidities of conscience, the child regarding him- self as a hopeless sinner, or, in children of more robust nature, to the determined crushing-under of a conscience that has become so pessimistic a companion. In the one case the result is hyper- trophy, in the other atrophy, of conscience. His method of avoiding both evils was to teach the facts of our mixed inheritance, in connection both with world-history and with simple evolu- tionary science. These are big words when one thinks of small children, but Ford proved that the teaching could be effectual through the stor- ies of human and animal life that were the small beginnings for a knowledge of history and of evolution. He developed in children a conscious- ness of the barbarian in themselves, not as a mys- terious and an almost obscene monster to be shamefacedly suppressed, but as a cousin of the cave-dweller and the ape, a creature that needed to be trained and taught its manners so that it might become fit for civilised society. But he made this consciousness outward-looking; he had no desire to train up introspective children. When he was talking about the character of an Israel- ite or a Norman king, he would speak of it in terms of the man's mixed nature, and of his suc- cess or failure in controlling or being dominated by his under-self. He led children at every turn, by methods simple or more mature according to their stage of development, to look out upon the whole phenomenon of character and conduct as a A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 197 question of the relation between the higher and the more primitive natures of man. This part of Ford's method in character train- ing relates only to one point in that important and little-studied art; but it was the point upon which he laid most stress in discussing method with us who taught in the school — with Mme. An- dree and myself in the first instance, and later with his larger staff. He believed that systematic handling of the main natural difficulty in train- ing character had always been unduly neglected in education, and that a confusion between morals and natural history has always been a bar to clear-headed teaching. But he was far from mak- ing natural history explain morals out of exist- ence; rather, he strengthened morals by bringing them into connection with reason. The moral re- sponsibility of his children was the more abso- lute because they knew better than most children what self-control ought to mean. Besides this self-control of the individual, there was the question of the individual child's obedi- ence to the control of the teacher, and of the nec- essary laws of the school community. Here Ford made application of principles that are well known to the comparatively few who study the work and the teachings of the great educators of the past. He believed in education through free- dom, and for freedom, but he knew that the only real liberty is social liberty — the harmony of free- dom with obedience that comes of an understand- 198 W. E. FORD ing consent to the control of a reasonable law. ^ Ford's chief contribution to method for educa- tion in freedom was to insist upon the develop- ment by teachers of something which he called ^Hhe technique of praise/' Our guiding princi- ple, he said, was that a thing well done and spon- taneously was of far greater educational value than a thing well done under constraint. Con- straint was necessary in so far as one had not yet secured the spontaneity; but it was a second- best — a confession of weakness. And constraint ultimately rested upon punishments. A punish- ment was, as it were, a push from behind. Quite an elaborate technique of punishment had been worked out by the teaching profession — all of it unsatisfactory, because punishment is in itself an unsatisfactory method. But if we disliked, as all teachers dislike, this clumsy and unsatisfac- tory push from behind, why had we not developed a method of pulling from the front? A member of the staff (I am quoting from my recollection of a staff meeting) complained that Ford had done away mth the means to that end — marks and prizes. Ford explained once more his view that there is a special faculty for accu- mulating marks, passing examinations and win- ning prizes, which has very little relation to the genuine educational values. Those who achieve academic success are seldom those who make a success of life. One cannot measure a child's *I have dealt with the historical development of this idea in The Permanent Values in Education. (Constable, 1917.) A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 199 quality in the quantitative, numerical language of marks ; and in trying to do so, one actually meas- ures something akin to, but different from, the faculty for amassing money — some talent for gathering and hoarding, in its essence a form of greed. This is not the right incentive to learn- ing ; it is an ulterior motive ; and, worse, a wrong ulterior motive. The real motive for aspiring to wisdom and goodness, Ford proceeded to urge, is, simply, wis- dom and goodness for their own sake ; but children do need some test of their own advance — some recognition from outside to reassure their own inner consciousness that their reasonable self-ap- probation when they have done well is not mis- placed. Marks are a clumsy and an ineffectual form of recognition. They put a premium upon the facile, shallow, easily adaptable mind. And there is an older, a more natural and fundamental reaching-out of the childish consciousness for rec- ognition of childish effort: the sane and simple desire of childhood for praise when praise is due. Ford warmed to his subject. How far, he asked us (I paraphrase his words, of course), do we try to make our praise expressive and effectual! Our encouragement of a child's efforts, when we can see them to be sincere and painstaking, ought al- ways to be articulate and inspiring. The hope of our discriminating praise ought to be a far stronger incentive for a child than the fear of our clumsy punishments. If we could only learn to 200 W. E. FORD praise rightly, Ford concluded, there might be a hope that punishments would become altogether unnecessary. The need for the clumsy push from behind, in fact, might vanish, if only the pull from before were made effectual. Eventually, Ford practically abolished punish- ments from the school. He made it a rule that every case of insubordination, idleness, or other cause of reprobation should be referred directly to himself; and when he had talked over the dif- ficulty with the child who was at fault there was seldom any need for punitive retribution. Gen- erally there was at the root of the trouble some misunderstanding between the child and the teacher; certainly this was always the case with any child whom I myself '^sent up.^' Ford could always see that I had made a mistake somewhere, and could tell me what was wrong; usually I had failed to make the child see what he should be aiming at, and had stupidly tried to exercise the blind * ^ push from behind. ^ ' In so far as the child, too, had been in the wrong. Ford brought into play his customary principle of exacting, not retribu- tion, but reparation ; and I often had a recalcitrant pupil return from his talk with Ford full of apolo- gies and promises of amendment. The apologies, by the time Ford had done with the two of us, were usually mutual. I had known Ford, and had learned to trust him, through many year s. Some of my colleagues, in the later'^clevelopineht oi th'e^cEbol, 3T3' nor^iiow A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 201 him, and could not trust Mm when it came to maintenance of a child's rights and dignities against their own. This was one of the reasons for the failure of as hopeful an educational ex- periment as has ever been made in England. CHAPTER IX It has been said, and with a certain amount of truth, that a headmaster can keep on good terms with his school or with his staff, but not with both. Ford's staff approved of his methods of teaching and worked hard to apply them, but there was something in his wider attitude towards edu- cation that seemed inevitably to rouse a certain kind of mistrust. Put in simple terms, the feel- ing was that his system as a whole would make children too good to live. Different forms of this fundamental misgiving were continually crop- ping up at staff meetings, in relation to one detail after another of educational practice. I do not want, in this matter, to indulge in retrospective criticism of those who were my colleagues in the carrying out of Ford's work; the principle under- lying their uneasiness was sincerely held, and pa- tiently discussed with Ford in all its protean shapes. It would be a somewhat technical business to make this deeply rooted difference of opinion clear by tracing its subtle influence through a descrip- tion of a typical staff-meeting discussion of school method ; and the objection which Ford had so con- tinually to answer was best and most simply put into words by Mr. Wishart, during an after-dinner 202 A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 203 talk. Ford and I had gone to dine with Mr. and Miss Wishart after one of the weekly staff meet- ings at the school ; Mr. Wishart, occasionally pres- ent at staff-meetings (where he would drop out a common sense suggestion from time to time, never without its value), had on that occasion been away, as was more usual. We were at about the middle of the school's third term; the twenty- two children gathered in by the end of the first term had been increased to thirty-three; there were four forms (kindergarten. Forms la and lb, and Form II.), and two more trained teachers, a master and a mistress, had brought the staff, with Ford, up to five. The two newer members and Mme. Andree had been giving voice that after- noon to their searchings of spirit over several of the details in Ford's treatment of current prob- lems ; and Ford, as we sat with our coffee in the Wisharts' drawing-room, was talking about his difficulty in seeing what was the obstacle, exactly, at which they always appeared to pull up short. *^ People generally pull up when they can't see where you're leading them," suggested Mr. Wish- art; and he went on to say, in effect, that there was something in Ford's system that puzzled him, and that perhaps it would be this that disquieted the three teachers, though they might not quite know it. He was more outside the school; they, very likely, couldn't see the wood for the trees, and could only jib at this and that detail. His trouble was that he couldn't see what was to be- come of Ford's pupils, eventually, in the knock- 204 W. E. FORD about conditions of the everyday world. It wasn 't that he was afraid they would be soft ; but he was afraid they would be too fine. Ford was teaching them to think about what is right, he said, with a humorous suggestion of disapproval in his tone. While a man is thinking about what is right, he added, other folk march along and trample over him. Did he mean, Ford inquired, that they ought to know how to trample back? Mr. Wishart wouldn't go so far as to say that; but it was some- thing of the sort, he admitted, that he had in mind. Not exactly trampling ... no ; rather the kind of spirit that could resist trampling. '*But aren't we trying to get that!" Ford put in. Was not the spirit of real thought — the re- flective spirit — exactly the spirit that would end its reflections by refusing to be trodden upon? Mr. Wishart was still doubtful. The point that he wanted to raise was whether the reflective spirit that Ford was training up would not reflect for too long — and find out that while it had been re- flecting others had been acting, and monopolising the first and the best chances. Ford was not forgetting, he reminded us, that reflection has to result in action. The children were learning that all right; and his own idea was that sensible reflection would result in better conceived action. But this was just the point upon which Mr. Wishart took him up. His whole doubt was whether Ford 's spirit of reflection might not be a snare and a delusion from the practical point of view. It was a fine thing in itself, but it only A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 205 existed for itself. If you began reflecting, in a philosophical way, you went on reflecting — for the sake of an intellectual satisfaction. You thought for the sake of thinking; and then you got over- taken by the man who thinks for the sake of busi- ness. Ford gave a thoughtful pause to this. ** You're perfectly right, Mr. Wishart,'' he said at last. That standpoint, he went on, was entirely reason- able and coherent. But honestly, which was the better type — the man who thinks for the sake of thought, or the man who thinks for the sake of business 1 Was not the one in search of the spirit- ual reality, and the other only in search of the material? But we have to live by the material; this was Mr. Wishart's objection — and that was the fault that he found with Ford's system. It was a grand system, but he was afraid of its becoming alto- gether too spiritual. Miss Wishart looked up quickly from her needle-work. ^^Can anything be too spiritual?'' she asked quietly. Ford, too, had looked up at the sound of her voice, and their eyes met for a moment. ^'You're right, Margaret," said Mr. Wishart. Perhaps, he went on, he should not have said * ' too spiritual." Perhaps he had meant, rather, too metaphysical. Ford characterised this as a really valuable piece of criticism. Mr. Wishart meant, he suggested, that he tended to encourage think- ing just for the sake of thinking — just for the en- 206 W. E. FORD joyment of the process — instead of for the spirit of truth which ought to be behind the thought. Mr. Wishart confessed that he had had the no- tion in his mind ; but he could see that it was not true. It was, he saw, the spirit behind that Ford wanted to bring out. And it was a fine spirit — but it was just its fineness that he was afraid of. He would grant freely that it was right, . . . **And will you grant me that it is its rightness that you're afraid of?" asked Ford, quietly inter- rupting. Mr. Wishart would grant even that, in a sense. He could see where Ford was driving him. Ford did not think, he said, that any one can be too right; so he was driving him on to put what is practical before what is right. Well, his defence was that nothing is right unless it is practical as well. Ford wholly agreed, but objected that they were beginning to argue in a circle. Suppose he, Ford, stood out for training children in pure rightness of thought — ^what was Mr. Wishart 's objection? Mr. Wishart 's objection was, in essence, that Ford would then be training up a race of intellec- tual martyrs. These young thinkers of his were bound to suffer — terribly. Ford took leave to doubt it. They were not growing up into such pure, unmitigated thinkers as Mr. Wishart imagined. They were learning to make their thinking practical — learning how to **get ahead," even in business. But — suppose for A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 207 the sake of argument that they all had to become martyrs in the cause of truth — what then? Then, in Mr. Wishart's drily expressed opinion, their parents would consider themselves to have been extensively swindled. Parents wanted their children taught to be successes, not picturesque failures. Perhaps, Ford allowed, that is what parents think they want. But he insisted that what they really want, if they are decent parents, is that their children may be good — clever after- wards, and successful after that, if fortune is fa- vourable ; but good, whatever may happen to them in consequence. Miss Wishart looked up again, and again met Ford's eyes. Then she looked at her father. What the children wanted, she said, was just goodness, whether the parents or the teachers really wanted it for them or not. That was her own reason for thinking that Ford was in the right. Mr. Wishart gave a businesslike sigh. On re- flection he, too, was afraid that Ford was right. The children had to concentrate on goodness — and then dree their weird. Ford was not going to accept this judgment without qualification. The * ^ weird, ' ' he was certain, would not prove so fate- ful as Mr. Wishart imagined. He slyly suggested that what Mr. Wishart was really afraid of was not goodness, but unco ' guidness — a quality which he had no intention whatever of encouraging. I was not wholly surprised to learn, a week or two later, that Ford and Miss Wishart were to be married as soon as the summer holidays be- 208 W. E. FORD gan. There had been indications which even a young teacher, fresh in enthusiasm for his art, was too hnman to pass by without a sapient glance. I had felt sure of it ; and I was glad when the definite news came. Ford's happiness was beautiful to see ; and since happiness, to him, was a thing that naturally translated itself into in- spired work, he seemed somehow to infect the school, children and staff alike, with the radiant enthusiasm that overflowed from him. It was as though the school itself were in love. Ford and his wife left for Normandy early in August, 1905. I had acted as best man at their simple wedding — only the Wisharts and a few near friends were present — and in a few days I had a letter from Ford referring, in the first in- stance, to my carrying out that office : — EvREux, Aug. 6, 1905. Dear K., — I never thanked you for your efficient steersmanship, while if it hadn't been for you I might have gone to the wrong church and married the wrong lady, and been carried off for all I know to Mentone or even Monte Carlo! Expect no sense from me; I am countless centuries old to-day, and much too wise to talk sense; also I am an infant and inarticulate. Mar- garet (I haven't learnt to say "my wife" yet — it's the thought of that phrase that drives men to go honey- mooning abroad — and anyhow I shan't use it to you) says she caught you looking very end-of-a-chapterish just before we went off. Remember I'm not going to stand any beastly pride from you when we come back — the new chapter begins exactly where the old one left off.— Yours ever, W. E. F. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 209 Mr. and Mrs. Ford came home full of plans for '^completing the circle," as Ford put it, of the school's life. They had talked over at length the difficulty which Ford had begun to experience in getting the staff to go with him whole-heartedly, and also the comparative failure of the school, in most cases, to win the co-operation of the parents ; and they had great hopes that under the new menage a more effectual meeting of minds would be possible. Ford spoke to me of their conclu- sions soon after their return. He had taken very seriously the tentative phrase to which Mr. Wish- art's criticism — identical, we believed, with the subconscious criticism of the staff — had reduced itself. It was perfectly true, he said, that his con- tact with us all, children, staff and parents, had been ''too metaphysical.'' His own instinct al- ways was to search out and explain the philosophy of school work, and to be satisfied when he had done so and also translated the philosophy into effective practice. With children, this succeeded perfectly. All children are bom philosophers, if by a philosopher we understand one who loves to search out the nature and the causes of things, and not necessarily to explain them in compli- cated and abstract language. Ford's philosophy for the young was sufficiently concrete and prac- tical, as his method of teaching them to apply every principle to everyday life clearly evinces; but he was not at this time quite satisfied in his own mind about his teaching system. Might it not be, after all, *Hoo metaphysical" — too closely 210 W. E. FORD dependent upon intellect — tending too much to iso- late intellect? He thought that perhaps he was neglecting the direct simplicities of approach to a child's mind through feelings and instincts. I do not think he was right in this idea, as far as he himself was concerned; he taught through feelings and instincts more than he knew. Pos- sessing the ^* strong personality" so much desid- erated by Mrs. A. and Mrs. B., he felt the need to keep it in the background. It shone through his work strongly enough whatever he was doing. But I think it was true, as I haltingly tried to ex- plain to him, that the intellectual harness in which he kept himself might be heavy for those who were working with him. His method without him- self tended to become too abstract in a teacher's mind; and the teacher, as was natural, instinc- tively laid the blame upon the method. Ford said that this instinct was not only natural, but per- fectly just. It was his business to arrange method so that it would work in other hands than his own. In so far as it became artificial to the staff, and led them to think that he wanted the children taught to be too exclusively philosophical, it was wrong method, and needed recasting — simplifying. I was angry at this self -accusation. Ford's method, I felt, was too fine a thing to be watered down to suit teachers who would not make the effort to understand it; and I blurted out something to this effect. Ford said that better understanding was what he chiefly hoped for, now. Mrs. Ford would be able to help. We must thaw some of the A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 211 professional frigidity out of tlie staff meetings. A clrawing-room, and the comfortable pervasive- ness of afternoon tea, would do a good deal. I took in the implication that Mrs. Ford's particu- lar gift in conversation — her power of quietly stat- ing an issue in its simplest human terms — would do a good deal more. The influence of a drawing-room, and of its pre- siding mistress, was to have its effect, too, upon the relation between the school and the parents. ''They are always on their hind legs with me,'' Ford observed. It was true that he had never overcome the tendency of most of the parents to stand upon the defensive with him. They thought him ''so clever," and were afraid to give them- selves away. Mrs. Ford was, actually, of the greatest possible help in getting the school and the parents upon easy terms. Both in this and in promoting the education of the staff, her pres- ence was a source of strength for the more diffi- cult time that lay ahead — the time when Ford's system would have to struggle to make good its hold upon children of an age to have their careers seriously considered and to be sent off, in the in- terest of their careers, to go through the conven- tional scholastic mill. The year that succeeded Ford's marriage was a year of quiet, happy work with everything going well. Numbers increased, and the school extended upwards into three new forms, with a correspond- ing increase of staff. Mr. Wishart's plan for the gradual, tentative introduction of co-education had 212 W. E. FORD worked admirably; Ford's was known and recog- nised by this time as a *'boys-and-girls" school, and no one appeared to think the fact, thus gradu- ally accomplished, anything but right and natu- ral. The children were reaching an age, however, when the girls' work began to diverge from the boys' in a few practical subjects, and it was a good think that a mistress of the house should be at the head of these activities. Mrs. Ford had not made a technical study of domestic economy, but she had managed a good-sized household with Scottish thriftiness, and could teach from experi- ence rather than from theory. I believe it was Mrs. Ford who sensed a per- sonal feeling at the root of that uneasiness on the part of the staff which Ford and Mr. Wishart had identified only with an impersonal solicitude for the children. Ford's system was not rigid; every teacher was called upon to make an individual contribution to its working, and to think and plan for its realisation in detail and for the linking-up of its parts ; but it was very definitely Ford's sys- tem all the time — if only because Ford thought and planned very much more effectually than the rest of us. This made some of the staff feel that they had less control than was their due ; and the feel- ing was accentuated by Ford's scheme of having every difficulty of discipline referred directly to himself. In both cases we all knew that Ford was right: his system of teaching would have gone to pieces if any of us had been able to fly off at a tangent upon any method of our own, regardless A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 213 of the need to unify the whole ; and the plain fact that Ford, by taking all matters of discipline into his own hands, had done away with the continual drizzle of small, futile punishments that usually disfigures the work of a school, was enough to pre- vent any one from wanting their individual con- trol back in that respect. But it is possible both to see that a thing is right, and to resent it. The continual hankering of the staff for a sys- tem of marks and prizes was partly an expression of their desire to wield some symbol of personal authority. Ford wanted all control, including his own, to be as impersonal as possible — as much as possible an appeal to the children's own desire for the best, both as individuals and as a com- munity. But he recognised that something in the nature of a Votes for Teachers agitation was at the back of the staff's mind, and tried to work out a right answer to the inarticulate demand. He hit upon a new system of marks and prizes in consequence. At the end of a term every teacher was to make a list of children who had done thor- oughly well, in that teacher's opinion, in one sub- ject or another. Ford carefully explained that we were not necessarily to put down the name of a child who could be considered as ^^top of the Form" in a particular subject, but of the child who seemed to have worked the hardest and to have made the most progress considering his ca- pabilities. To be mentioned in this way upon a teacher's end-of-term list was to receive one vote towards a *^ progress prize"; this prize, in each 214 W. E. FORD Form, went to the child who had the greatest number of teachers' votes. When two children in a Form tied for the prize, their claims were settled by the votes of the other children in that Form — votes that were always cast with the im- partiality of the strong childish sense of justice. The system worked well in every way: it was Ford's *^ technique of praise" in concrete and offi- cial form; there was a general feeing that the prizes had gone to the children who really de- served them best, and the staff felt that their judgment had found voice. At the same time the system was not in its essence competitive — and to that extent did not satisfy the other underly- ing demand of the staff, that Ford's school should give more of a preparation for the worldly scram- ble. On this point Ford was obdurate. He re- garded competition as an evolutionary stage more than ready to be superseded in civilised life by co-operation, and held that the old competitive im- pulse in man, like the combative impulse, was strong enough — and troublesome enough — without being fostered by education. It is difficult to write about the later develop- ment of Ford's school, the development through which we hoped it would gradually blossom out into an educational institution of effective size and influence, and even, perhaps, set going some small wave of general reform in education. To de- scribe it, now, is to describe its failure to achieve these ideals, in the rather desperate hope that this failure may lead others to follow a similar A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY S15 educational ideal with success. Ford's ideal is worth following; of that no one who worked with him or studied under him has the slightest doubt. If I make an attempt to trace the causes of its failure, it is not with any idea of demonstrating the hopelessness of a fine educational ideal under present conditions, but rather of showing how far the ideal could be, and was, carried, and why the difficulties arose that prevented it from being carried further. I have used, and repeated, the word *^ failure*'; but I must be understood to mean the failure, not of the ideal, but of its r; to a further pitch of development than Ford achieved in the first decade of the twentieth cen- tury. The failure passes; the ideal, surely, is worthy to remain. And the ^^ failure" was only the fact that Ford's educational impetus was brought to a standstill at one particular milestone, beyond which, perhaps, few of his time could have followed him. It would be easier to dwell upon his success — upon the fact that a few hundred children passed through his hands who never wholly for- got his influence, and who in their turn are spread- ing by now some reflection, at least, of the light that suffused his teaching. But it is better, I think, to ask why his teaching, comparatively, failed ; to try to ascertain how it was that so fine an educational method could not establish itself beyond the point at which convention called a halt. Convention crystallises itself, to my own view, in the person of the uncle of one of our children, 216 W. E. FORD who came with the child's mother to look over the school. He was large, bluff, friendly, and inac- cessible even to the most slangy expression of an educational notion. Ford told him that we tried to teach the children to pull together — a suffi- ciently sporting simplification of our educational idea; the uncle rephed, taking on a redder tinge with the eiTort of abstract thought, that kids had to learn how to fight for their own hand if they were going to make their way in the world. He was afraid that his small nephew would ^^get soft,'' he said, **with all these girls around" (his nephew had at any rate learned how to meet a girl's hard common sense) ; he was glad that the boy should be learning to think, but he consid- ered (with Mrs. A. and in almost the same words) that ^ * there is too much thinking nowadays. ' ' As a study in current humanity he was a joy to Ford — a joy often quoted, later on. As the influential uncle of one of our children, he stood for Ford as the shape and symbol of our most insuperable obstacle. As he turned to go away with the boy's mother we heard him say — ^before he could have thought, if he had thought, to be out of earshot — '^My dear girl, when are you going to send that child to a proper school?" Boys who went from Ford's to a *^ proper school" always did well. They were seldom placed high at the first transplanting — I can im- agine a certain bewilderment at the difference of standard, a bewilderment not unshared by those who applied to them a rule-of-thumb test of A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 217 knowledge; but they liad learned to think, and quickly mastered the main lines of a more auto- matic method of instruction. It was a common thing for a boy from Ford's to be promoted twice in his first term elsewhere, and promoted again every term until he had found his level. Ford might have been content, as, some years later, he said himself, simply to train up young children so that they might climb the conventional ladder of learning the more nimbly. All educational re- form has its best chance with the youngest chil- dren, and the most sensible and natural form of education in England is to be found in the kinder- gartens ; Ford might have been satisfied by being allowed to carry a rational method to a further stage. But his training of younger children, much as he loved the work, was only the founda- tion for a very much wider and fuller scheme. It was for the realisation of this scheme that he struggled during the last two years of the school 's life. His hope was to build up and extend the school until it carried children through to University age or to the age when they should go out into the world. It could not satisfy him to begin and end by preparing children to make the best of con- ventional education and its disjointed compro- mises. His work as an educator reached out to a single, definite goal — that the school should send into the world of thought and action young men and women who had learned the unity of all knowl- edge with itself and with life. It may well be 218 W. E. FORD imagined that if his children were sent away to learn the parcelling-up and pigeon-holing of knowledge that for many people constitutes edu- cation, it was little comfort to Ford that he had trained them so that they could do it intelligently. He could not take a pride in their lending their intelligence to a process which he regarded as fun- damentally stupid — the process of putting up par- titions in the mind between different "subjects/' dividing and subdividing, seldo mor neer uniting. This was not merely a matter of scholastic the- ory to him. He believed the whole outlook of civ- ilised people to be qualified by their prevailing inability to hold more than one idea in their heads at a time — and their inability, as he once said, "to put their heads together over any question without knocking them together. ' ' Discussion, he said, is the machinery of agreement, which is pre- liminary to the co-operation that distinguishes civilised from barbaric life; and we do not dis- cuss, we dispute. Each of us follows up his own narrow train of thought, firmly states his own narrow conclusion, and has done with it; you rarely find two parties to a discussion attending to each other's argument — the first, elementary necessity if they are to agree. As Ford traced all the failures of civilisation in some measure to failure of agreement, so he traced failure of agree- ment to the division and separation of ideas that are fostered by our prevailing modes of teaching. Division there had to be — dissection, careful ar- rangement and classification; but always with a A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 219 view to subsequent reconstruction and reunion, the fuller and more complete for the division that had gone before. Our usual system of education, he said, divides ; and then forgets to reunite. It was thought by some that Ford's eventual abandonment of his school was due to infirmity of purpose, or to a kind of petulance; in reality, he gave it up rather than make it auxiliary to the conventional system. It was not that he despaired of prevailing methods; he believed that they could and would be obliged to undergo a process of gradual, organic reform; but he believed that this reform could only be brought about from within — ^not, at any rate, by children, barely grounded in a different way of thought. These would only show themselves somewhat more intel- ligent pigeon-holers than the rest. Ford's desire was to show the completed result of a properly unified system; and it was because this essential aim of his proved impossible of achievement that he gave up the attempt. A single instance will perhaps show best what it was that he declined to continue doing. A boy of fourteen, one of our most sensible all-round thinkers though in no way particularly brilliant, and the son of parents who had always shown a keen and an understanding interest in the school, was one upon whom we had securely reckoned to go on with us. It was rather suddenly decided (perhaps an uncle, in this case, had a say in the matter — I do not know) that the boy should go to one of the greater public schools. Such a de- 220 W. E. FORD f ection of the faithful was always a grief to Ford. He saw that it was not wholly the parents* fault. The keeping of effective numbers in the upper part of the school — now just passing the age of fourteen, the conventional time of transition to public- school life — ^was an uncertain business ; and parents who were most keen that the building up of the school should continue were also afraid that only a straggling few would remain to consti- tute the upper forms for which we hoped. But, as Ford always pointed out to them, they did not greatly help to remove this fear by taking their own children away. Ford did not plan to teach Greek until the age of sixteen, when it could be learned with quick- ness and certainty by children trained in the gen- eral study of the science of language; this boy was required to pass an entrance examination that included elementary Greek, within six weeks ' time. Ford gave him half an hour's coaching every afternoon, without homework, to teach him Greek and the particular formalisms required for examination-passing in general. With these six weeks of quiet, unhurried preparation the boy passed the examination easily. He had been so trained that, as Greek was only a special case of a known system of language, so the unfamiliar formalisms of the examination system were only a special and a somewhat narrow way of express- ing certain parts of a realised system of knowl- edge. The boy took a good place in the public school and rose rapidly. He came to see us sev- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 221 eral times later on. His work at school, parcelled out into a series of watertight compartments, was growing steadily narrower in its scope; he was learning no natural science, scarcely anything about his own language, nothing to any purpose except different, disconnected branches of clas- sics and mathematics. He remained keen and full of interest in the world and its concerns, but with an unguided keenness and an ignorant interest. Plainly his interests ^and his knowledge were growing more and more detached from one an- other. His work was giving him no terms in which to think and speak about the real concerns of life. It was just work, to be done and put aside. The boy's mind and his nature, which we had watched growing into an effective whole while he was with us, were growing apart — the one sterile, the other starved of thought. It was against results of this kind that Ford's soul revolted; and they began to appear with in- creasing regularity during the school's last two years, when one child after another drifted away at about the age of fourteen, to return presently as an ^^old" boy or girl, shyly affectionate, full of inarticulate phrases of gratitude for old times, and manifestly resigned to new times that gave them little satisfaction of the spirit. They came back, as Ford once said, with their wings tidily and neatly clipped — no cheerful spectacle for the man who had trained them in the beginnings of the art of mental flight. A Form of children over fourteen — Form V. — L 222 W. E. FORD struggled into being with the opening of what was to prove the last year of the school's life. There was some talk of making it a Form of boys alone ; but Mr. Wishart, who first threw out the idea, never entertained it seriously. None of us had the least doubt by now upon the merits of the co- educational case; and from the point of view of success, there had been very little evidence that prejudice on this subject stood in the school's way. Parents who withdrew their children often la- mented that a ''proper school" would have to be a separate boys' or girls' school; and it seemed likely that in excluding girls from the new upper forms we might lose not only the girls, but one or two boys as well — besides surrendering a princi- ple in which we had learned by experience to be- lieve. Ford, indeed, was sure that to educate small boys and girls together was chiefly impor- tant as leading up to natural relations during adolescence ; it was then that the principal advan- tage of co-education — "the civilising of the sexes" — would really begin. It was not the least of the tragedy which the school's ending implied for him that this development of a sane intellectual understanding between adolescent boys and girls was denied the thought and care which he was so ready and eager to devote to it. The struggle for existence which was the or- deal of Form V. during that concluding year can best be presented in three acts — the three terms of the school's last twelvemonth. The starting of the Form was in any case a precarious undertak- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 223 ing. There were five children, three boys and two girls, who had surpassed the standard of Form TVay and whose parents had faith enough to let them adventure upon the further course. Ford felt that it was now or never — to reject this somewhat meagre opportunity of extension would be to put a closure upon later opportunities — and Mr. Wishart agreed that the new Form had bet- ter be started. When another boy, withdrawn by provisional notice given before the preceding sum- mer term, was unexpectedly returned to the fold at the end of the summer holidays, we rejoiced as at a favourable omen. Form V. would now come into being full six strong. And when an- other girl, a new-comer of fifteen, elder sister of a boy already in the school, was entered on the very day that term began, we felt that at this rate ultimate success was assured. Seven children who had crossed the fourteen-year-old Rubicon were a nucleus worthy of respect for the founda- tion of an upper school. I think that at this time we all upheld one another in a desperate opti- mism; Mrs. Ford, I remembered, even brought in the argument that seven was a lucky number. The autumn term seemed to begin under the happiest auspices — and in three weeks there was trouble brewing among the staff. Perhaps there was an underconsciousness that our hopes ran be- yond our prospects ; but the instinct even of rats leads them to do nothing worse than desert a ship that is doomed to sink. They do not accelerate the sinking by gnawing at her sides. Our rats I W. E. FORD talked with one anotlier, and with some of the parents, and their talk was of the kind that disin- tegrates loyalty. I am convinced, I must say in justice, that they had no conscious motive in doing so; they helped in their degree to pull Ford's school down because they felt unsure of its suc- cess, and so felt in honour bound to prophesy, and to exonerate themselves from, its failure. But incidentally they lost the school two of its seven elder pupils; and this was the conclusion of the first act. The spring term that followed found us with five elder children, four of them under provisional notice to leave if more should not be forthcoming. The spring term is always the least cheerful of terms ; colds rage, even if more formidable epi- demics are absent, and in any case human enthu- siasm is liable to fall to its lowest ebb some- where about the end of February — "the year's two-o 'clock-in-the-morning, " as Ford once put it. The parents of our Form V. talked with one an- other, and with the more despondent members of the staff; and thereafter Ford and Mrs. Ford talked with them in vain. They were convinced — perhaps they were right — that Form V. would never grow into a completed upper school. Pro- visional notices were confirmed; the existence of Form V. was to end with the ending of the spring term. Ford had lost. We talked it over in full con- clave — the staff a little remorseful, and inclined, too late, to try to see the bright side of things — A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 225 towards the end of tlie term. There was no hope at all of building up a new upper school ; the rot had already spread to the parents of Forms IVa and even lYb, who were giving panic-stricken notice of removal at the end of the next term. The staff, I believe, really hoped that at last this ambitious foolishness of trying to extend the school beyond the preparatory level might be at an end. The attitude of Ford and his wife, fully backed up by Mr. Wishart, came as a surprise to them. The school was not to continue as a pre- paratory. It was to end with the following sum- mer term ; and notice of its winding-up was to be sent to all the parents forthwith. This was the mildly and by no means pleasantly dramatic con- clusion of the second act. I did not envy Ford his Easter holidays — I did not enjoy my own. He and his wife went with Mr. Wishart to North Cornwall, and the three talked, I believe, at length about the possibility of another educational scheme, always to come back to the fact of pres- ent failure. They could form no judgment, in the end, but that the present failure was absolute, and under present conditions irreparable. Ford began at this time, I know, to look beyond the proc- ess of education itself for the causes of the fail- ure, and to ask himself what might be the funda- mental trouble of a civilisation so slow to develop its educational function. But his dealing with this wider problem must be the subject of another chapter. The third act, the summer term, our last term. 226 W. E. FORD opened in false sunshine, as false as the May clondlessness that led on to the downpours of June and July. It was not that the ill weather of our final weeks symbolised a prevailing gloom- iness among ourselves ; the school went down with all its flags flying, and in a way there was more of essential harmony in its work at the end than there had even been before. Ford seemed re- solved to throw the very best of himself into a last effort on behalf of the school's remnant, and we were all infected with his energy and enthusiasm. Misgivings among the staif were at an end, except the misgiving that it might be a heroic mistake to refuse to go on quietly with the material for good work that still remained. But there was a sense of finality over it all. It was the end; and if we all strove so eagerly to make the most of it, the chief reason was because we felt it to be the end. If it had been a new, constricted beginning — Ford's school with its wings clipped — I doubt if the same feeling would have inspired us. I feel no doubt at all that it was best for the school to end as it did, in cheerful, far from fatalistic rec- ognition of the inevitable. It was not the kind of school to seek for itself a level that would compro- mise with convention. It had to stand or fall in the light of Ford's inspiration as an educator; ultimately, it had to fall, and Ford had to dig deeper into reality to find out why it fell. If it had continued, maintaining itself upon a specious compromise, it would have grown stagnant, and Ford would never have begun to analyse that cen- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 227 tral trouble of civilisation which still makes it im- possible for such teaching as his to achieve suc- cess. An idea was mooted by some of the parents for keeping the lower forms in being, and two of the staff approached Ford and Mr. Wishart with a proposal for taking over the younger children. Ford was not unwilling that this should be done, and even offered to draw up a simplified scheme for a young children's school that should aim, not at extending its scope, but at providing as rational a preparation as possible for conven- tional instruction. The plan was not followed up, for a variety of reasons. Ostensibly, a financial difficulty was the chief obstacle. The school house and its arrangements were on a scale that would overburden the resources of a small school. But a way out of this and the other difficulties that arose could have been found if the will had been present. When it came to the point, even those who had felt the strongest misgivings about Ford's wider educational ideal, found themselves unable to face the prospect of taking over chil- dren whom Ford had taught, and giving them, in- evitably, less than Ford had given. Eventually, only the kindergarten was kept on, by the faith- ful Mme. Andree; Mr. Wishart made her a pres- ent on the connection, and she took rooms in the neighbourhood and carried on the methods of Froebel, with some reminiscence of Ford, until family affairs recalled her to Switzerland some years later. 228 W. E. FORD One father took the trouble to write to Ford a letter that was a reasoned criticism of the de- cision to give up the school. While expressing re- gret that Ford's ^intelligent system should not have met with more quantitative appreciation/' he put forward the opinion that it was Ford's business as an educator to adjust his system to suit the world as it is. ^'Your way is better, I fully recognise," he wrote. *'But it has not worked; and if our stupidity is to blame for that fact (as I certainly think it is), then surely you should make things easier for us, not throw us over altogether." I wish I had a copy of the re- ply that Ford showed to me before he sent it off. It expressed his real reasons for dropping the school better in a few sentences than I could an- alyse them in many pages. The bald gist of it was that Ford could only see two ways of educat- ing — the right way and the wrong way; he had worked out as popularly as possible the way that he considered right, and he was not going to do the only thing that remained to do: to compro^ mise with the way that he considered wrong. In this, he explained, he was not setting up an abso- lute of rightness in education ; he was simply fol- lowing his own nose. When he found that the way which he considered right was blocked, he could only set himself to find out what the ob- struction was and how it might eventually be re- nioved. That, he concluded, was an investigation which he meant to begin forthwith. The real question that he had had to decide A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 229 was whether the obstacle to the practical success of his system — a system, be it remembered, that was not his alone, but was based upon educational principles long- ago accepted as gospel in theory and left on the shelf in practice — was one that could be removed by education itself, or one for which the cause would have to be sought in some flaw of civilisation outside the educational field. The fact that the main principles which he fol- lowed had been in existence for centuries had the casting vote in his decision. Three hundred years had passed since the Moravian educator, Come- nius, laid down a system of which Ford's was the direct descendant; the principles of Comenius were everywhere accepted in theory without pro- ducing any but the most superficial influence upon actual school work. Three hundred years, eight or ten generations, Ford considered enough for the conversion of sound principle into effectual prac- tice, if the evolution of teaching alone were con- cerned. The blindest conservatism yields in time to a process of gradual, organic development. The obstruction must lie outside the educational circle. *^ There is a dead hand upon education," Ford wrote in a letter to me, **and I have got to find out what it is.'' He did not expect to find out any immediate, easy formula for the explanation of the **dead hand." As he thought more about the question he saw more and more clearly how large was the undertaking to which he had committed himself. It was nothing less than a study of civilised so- S30 W. E. FORD ciety as a whole, an attempt to trace and map out all the ramifying influences of social life. Some- where among that network of influences there was a tangle, a falsity, in which the advance of edu- cation was caught up and impeded: and to un- ravel the tangle it would be necessary to know where every thread ought to lead. It was thus that Ford became absorbed in the gigantic sub- ject of the organisation of social life; and from this, again, that he developed, and left, alas, un- finished, a system of social philosophy that will be outlined later on.^ He threw himself with a certain sternness of zeal into the new work. It was of his own free will that he abandoned school work but none the less for that^ — perhaps the more — he missed his school terribly, and needed the consolatory dis- traction of hard thinking. He found another sol- ace in watching with Mrs. Ford the dawning in- telligence of the two little girls who had been born to them. There remained a note of restrained sadness in Ford's expression ever after the giv- ing up of the school, and I think no one but his wife knew quite how hard he had been hit; but to see him with his children was to see the old Ford as though no reverse had happened to him in all his life. He seemed to participate in the freshness of their experience, to feel in himself the infantile, elemental wonder with which his babies looked out upon the visible universe. * This reference is to the larger work we have under considera- tion, and not to the few notes on Ford 's philosophy which make up chapter xi. CHAPTER X Ford's great undertaking began, as Ms venture into school-keeping had begun, with the study of authorities ; he became again a frequenter of the British Museum reading-room, and began to fill the first of a series of manuscript books (I have seventeen of these before me) with notes upon the natural history of civilisation. One point struck him almost from the first. I remember his speaking of it to me, certainly within a month of beginning his investigation ; and it creeps into his first note-book at the ninth page, becoming more and more pronounced thereafter. The au- thorities were all profoundly ignorant of some- thing that Ford dimly knew. Or rather, they were congenitally blind to certain lights or colourings in the history of civilisation that struck vividly upon his eye, though without immediate signifi- cance. Ford possessed some undefinable sixth sense that often brought him to conclusions more true and complete than seemed to be available from the evidence before him. He appeared at times, in his moods of concentration, literally to orig- inate knowledge; reaching out beyond his power of clear and acute reasoning there was an intuitive faculty that seemed to grasp the evolution of fact 231 2S2 W. E. FORD without intermediary thought about causes and probabilities. It was as though he put himself in touch with the essential process of becoming. I am obliged to tantalise the reader as much as I am tantalised myself over that elusive realisa- tion which was at the root of Ford's eventual views upon the progress of man. He loathed mystifications, and was always lucid and illum- inating upon any point that he had reasoned out; but these intuitive conclusions of his refused to fit into any formula. I could say that his early intuition of a flaw in our whole conception of civilisation was this or that, but only to find that it was really the other — an *^ other'' which escapes definition. I have only one distinct clue: Ford's extraor- dinary knowledge of working-class life and thought and feeling had something to do with it. The ** masses," upon whose labour civilisation rests, have an ethic and a philosophy of their own, comprehended but unexpressed by them- selves, uncomprehended and mis-stated by their would-be interpreters. Ford in some way knew it from the inside ; and he saw a fundamental un- reality in a state of society in which the thoughts of the vast majority are a closed book, or rather a book wide open but unreadable, to the compara- tively few who endeavour to steer the entire bulk. **It isn't they" (the masses) ^^who sutfer," he once said to me; **it's us." Civilisation, he in- sisted, in so far as it is civilisation and not an unhappy illusion, is unity, unanimity; and the A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 233 people at the top, whose privilege of leisure and educated thought should mean that they repre- sent the mind, the self-consciousness of the whole, are simply uncivilised — ^Hamed and pampered savages playing at manners,'' as Ford once put it — in so far as their consciousness extends only to themselves and to their own group. This conception of the prevailing culture as an essentially hollow thing, a painted shell detached from the realities that all men share, gives one index, I think, to the flaw which Ford's intuition perceived in the civilised life of to-day. But it was an explanation much wider and also much more definite of which he was in search. I read his note-books, and the explanation seems to be there, complete and ready, urgent even, to be uttered ; I look up from his pages and try to find words for the thought, and the whole sense of it has vanished. I wonder, if Ford had lived to write his book upon the principles of civilisation, whether he could have reduced to clear language his inner sense that he of had our central stum- bling-block. The word ''fellowship" haunts my mind when I try to express for myself the essen- tial which, in Ford's view, all civilisations have lacked; but that is a word whose meaning de- pends entirely upon experience of the reality. Ford had taken a house in Golden Square; partly to be near the Museum, partly because he had a curious fondness, which Mrs. Ford found no difiiculty in sharing, for the neighbourhood of 234 W. E. FORD Bloomsbury. He said that for middle-class people of a serious turn of mind Bloomsbury was the only district in London that fitted. Everywhere else you found pretentiousness. Kensington was so- cially pretentious; Chelsea aesthetically; Bays- water, St. John's Wood, Battersea, had each their distinctive brand of artificiality. Bloomsbury alone, he explained to me with exaggerated solem- nity, was wholly, perfectly uncoloured. Its by- gone standing as a fashionable quarter gone, it had acquired no new status to which it would be criminal not to conform ; it was a trifle drab and musty, perhaps, but in your own corner you could sweep away the dust of the eighteenth century and be free to think your own thoughts uncensored. The environment of his working hours, the Mu- seam reading-room, also satisfied his sense of fit- ness. It was an intellectual centre where there was a real democracy of intellect. The reader in the next place to yours might be a Rabbi trans- lating an old Hebrew manuscript, or a veterinary student investigating the physiology of the horse ; there was no convention of study, and yet you were in an atmosphere of study that was quietly stimulating. Ford threw out the idea that per- haps if every one were left more free to study in his own way, an education might be evolved that would undermine the artificialities of civilisation. It is hardly fair to quote a loose, half-humorous statement of this kind, but it indicates the gen- eral direction in which Ford's mind was working at this time. He wanted to see the art of thinking A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 235 freed from the vague, atmosplieric, but powerful influences that dictate to us, before we begin, what we ought to think. The mental atmosphere of Bloomsbury and the Museum reading-room might be free enough, but the physical atmosphere was another matter ; and after six months or so Mrs. Ford began to be anxious about Ford's health. Ford admitted that the British Museum was not an ideal breathing- place. ^' There are three kinds of air,'' he said to me once, ^' fresh air, stale air, and ventilation. Ventilation is the worst of the three." The fil- tered, devitalised air of the Museum certainly did not suit him ; and Bloomsbury itself is not exactly one of the lungs of London. Mrs. Ford declared that he had suffered more and lost more vitality than he knew, or would recognise, over the failure of the school; and there was no doubt, besides, that the magnitude of his new task weighed upon him; at all events his physical well-being began to be a matter of concern. I do not know how far this factor, and a growing distaste for ^Ventila- tion," made him decide that there was little more to be gained by poring over the scores of volumes upon his list that were still unread; but I think that his disquiet was mainly due to the unsatis- factoriness of the learned authorities to whom he had turned for guidance at the beginning of his quest. He was disappointed that the store of re- corded human wisdom told so little ; and the drop in his physical vitality was, I think, as much the reflex of this disappointment as anything else. 236 W. E. FORD Ford decided, suddenly, to leave his family and to go abroad for a time. Mrs. Ford dwelt upon the question of his health as the determining rea- son ; Ford himself spoke only of the claims of his work. He has been severely criticised for spend- ing three quarters of his time, in the last years of his life, in travelling alone. I am naturally a partisan of Ford's upon any point of criticism that can be brought against him, but I do not think it is for that reason that I cannot see the case against him as a deserter of the domesticities. If he had been a naval officer, his disappearances would have seemed the most natural thing in the world; as a philosopher engaged in original re- search he had apparently no such claim upon the indulgence of some of his friends. He was in pur- suit of an important truth; books had told him all that they could about the nature of civilisa- tion — or had shown him their incapacity to tell the thing that he chiefly cared to know; and he went about the world to see and discover for him- self at first hand. It was his business in life; to regard it as a dereliction of marital duty seems to me a foolishness past criticism. But there are those who have never recognised that in the work and thought of Ford's last years lies the principal evidence of the greatness of his personality. The first purpose of his travelling was to dis- cover what are the elements of permanence and stability in civilisation. He always remembered Palma as a supreme instance of a healthy and con- tented human society ; but Pahna was a peaceful A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 237 backwater in the development of civilisation, where the real problems of modem life were not worked out but left out. He talked to me at some length, one evening about a week before he set out upon his first journey. Palma, he said, was the foundation, but no more than the foundation, of that which he conceived as an ideal society. It was the starting-point; a simple and a right form of social organisation that was capable of branching out into a state of being at once more highly de- veloped and more conscious of itself. Every high civilisation had been a Palma at one time. Some such Arcadian phase was the necessary begin- ning. But then every civilisation, in its develop- ment, seemed obliged to lose the distinctive, fun- damental qualities of the Palma people. Inter- ests, ways of thought and language, became de- tached from one another ; specialised development branched into endless divisions and sub-divisions, but the unity of the whole was lost. Ford was convinced that disunity in any civilisation is dead- ness : that diversification is signal evidence of vi- tality, but that diversification which does not lead to a further and a fuller unity in difference is a sign that vitality is running into a blind alley. He had searched the historians in vain for any clear recognition of this principle ; and it was essential to his investigation to make sure whether the branching-out of civilisation into a necessary and inevitable diversity of separate paths must nec- essarily and inevitably lead to disunity, or whether there was any sign that a higher and W. E. FORD more complex unity tended to supervene — as in the evolution of animal life, where diversity of organs and functions could only develop hand-in- hand with the growth of a centralised, co-ordinat- ing nervous system. In the one case Ford could only conclude that civilisation as we conceive it is a mistake, a mere proliferation without purpose, necessarily doomed to decline; and that it is our business to resign ourselves humbly to the simpler way of life — more or less after the Palma model. But if the complete unity in diversity which was his own ideal of a sound civilisation was attainable, it was clear that we were not going the right way to attain it. In this case, it was our business to investigate the more stable civilisations, and try to see what was the principle of permanence to which they owed their survival. This the his- torians had failed to do, if one can speak of fail- ure in a task that has never been attempted. Ford intended to travel through India and China for a beginning — not, I need hardly say, to invent means of adapting the manners and customs of Indians and Chinese to English use, but to see if he could discover, by observation of their ways of life, the particular causes that had given to those peoples so long an innings in the history of civilisation. He had gained, by his stay in Pahna, an experience of unique value to his outlook upon human life ; he hoped to catch in the same way the essential atmosphere of an ancient and long en- during social organisation. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 239 The magnitude of the reaction which the East produced upon such a mind as Ford's can be imagined. The note-books, which record his deep- ening impression of an outlook fundamentally dif- ferent from the Western, record also a struggle in his o\Mi mind — a struggle to escape being swept into a wider field of investigation than that upon which he had set out. He wanted to realise the Eastern philosophy of civilisation; he found it closely entangled with an Eastern philosophy of the universe. Take this series of jottings from one of the note-books : — ^* Principle of permanence in civilisation is unity. Principle of progress is continual diversi- fication. Hyp. : the East has an excess of the former principle, the West of the latter. ^'Obj.: Castes. But these are old and fixed — no further diversification possible — would be thought impious. And they exist in static inter- relation — an established unity in difference. '^Nirvana ^: Very significant that in this ideal of an ultimate state no attraction whatever is held out but absolute union with deity; i.e. unity must end by swallowing up diversity, not perfect- ing and justifying it. Is this philosophically thinkable ? The only unity that satisfies the equa- tion seems to be a unity in absolute annihilation. If this is sound: — *^Much of the East has a religion that poetises * Obviously the Nirvana of common acceptance in the East, not the Nirvana of a few (chiefly Western) philosophers, in which individuality is in some sense conserved. 240 W. E. FORD belief in ultimate cessation of being. (N.B. Dass admits this, but with reservations as to the mean- ing of the term ** being/' Don't think he escapes my conclusion.) ' * If being is unity in difference ^ — the wider the ramification, given full co-ordination of parts and functions, the higher the perfection. {N.B, This necessarily makes perfection a relative, not an absolute term.) Then Nirvana, abolition of dif- ference, is abolition of being. ''Unless these people, as Dass seems to imply, can sense some entirely different category of be- ing, quite unseizable by thought. (Nirvana is positive — ecstatic.) But if so, there is absolute cleavage between this sense and thought; i.e. thought is absolutely, not relatively, fallacious. Experience denies this. **It appears that the conception of Nirvana results from letting go of thought at the point where thought demands an uncomfortable degree of diversity; falling back upon an ideal of unity pure and simple {i.e. logically, unity of nothing with nothing in nothingness) ; and importing into this entirely hollow ideal a foreign content, de- rived from subconscious conviction of, or desire for, a happy ending to the story of life. ^'ConcL: The East clings to the conception of unity at all costs ; we cling to individuation at all costs. Their penalty is a scale of life that cannot * Ford is here taking for granted a philosophical definition of being which is, I believe, his own; the following chapter will make its basis clear. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 241 proliferate beyond a certain point; ours, a blind, unordered proliferation that runs into culs-de- sac/' *'Hyp/' means hypothesis, **Obj." objection, and ^'Concl.'' conclusion — Ford's notes are freely interspersed with signposts of this kind, more il- luminating, perhaps, to those familiar with his ways of thought than to the casual reader. As is natural, his jottings are often scrappy and tan- talising (to use again the word that these note- books continually suggest) ; they mark, not real- isations, but only the raw material for realisa- tions ; but Ford always shows the lines upon which his thought is working. *^Dass," obviously, must have been some English-speaking Indian of his acquaintance, with whom he seems to have fallen into a discussion upon Oriental theology. It would be interesting to have full notes of that discussion. It will be clear, at any rate, that Ford's study of the civilised consciousness led him into a con- sideration, not only of the civilisations of other peoples, but of their philosophies and religions. He told me later, at the end of his first journey to the East (which took him, as it turned out, no further than India, where he found the material so inexhaustible that China had to wait), how he had consistently tried to keep his view objective ; and how persistently the conclusion was forced upon him that the root causes of varying civilised tendencies were subjective — that men developed their societies according to their cast of thought, «42 W. E. FORD and that their thought-moulds were, simply, their spiritual beliefs or disbeliefs. He went out in the modern, scientific spirit of investigation, pre- pared to see different ways of life explained by varying conditions of life ; he found himself more and more convinced that man moulds his circum- stances far more than his circumstances mould man. Ultimately, the machinery of a society did not explain the society. To discover the *'how'' was interesting in itself, but it threw no light upon the **why.'* The *Svhy'' of a civilisation, he suspected, depended at bottom upon nothing but the root philosophy, conscious or subcon- scious, of its component people. The question re- mained upon what causes that philosophy de- pended. Ford's provisional theory was that hu- man nature evolves a natural and a balanced philosophy of life of its own accord if nothing artificial steps in to hinder it in the process; in fact, that his investigation was not a search for the causes of a right social philosophy so muclj as for the origins of those checks and hindrances that make such a philosophy grow lopsided and unbalanced. Meanwhile he had formed a very strong con- viction upon the educational issue : that whatever our philosophy of social life is, we take far too little trouble to express it in clear terms, either for ourselves or for the rising generation. Our conception of civilisation is, he maintained, almost entirely subconscious ; and the result is that what- ever flaws exist in our social theory go undetected A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 24.3 and are free to spread unregarded. We need, as Ford has written at the end of his Indian not^ book, *^to teach a coherent system of social phil- osophy in our schools.'' The Indian child at least learns the religious philosophy based upon the single, clear doctrine of the unity of all spirit — an anchorage for the social sense, though it is an an- chorage in a half-truth. The reason for our possessing no philosophy of social life Ford traced directly to our Western passion for individualism, for diversity of self- hood — the other, correlative half-truth, though we do not take the trouble to express it clearly to our- selves. We cannot teach a religion, because re- ligion is at the mercy of the sects, and each sect cares first and foremost for itself. We cannot teach social science, because social science is a matter of never-ending debate between political camps, and we fear bias on the part of teachers; ultimately, a political camp is more important to us than a political truth. This was the general line of Ford's analysis — not, it must be remem- bered, a considered judgment, but a stage in the process of thought upon which he had embarked. I was able to see very little of Ford at the time of his first return to England; my time was sel- dom my own, and Ford was much engaged with a project that began, I believe, at Mr. Wishart's suggestion, and certainly continued with his help. It might be described, in its effect though not in its expressed intention, as a scheme to dissem- inate Ford's educational ideals by the method of 244 W. E.FORD peaceful penetration. Mr. Wishart was keen that Ford should begin to write upon education; not that he should produce a treatise, or even a text- book on method, but that he should submit articles on teaching to the educational papers, and try to instil the essence of his ideal into the world of educational thought. I think that, besides his real keenness for the effectual spread of Ford's views, Mr. Wishart was also plotting to give him an an- chorage in England, and to obviate, or at least postpone, the need of another expedition to strange and foreign places. Mr. Wishart was not among those who indulged in reprobation of Ford's journeyings, but he would have been glad to keep his son-in-law at home. Ford was not attracted by the idea of writing, as yet. His business at present, he said, was to take in rather than to give out; he did not want to write about the detail of education until he had recast his theory of education as a whole, and the recasting process depended upon that study of educational possibilities, in relation to our present phase of civilised life, which was now absorbing his energies. What he did need was to come more closely into touch with representa- tive people who, understanding sociology and poli- tics, were well disposed towards educational re- form; not that he might convert them, but that they might make more clear to him what were the opinions and the hopes of the best available minds. Mr. Wishart 's acquaintance with the world of the influential was enough to secure a number of in- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 245 troductions. I wish I could give a distinct ac- count of Ford's interviews with these distin- guished persons — some of them men who had much to do with the practical conduct of state affairs. But I had only one short talk with him on the subject, and a sketchy second-hand account of his impressions might do injustice to individual public servants who already have quite enough ill-informed criticism to put up with. But, to speak generally, Ford was depressed ; not by any ineptitude or lack of vision in the men with whom he talked, but by the obvious impossibility of their applying through public machinery more than a tiny fraction of the intellectual power and the idealism that they had it in them to give to the public service — and by their manifest resigna- tion to the fact. ^^They can't give their real best,'' I remember Ford saying, ^^and they have given up trying." They were the victims, he went on, of the lazy English habit of making an opposition between the theoretical and the practical, with the result that a man sees what ought to be done, and then does not do it because there are difficulties in the way. No one but a fanatic. Ford said (the word * ^fanatic" was not, to him, a cheap term of abuse), could stand against our general tendency to call ourselves practical when we make difficulties a sufficient excuse for inaction. The politician, the public servant in general, could seldom be a fa- natic and remain a public servant; he could only drift down stream with the sluggish current, keep- W. E. FORD ing his slowly deteriorating principles to himself and becoming more and more a mere time-server in action. Some men could keep the fire of their original sincerity available, half -histrionically, for time-serving purposes; and these were the most dangerously misleading of all. Ford refused to blame the individuals in more than a very limited degree. In the common phrase, it was the system that was wrong; and at the back of the system was the common way of thought of the mass of '* educated'* people. It was unity of thought, he insisted, that was lack- ing; diversity of opinion was the chief practical obstacle to the carrying out of principles, and we made no study, educational or other, of the ways in which people of diverse opinions might arrive at a meeting of minds. Oriental minds had equally encountered am obstacle, and had found their unity in something little better than a common fatalism. Our resignation to the *^ practical'' dif- ficulties that come of divided counsels had, curi- ously enough, the same taint of fatalism. ^'The different forms of fatalism," Ford remarked, *'are the blind alleys of spiritual evolution." I gathered from Mrs. Ford that some of these eminent acquaintances of his were really inter- ested in his way of thought and anxious to see more of him; and perhaps a region of influence might have opened out before him, as Mr. Wish- art hoped, if their deed had been as good as their will. But a busy official, however idealistic his pri- vate views, only admires a prophet or a philos- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY Ml opher on principle; he does not cultivate him in practice. He is committed to a way of life from which such indulgences are, in practice, crowded out. I do not think Ford was disappointed. He had seen enough for his present purposes of a type which he wanted to understand. He wanted now — he had been five months at home — to con- tinue his voyaging, and particularly to visit China. Ford's impressions of China, as they are re- corded in the note-books (I shall have but little other record to adduce), are at once peculiarly rich and, if the paradox will be understood, pe- culiarly vague. They show more than anything else his real reason for wishing to see outlandish civilisations in being, not merely to read what other observers had written about them — the fact, of which he must have been unconsciously aware, that by living for a time in any society of people he could absorb, through the pores of his skin as it were, more of the true, essential explanation of their social ethic than the trained literary in- terpreter could express in many volumes. He told me once that he could learn more about the soul of Japan from one slight story of Lafcadio Hearn's telling than from all the Japanese his- tory that is extant, though Hearn is admittedly an inaccurate reporter; and I think the reason is that Hearn, like Ford, possessed a certain im- aginative sympathy which could enter into direct communication with the inner social sense of a people, disregarding the multiplicity of detail that 248 W. E. FORD only obscures the vision of the more pedestrian if more painstaking investigator. At all events Ford's China, like Hearn's Japan, seems to me a real place, queer but intelligible ; the China and the Japan of the careful European historian seem, by comparison, a fantastic myth. All of this goes to support a contention of Ford's that reality, for the mind, depends not upon facts in themselves, but upon the imaginative understand- ing of facts. Ford took in a few facts at first hand, and understood them, and arrived at a real interpretation of China; the historical commenta- tors who had made a life's study of China gath- ered in many facts, chiefly at second or third hand, and did not understand them, and produced a Chinese fairy tale. But let me give another ex- tract from the note-books : — ^ * The most exciting thing about this civilisation, from the modern European point of view, is that it has had no industrial revolution — not as an entire civilisation. India had; though the wind has been tempered to the Indian masses to a great extent. (Had Europe to bear the first and hard- est brunt because Europe alone was so far ad- vanced in strength as only to sag perilously, not actually to break, under the onslaught?) Dis- counting the Oriental isolation of the unity ideal — the Oriental fatalism — China is what Europe was before steam and rails came in. ^'Hyp. Suppose industrialism were now fully introduced into China, as into Japan, this would be the result: machinery, the whole complex A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 249 mechanism of industrial relations, would come in- to being among a people whose way of thought, ingrained by centuries upon centuries of routine, would make them utterly incapable of interpreting it. They would not control the machine; the ma- chine would control them. And their fatalism would make it seem right to them that a machine should take on this supremacy. ^*Did anything so very different happen when industrialism made its swift conquest of Europe? We had our own fatalism — our belief in the ab- solute and sole necessity of individuation ; and the Manchester School was the consequence. Let diversity of industrial interest have free play, we said ; unity of interest will settle itself. In other words, let unity of industrial interest go hang. The Chinaman would say, in effect. This great Spirit of Machinery has taken hold of us and pos- sessed us; it is no use for us, mere cogs in its wheels, to protest. In other words, let the work- ing individual go hang. On this hypothesis the result in the two cases is curiously the same. '^Conf} Factory workers in Nanchong seem to show exactly the pessimism and the resignation of English sweated operatives. The difference is in the mode of relief : the Englishman takes gin and becomes, fallaciously, a free-born Briton again; the Chinaman takes opium and identifies himself with *the circumambient inane.' To the one, a false individuation — to the other, a false sense of his unity with everything. ^Confirmation (of the hypothesis). 250 W. E. FORD ^* (No — not wholly false. Stolen, rather; stolen from the man's inner consciousness. He is living, at these moments, upon his spiritual capital.) ^^ Compare Chinese peasantry, now, with Eng- lish peasantry before the industrial revolution. Discounting the vast difference between their views of what is ultimately important, their life, in detail, is much of a muchness. The elementary fact that the people depend on the land, and the land on the people, is at the root of the people's contentment and the land's fecundity. Imagine the mass of Chinese peasantry swept into the in- dustrial vortex, and you imagine an incalculable upheaval and uprooting. That upheaval and up- rooting has happened to us ; it is wonderful that we are not in a worse mess than we are." No specimen from Ford's note-books can render the cumulative effect that the whole mass of his notes has for me, who knew his way of thinking, and can see the relation between his small, subtly casual allusions and the general trend of his thought. The above quotation, now that I have copied it into my manuscript, seems vague and purposeless out of its context — which is the haunt- ing meaning that the whole body of his notes dim- ly conveys to me. The notes in themselves, as detailed excerpts, such as the two that I have given, have comparatively little meaning. Ford put these jottings down for his own eye — they were to be his raw material when he came to write his book, and he deliberately put them down A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 251 in the raw. But perhaps the reader will have both the patience and the insight to see in them, at least, the movement of a mind that always looked through seemings to realities, and lived for the true concerns of life. I make no attempt to portray Ford's impres- sions of India and China^ — those romantically pic- turesque civilisations — in their picturesque aspect. It was not that aspect that concerned him. He wanted to arrive at the truth about these civilisa- tions as it affects, or should affect, our own ide^. of civilisation. I do not profess to give his con- clusions ; those he could only have worked out for himself. I only hope to give a hint, and a very slight hint, of his working. The tragedy is that he himself was not permitted to work out his conclusions in full. He came home from China, as from India, not because material was exhausted — far from it — but because he seemed to have been long enough away. And he came back resolved to go out again, presently, to Japan — the country where East and West have met in an alliance closer and more baffling to the mind than can be discovered in any other corner of the globe. ^^ Understand Japan,'' he said to me, ^*and you understand the whole of the modern world." Japan, he went on to say, would probably show itself to be a crude mixture of Eastern and Western influences; but there one ought to see, not by any means a new and a perfected civilisation, but the embryo of a civilisation begotten by the West upon the East. «52 W. E. FORD He did not look to Japan as an ideal, but rather, almost, as an exemplary warning. It might be the privilege of the Japanese to show us all how not to do it; in any case, he meant to find out. This time his stay in London was a short one — less than two months ; and he gave all his time to his wife and children. It was only because he wanted to be with them again that he had come home. It is amusing that one of the friends who most deplored his absences abroad was highly scandalised at his extravagance in undertaking a journey home for so short a period. It was not that he could not afford it, nor even that he was spending Mrs. Ford's money — if it had been any business of his friends to speculate upon these questions — it was simply the uncomfortable sense of a disproportion between the length and cost of a journey home from the East and back and a stay in England of merely a few weeks. The value of those weeks was not to be measured by their number ; and they were destined to be a very precious memory to those for whose sake he re- turned. I saw Ford twice during this time ; and at our first meeting he was full of humorous comments upon his friend's letter of expostulation. It was part, he said, of the eternal discussion whether things are more square than they are pink. The expense of his journey represented one value; the happiness of a domestic reunion represented an- other and a wholly different value, as different as the quality of pinkness is from the quality of A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 253 squareness. People were for ever trying to measure incommensurable things against one an- other, especially to translate into terms of quan- tity things that can only be estimated in terms of quality. He said that he saw himself, during his stay in England, in the character of Lewis Car- roll's engine-driver, whose time was worth a thou- sand pounds a minute. In his own case, the actual value of a minute or an hour or a day of his pres- ence at home to himself, to his wife, to either of his children, was absolutely unmeasurable, even in terms of quality, by any one outside the fam- ily; but when you had a value widely accepted and in a sense understood by the public, its ex- pression in terms of quantity might be just as im- possible. Ford adduced the case of a short poem in the evening paper which he had brought home with him, a little lyric in two four-line stanzas, full, he declared, of the true creative spirit. (The poet's name was unknown to me, as to Ford; not long ago I came upon the verses again, in a vol- ume now cherished by those who have a seeing eye for modern poetry, as the work of a master of delicate fantasy in rhyme. ^) Ford held out the sheet. '^What is this worth, in terms of quan- tity?'' he asked. ^^Fourpence a line — four eights are thirty-two — two and eight pence." As to the real value in terms of quality, who could judge? The thrill of pleasure that it had given to us was a spark from the authentic fires of poetry; but, again, it might be a spark that would gleam for a * Walter de la Mare. 254 W. E. FORD little and die out, a small shooting star in an August sky, or it might be a new fixed star among the hosts in the poetic firmament, to be registered upon the charts of astronomer-critics of poetry for as long as word-constellations in our language should endure. In the lesser event, even, its value could be gauged by no quantitative foot-rule of any one^s devising. *^The qualitative is the abso- lute,'' said Ford; a saying upon which I have often reflected since this talk, and always with a feeling that Ford is tantalising me again — that a world of meaning lies behind the phrase, of mean- ing which Ford ought to have lived to elucidate more fully. At all events, I feel certain that the converse of his statement is true : that the quan- titative is the impermanent — that anything which can be weighed and measured in terms of quan- tity is of its nature fleeting, and of its nature un- satisfying to the spirit of man. The quantitative is, by definition, the finite. The second time that I saw Ford during this return to England, and the last time that I was to talk with him before his departure for Japan, was within a week of his sailing. I was preoccu- pied with my own concerns. I had the choice be- fore me of two careers ; the one ambitious, in the sense in which ambition means the seeking of money, the other artistic, in the sense in which art means the satisfaction of one's own inner needs. I laid my position — of which the details need not concern the reader^ — ^before Ford. The result of the otherwise unimportant incident was A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 255 that Ford gave me his mind about the perennial conflict in the estimation of a youngish man be- tween ideals and practical necessities, in terms which ought, I think, to be definitely stated and underlined, though the attempt to restate the prin- ciples that Ford could express and illustrate with such easy power is an undertaking full of diffi- culty. To begin with, he insisted that all conflict be- tween the ideal and the necessary is unnatural conflict. It is of the same nature as the opposi- tion between the theoretical and the practical. None the less, that unnatural opposition, that un- natural conflict is continually present in our civil- isation : we must never forget that it is there, but we must never forget that it is unnatural. Ford imagined as an instance the case of an artist, a literary man, who wants to write literature of one kind, while his agent or publisher, represent- ing the public taste, wants him to write literature (if it be literature) of another kind. His artistic sense demands that he should write what he wants to write, and his artistic sense is wrong, to this extent: it is also his business to say what other people want, or need, to have said. Real art is never born of the artistic sense alone; it springs from a fusion of the artistic with the social sense. Undoubtedly the artist often knows best, not what is merely wanted, but w^hat is truly needed; but that is not because of his artistic sense alone, but because his social sense is often finer than that of his agent or publisher — in whom artistic and 256 W. E. FORD social ideals are alike merged in some degree in commercial considerations. A writer, so Ford declared, has no need to com- promise between his artistic conscience and the need for making money. Indeed, as a rule, he only falls between two stools if he tries to do so. What he needs is not a compromise, but a unity; and that not between art and money-making, but between art and an understanding of the people to whom the art must speak. Money-making must be incidental. ^^If an artist tries to aim straight at money,'' said Ford, '^he will miss it. The pull of his art will deflect his aim." Under the vague term ' ' artist ' ' Ford tended to include all those who follow a given activity sim- ply and solely for its own sake. The others were those who had fame or money for their chief ob- jective. The desire for fame in itself — apart from the desire for recognition and love from those for whom one has worked — he regarded as a disease of the mind, instancing the number of great seekers after fame who have been epileptics. A desire for money, on the other hand, was often worthy of entire respect. In a perfect civilisa- tion, he said, we should all do our work for its own sake and for the sake of our neighbours, and our material reward would come incidentally ; in civilisation as it is, the animal law of a strug- ^'le for existence is only very partially super- seded, and most of the money that is the agreed token for food, shelter, and security is scrambled for rather than earned. This being so. Ford was A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 257 clear that the element of scramble must be al- lowed for — and kept in its proper place. The trouble was, as Ford said, that there appeared to be a law of ' * once a scrambler, always a scram- bler '*; the world might be roughly divided into scramblers, earners, and artists, all remaining fairly true to type. The difficulty was to know when to stop scram- bling. Almost every one had the right instinct about this; almost every one said to himself, ^^I need so much for security; I will make so much and then stop.'' And almost every one, succeed- ing in the money-scramble, found himself unable to stop. Ford put this down to two causes. First, ^* scrambling'' satisfies an instinct older than hu- manity, the instinct developed through aeons of evolution through struggle; and the appetite of that instinct grows with exercise. Second, there is the difficulty of persuading the stopping-place to remain fixed. A man aims at a modest £300 a year. Starting from the basis of a very simple way of life, he sees £300 a year as, upon that basis, a comfortable assurance of security. But unless he is a person of great simplicity, or of great determination and fixity of purpose, his basis, his scale of life, rises with every increase in his income; and when he has his £300 a year he is already living on a £300 a year basis, and thinks how pleasant it would be to feel really com- fortable and secure — ^with an income of, say, £600 a year. And so the process goes on, without limit ; and so. Ford considered, it was likely to go on 258 W. E. FORD until society should take account of the sound in- stinct for moderation with which most people en- ter upon a money-making career, and should give it expression by setting a limit to wealth, thus protecting the individual against his own lower instincts. This, I suggested, would abolish capitalism — would it not involve a mechanical State-Socialism? Possibly, Ford thought, not at all necessarily. Private ownership had had its use, he thought. The time had already come when an industry could be owned entirely by small shareholders and managed by salaried experts. Possibly, in the future, the workers would become the share- holders — and the shareholder class, through an education that would rouse the mass of the genteel out of idleness and apathy, would become work- ers as well. That, he was inclined to think, would be in the long run the solution of the industrial problem; but it would be a very long run. By that time industry would have become an art, and grab and scramble would have been quite super- seded; a consummation desirable enough in all conscience, but not likely to come about in a gen- eration or two. This was the last talk that I had with Ford. He sailed for Japan in the spring of 1913. For some Vv eeks after his landing there his letters were dis- patched regularly every mail, as usual; and as usual they told Mrs. Ford of little but his actual movements — he was never a descriptive letter- writer, and he seldom mentioned the progress of A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 259 his investigations, keeping this material for his note-books and for conversation when he should return. He seldom wrote to any one but his wife, and, occasionally, his elder girl; and he wrote rather as husband and father than as travelle-- and thinker. Mrs. Ford alloAvs me to publish a part of one brief letter, which has only the sad distinction of being his last : — ''This is a quiet little up-conntrv villas'e. I have got all that I can hold for the present out of the tovvns and the English-speaking Japs, and I want to get tlie atmosphere of the un-Europeanised rustic life. Doing without an interpreter already, with results that strain the splendiferous native courtesy at times. Jolly quar- ters, with a fine view — I'm seeing plenty of it, being tied by the leg with a chill of sorts — getting better now, after a couple of days' fever. I really wished you were here the day before yesterday! ..." After this letter, silence. Ford had always writ- ten by every mail, and when two mails had passed with no further w^ord from him, Mrs. Ford was anxious enough to have word sent, provisionally, to the British Consul at Tokyo, asking that in- quiries might be made unless a cable from her should have let him know meanwhile that all was well. Still no news arriving, she cabled to the consul on the day when the information sent by mail was due to reach him, asking that inquiries should be pushed forward without delay. There followed another fortnight of suspense, and then the answering cable arrived. Ford had died and 260 W. E. FORD had been buried several weeks before in the little village from which he had last written. Confirmatory details by the mail following the cable told little more. The foreign visitor had been stricken down by a fever, had rallied strongly, and then had had a quick and fatal re- lapse. The village people had guarded his few possessions, and these were being sent home. (Ultimately only his pocket-book, sent separately by registered mail, arrived; the thing of most value, the notes that he had had time to make in Japan, were lost with the main consignment, no one could tell how.) There was no hint of any final note or message; at Mrs. Ford's request the envoy from the Consulate made a second journey to the village to make sure of this, and learned that Ford had passed from a return of high fever into unconsciousness, from which he did not awaken. I believe that Ford died with many secrets locked, half-solved, in his mind, many half- worked problems whose solution would have brought him widespread gratitude among thinking people. It is part of my sorrow to be able to pre- sent only so slight and vague a hint even of the nature of the great undertaking in the midst of which he was cut off. This was to have been the practical outcome, the practical service, of his essential philosophy, his essential view of man and of the universe. Of that philosophy itself, so far as Beresford and I have been able to recon- struct it from our memory of his casual exposi- A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 261 tions (Beresford was fortunate in having one really exhaustive talk with him about it), the next chapter will give some account. Of the man I will attempt no concluding panegyric; the mem- ory of his inner nature is the sacred possession of those who have lost him. PART THREE A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY PART THREE A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER XI Richmond and I are in disagreement concerning what appears to be an essential of Ford's philos- ophy, but I believe that our very quarrel demon- strates the validity of the principle that provides my thesis. Richmond loved Ford the man. He admired the structure of Ford's character and the rule of his life. Richmond saw results and found an application; he was satisfied as to the prag- matic test of the philosophy, and while he would not for a moment admit that pragmatism is a phi- losophy in itself, he has found in it a useful tool. Just in so far as our present partnership is con- cerned he represents the active exponent. It is he who has written Ford's life, who has had some vision of a teleology and has translated his sub- ject into comprehensible terms. My share, as represented in this final chapter, imposes upon me a task that must be less sympathetic to the ordi- nary reader. And I must premise, further, that I cannot at- tempt a dogmatic exposition of Ford's philoso- 265 ^66 W. E. FORD phy. He never himself formulated it in philosoph- ical terms, and although I may lapse into that shortland from a characteristic inability to find the illuminating paraphrase, I propose to confine myself as far as possible to the instrument of common language understood by the plain man. Ford had the same difficulty. I have before me at this moment a letter that he wrote to me when I was living at Parks tone in the summer of 1905, and I quote a passage here as the true apology for my method. ^*I am confoundedly bothered by my search for terms,'' he writes apropos of the philosophical consolation he was prescribing for my mental depression, '^and I don't want to sit down and invent a new terminology. So you must be sympathetic with me and not allow the prejudice of old associations to bias you if yoii find me talking of ''spirit" and ''matter," for example. I shall only be using them as conveni- ent little labels like the placards of the Eliza- bethan stage." It follows, therefore, firstly, that my statement will be of no value to the specialist ; and secondly, that I may have received a faulty impression of Ford's philosophy, and may pass on a second ren- dering which will be still more distorted. This resort to the language of pictures, the language so sedulously avoided in definition by the aca- demic philosopher, inevitably touches too various a response in the imaginations of different read- ers. When the placard goes up, "This is a Cas- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 267 tie," the average spectator responds according to his experience, and pictures not an ideal pile of his own construction, but the Windsor or Ken- ilworth of his last excursion, the flat presentation of a familiar engraving, or the memory of a real- istic backcloth. And as I, too, may have substi- tuted Windsor for Ford's Kenilworth, and may succeed in nothing more than creating the impres- sion of a drop scene, I feel cautiously inclined to warn all whom it may comjern that my exegesis, no less than my personal impression of the phi- losopher himself, is coloured by my own tenden- cies. Lastly, the problem is still more complicated by the fact that Ford's main proposition is as pure an essay in a priorism as I ever came across. When he first began to hint at his philosophy to me, in 1904, he had not read Bergson ; but he had completely anticipated the method of intuition prescribed in the Introduction to Metaphysics. Hence his preliminary thesis is founded on no sort of inductive process, and may appear at first sight to contradict the empirical and pragmatic tests of social benefit. . . . But my apology is accumulating beyond the limits of necessity ; and having qualified it by add- ing that my attempt at reproducing Ford's phi- losophy also rests mainly upon an intuition, I will struggle to find symbols that shall render as nearly as may be my own reflection of the orig- inal. I do not propose to find names for Ford's phi- 268 W. E. FORD losophy. It does not matter greatly whether we call it broadly a form of Vitalism, or bring it into a more definite category under the heading of Idealistic Monism. Indeed, I am not sure whether or not Ford regarded matter as a reflex of spirit, or as a second elementary. I incline to the for- mer hypothesis. In his talk of matter, when he ranged beyond the last-known fence of molecular physics, he implied a theory of impeded, tempo- rarily crystallised force as the ultimate atom. I remember receiving an impression of the *'knot in the ether,'' in unmaterial terms, as force con- fined by its own superabundance of energy, as some indefinable element piling up to visibility. But as I attempt to translate the intuition the matter inevitably becomes temporal and spatial, and it seems that no other figure is possible. Nevertheless, I believe that we are approaching some expression of that hypothecated urgency be- hind life. The academic philosophers have had their uses. They have trained the mind to disso- ciate itself from the concrete example. And if no academic philosophy has yet succeeded in for- mulating any idea of a ^^ first cause," many phi- losophers have helped us to clear the field of thought. I like to think that we are feeling our way to a new form in this kind. Bergson has failed us in many respects, but he has come nearer than any waiter of my generation to carry the statement of his thesis into the domain of poetry. His work has, in fact, what Mr. Eansome would call a po- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 269 tential value. Behind many of his passages in Creative Evolution lies a power of suggestion that is more valuable than the logical demonstra- tion. And it is for this reason that all his many exegetes have failed to do more than confuse our hopeful vision of his principles. Bergson's logic carries us no further than the logic of Hegel, but Bergson's statement tends to display a new pos- sibility. When logic and mathematics and the language of accuracy can carry us no further, poetry, music, and even the graphic arts may com- plete the expression. So, too, in these haphazard notes on Ford's theory of causation, I can only hope to convey some vague, embracing impression of that postu- lated first cause which has found such other names and such other significances as God, the First Cause, the Life Force, the Elan Vital, or, as I unthinkingly put it, the urgency behind life — a definition that I should be sorry to defend phOo- sophically. I use it, now, neither poetically nor scientifically, but because it satisfied my need as I wrote it, and I hope that it may by its very vagueness and inaccuracy serve my purpose of avoiding the over definite. To Ford this urgency was all *^good" in the sense that it was beyond criticism in its essence, however various in expression; and his first and most important principle was that right thinking, judgment and action are attained only by permit- ting the freest possible expression of the tenden- 270 W. E. FORD cies tliat seek to manifest themselves as a libera- tion of this antecedent urge. In the parable of force piling itself up till it becomes comprehensible as matter, we find our Ormuzd in liberation, our Ahriman in impediment or constriction. So in the moral analogy, free ex- pression presents an aspect of right; judgment and inhibition an aspect of wrong. Consequently, right and wrong are never absolutes, but only de- grees of resistance. It follows as a kind of corollary to this that each check or impediment to the free expression of this active urgency behind life remains tem- porarily as a further complex that must ultimately be resolved. I remember that on one occasion Ford took up the old analogy of the river, postu- lating that one must not think of the current as a movement of particles, but as an abstract force thrusting forward, a force that must not be con- fused in this instance with any physical theory of gravity. In that metaphor the impediments took the shape of the whirlpools and eddies, and for a time he elaborated the figure and made me see how each vortex must be resolved, each resist- ance overcome, by the ultimate force of a stream of energy that could be momentarily diverted but never, even momentarily, checked. I had a fleet- ing vision of some eternal persistence whose di- rection and temporality could only be measured by the ephemeral whirlpool it created. And then Ford dismissed the whole mataphor with one sweeping movement of his arm. *^It's just one A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 271 figure out of a million," he said; 'Hhe only point of it is to show that any figure one may choose has the same interpretation." But if that remark of his is true, it does, in- deed, contain some element of proof. If we can find evidence of the same theory in every material illustration, we may logically accept the theory on the mere ground of probability ; we are in sight of a hypothesis that explains all the phenomena. In a somewhat inconsequent series of notes such as this, anything like a general argument would be out of place. I can only suggest and leave the immense range of extensions and ob- jections to those who are willing to work in the cause of truth. Nevertheless, I must pause for a moment to point out that in certain applications Ford's general theory does help us to plainer statement. The theological problem of the origin of evij, for example, is resolved into simpler terms. Ex hypothesi, this primitive urge is non-moral, and whatever appears to us as evil is only an instance of a degree of temporary impediment. On the other hand, if we push the problem further back, and inquire whence came the first hindrance, whence the original superfluity that became trans- lated into matter, we may find some explanation and satisfaction in the contemplation of our prin- ciple as at once rhythmic and eternal. We may think of it as some immeasurable wave that pulses for ever, without origin or climax; and we, the infinitely small presentation of a human resultant, 272 W. E. FORD may find ourselves at a node of accumulation, buoying ourselves with the certainty of a heaven of present expansion. For the amplitude of our imagined wave is so vast that it may contain the birth, growth, and dissolution of a universe. In one great throb of our single element, matter may come into being, pass through its myriad forms of presentation and dissolve again into the serenity of the All-thing that is, in its essence, immutable. No concep- tion of our material time is great enough to meas- ure such a cycle. ^ Our little measure of revolu- tion about a central sun must be so indefinitely multiplied that the human mind must forget that unit before the larger conception can be realised. And if the unit grow to the passing of a solar sys- tem, it is still too small to reckon the comparative eternity of a single movement of our primary ele- ment. Yet now, and with one effortless turn of the imagination, the reckoning can be made if we do but grasp the thought that by its extension all time may be eliminated; drowned in the greater infinity as the thought of a single second is drowned in the conception of a million years. That is as far, perhaps, as we may reach towards our elimination of the concept of time, while we are still so confronted and harassed by this per- petual cage of matter. But if the method fail to achieve its ultimate object, namely, the complete * I write the word ' ' cycle ' ' deliberately, since in this relation I may change the metaphor without apology. The figure is in- essential. The All-thing embraces every forni, while for ever remaining itself formless. A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 273 elimination of the time measure, it may serve, as philosophy has served, to dissociate the mind from a concrete example. Indeed I would find my excuse for this picture- language in a continual clash of metaphor. If a single image is chosen and elaborated, it tends to crystallise as the idea in itself. But if we have no sooner pictured a stream than we find the thought of it changed to a wave, to a wheel, to a measure of time, we have some hope of momen- tarily touching the abstract as a result of our confusion. Just in this manner do our thoughts often reach out more profoundly when a demand is made upon our immediate attention. In con- versation, while we are reading, in the midst of some active employment, the vividly enticing ided: will often present itself, and we long for instant freedom in order that the idea may be wooed to fuller expression. But when the distraction is removed, when we have escaped it may be our companion or even quickly laid down our book, some magic is gone from our thought, the wonder slips from us, and that which had been for a mo- ment vital and entrancing becomes the flat simu- lacrum projected by a labouring imagination. And for this reason I have a hope that among the torturing clash of metaphors, the mind of the reader may find some moment of escape ; and ap- proach, if only for the tiniest instant, the idea of that shapeless, timeless abstraction which was Ford's intuition of the primary urge behind life. I come to a second application of his theory — 274 W. E. FORD and it shall be my only other instance — by way of the problem of evolution. When the theologists presented our element in the shape of God, and gave Him the human quali- ties of pity, mercy, and gentleness, they were sorely hampered to explain the apparent cruelty not only of that expression we have labelled Na- ture, but also of the incongruous tragedies of hu- man fate. By one of those convincing fallacies which have something in common with my sliding metaphors of the All-thing, they came to postulate that the ways of God were inscrutable, while at- tempting still to retain those essentially scrutable characteristics of pity and mercy with which they had anthropomorphically endowed him. God be- came to us, therefore, a horrible paradox of cruel kindness, and from that our puzzled imaginations were reduced to contemplating human sin as a kind of Absolute that might perhaps be elimi- nated by punishment. The thought of our own abasement gave a more plausible colour to the inscrutable fury of God. If we could attain no such high conception of His purity as should ele- vate Him beyond all possibility of criticism, we might reach towards the same effect by lowering our measure of human virtue. The older theolo- gists sought, in fact, to approve God by debasing the standard of their regard of Him. Ford, in all his tests of the All-thing, steadily refused to humanise it. Cruelty no less than kind- ness was to him a mode of motion, a function, a phenomenon, that we judge by the present stan- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 275 dard of humanity in a particular stage of evolu- tion. He found no absolute criterion in any of these qualities. Right and wrong were relatives of immediate worth, but they had for him no such intrinsic qualities as marked them out for ulti- mate permanence. Indeed, if I were asked to state his absolutes in this kind, I could only label them as Obstruction and Liberation — a definition that I will consider later when I come to the ques- tion of his practical ethic. And it seems to me that if we regard the large problem of evolution from this attitude, all those vague questions concerning waste and superfluity, the apparent regard for the type, and the reckless cruelty to the individual; all those queries of pur- pose and morality which strain towards an accept- able teleology, become suddenly futile or incapable of an immediate solution. I do not find Ford's primitive urge inscrutable if I cease to regard it as the creation of a human mind. The All-thing is not made in man's image, and man is no more than a mode of expression for the All-thing. And if with our limitations we seek some definite hope, some goal at which we may momentarily gaze in this flitting instant of our long journey, we may find it in newer words than Heaven and Hell ; in such words as obstruction and liberation, or in the thought of a passage from conflict towards peace. But all the particular problems connected with man's present moral, intellectual, and physical condition will surround us when we leave the 276 W. E. FORD freedom of our unlocateable a priori standpoint and look back at our insurgent premiss through the circumscriptions of that empirical pragma- tism which appears to be the accepted criterion of social values. There is, indeed, another crite- rion, and, perhaps, a more important one, I mean the intuitions of that genius which is the gift in a greater or less degree of all humanity. But for what we call practical purposes, every inspiration that touches the regulations of social life must be submitted to the final test of ^^Will it workr' In the temporal, spatial domain which encloses the material complex in a delicate, strong net of very urgent restrictions, it is inevitable that we should attach a considerable importance to the more or- derly arrangement of molecules. Before I come to those immediate concerns of life, however, I must deal briefly with an inter- mediate problem arising out of the main premiss and subsidiary to it ; a problem that leaves us still outside the net. Ford's second a priori proposi- tion deals with the subject of consciousness. His statement differs most importantly from the statements of such philosophers as, say, Wil- liam James, inasmuch as Ford touches a greater unity. James spoke of an *^ ocean of conscious- ness, '^ and either that or any other metaphor of the same kind presents the antinomies of ^^ spirit'* and ^^ matter '* — even if the matter, as James seemed to imply, is held in suspension. Ford did not haggle over degrees of permeability. He pos- tulated consciousness as a universal property of A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 277 what we call matter, and drew his differentiating line, not between consciousness and unconscious- ness, but between consciousness and the poten- tiality for its realisation. At first sight his theory of that scale of poten- tiality may appear as nothing more than a piece of ingenuity, but when the theory is put to the widest test of analogy, it gains immense force by the appeal of its application. Ford's key-word in this connection was *^ Reciprocity.'' He pos- tulated that the degree of realisation necessary for the understanding of what we speak of broad- ly as consciousness, is proportionate to the de- gree of reciprocity between the units of conscious- ness. (I deplore the material significance of the word ' * unit, ' ' but each and every synonym is open to the same objection. We have, unfortunately, no comprehensible language with which to meas- ure such abstractions as this; and ''unit" has the advantage of carrying less suggestion of solidity than such alternatives as molecule or atom.) For the sake of illustration our unit may be figured as some minimum translation of the omni- present thrust into spatial expression. We might, indeed, express it by an algebraical formula, for, when we enter the net, the chief of our restric- tions is imposed by a fundamental mathematical process working within three or at most four dimensions ; a restriction that is imposed upon all would-be definitive language. We may, however, accept the word ''unit" as a reasonably flexible description. 278 W. E. FORD It is far harder to attempt a definition of * ^ re- ciprocity,'* a word that in this connection includes and correlates a whole host of values. It must, I think, include love for example at one end, while at the other it might express the mechanical re- lations of the transmitter and receiver of a Mar- coni apparatus. We may, perhaps, hold the idea of reciprocity as a potential function of the unit, and find instances of the function in phenomena apparently so diverse as telepathy and chenaical affinities. Ford's main premiss with regard to conscious- ness now emerges as the postulate that the ten- dency of all the known manifestations of reciproc- ity was towards the realisation of consciousness. He sometimes found a statement of his antino- mies in this proposition by using the chemical terms crystalloid and colloid, the former repre- senting the more static, and the latter the more fluid forms of cohesion. And in this figure he further assumed that the static represented the more obstructive complex, while the fluid was the more susceptible instrument that was evolving more rapidly towards the ideal of expression. Nevertheless, in this as in his figures of the primitive urge behind life, all statements must be accepted as presenting a material analogy which cannot be pressed too far. And later, when I come to his theory of ^^ tenuity'' in connection with what is commonly called genius, I shall have occasion to elaborate, by a more biological paral- lel, the peculiar application of such symbols as A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 279 '* crystalloid'* and '* colloid'*; symbols that stood to him as portraying the increasing diversity be- tween the inorganic and the organic forms of life. For the immediate purpose of these notes, however, I shall accept the main argument as hav- ing been stated in the formula I have adopted, and proceed to an explanatory illustration of the theory with no further apology for any abrupt transition of metaphor. Two terms, alone, will remain constant, namely that of *^unit" and that of *' reciprocity, * * both of which have been, in some sense, defined. An illustration of Ford's that gave me a sense of apprehension, when I first tentatively strug- gled with his exposition of consciousness, took for its unit the high exponent of individual life. The thing we know as a group consciousness, he said, does very evidently depend on the degree of reciprocity between individuals. But beyond the small group we come to a still more imperfect form in a national consciousness; while a world consciousness can hardly be said to exist. The differences being fairly attributable to the dimin- ishing potentiality for reciprocity. In the small, more or less selected group, for example, such as the congregation of a revivalist preacher, the sitters at a spiritualistic seamce, or the crowd at a public meeting, a temporary de- gree of reciprocity is attained by the attention given to a central theme. The individual sur- renders himself in a greater or less degree to the exhortation of the preacher, to the thought of £80 W. E. FORD the common desire to witness some psychical phe- nomenon, or to the considered statement of the public speaker. This surrender connotes a form of free expression, which in Ford's argument is the continual tendency of his primal force, and as a result of the temporary failure of opposition, a higher form of reciprocity becomes immediately possible, a form that is manifested as the passing phenomenon of a group consciousness. In the larger instance of the national consciousness, the common subject of attention must obviously be wider in scope, an instance of which will inevita- bly occur to any one in this period of the present war. Now, it will probably be urged that this mani- festation of the higher consciousness is open to criticism on ethical grounds. The temporarily- created revivalist and psychic emotions will be condemned by the materialist; the public crowd's emotion by its political opponents; the fighting emotion by the pacifist. And all these condemna- tions can be upheld by a perfectly sound prag- matic argument based upon the values of social benefit. But Ford overrode all such considera- tions as these in his statement of the broad the- ory. He urged that the pragmatic test was no more applicable in this connection than the charge of cruelty levied against an omniscient God. The phenomenon was too temporary and too various in its expression to be bottled for future use, and the only test we could apply, he suggested, was the test of potentiality. And as to that, there A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 281 cannot, I think, be two opinions. The common emotion which animates a crowd to a momentary union, may be judged by some passing standard as useless or positively harmful; but it is an im- mensely powerful and effective force. And when such a common emotion has been maintained in the furtherance of a common purpose sacred to a particular group, the power evolved has been demonstrated as capable of radically changing the political, social, or religious conditions of a con- tinent. Another symbol for the enlargement of con- sciousness might be taken from the Life of the Bee. Maeterlinck became aware of some imma- terial entity that he called the ^'Spirit of the Hive''; but less poetical, less intuitive minds have been driven to the same kind of resort to explain the appearance of an unincorporated conscious- ness arising from a certain degree of reciprocity between sufficiently sensitive units. In this in- stance of the bees more particularly, and to a less degree in other examples of gregarious life (the law of the wolf -pack will serve as another type), the perfect submission of the unit seems to be the prime essential for the expression of a group con- sciousness — a deduction which so continually faced Ford that he later built upon it his theory of social philosophy. Nevertheless, a very clear distinction must be drawn between purposive and motiveless submission, using both expressions in relation to a quality of deliberateness exercised by the unit, and not in any sense as denoting the re- 282 W. E. FORD suit achieved by the immanent will, which, accord- ing to Ford's definition, could have no deliberate purpose as we commonly regard it. The precise quality of this attention or submis- sion cannot possibly be defined in the present state of our knowledge ; though I find in the general at- titude another statement of Bacon's apophthegm that Nature can only be commanded by obeying her. When Ford first began to talk his philoso- phy to me, I received an impression of some vaguely pictured force or purpose ^^ coming through*'; and although I rather deprecate the slightly theological suggestion of that phrase, it has a certain applicability in some relations. But, indeed, a whole range of 'metaphors drawn from physics would portray the outline of the same figure. Any sympathetic vibration illustrates an aspect of reciprocity and at the same time the ap- pearance of the new phenomenon which inevitably arises out of any demonstration of union. ^ And it may well be that in different regions, a common chemical experiment, the swarming of the hive, and the expression of a national impulse, are but' unimportant variants of the same simple theme. Again, my chief point is the wideness of the anal- ogy rather than the applicability of a single in- stance. In expounding his theory of conscious- ness or his theory of causation. Ford sought to carry out an underlying principle by hinting and * Browning said the same thing when he wrote, of a musician, that out of three sounds he framed, **Not a fourth sound, but a star.'^ A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 283 suggesting rather than by the exposition of dog- ma. For, as I hope to show later, the plasticity of the human mind illustrates a symptomatic con- dition in this relation. Lastly, before I leave these tentative notes on the subject of consciousness, I feel that I must make some reference to those aspects of apparent negation illustrated by the phenomena of sleep and death. No physiological explanation of the former condition has yet been universally ac- cepted, but there would seem to be a trend of opinion in favour of believing that '' natural' ' death or death from old age, is attributable broadly to some form of physical crystallisation. '' Natural' ' death, in fact, presents no real dififi- culty in this connection, displaying, perhaps, an instance of cumulative physical obstruction which finally ceases to convey the primitive urge behind life. Death from any other known cause is attrib- utable to a like failure of reciprocity between the units of the body, however different the accident which determines the immediate agent. The re- sult in every case is the passing from a compara- tive unison to a more or less absolute individuali- sation. Obviously the primal units of conscious- ness are for physical purposes indestructible; but their separation connotes a cessation of the group consciousness; just as the dispersal of the members of the hive would connote the disappear- ance of that collaboration which Maeterlinck has described as a spirit, and which has, indeed, a rec- ognisable entity. «84. W. E. FORD Sleep comes into quite another category, and I find no inspiration in the poetic figure which likens it to a little death. Personally I incline to the view that there is no cessation of conscious- ness either during natural sleep or during the failure of objective response evidenced by a sub- ject under an anaesthetic. The difference to my mind is one of manifestation. It is what I have earlier termed ''the potentiality for realisation'' that has inexplicably fallen. And if I am unwill- ingly compelled to leave that ''inexplicably'' con- fronting me with the blank negation of the insolu- ble, I find consolation in the thought that this problem belongs rather to the domain of the phys- iologist with his collaborators the physicist and the chemist, than to that of the philosopher. Since, to wind up this section of the general con- tention, it must, I think, be quite clear by this that the consciousness of Ford's premiss denotes a different concept from the ' ' awareness ' ' of cur- rent philosophy. "The spirit of the hive," for example, has been used as a type of group con- sciousness, but it is impossible to postulate it as a form of awareness attributable to any indi- vidual. When I first began to discuss philosophy with Ford, he shaped for me a little allegory designed as a bridge to lead over my hesitating thought from the practical application of my starting point to the unexplored region of the abstract in which I was then such a groping stranger. I used A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 285 to call that allegory of his ' * the visitor story. ' ^ It was to me in those days a method by which I achieved distraction; and such was the frequent use I made of it that presently the story changed its function and I came to use it for the return instead of the outward journey. And I propose, now, to revert to that old allegory as a means of re-entering the net of material life. I have, in- deed, to recast the form in which the story was given to me ; and I admit that in my new version little if anything remains of Ford^s original in- tention. He gave me a way of escape from the throng of immediate worries which beset me at that time, and I found an intellectual refuge whence I was able to survey, a little drunkenly, perhaps, the limitations of my ordinary life. And in reversing the process, I lose more than the pur- pose of an anodyne, since I lose, also, the char- acteristic attitude of Ford himself. As I have used it here, the *^ visitor story ^' must not be made a criterion of Ford's personal philosophy. The essential symbol of the allegory hovers about that ability for abstraction which I once gained from steadily regarding myself as a vis- itor to this planet. This ability is a common pos- session of ours, and the knowledge has weighed more with me than any argument in favour of immortality. We are aware of two worlds, as we are aware of two (or more?) selves; and just as I am able to hold a controversial and even a heated duologue between myself and me, so am I able to take an objective or a subjective stand- 286 W. E. FORD point. The ability to do these things varies no doubt with the individual, but in every one the power is there, and may be developed by use much as our physical co-ordinations may be developed. But, now, I am not leaving the common experi- ence of life, but returning to it ; and I want to set out, as lucidly as I may, the aspects of approach. All that had been accepted as the conventional appearance of life is become new and strange during the interval of absence. Language, the laws of civilised society, the restrictions of social intercourse, all the mechanical ordinances that have served to check free expression, are seen as brief artificial devices that enclose the minds of man in a brittle, imperfect cage. This pisture- language of ours, for example, this language that in its highest form achieves poetry not by direct statement but by delicate suggestion of that for which we have no symbol, is built almost exclu- sively from the metaphors of objective everyday experience. But coming as a visitor, I must tedi- ously learn some set of imperfect figures in or- der that I may communicate with a few of my fel- low-visitors, although I may never know them by that mechanical intercourse, nor can they recog- nise me. We are like children exchanging gifts. We hope that our little offering of words may be accepted as a pledge; but I know not what my fellow-child is seeking in return for his offering, which I, on my part, may despise. Even accept- ance is no evidence of understanding. If I offer that for which I find such symbols as love, devo- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 287 tion or friendship, I may never know by any fur- ther interchange of these toys of language how gratefully my offering has been received. Love takes little heed of words. And in lesser matters than this, language has little power to express, say, honesty of intention. In business we are forced to write our symbols on paper as an earnest that may be submitted to an arbitrary court of justice whose atfair it is to translate the formula into action, by the explicit or implicit threat of punishment. So much easier is it to conceal than to display our intentions by this queer mechanism of intercourse. When we are in the midst of objective life, the language we laboriously acquire soon appears as a comprehensible, even as a highly convenient, form of exchange; but the approaching visitor views it with foreboding and dismay. And what is true of language is equally true of custom, a secondary but indeed a still more terri- fying mechanism. Presently, when I have defi- nitely entered the spatial and temporal realm which so nearly shuts me in from any sight of reality, I shall accept custom as a rigid and es- sential ordinance built upon the experience of the generations. The laws and conventions of a little group of visitors — by inclining the development of some common factor towards a formula for reciprocity within the confines of a similar lan- guage — will so bind me for a time that I may come to regard these temporary rules as inspired ordinances framed by the disciplanarian God who W. E. FORD is the ideal representative of the particular race I have fortuitously visited. Again, I shall find comfort and entertainment within this little cage ^ of matter ; I shall find ideals of success and personal happiness; worst of all I shall encourage obstinate antagonisms against my fellow-men, forgetting that they, too, are visitors no less than I. I pause for an instant, already partly entan- gled, wondering, debating. Is it possible, I ask, for me to remember my vision of matter from without ? All these vast knots and intricacies ter- rify me by their massive threat of obstruction. I may not forget, but I shall soon be groping in a tangled web of endless restraints. And the only means of stating and holding my remembrance will be this queer, clumsy language that has no words for the thing I struggle to remember. Two endowments alone are conferred upon me, intuition and imagination — neither of them defin- able save by such gross and clumsy metaphor as leaves them still inviolable. . . . An analysis of Ford's concerned with social values, that left a particular impression on my mind, sprang from a discussion of ours on the subject of unselfishness ; and this subject provides such an admirable approach to the whole question of motive that I cannot do better than attempt a * Sometimes I see it as a cage, at others as a net; neither figure is important, but I appreciate a distinction which marks a differ- ence of mood. The use of the word net comes with a certain restive uneasiness of mind, and cage is the more optimistic simile. A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 289 summary of our general conclusions under that head. I say our conclusions, for I certainly be- lieved at the time that I contributed valuable ma- terial to the argument; but Ford had a way of avoiding credit for any originality, and it is quite probable that all my share was elicited by his suggestions. We began by the premiss that ''unselfishness" was a conscious self-denial, or self-expression, ex- ercised in order to gain some ulterior object which might or might not be consciously realised. This is, of course, a version of the old statement that pure unselfishness is inconceivable, since some personal reward inevitably follows an act of de- nial, even although such reward may be nothing more than a vague awareness of ethical consola- tion that will crown the physical inhibition. The generalisation is one of considerable cogency, and has often led to the conclusion that ''unselfish- ness" is only a relative term indicating a degree of capacity for immediate self-forgetfulness. Ford took that deduction a step further by pos- tulating that unselfishness could never become a true virtue until it could be described as abso- lutely selfish, not in motive but in expression. If a friend of mine is ill, he said, and I sit up with him — an act of self-denial that causes me, let us suppose, considerable physical inconvenience — I am obviously being relatively selfish if I stay with him, because I hope to gain the reward of my own approval. And this relative selfishness is a thing which we have agreed on general grounds to dis- 290 W. E. FORD approve, at least for the purposes of this argu- ment. But if I sit up with my friend because my feeling for him is such that I cannot bear to leave him, the act takes quite a different colour. Ob- viously I appear in this case to serve nothing but my own desires. Such was Ford^s general example, but coming to it, now, with the deliberate criticism of one who attempts to enunciate a clear proposition, I find that half a dozen contingents have yet to be recon- sidered. When I listened to Ford, I followed his thought rather than his actual words, but I can- not expect that the prejudiced reader — and nearly all readers are necessarily prejudiced — will take for granted the various steps which I intuitively leaped. In this example, then, certain inevitable mis- conceptions must be cleared away before I can suggest the ideal that cannot be absolutely de- fined. In this act of what we have called pure selfishness, no account can be taken of any fu- ture satisfactions that may presently arise. As- suming that the devotion is mine, I do not, for in- stance, look for my friend's gratitude, so it may be further postulated that he is unconscious and will never learn the part I have played in nursing him. Again, I am not intent on saving him in -order that I may continue to enjoy his company in the future. We must, in short, eradicate any aspect of human, personal advantage whether im- mediate or anticipated, whether actively realised or completely subconscious. What remains is as A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 291 difficult of analysis as the ''dog's temper^' of the Red Queen's classic example, the sublime and the ridiculous being nothing more than differences of presentation. We may, in fact, say that my "tem- per" (in its right sense) is postulated as the sole motive force in the "unselfish" act adduced; that what may appear to the introspective as an in- stance of self-denial is, indeed, the effortless, mo- tiveless expression of my love for a friend. The nearest recognisable parallel to such a form of expression must be found in the act of a man in a consuming rage, or, better still, perhaps, in the fury of a madman. It is essential to fix the at- tention on the thought of pure spontaneity, avoid- ing at the same time all the difficult suggestions that have come to haunt the word instinctive. Now, if this concept can be reached by intui- tion, it will resolve our terms of ' ' selfishness ' ' and "unselfishness" into an incongruous relativity. Both terms are practical, logical, and material, dealing, in effect, with some physical or spiritual bargain. They connote deliberation and effort, even if the primary impulse be so sudden as to ap- pear spontaneous and the reward be so vaguely imagined as to seem valueless as a stimulant. In either case both deliberation and effort must in- evitably appear during the long night watch of our example. On the other hand, the effortless, motiveless expression of our intuition has no limit of dura- tion, and is independent of any translation into act, just as it is beyond the reach of our persona? W. E. FORD recognition. Before I can appreciate my own performance, the trne expression must have ceased. To label the emotion with a cliche which has a valuable if incomplete significance, I lose myself in the thought of my friend. Eegarded from the practical, material stand- point, this pure expression of love, or longing, may appear to fail at the first moment of intro- spection. Directly I pause, as it were, in my long night watch and begin to probe my own motive, I seem to become again the selfishly unselfish creature of the first example. This difficulty, how- ever, is only apparent, since the pause for intro- spection indicates a temporary failure of expres- sion and not a cessation of the true impulse. Any distraction, such as a moan of pain from our un- conscious sufferer, will immediately dissipate the interrupting force of the introspective mind, and once more permit the free effusion of our motive- less longing. That longing might perhaps be com- pared in this instance with any physical force, in- ferentially continuous but intermittently exhib- ited according to the potentiality or condition of the material agent. The force itself neither ceases nor varies in kind, but the least diversion of the recording instrument is sufficient to interrupt the manifestation. The power is cut off, the agent temporarily depolarised. If this instance be accepted, it must be taken as stating a very important premiss with regard to the fundamental ethic of all human actions, inas- much as the instance assumes an extraneous im- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 293 pulse that will be manifested whenever the human condition is such as to permit free expression. Assuming this premiss, then, for the sake of ar- gument, we come at once to the important consid- eration of conduct and morality in relation to ul- timate development. Ford died before Glutton Brock's book, The Ultimate Belief, was published, but it seems to me that there is in that work a tendency, not quite clearly expressed, to formulate one aspect of Ford's philosophy. Mr. Brock takes a leap — not, in my opinion, quite justifiable as yet — and as- sumes that the ^'extraneous impulse" of our il- lustration works altogether for what we call good. Ford would, I know, have agreed in principle, but he would have postulated that this goodness is not of the kind that would at the present time be, without exception, recognised as morality. He admitted two extreme types, that may be classi- fied as the free and the inhibited — neither ever at- taining complete development — and while he as- serted that the free was the ideal and the inhib- ited the stunted condition, he constantly warned me that the condition of freedom was one that was amazingly deceptive. I must, however, state my terms more broadly before I come to the ques- tion of stipulations. And since it is the easier of the two, and a definition of the contrasted condi- tion arises out of it by implication, I will take inhibition as the first subject. Now, in the first place, it is essential to find some means of distinguishing inhibition from self- 294 W. E. FORD control, in order to clear away the suspicion which would otherwise inevitably arise, that Ford intended to portray ideal humanity as an automa- ton, reacting to some agency it could not compre- hend. The main difference between these two human abilities much resembles the difference be- tween courage and fear. The man who faces and conquers temptation displays self-control; the man who runs away from a temptation displays an aspect of inhibition. If I say that I will not permit myself to think of a sex longing and by an effort of will deliberately and, apparently, suc- cessfully thrust the whole subject of sex relations into some secret chamber of my mind, I commit an act of fear. I admit that my longing is so strong that I dare not face it. Nevertheless, be- cause the word inhibition has been so freely used by the psychologists and the medical profession to describe a normal act of self-control, it is as well to throw all the specialised meanings of the word into the category of what might be called ^'morbid'' inhibitions. This category would, in my opinion, include any act of self- suppression that had a quality of fear. I see inhibition in my own thought, as being in the nature of a convul- sive clenching. It is a shutting out, a closing of the mind, a cowering and a denial of that which sanity demands that we should affirm. Of the physiological effects of such morbid inhibitions I need say nothing here. The psycho-analysts have demonstrated that this convulsive clenching of the mind almost invariably leads to some form of hys- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 295 teria, a condition that may often be cured when the cramp of the original act is, as it were, re- leased by confession. But the moral effect is far more dangerous, and in one sense it may be said to be contagious, since the inhibited frequently come to a morbid admiration for their own inef- fectual morality and preach it to an ignorant con- gregation. I may, perhaps, come to a wider view of the many aspects of ^^ morbid*^ inhibition by consider- ing a somewhat bizarre illustration. Ford was familiar with the works of Freud and Jung and had met some of the practical exponents of the theory of psycho-analysis in London; and it was while he and I were discussing this theory that he gave me the instance I am about to describe. He had begun by severely criticising the limitations Freud had imposed upon himself by referring all forms of hysteria to a sexual complex, and came from that to a sudden and startling dictum by saying that the party politican was one of the fin- est instances of the inhibited mind. At first I un- derstood him to mean the actual representative or member; but he told me that he believed the greater number of members and certainly all those who had risen to high place were free from the peculiar obliquity he had in mind. He touched on that aspect of the House of Commons which presents it as the *^best club in London,'' and confessed his belief that it was very rare for any well-informed member of the Government to be the blind adherent of a particular policy. They 296 W. E. FORD adopt a label, he said, botli for public convenience and purposes of private ambition; but it is quite incredible that any clear-sighted man should per- sistently and conscientiously vote ^'Liberal'' or * ^ Conservative ' ^ on any measure before the House. He then explained that his instance of the inhibited referred rather to the typical mid- dle- and upper-class voter. Since that conversation — it must have taken place, I think, in the winter of 1912-13 — I have made many applications of this instance and have found an appealing aspect of his theory. Indeed, it can hardly be denied that the politician who de- liberately and conscientiously refuses to admit virtue in his opponent's creed, must have inhib- ited in some degree his natural tendency to ac- quire knowledge. ^ To put it more plainly, the man, whether politician or religious enthusiast, who becomes fanatic to the point of denying any kind of validity to the unwelcome statement is, or at some time has been, influenced by fear. The attempted explanation of absorption in a par- ticular line of thought does not invalidate this statement, for although that explanation may ac- count for an original bias or eventual hyper- trophy in a particular direction, it cannot ac- count for the blindness of the fanatic. The spe- cialist cannot, for example, pretend to be an au- thority on a subject outside his own province ; and he cannot specialise in politics, for example, by *I must beg that statement for the moment, but it is implicit in the whole of Ford's philosophy. A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 297 studying a single aspect of the question. Ab- sorption in the propaganda of a particular party, where such absorption does not arise from a per- sonal, which is practically in this sense an eco- nomic interest, must imply that there has been a deliberate denial of the alternative policy ; and in the case of the common exponent of this political bigotry I have always found that the party enthu- siast was afraid to listen to any statement of his opponents. But, indeed, it should be evident that the absolute denial involved by a blind adherence to party, must constitute a form of morbid inhi- bition or obstruction. And, although I have taken this convenient illustration of politics and men- tioned the more complex example of religious fanaticism, it must be understood that the argu- ment applies with varying force to questions of belief in all forms that involve complete reject tion, without sufficient examination, of the alter- native statement. The fear of conversion, if it is not freed by a candid and liberal examination of the imagined dangers, can only be driven back by some form of what I have called morbid inhibi- tions. In this connection, however, it must be clearly understood, first, that there are degrees of reso- lution, and so of effectiveness in the inhibiting act; and, secondly, that in applying the test, say, to a man of public reputation, it is impossible to judge him by his public writings or utterances. Many Cabinet Ministers have the fullest sympa- thy with their opponents^ policy, and have per- 298 W. E. FORD sisted in their own, either for purposes of private interest or of what they may regard as temporary expediency. Judged by the commonly prevailing standard of morality, such men are sometimes subjects for contempt ; but as a matter of fact they have been compelled by the very convention which condemns them. In a government which is elected by the inhibited, the free man can find no oppor- tunity for action. A further aspect of inhibition, and one that can- not primarily be included in the ^^ morbid" cate- gory, is that aspect which influences the common conditions of social intercourse. All our ordinary relations with mankind necessitate some form of self-repression, the most obvious examples being those arising from politeness and tact. In these examples, however, the normal, inhibitive act is merely one of self-control so long as nothing but our speech and conduct is restrained. It is only when the thought of such natural desires as would lead to a rupture of social relations is fearfully thrust back into the subconsciousness that the in- hibition may become morbid. It is evident in these examples that fear is again the dominant impulse ; and that the greater the fear of offend- ing, the more dangerous becomes the self-suppres- sion. Again the common impulse — probably arising in this case from a sexual complex — to shock a social gathering by some obscene act or expres- sion, may be dangerous to sanity if it be mentally suppressed with a shudder of fear. Some release A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 299 from this inhibition is afforded in dreams — the characteristic dream of appearing naked among a crowd being an instance; but any tendency to morbidity is avoided by a quiet mental reception and examination of the impulse when it arises. Where there is no fear there is no danger, was one of Ford's obiter dicta. But enough if the gen- eral nature of morbid inhibition and obstruction has been indicated to allow the emergence of its opposite as a fairly definite conception. I have suggested in the foregoing paragraphs that Ford recognised two main forms of inhibi- tion. One of them comparatively innocuous and hardly distinguishable from self-control, namely, the form in which the thought is allowed free play in the mind, and only possible consequences of conduct and speech are withheld; while the other is that which I have called dangerous, and im- plies the terrified or shocked rejection of the thought itself. The first of these forms is also a form of the antithesis we are now examining. The acceptance of a thought and the refusal to express it in words or action is the higher form of inhibition and the lower form of identification with the primitive urge. The higher form of the latter dares all with splendid courage. But both forms are essential to the conduct of life under present conditions; or, perhaps, I should rather say in the present state of our psychical and phys- ical development. I must admit, however, that the necessity for 300 W. E. FORD the use of restraint in this passing stage of our evolution constitutes a difficulty that Ford never made quite clear to me. On a priori grounds he found this necessity hard to explain and his near- est approximation to a solution was probably the one I indicated in a previous paragraph, namely, that our standard of goodness is constantly chang- ing. Starting from his original hypothesis he could not deny the validity of impulse, but he sought to justify its expression to meet the de- mands of the multiform other impulses to which it would necessarily be opposed. I remember his speaking of the *^ crazy impa- tience'' of Nietzsche in this connection, and the phrase stuck in my mind and has furnished me with the vague outline of a test. For it must be evident that Ford's theory of the rightness of free expression would, if it were pressed to its logical conclusion, coincide exactly with Nietz- sche's principle of saying **Yea, to Life." Yet, if we give a free rein to hate, lust, and appetite — impulses which appear far more general than the covering antitheses of love and the desire for the beautiful — ^we appear inevitably to be riding towards destruction. The phrase ** crazy impatience" has suggested to me the possibility of emergence from this apparently blind alley. Let me take ^'Hate" as an example. Now in some forms hatred has been upheld as an admirable quality. Christ exhibited quite clearly His hatred of hypocrisy and expressed it both in His words and actions; while hatred A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 301 of injustice and oppression is so universally ad- mired among civilised nations, that we have boldly proclaimed it as the inspiration of Eng- land's motive for entering the Great War. But if it be praiseworthy to hate what we call an *^evir' principle, how can we avoid the infer- ence that it is justifiable to hate the exponents of an evil principle? Christ preached salvation by an act of defensive meekness, and drove out the money-lenders with a scourge ; and it is a la- mentable fact that the gospel of love has failed to overcome the gospel of hate in the practice of human affairs. It would seem to follow, there- fore, that failing to convert the exponent of evil we are justified in meeting hate with hate. Can we find a way out of this impasse without a partial withdrawal of our premisses, in the thought of that ** crazy impatience"? To me the phrase represents at once a qualification and a definition; but I will confine myself to the defini- tion as the qualification is implicit. Let us assume, then, that hate of what we are pleased to call evil or obstruction is a natural impulse and works for good or liberation; and beg, for a moment, the question of whether the subject of passion can excuse an impulse which might be evil if otherwise directed. Beyond this I would postulate that the impulse of hate is al- ways courageous, and further that many of its supposed expressions, such as ferocity or bru- tality, are so poisoned with fear that they can- not be called free; but are, in fact, an instance W. E. FORD of craziness. And to complete the analogy of our phrase, I would submit that impatience must always imply some inner restraint; that we are not, as a matter of fact, impatient with anything but our own weakness to overcome a real or imag- ined obstacle. To elaborate the last paragraph I will suggest a couple of illustrations, and ask first if ferocity or cruelty can possibly be the expressions of the thing I have in mind as a spontaneous impulse? The terrorised animal, such as the uniformed German citizen suspecting treachery from every member of the outraged Belgian population, dis- plays ferocity. And we are told that the greater part of the German nation displays the same tendency, occasionally, against the threat of Eng- lish interference. But I insist without hesitation that the instance is essentially one of inhibition. I do not believe that the average German citizen can exhibit pure impulsive hate. He has been terrified, and in defence he has inhibited all his natural desire towards fraternity, towards peace, towards a sentimental good humour so far as the English are concerned. (The English, not Eng- land ; that stands to him merely as a meaningless symbol of an imagined evil.) He dare not con- sider, much less liberate, his natural gentleness. He has thrust it far back into his subconscious- ness, as a danger and an obstacle that may pre- vent his winning the War. And every word of this condemnation applies to ourselves not less than to our present enemies. This hate of ours A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 303 and theirs, represents a deliberate clenching of our natural expression. There is nothing cour- ageous or liberating in this hate that finds emer- gence in ferocity. In the same way I would urge that impatience always implies some inner suppression, or even that impatience is nothing more than a symptom of a divided mind, of desires thwarted by our inability to find free expression. To take a pal- try instance — as probably the more difficult ex- ample to explain — if I fumble with a knot in my boot-lace and finally break it in exasperation, I exhibit the sjTuptoms of a double purpose. On the one hand, I have lacked the concentration to disentangle the knot; on the other, I have not at once put that intention away from me and solved the problem by an exercise of strength. And it would be quite easy to prove that every symptom of impatience is due to a similar opposition of two or more half-expressed intentions. The bar that thwarts us is not the material or psychical opposition we meet from without, but our own in- ability to find the single countervailing force of expression. Impatience, in fine, denotes hesita- tion; and hesitation implies the need for inhibit- ing one or more modes of thought or action. From these illustrations we come to a thought of our ideal impulse of hate as being in its es- sence a single desire; and we must therefore ex- clude from our consideration all those apparent examples of hate which imply a mixed intention, and thus the necessity for the suppression of. 304 W. E. FORD say, a counterbalancing ethical motive. And I do not believe (I join issue here with Mr. Glutton Brock's theory expressed in The Ultimate Belief) that human hatred ever finds this singleness of impulse unless the cause of the hatred is, in some sense, a righteous one. We have moved too far towards sympathy and understanding to hate the unoffending. Hate is a natural impulse and a wonderful power, but it can never find pure ex- pression unless it is great enough to be as single- minded as love. Indeed, I am not sure that hate and love are necessarily opposites. It seems possible that if we could refine our definitions to absolute purity, we might reach the single, un- diluted base of both emotions. This long diversion has taken me somewhat away from my exposition of Ford's philosophy, inasmuch as I have been striving to justify him by an inductive process of my own — a risky task for the exegete. At the same time I believe that my attempted analysis has done something to in- dicate, if only by implication, an important prin- ciple of his general theory. So much depends on that ** singleness of mind," I have deliberately insisted upon; a description that denotes not the narrow-minded fury of the fanatic, but a con- sciousness of unity with all life, with something more than physical humanity. In a former paragraph I made reference to Ford's phrase the ^'tenuity of genius," and as this chapter does not purport to be anything more than a haphazard collection of notes, I may ad- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 305 cluce that instance here as a further commentary on the fundamental theory. *^ Tenuity, '* in this sense, does not, of course, denote ^ thinness," but was used in its derivative meaning as applied to fluids, and indicates — if I may put it negatively — a lack of density. The quality of mind that is exhibited as genius, had in it, according to Ford, something peculiarly subtile, and as it were dis- crete. On the other hand, I remember his using one of his hasty figures and saying that the par- ticles of the man of genius behaved like steel fil- ings in a magnetic field, * ^ leaping to arrangement and interpretation.'' But both figures imply mobility, and that is, perhaps, the more incon- clusive concept. And to mobility again must be added the idea of a higher potential for that re- ciprocity between the units which was discussed in its relation to consciousness. All these phrases and figures, however, must not be too rigorously related to a physical con- ception. The base of our unit as discussed in an earlier paragraph is not material but spiritual. At the same time there is no absurdity in the assumption that this primitive spiritual unit should obey those laws which we have hypothe- cated as controlling the limitations of matter. When we come to examine those '^laws,'' indeed, we find that no one of them is susceptible of an a priori explanation. Are we, for example, quite unable to prove that the law of gravitation might be suspended in certain conditions which do not happen to have occurred within human experi- 306 W. E. FORD ence? We have no more knowledge of the true '^how'' and ^^why'* of gravitation than we have of the intentions of God. . For these reasons I maintain that there is no inherent absurdity, even from the point of view of the physicist, in postulating an ultimate atom which is not material and yet — in the complexes that alone permit our awareness of its functions — conforms within human experience to certain inferred principles of apparently mechanical con- duct. And it is this elusive, undefinable unit which Ford referred to, in his suggestion of greater *^ mobility ^^ in the composition of the mere physical structure of the man whom we rec- ognise as a genius. He always avoided the use of such words as brain or mentality in this con- nection ; agreeing with Samuel Butler that we are far too apt to relate all physical phenomena, such as that of memory, to this single function. He admitted that he was unable to give a precise value to that function in the human economy. It might, he thought, be a predominant one. But he inclined to believe that the work of the brain was primarily one of correlation rather than of initiative ; while he always assumed that what we call character or personality was inherent in the constitution of the individual as a whole and de- pended largely on that constitution's potentiali- ties for mobility and reciprocity. With such assumptions it becomes, I think, in- creasingly evident that the man of genius is one who mobilises most easily into ^ * arrangement and A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 307 interpretation" under the impulse of the primi- tive urge; and so is able to reveal some fraction of that universal content, which this ^^ primitive urge'' of ours is always seeking to express. And if we make application of this wide principle to the meagre data we have so far collected as bear- ing on the problem under consideration, we shall find that the empiric or pragmatic test may be reasonably satisfied — ^possibly to the complete reconciliation of Nordau and Shaw. As an example of this application I may note that genius, according to Ford, must be vagarious if it is to come to its fullest expression. To ap- ply the more or less mechanical formula sug- gested above, the arrangement which tends to be- come static destroys its own value for interpre- tation. In the attempt to express an universal it is fatal to crystallise an abstraction, for it then inclines to become obstructive. Nietzsche is an excellent instance of this principle. So long as he remained mobile to the creative suggestion he was an immensely valuable interpreter. But when he fell in love with his own abstraction, he shut out, as it were, all impulses that did not subserve his immediate purpose, which then became cramped, didactic, inconclusive. The effect upon himself was inevitable. His high original poten- tiality, or, in other words, his sensitivity, indi- cated a force strong enough to inhibit what he re- garded as antagonistic impulses, all too com- pletely. Thus he lost his capacity for mobility, and mobility being an essential function of his 308 W. E. FORD character as a man of genius he destroyed himself by assuming rigidity. Or it may seem, Ford said, abruptly changing the metaphor, as if he had drowned himself. While he kept all his gates open to the flood the stream poured through him, but when he closed one after another until only one was left, the flood rose higher and higher until he was swept away. For a time, you know, it looks as if we were doing an immense work with that one open gate — the rush is so terrific. But it can't last. There must be other outlets. That single gate is known to us pathologically as the idee fixe. And that metaphor may help us to explain the apparent immorality of some men of genius. They must open their volitions to other impulses or be drowned. But sometimes those other gates are drawn too high, and then the stream of interpre- tation may dwindle to the veriest trickle. ** Again you may find another illustration of what I mean in my metaphors,'' he once wrote to me, **the single illustration that tends to crystallise the idea is an awful snare. You cannot express genius in a purely physical formula." I am uncomfortably aware that these notes are lamentably insufficient, but I dare not expand them. I see only too clearly that if I once permit myself to attempt a fuller exposition, all the first part of this book will shrink to a mere preface in comparison with the immense work I feel so strongly inclined to write. That work, however, A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 309 must be postponed until I have the leisure to col- late Ford^s material. Meanwhile I must point out that what I have written here must not be subjected to too intensive or stringent criticism. All that I have attempted in this place is sugges- tion. I have found in Ford's philosophy the hint of a new aspect; and I have striven to convey that, often to the detriment of a logical statement. But, indeed, although a reasoned analysis must succeed to this mere indication of a test and a formula, I know that the analysis must tend to narrow and obstruct the fundamental principle. It is the limitation of the logical method that it attempts too complete an exposition, and so crys- tallises a part to the rejection of all those appar- ently contradictory impulses that also seek ex- pression. The analogy of Ford's primary assump- tion runs through every example. We cannot ex- press the whole, but the danger of morbid inhibi- tion lies behind every denial. And Ford would agree with me in affirming that a positive immor- ality (as we now regard it) is a far more admir- able thing than a negative virtue. J. D. B. A FURTHER NOTE ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY By K. R. I CONSIDER that Ford was not so much a philoso- pher as a man who tried to live in the light of a 310 W. E. FORD philosophical outlook — or, to put it better, of a philosophical ^^inlook.*' His philosophy was pri- marily felt, and only incidentally formulated. He seemed at times to reach back into hidden re- cesses of his mind and to draw upon a subcon- scious store of wisdom ; at other times he seemed — I can only put it in this way — literally to create wisdom. The point which I feel I must empha- sise is that every expression of his philosophy to which he gave voice was an ad hoc expression. Devoted to synthesis, to the mental task of view- ing reality, value, and purpose as a coherent unity, he no sooner gave thought to the smallest significant problem than he made it an essential fragment of the universal problem; but for him the universal existed to be explored by intuition in the interests of the immediate. He maintained that one cannot consciously build up an intellec- tual conception of the universe without gradually, and at last completely, exchanging interest in the universe for interest in dialectic. He had a con- structive philosophy, but it was intuitional, and that is why neither Beresford nor I can explain how he constructed it. He let the material re- cede into the back of his mind and the philosophy constructed itself ; that is one way of putting it. Or I could say that he treated intuition as a faculty that can be trained by practice in its func- tion of apprehending, by degrees, the nature of the universe; this best expresses my own notion of the matter, and, I think, best renders Ford^s notion, but to postulate this subconscious func- A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 311 tion — or superconscious function, as I should pre- fer to call it — is to make a very large prior as- sumption. I will therefore leave open the hypoth- esis of superconscious constructive thought (an idea familiar to any one who has ever *^ slept on" a knotty problem) side by side with that of su- perconscious apprehension of existing structure; without prejudice to the further possibility that the two hypotheses may be related aspects of the same truth. Now, in presenting to Beresford the nearest ap- proach that he ever made to a formal statement of his philosophical position. Ford was none the less following his usual practice and interpreting his intuition for the furtherance of an immediate end. (I need hardly labour the point that the more strictly immediate an end, the more it ex- cludes ulterior motive.) And the end in this case iSnds its fulfilment in Beresford 's foregoing chap- ter. It was to elicit a view of the universe that he and Beresford could hold in common. Hence Beresford 's difficulty in knowing how much is Ford's and how much his own. When Ford gave you an idea he kept no mortgage upon it himself ; he made it your own idea by unrestricted deed of gift. And to give — to give effectually — ^was al- ways the most immediate of his aims. What I have just written would imply a criti- cism of Beresford 's presentation, were it not that it reinforces his claim to make that presentation as much of a personal re-interpretation as he chooses. Beresford has spoken of our difference 312 W. E. FORD of view as to the teleological trend of Ford's phi- losophy. I will not try to show how his presenta- tion could be converted, by certain differences of proportionate emphasis without any change of substantial statement, into a teleology qualified only by necessary human incomprehension. I only mention that this would be possible, so that in .speaking further of Ford's doctrine of imme- diate ends — which, unless it is teleological, is pragmatism unmitigated and abominable — I may not lose essential touch with that region of his intuitive speculations which Beresford has por- trayed. For the practical Ford, the Ford of daily in- genuities and expediencies in school work, was identical with the Ford whom we remember reaching back into the depths of his mind — or the depths beyond his mind — for that conception of '^the primary urge behind life." But when I think of his philosophy as expressed in daylight action, my instinct (I am willing to underline the ^^my") pictures him as listening and respond- ing to a whispered call from before, rather than as yielding to a suggestive pressure from behind. As the parents used to say of their children, he could be led but he could not be driven. The dis- tinction is only a symbolism, in connection with a ** primary urge," which must be conceived as extra-spatial and extra-temporal; but it matters a good deal to my present purpose. I have given some slight indication of Ford's views about the function of intuition in framing A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 313 a cosmology, and Beresford has caught the au- thentic thrill of his venturous journeys into the darker unknown; it needs an effort of imagina- tive understanding to co-ordinate this with the principle of immediate ends which was the basis of his practical philosophy of life. Still, this principle can be defined in terms of intuition — of intuition in league with intellect. The imme- diate end is the end towards which no secondary or ulterior motive points; it is the end dictated by the nearest possible approach of pure volition. An act of volition. Ford would maintain, was '*pure'' in so far as it was prompted by intuition alone; the function of intellect was to keep open the right intuitive channel, by recognising ulte- rior motives and holding them on one side. Not that an ulterior motive, in his view, was neces- sarily irrelevant to right action; it was often ex- tremely relevant, but always subordinate. Pure volition had first to be isolated in the mind (he characterised this as a clumsy description of a very swift, habitual form of mental action) ; it had then to be set free along the open channel, drawing relevant motive after it in its course leaving irrelevant motive behind. The union of this conception with Beresford 's formula of *^ effortless, niotiveless expression" will be ob- vious enough, and I can turn to its practical ap- plication, especially its application to the teach- ing of children. It seems to me that Ford got right away from the usual pendulum-swing between the morbidly 314 W. E. FORD introspective and the cheerfully conscienceless view of conduct, by putting his finger upon the true function of the introspective faculty. Sim- ple action upon impulse, entirely non-moral as far as the consciousness is aware, has the gen- eral approval of mankind in spite of its obvious dangers: even in the case of crime, we condone the crime of impulse while we condemn the crime of intention. The problem is to interpose the conscious censorship, the conscious inhibition (later, of course, to become habitual and in that sense subconscious) without clogging the passage for pure volition. Ford believed that, instinc- tively fearing this obstruction, we shrink from ap- phdng introspection and inhibition until some- thing has gone manifestly and uncomfortably wrong; and then it is too late for the right use of the unpractised power. Consequently, he taught children to sift their own motives continu- ally, as a kind of mental game, and so to give the introspection-faculty continual practice upon ma- terial that was not painful to touch; thus, he be- lieved, a habit of easy, rapid and entirely healthy introspection was encouraged. On the other hand, he never fostered introspection when a child was in some small crisis of difficulty, but waited for the inflammation to subside. I was puzzled as to the process by which inhi- bitions could be ranged, as in the mental picture he had given me, to form as it were a guard of honour for pure volition ; his only explanation was that they arranged themselves, when once the A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 315 healthy habit of mind was in operation. They be- came knotted and obstmctive (he twisted his fin- gers together to convey a sense of painful ten- sion) when they had been habitually applied to none but the *^sore places in the consciousness. '* We seem to touch here upon the genesis of those inhibitions due to fear of which Beresford has spoken. Ford left the picture of normal inhibitions con- stituting a ^* guard of honour'' for pure volition, to stand as his meaning while he cleared the field of discussion; but he meant more. The function of intellect in morals was not merely negative and restrictive. It was also directive ; and it is here that the word inhibition fails. A gas-pipe, he said, inhibits the gas from escaping where it is not wanted and would be dangerous; but it also performs the very positive function of directing the gas to the precise places where illumination is needed; and he sketched a conception of the moral consciousness as a system of flexible, sen- tient tubes — subtle tentacles of mind-stuff — ready at a moment's notice to dart a jet of volition into the right place. But this figure erred on the other side, making volition too subservient, unless one imagined that the nature of the volition deter- mined the direction to be accorded for its own best expression. I am trying to give, by means of fugitive hints and recollections, some notion of the way in which Ford related his wide intuitive conception of the nature of the universe to the particular 316 W. E. FORD problem of everyday morals. Perhaps I can best sum up that relation by saying that he saw the ** primary urge'' as functioning through an un- thinkable multiplicity of channels, constituting in total a resistance, like the resistance of a vast and complex electrical circuit, through which only a power of unthinkable magnitude could manifest itself. And the microcosm of human individuality is also a complex ramification of resistances, through which volition plays, breaking down and re-fashioning the structure in the course of self- expression. No man can come near to expressing his own total volition, his own small share in the ** primary urge,'' except in rare moments of high passion ; the moral problem in the main is that of directing volition through resistance. And lie^' the practical question about volition itself arises : what is the objective of will! Ford's principle of immediate ends furnishes, I think, a much-to-be- desired point of union between the volitional prin- ciple and practical morality. It gives to true im- mediacy the dignity of an ultimate — of The Ultimate. We are still in the cold as to the nature of that motiveless motive (the naked paradox is unavoid- able) which lies behind the merely temporary explanation of immediacy. What volition is there that is in no sense mediate? I can draw an an- swer only from Ford's life and character; he never stated his final principle in so many words. But I come to a conclusion which Beresford's presentation has foreshadowed in assigning an A FEW NOTES ON FORD'S PHILOSOPHY 317 ultimate value to the principle of reciprocity. Here I am afraid of colouring Ford's philosophy with an eschatology of my own to which I cannot be sure that he would have assented, though per- sonally I feel it to be in essential unity with his thought. But I am on safe ground in saying that fellowship — service — the constructive union of human volitions — in a word, that Love was the one immediate principle of his own practical mo- rality; and I can scarcely hesitate to go further, and to say that he believed in some ultimate syn- thesis in terms of Love. Or — if I continue to grope for definitions in a region where the intel- lectual boundaries fade and disappear — that this synthesis was not so much ultimate as perpetual, and, because perpetual, eternal, timeless. Ford was more sternly sincere in facing the implica- tions of reality than any man whom I have known ; and he also, more than any man whom I have known, put his trust in reality, with all its para- doxes, its bewildering maze of indeterminate equations. Some inner sense in him was satisfied by that exacting and laborious service. He de- clined to fall back upon comfortable illusions of certainty. I can see no other interpretation than that he surmised a purpose in life, implying a realisation of triumph and joy in that Immediate which is our window upon the Eternal. THE END 35+77 "7 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: May 2009 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 (724)779-2111