W.E. Ford: a biography

Front matter

W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY

J. D. BERESFORD and KENNETH R I C H M O N n

By J.. D. BERESFORD

Prefatory Note

A DEAwiNG in Mrs. Ford^s possession, representing Ford at about the age of fifteen, has been deliberately chosen in preference to later photographs for the frontispiece of this book. This picture 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 character; 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 collation of facts ; at the same time they wish to take all responsibility in matters of conjecture and interpretation, 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.

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, however, has a somewhat limited meaning, and implies the making of a mark in public life or the accomphshment of some achievement in the pliblic 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 Sundayschool books, the clear indication remains prominent: ^^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 suecess 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 altogether 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 recall 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 perfect beast in his own home, would make very interesting 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 publication. 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 influence on the English Prayer-book and the English 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, Frangois 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. Nevertheless, 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 creative 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 illuminate the heathen, but rather to find illumination for himself. The name of William Elphinstone Ford will evoke no response in the minds of newspaper 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 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 experiment, 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 philosophy, 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 speculations 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 exaggerated the significance of the indications. But I am convinced that when every allowance has been made for my personal prejudice, sufficient evidence remains to prove that civilisation is moving 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 repression 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 history; 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 assertion 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 development 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 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 differed radically from theirs. For the practice of all present day religions is founded on the commandments 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 expression," 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 separate my own contribution to his theory of life. Ford was so apparently ductible in argument. He had a wonderful gift for making one state 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, forasmuch 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. Richmond 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 biography; and in that connection I feel entitled to express a general opinion that involves no discussion of detail.

For I see that any hope for a practical exposition of Ford's philosophy will be found in the schoolroom. Few adults are teachable, but most children. And I believe that many enlightened 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 commercial and competitive conditions of modem life There may be practical means of overcoming'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 dehnitely inferred. .

Personally, I regard this war as evidencing the final failure of the Christian principle of suppression. How far that principle derives from Christ and not from the embroideries of the theologian, I have no time to discuss. The one absurd iustification for fighting which has been advanced by the churches, rests on the text, I came to bring not peace but a sword,'' a statement conflicting so intolerably with Christ's general doctrine, 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 affirmation 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 attempts 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 until 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. Suppression 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 hysteria. And beyond a certain point, the national body must rid itself of these morbid secretions or go mad. Germany had reached her limit of endurance, 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-righteousness 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 contemporaries! 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 himself — an uncommonly hard, perhaps an impossible, task for any public man in modern conditions. Possibly W. E. Gladstone came as near the ideal as any prominent statesman of recent years.

In conclusion, I relinquish, with a sigh of dissatisfaction, this task of trying to present Ford. I feel that I have failed to render him with anything approaching justice; and I console myself with the reflection that Mr. Richmond's chapters on education are a real contribution to knowledge. 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 Moorgate Street at that time; and as pageants and processions have never interested me (I lived for eighteen consecutive years in London without seeing 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 sailing 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 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 meeting 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, request. 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 sitting-room as if he had been the great Panjandrum 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 influence insisted on two pairs of curtains and a lace 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 lampshade 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 furnishing the effective element of surprise. I based my dreaming on that episode described by Borrow 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 earlier conversation that night, were slightly prejudiced by this attitude of mine. I was only an architect'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 inevitable 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, however, produced a result he had not designed.

I have always been very sensitive to criticism. Any one can shut me up in conversation. Underneath that romantic desire to shine in any society, I carry the knowledge of my own incapacity; 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, discerned 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 difference 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 positions had been reversed, I should never have discerned, 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 company, 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 responded to that. I know the river well, and my replies at first were, I suspect, largely topographical — another boast of knowledge. But presently he touched me to hesitating confidences. There were thinocs I had felt about the Thames that I 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 appreciating 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 sunset to find a camping ground, and had come wonderfully upon an old mill, and floated into an enceinte 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 literature, spoiled at first by the remains of my romantic 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 myself referring all his openings to my limited authorities, I honestly shifted my ground and confessed 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. Chronologically 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 Norfolk; 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 always 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

I was somewhat eager for the final verdict, for some assurance that I had emerged creditably from this welter of various disciplines, I was flattered 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 appetite.

It is difficult now to separate the particular suggestions he made that night from the completer argument I heard him set out in later conversations ; but certain of his simpler theses must have been touched upon at our first meeting. Indeed, 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 mouthpiece 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 sense that I never conld be, will perhaps object that my translation has lost the spirit of the original. Nevertheless, I do not think that my perversions and remodellings will seriously misrepresent Ford's general attitude. If they do, I commend a study of Richmond's chapters as more likely to display the inwardness of these theories than my own personal reactions to what appeared, most hopefully at the time, as a new doctrine; 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 afterwards 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 realise 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 illustrate that thesis under my hesitating recognition, and gave me a picture of a finely trained muscular system, quick and adaptable ; a tool competent for any specialisation, if specialisation were ultimately the goal of a particular education.

I grasped that figure with the objection that 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 haphazard, 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 scholarship; 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 appropriate 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.