JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ABOUT 1940

THE YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

GAZETTE

VOLUME 26

APRIL 1952

NUMBER 4

JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD: AN APPRECIATION

BY FRANCIS H. BANGS

AFTER the death of Julia Ellsworth Ford at her home in Rye, New York, in August, 1950, it became my task to select for presentation to the Yale Library certain books from her library and such letters, papers, pictures, and general mementoes from among her remains as were pertinent to her literary, artistic, and civic career. Some years must pass before some of this material can be made available for scrutiny. The living must be respected by the dead!

Mrs. Ford's bequest of these books, letters, and other material was made to the Yale Library partly out of sentimentality and partly because of the assiduity of the writer of this appreciation. The sentimentality bases on the fact that Mrs. Ford first met William Butler Yeats when he lectured at Yale on November 16, 1903, presumably his first lecture in America. Mrs. Ford's son Ellsworth was then a freshman in the Sheffield Scientific School, and he telephoned his mother in Rye to "pack up her toothbrush" and take the first train for New Haven. He knew of his mother's great interest in the poetry of Yeats, and she responded eagerly to his suggestion. While he was in New Haven, Yeats was lured into a photographic shop and photographed. Ellsworth Ford saw a copy of the picture in the photographer's window and obtained six copies for his mother. One of these Yeats, in March, 1904, before returning to Ireland, signed for Mrs.

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Ford. She used to refer to it as "The Yale Yeats," and it is included
in her gift.

So impressed was Mrs. Ford with Yeats's lecture that she at once
arranged through his manager John Quinn for an early appearance
of the Irish poet in New York City. Mrs. Ford personally invited the
guests to this event, which took place at the Arts Club on December
30, 1903, when Yeats spoke on "Poetry in the Old Time and in the
New." Nina Wilcox Putnam, in her autobiography, *Laughing
Through*, recalls the visit:

And when William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, came to America, looking mildly and somewhat reproachfully at our country through a cloud of tangled black hair that was never tidy and the thick lenses of his spectacles, he came as a hero, for Mrs. Ford saw to it that this was so. Under her direction we all sat at his feet to hear his timid shy utterances. These were so erudite and scholastic and impersonal as to seem like a half-heard message from another world.

Mrs. Putnam fails to mention Mr. Yeats's distinctive flowing black tie, and perhaps it should be here recorded for posterity that Yeats once, because of a crisis in cravats, wore a pair of Mrs. Ford's black silk stockings in lieu of the customary adornment.

Mrs. Ford later became a close personal friend of Yeats's sister Elizabeth and of his father John Butler Yeats. She brought Elizabeth Yeats to this country and arranged for her to exhibit her books, paintings, and fans. And when John Butler Yeats came to America, never to return to his home in Dublin, he stayed as a guest of Mrs. Ford, for the first year-and-a-half, at the Grand Union Hotel, a property owned by Mrs. Ford and her brother Samuel T. Shaw, and presided over, as co-proprietor with Mr. Shaw, by Mrs. Ford's husband Simeon Ford, the celebrated wit and after-dinner speaker. Until John Butler Yeats's death some fourteen years later, he was a frequent guest at Mrs. Ford's Monday Afternoons or Friday Nights, which she held at her residence in New York. Occasionally he visited Mr. and Mrs. Ford at Rye, but after having been stung there once by an insect, he would never return. He wrote Mrs. Ford of his "dread" of mosquitoes.

Elizabeth Yeats was gifted with a sort of "second sight." She said
that on the first night she spent in the Grand Union Hotel she saw,
in the open doorway between her room and the bathroom, the

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ghost of a man who had hanged himself. She asked Simeon Ford if
anyone had hanged himself in that room, and Mr. Ford replied that
many people came to New York, spent all their money in other
hotels, and then came and committed suicide in his.

Through Mrs. Ford's association with the Yeats family in New
York and in Dublin, she met many of the leading personalities of the
Irish Literary Renaissance, and entertained most of them. Douglas
Hyde, the first president of the Irish Republic, was her guest at Rye,
as was also Ronald McNeill, later first Baron Cushendun, at a time
when he was a member of Parliament from North Ireland. She knew
"A.E." (George W. Russell), John M. Synge, Florence Farr, and en-
tertained in New York Shane Leslie, Lady Gregory, and Lord and
Lady Dunsany.

Within the compass of this appreciation it is impossible to deal ex-
tensively with Mrs. Ford's multiple interests, the personalities she
associated with, her influence upon many and the largely unknown
benefits she conferred upon some of them. She was rich enough to
be a patron of the arts. A very generous person, she quietly aided the
causes she was interested in by giving assistance to active agents rather
than to institutions. Almost all of her giving was very personal.

It has been said of Mrs. Ford that few outstanding people of her
time have so completely expressed in their lives Alexander von Hum-
boldt's motto: "The mission of man is to bring his highest gifts to
perfection—and to help others do likewise." Throughout her career,
there never was a time when she was not busy perfecting some latent
gift of her own, and at the same time encouraging a host of gifted
men and women to perfect theirs. There are few major countries in
the world where Julia Ellsworth Ford's understanding and generosity
have not left their mark through outstanding literary and artistic
achievements of the gifted people she helped and encouraged.

The range of her interests and acquaintances is indicated in part by
the books and letters bequeathed to the Yale Library. Among some
nine hundred books and pamphlets (more than one hundred of which
are presentation copies), there are about one hundred and fifty titles
pertaining to India, China, Japan, and the Orient in general. There
are eighty-one books by or about William Butler Yeats, some of
them inscribed and many signed; thirty-six of these are Cuala Press

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editions, and there are twenty-nine Cuala Press books, mostly inscribed, by other Irish authors. Books by or about Walt Whitman number sixty-five. Percy MacKaye, who was for forty years a close friend of Mrs. Ford, is represented by forty-three titles, seventeen of them with presentation inscriptions, which include the folio signed limited edition of *The Mystery of Hamlet King of Denmark* (New York, 1950). Books by John Masefield number thirty-five, six presented to Mrs. Ford; and there are eleven inscribed first editions by Witter Bynner.

Among the correspondents represented by about three hundred and fifty letters to Mrs. Ford are such individuals as Laurence Alma-Tadema (3), Norman Angell (8), John Kendrick Bangs (5), George Grey Barnard (3), James M. Barrie (1), Pearl Buck (2), Witter Bynner (56), Gilbert Cannan (7), Charles Chaplin (1), Padraic Colum (3), Walter de la Mare (2), Robert Frost (1), John Galsworthy (3), Kahlil Gibran (4), Lady Gregory (2), Arthur Hacker (15), Syud Hossain (2), Laurence Housman (13), James Huneker (2), Madame Chiang Kai-shek (2), Edith Wynne Matthison Kennedy (5), Gertrude Kingston (4), Thomas W. Lamont (3), Shane Leslie (2), Amy Lowell (3), Percy MacKaye (80), John Masefield (9), Alice Meynell (3), E. D. Morel (3), Josephine Preston Peabody (6), Ezra Pound (1), Arthur Rackham (9), Edwin Arlington Robinson (2), Romain Rolland (2), W. M. Rossetti (3), Bertrand Russell (2), Ruth St. Denis (2), Mrs. William Sharp (7), Sara Teasdale (2), Ellen Terry (5), J. W. Waterhouse (5), Elinor Wylie (2), Elizabeth Yeats (12), Jack B. Yeats (1), John Butler Yeats (13), and William Butler Yeats (3).

Mrs. Ford cared next to nothing about rare books, and made no attempt to collect them. First editions meant nothing to her. Her Cuala Press editions derived from her personal interest in Elizabeth Yeats, who ran the Cuala Press. The preservation of letters was often a matter of chance. There was an old black box in which letters which she had marked "Keep" happened, when convenient, to be put. Half the letters listed above I picked up in that box, covered with dust, some time after her demise. Other letters her son Hobart sent me as the result of a long winnowing process he had conducted while emptying drawers and cabinets of ninety years' accumulations. Mrs.

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Ford cared little for scholarship. She thought scholars knew nothing about anyone except what they read in books. She couldn't remember dates. "Never ask me about dates!" she said. She misspelled proper names with impunity: Margaret Wycherly, whom she helped to produce Yeats's plays, was Margaret Wichly; E. D. Morel was Morell; Bertrand Russell was Bertram; Edith Wynne Matthison never got her double "t," and John Haynes Holmes, whom she knew intimately for years, seldom got the "n" in his middle name.

My relation with Mrs. Ford began when I was in my teens. The country home of the Fords was situated on Long Island Sound, at Milton Point, Rye, New York. Their house was a spacious affair, being in fact two complete domiciles under a single roof. These were identical in design, but diametrically opposed to each other in their arrangement, with the result that the single dwelling had perfect symmetry. In one of these large houses under the single roof lived Mr. and Mrs. Ford and family. The other house had belonged to Mrs. Ford's mother, after whose death it was seldom rented, but usually occupied. Mrs. Ford delighted to have people she knew and liked occupying her mother's house. She had given it for some years to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Lamont, at a time when Mr. Lamont had not yet risen to eminence in finance. It was occupied at a later date by Mr. and Mrs. Percy MacKaye, by Witter Bynner and his mother, and, at another time, by fourteen of Isadora Duncan's dancing children who had fled Europe for America in August, 1914. Miss Duncan, at the start of her dancing career, had been one of Mrs. Ford's protégés, and Mrs. Ford rescued the Duncan School from Ellis Island and gave it a home. These girls of Isadora Duncan's were of many different nationalities, and Percy MacKaye once wrote a poem about them after seeing them dancing at Rye. The poem is published in Miss Duncan's autobiography *My Life*.

For two years, 1905 to 1907, Mrs. Ford gave her mother's house to my parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Kendrick Bangs, both of whom were old friends. Indeed my father had gone to Sunday School with Mrs. Ford when she was Julia Shaw. I was the same age as Mrs. Ford's son Hobart, and I spent most of my time with him, eventually coming to call Mrs. Ford "Aunt Julia." To the time of her death, she always thought of me as "Little Frankie."

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Hobart Ford and I had the run of both houses and could enter either at will through a great common cellar or a great common attic. In the attic we often camped out on rainy or winter days. The Fords' domestics were a particularly genial lot, always Irish in extraction, and were very friendly to us boys. As a matter of fact, in later years, after Simeon Ford's death, they became a kind of autonomy in themselves. They were always most respectful to Mrs. Ford and her guests, but they added a warmth and geniality to the home entirely their own. Mrs. Ford was kindness itself to them, but she sometimes forgot who her cook was, because the cook was seldom visible above stairs. Once Mrs. Ford, going into her attic, found a woman there sitting on a trunk. "Who are you," she asked, "and what are you doing sitting on my trunk?" "I'm your cook, Mrs. Ford," was the reply; "I've been with you for sixteen years, and I'm sitting on my own trunk!" This same cook had been with the family for a number of years before she ever saw Mr. Ford. The kitchen was underground and had a couple of windows, high up, which let in light from the lawn facing the Sound. When Mr. Ford went out on the lawn one day, the cook was told that he was there, and climbed on a chair to see him, but the chair broke. Mary Leslie, Mrs. Ford's waitress, was a lovable character who never tired of repeating remarks which she had overheard while waiting on the table. At one of Mrs. Ford's poetry diners, Mary stood patiently by, waiting for Mrs. Ford to get through talking and take a hot biscuit. Finally she interrupted: "Is it to be poetry, Mrs. Ford, or is it to be bread?"

My Aunt Julia was all for the mystical, the prophetic, and the symbolical. The great inspiration of her life was Walt Whitman. The greatest man in history, to her, was Akhnaton. She came upon the latter too late for him to be the principal mainspring of her existence. He didn't become unmummified until she was past her meridian. I spent six months of the last year of Mrs. Ford's life with her at Palm Beach. She was ninety years old and pretty sick, but she clung to Akhnaton as a Christian clings to the Cross. From Asheville, North Carolina, her friend Olive Dargan wrote her of telepathic conversations that she was having with Socrates, but Mrs. Ford telephoned Mrs. Dargan that she personally preferred Akhnaton, and that Mrs. Dargan "could have her old Soc!" Mrs. Ford sought greatness in

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Plato—although she thought him too intellectual—in Buddha, in Asoka, in Confucius, and, among the living, in Gandhi. She once had a conversation with “A.E.” over the respective merits of Gandhi and Tagore. Mrs. Ford preferred the Mahatma, but “A.E.” thought Rabindranath the greater person.

Mrs. Ford was inclined to judge a country by the saints it had produced. To her way of thinking Whitman and Lincoln were American saints. She granted Spain, Italy, and France saints in Saint Teresa, Saint Francis, and Jeanne d'Arc. But she couldn't find any saints in England, Germany, and Japan. Shelley had stirred her greatly in her girlhood, and Blake later. William Butler Yeats alone awed her among her contemporaries, especially in his later life. In him she felt an authentic presence, and she was uncomfortable when talking with him. He apparently made no effort to make her comfortable, and she was bewildered.

Mrs. Ford was an intimate friend of Ellen Terry, whom she thought the most beautiful and lovely personality among all women she had ever known. She visited Ellen Terry in England, and Ellen Terry visited her in both Rye and New York. Ellen Terry was very fond of Mrs. Ford's now famous daughter Lauren, whom she always called "Karen," and when she left America after her final lecture tour she gave Lauren the chair she always used on the platform. Mrs. Ford never knew anything more beautiful than the face of Ellen Terry, the tilt of her nose and the magical slant of her eyes, and thought that Ellen Terry as the Lady of Belmont in the casket scene of *The Merchant of Venice* transcended in beauty anything she had ever seen on the stage. Mrs. Ford said that Ellen Terry was of so generous a nature that she spent her own money lavishly to help others, and practically impoverished herself. She took Ellen Terry to have her voice recorded in the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, for which recording Ellen Terry was paid three hundred dollars. She at once went uptown and gave the money to a needy nephew. Simeon Ford, who did not share many of Mrs. Ford's enthusiasms, shared her regard for Ellen Terry. She was so beautiful that it almost made him weep to look at her. He had once made a speech at a Lotos Club banquet in honor of Ellen Terry's longtime stage associate, Sir Henry Irving, and Sir Henry had been so delighted with Mr. Ford's

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wit that he had written him a charming letter of appreciation. This
letter, framed together with the Lotos Club souvenir menu for the
occasion, was, the last time I saw it, hanging on one of the walls in
the Ford house in Rye.

Mrs. Ford knew Ruth St. Denis for more than forty years, and ad-
mired her greatly, particularly for the great religious feeling in her
inspired dances "Rhada" and "The Prophetess." In Isadora Duncan,
Mrs. Ford found two personalities, the Earthly Venus and something
approaching a Madonna. She met with few things as beautiful as
Isadora's love and care for her child dancers, and she was proud that
Isadora trusted her with these children as she would hardly trust any-
one else. Isadora Duncan delighted to shock other women, and she
often purposely made them uncomfortable. She never fazed Mrs.
Ford. Once coming to Mrs. Ford's for luncheon, uninvited, she said:
"Julia, I don't know why I came to your luncheon." "Well, I do,"
replied Mrs. Ford, and shoving some food before her said: "Have
some bread and butter!"

The Duncan was very frequently hard up. Toward the close of
her life, when she was living in Paris in someone else's studio, practi-
cally destitute, a friend, Madame Yorska, called upon her. She found
Isadora happily reading Mrs. Ford's *King Solomon and the Fair Shula-
mite*, an original arrangement of this Biblical idyl from the "Song of
Songs." Mrs. Ford had given Isadora this little book many years
before, and Isadora still had it with her, despite the fact that all her
possessions were in a single bag and her total resources were five
francs and some centimes. Madame Yorska tried to talk practical
matters with Isadora, but Isadora begged her to read Mrs. Ford's
idyl aloud to her instead. "When I had finished the book," said
Madame Yorska, "she was crying."

"Simeon," said Mrs. Ford, "would run a mile if he saw Isadora
Duncan coming." The first time Simeon met Isadora was when he
returned to Rye one day to find her there with her dancing
children, who had preceded her from Europe. He tried to sneak up
the stairs but was confronted at their foot by Mrs. Ford and Miss
Duncan. "Oh, Mr. Ford," said Isadora, "I never think of Julia as
being married, but always as being surrounded with poets." Said
Simeon: "How do you do! Good-bye!" and dashed up the stairway.

SIMEON FORD

A caricature published in the New York Herald, August 10, 1902, where it was accompanied
by a comic biography of Mr. Ford by "Wilberforce Jenkins," actually John Kendrick Bangs.

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Simeon dodged as often as possible his wife's Friday night poetical dinners and Monday afternoon receptions. He liked old John Butler Yeats, but he hated arguments; and so did old Yeats. Old Yeats preferred the Monday Afternoons. There were more ladies present, and he enjoyed conversation with them which would not develop into belligerency. The Friday night dinners contained too much "new thought." Mr. Ford was essentially conservative, whereas Mrs. Ford was extraordinarily liberal, even socialistic. Mrs. Ford was a particularly ardent antagonist of British imperialism, and Simeon Ford thought that the British Empire could do no wrong.

I attended a Friday Night of Mrs. Ford's on one occasion when Mr. Ford happened to be present. There were three or four American poets of moderate renown seated at the dinner table, with Mrs. Ford at one end and Mr. Ford at the other. When I had come in, I had greeted Mr. Ford with more enthusiasm than he seemed ready to receive. He had not seen me since I had grown up and he didn't know who I was. Halfway through dinner, Mrs. Ford called me "Frankie," with the result that Simeon burst out: "Are you Frankie Bangs? Thank God! I thought you were another one of these poetry fellers!" When Mrs. Ford left the table with the "poetry fellers" to go into the drawing-room, I stayed at the table with Simeon. As Mrs. Ford went out of the door she turned to us and said, "Will you blow out the candles?" We blew out the candles. "This is the way we save money," said Simeon.

On a Saturday, once, when he had returned to Rye for a quiet weekend at home, Simeon suddenly heard ominous sounds downstairs. It was Vachel Lindsay reciting "The Congo." "Who is that crazy man down there?" he asked, and took off for his weekend at the Apawamis Club, where he could be undisturbed. There was a late afternoon when Simeon was sitting at a window of the Union League Club on downtown Fifth Avenue and a friend pointed out two strange-looking individuals in oriental costume walking up town. "I wonder who they are?" said the friend. "I don't know," replied Simeon; and then, suddenly remembering that it was Friday, added: "but I'll find out when I get home." And so he did. They were two Japanese actors strolling uptown for one of Mrs. Ford's Friday night dinners.

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Mrs. Ford's Friday Nights, during the period when they were regular events, took place during the winter months over a stretch of ten or a dozen years at a time when she wintered in New York rather than in Rye. Kahlil Gibran missed only a night or two in all those years. Percy MacKaye was usually present, and Witter Bynner was there whenever he was in New York. Men were the staple at these dinners, and with Gibran, MacKaye, and Bynner to help in the entertaining, now and again joined by John Butler Yeats, many visitors from overseas, especially British poets in America to pick up some cash by lecturing, appeared at Mrs. Ford's table. At one time Mrs. Ford made a list of special guests who frequented her Friday Nights and Monday Afternoons. It included William Butler Yeats, John Masefield, Laurence Housman, Francis Meynell, Charles Rann Kennedy, John Drinkwater, Cecil Roberts, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Lord Dunsany, John Haynes Holmes, E. A. Robinson, Stephen Graham, Gilbert Cannan, Siegfried Sassoon, Norman Angell, Norman Thomas, James G. McDonald (then head of the Foreign Policy Association), Syud Hossain (editor of *The New Orient*), and Edwin Markham. Around 1917, Percy MacKaye wrote Mrs. Ford from Palm Beach asking her to extend his greetings to Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Walter de la Mare, so I suppose they were among those entertained also. Although women were not usually invited, Mrs. Ford repeatedly welcomed three "honorary" members: Ellen Terry, Isadora Duncan, and Olive Dargan. Other women who came at one time or another were Lady Dunsany, Edith Wynne Matthison, Ruth St. Denis, Amy Lowell, Josephine Preston Peabody, Sarojini Naidu, Italia Garibaldi, Leonora Speyer, Sara Teasdale, Margaret Sanger, Rose O'Neill, and Elinor Wylie. Elinor Wylie won the Julia Ellsworth Ford Poetry Prize, presented under the auspices of the Poetry Society of America.

I attended a number of these Friday Nights when I happened to be in New York, and they were lively affairs. There was one evening when Isadora Duncan came in unexpectedly, and danced around in a shawl, irritating Percy MacKaye by making ardent gestures in his direction. She wanted to go to a dance later with Witter Bynner, but he retired upstairs, feigning a headache. On another occasion I recall Percy MacKaye describing to John Drinkwater, at the moment well

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known for his successful play *Abraham Lincoln*, his own projected drama on George Washington. And at another time Witter Bynner delighted everybody by reading, before publication, a group of the satirical lyrics he and Arthur Davison Ficke were putting together for their celebrated poetic hoax *Spectra*. I have never seen a countenance more shiny with appreciation than that of Laurence Housman as Bynner boomed out the lines:

> If I were only dafter
> I might be making hymns
> To the liquor of your laughter
> And the lacquer of your limbs.

Housman, leaving America after his 1916 visit, wrote Mrs. Ford that he was sending a photograph, "And will you please let it say 'thank you' for all your mothering goodness to the stranger you befriended with such bountiful domesticity and warmth of heart? Believe me, I am very grateful for so much kindness." John Masefield in the same year wrote two steamer letters to Mrs. Ford. In one he described her kindness as "beyond all power of thanks"; in the other he said, "You have added a great deal to the happiness of my stay in America, and I do not know how to thank you for it all, for I never met with such kindness before, never in the wide world." Masefield's first lecture in New York, at the Macdowell Club, was due "entirely to the energy and generosity" of Mrs. Ford. What Edwin Markham wrote Mrs. Ford in 1919 was probably no exaggeration: "Our city has no friend of the literary folk more constant and conscientious than you are."

Mrs. Ford's relations with her men friends were truly platonic in the customary sense of that term. They were based on dignity and freedom. She was fearless of criticism and interested in genius wherever she found it. She did not require of others the personal behavior that she imposed upon herself. She thought it ridiculous that Ellen Terry should have been blackballed by a London club for "immorality" or that Isadora Duncan should be expected to acquire domesticity along with her children.

In a letter written from London in 1896, when she was thirty-

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seven years old, Mrs. Ford said of herself: "It is well that I am plain and staid looking." She had been sitting on the floor with William Michael Rossetti, looking for a picture of Circe among photographic reproductions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings and drawings. The picture was not found and probably does not exist. Mrs. Ford had a collection of Circe pictures and at one time was thinking of writing a little illustrated book about them. Frederick S. Church drew a picture or two of Mrs. Ford as Circe taming himself as a Scotch-plaid rattlesnake, and Arthur Hacker, the English Royal Academician, addressed her in several letters as Circe—but all this was artistic badinage.

Mrs. Ford dressed as she pleased and was never in or out of style. This she had done from her childhood days. As a little girl she threw her hoop skirt under her bed, where her fat nurse could not retrieve it. Later she refused to wear bustles or corsets. She went abroad almost yearly from the time she was a young woman, and bought many of her dresses at Liberty's in London. Their material was so substantial and beautiful that a score of them were still in her wardrobe when she died. Returning from Palm Beach at the age of ninety-one, three months before her death, she was carried off the train in one of these gowns, a blue velvet, and took her last drive up and down Fifth Avenue in a large Packard limousine, which was itself about thirty years old. Mrs. Ford liked grey stockings and silver buckles on her shoes, and she bought white stockings and had them dyed the grey she favored. She almost always wore an ostrich feather in her hat. She had a box full of them, of all colors, and she stuck them in her hats as she chose. Simeon Ford once asked her why she always wore a feather. The next day she left the feather off, and as Simeon and she were driving uptown in a Victoria he looked at her quizzically and said: "For God's sake, wear a feather!" Old John Butler Yeats had very much the same reaction when late one afternoon Mrs. Ford in his presence put on a false nose which she was going to wear that evening at a fancy-dress party at the Cosmopolitan Club. She was going as a tramp. "God Almighty!" exclaimed the old man; "I don't see why people make themselves look worse than they are!"

Mrs. Ford delighted in telling stories at her own expense, and her gusto of humor was sometimes extravagant when directed at others.

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She liked to tease what she thought was too much dignity. Mr. Ford was a very dignified and modest man, even in his own home. Mrs. Ford for years used to ask at breakfast: "Do you take one or two lumps of sugar in your coffee, Mr. Ford?" Simeon was very tall and very thin, and at a time when he was very active as an after-dinner speaker, Mrs. Ford had him telephoned to by a supposed representative of Barnum and Bailey, offering him a thousand dollars to take the place of the recently deceased Thin Man in the side show of the circus. Simeon's answer was: "Go to hell!"

Richard Mansfield, the great romantic actor and tragedian, lived in Rye for a time, and so did Frank Daniels, a well-known comedian. Both actors were often invited to use the wharf on the Fords' property for swimming during the summer months. Mr. Mansfield once telephoned Mrs. Ford, asking her please not to invite Daniels at the same time that she invited him. (Mr. Mansfield did not like low comedy on or off stage.) One morning Mrs. Ford espied the tragedian upon the wharf in his swimming habit. She lined her children up at one of the windows where they could have a good view of the proceedings, and then sauntered forth elegantly attired and carrying a parasol. On the wharf she engaged Mr. Mansfield in conversation, and suddenly toppled over into the Sound. Churning water, and with her parasol still above her head, she was rescued by the great actor without his being aware that he had an audience. Hobart Ford tells me that Mansfield did so dexterous a job that he lost neither his dignity nor his eyeglasses.

Old man Yeats was sometimes very frank with Mrs. Ford. He at one time wrote her:

> May I venture on a very dangerous proceeding and make on you a personal criticism? You have no self-esteem; so that when you meet a proud man, you meet a man unintelligible to you. Not for worlds would you hurt anyone's feelings. Indeed, you have a nature so melting with kindness that I don't believe you ever willingly caused any pain to anyone, even when it would be justified. But through sheer inadvertence, you will sometimes and perhaps often hurt the feelings and sensibility of a proud man. . . . In you there is less cruelty than in any person I ever met. In fact, it would be better if you had some, as it would make you a little more formidable. In a disturbed district one must carry arms,

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and New York Society is a disturbed district. My son owes a great deal to his power of crushing retort.*

Mr. Yeats was here referring to his son "Willie," as he always called him, and not to Jack. "Willie," it may be said, could be crushing even without retort. There is a rather pathetic account of a meeting Mrs. Ford had with "Willie" in Dublin, probably in the summer of 1915. She writes on stationery of the Shelbourne Hotel in that city:

> Well, I have seen "A.E." and W. B. Yeats. I felt so at home with "A.E.," I had an half hour's talk with him. I felt very uncomfortable with W. B., as I always do. In fact, he confuses me. Perhaps, if I were alone with him, it might be different. It is very difficult for me to hear him, and I do not like to ask him to repeat. I had in my hands a photograph of Whitman, which I wanted to give him. He looked at it and without comment handed it back. He didn't know I wanted to give it to him. He only remarked: "I haven't read him for years." But whether he liked him or admired him he didn't say. A very charming English woman who had tea with us in the Yeats drawing-room said: "I think you only read Whitman when you are young." I said I didn't agree with that. He was read in America by the mature minds. He was the greatest poet in America, and one of the greatest in the world, but he was not a lyrical poet. I also had Witter Bynner's *The New World* and Vincent Millay's *Renaissance*. I meant to give him Witter Bynner's book. He would have cared for that more than the other, but he took Edna Millay's book and handed it back without comment. Then I asked him if he knew or had *The New World*, and he said he couldn't remember, so I didn't dare ask him if he wanted it. I asked him what he thought of Ramsay MacDonald. My impression is he only said "Well" and stopped. Then I asked him if he was in sympathy with the Labor Government, and he answered: "I am a Tory." So that settled that.

Mrs. Ford was born in New York City the year that Darwin's *Origin of Species* was published. She liked to interpret this fact as meaning that the world was moving forward and that she was forever in the van. She liked the idea of being a pioneer in the intellectual, artistic, and social world. Marquis James in a copy of his Pulitzer Prize biography *Andrew Jackson* (1937) wrote: "To Julia Ellsworth

*John Butler Yeats was himself a proud man, and it is possible that Mrs. Ford inadvertently embarrassed him with too much kindness. One reason he did not return to Ireland was his fear of being a burden to his family. In America he could make his own way with a little help. Mrs. Ford was very careful how she helped people "to help themselves." That Mr. Yeats might maintain independence she herself got for him over fifty sitters for portraits. F.H.B.

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Ford, who is the greatest pioneer I know." In her last year Mrs. Ford was thinking seriously of writing her own memoirs, to be called *Looking Forward at Ninety*.

Mrs. Ford's father, James Edwin Shaw, owned extensive real estate in New York City, including the Grand Union Hotel, razed in 1914 to make way for the Grand Central Station and its subway connections. Her mother was interested in art, and her father had a beautiful library and literary inclinations. He paid his daughter Julia and his son Samuel a dollar for every book they read, thinking this a good educational investment. Into Mrs. Ford's life, when she was ten, came a great influence. The mother of a little friend, George W. Lawrence, died, leaving him an orphan. "Bring him to our house," said Julia's mother, and there George Lawrence lived, practically adopted by the Shaws, until the time of his marriage. George's and Julia's interests were much alike. At fifteen they were reading Carlyle's *Sartor Resartus* and experiencing transcendentalism. This did not keep them from Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. Nor did they neglect Byron, Shelley, Scott, Tennyson, and Thackeray. Dickens they found generally too sad for them. But the books that interested the young Julia most were those on China, Egypt, and Assyria, and her interest in the Far East and the Middle East was lifelong. She finally went to Japan, and thence to China, with Witter Bynner in her party. She spent a winter in Peking, where she began her novel *Consequences*, an attack on the opium traffic. At the same time Bynner began there his translating of Chinese poems. His *The Jade Mountain* (1929) is the first extensive collection of Chinese poetry translated by any American poet in our literature. Bynner wrote Mrs. Ford: "The longer I live the more I'll appreciate your great gift to me of China, but it's inestimable. How had we lived so long without it? How could we? Precious depths!"*

The greatest influence in Mrs. Ford's life came to her through her attendance at All Souls' Episcopal Church, where the liberal preacher Heber Newton read from the pulpit Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Browning—and was brought before the bishop for such heresy. The poetry of Whitman became Mrs. Ford's passion, and she made the mainspring of her life Whitman's lines:

*Printed with the kind permission of Mr. Bynner.

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Go, dear friend; if need be, give up all else, and commence today to inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness.

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

Mrs. Ford said that the great universal genius of Whitman hit her at fifteen, that she never missed a sermon by Heber Newton if she could help it, and that through the instrumentalities of Whitman and Emerson, Newton transcended sectarianism and restored the divine to the universal.

At sixteen Mrs. Ford wrote a novel with a Jane Austen flavor in which the heroine's name was presented to her in a flash of lightning in a dream. The lightning zigzagged on a black sky the word "Viz-LITE," and the heroine became Vizlete, and probably the book would have been called *Vizlete* had it ever got a title. For a child's story, *Imagina*, which she wrote in her maturity, Mrs. Ford got the final chapter out of the unconscious; and she got from the unconscious several other things. She had powers to heal herself and others, where aberration from the norm might be considered subject to psychosomatic influence. Four times she defeated her doctors by appealing to the unconscious, thus avoiding the knife. On one of these occasions both her doctor in Rye and her doctor in New York declared that an operation was absolutely necessary, and immediately. Mrs. Ford had a mattress put in her car, and was driven to New York to prepare for the worst. But she went into a huddle with herself for half an hour and came out with a personal solution. This she applied rigorously, and the next day called up her doctor and took him out to luncheon. He begged her to tell him what she had done, but she never would tell anyone.

Mrs. Ford was always a bit cavalier with her doctors; but some of them, particularly in Palm Beach, were content to have their suggestions, when they were crude enough to intrude medicine into their daily calls, neglected at a good price. When an ambulance came to her house in Rye to take her to a hospital in Port Chester for an X-ray treatment just before her last trip to Florida, the ambulance men tried to put her, quite according to etiquette, feet-first into the

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vehicle. This she forbade them to do, and finally she was put in head-
first, after she had warned them: "I may be ninety, but I can still
kick!"

This spirit of independence was evident throughout Mrs. Ford's
career. The little Julia Shaw would not get on her knees every night
before going to sleep because she was opposed to the monotonous,
objected to vain repetitions, and, also, because the floor was cold and
distracted her attention. She refused to say the Lord's Prayer because
the idea of God as a father suggested to her somebody in pants, a
form of vestment which she thought unworthy of divinity. She said
prayers of her own, however, for which her grandmother gave her
a china chicken. She didn't like Sunday School because she didn't like
the way they spoke of Jesus there. She set Jesus the Man very high in
her pantheon of saintly beings, but she cared not for Jesus the Second,
a term she used to distinguish, from the historical Jesus, the con-
coction of priest and church. Once, when a little girl, she was passing
by a Catholic church, and saw the coffin of a mother carried into the
edifice while a small baby's coffin was left outside on the sidewalk.
She rushed after the bearers of the mother's coffin to remind them
that they had "forgot the baby." She did not recognize in her child's
mind that, after all, the baby had not been baptized. She can be for-
given this irreverence, as she was really very young. It was probably
harder to forgive her for the trouble she caused at the first play she
attended. Someone on the stage was about to stab someone else in
the back. She screamed out a warning, and it became necessary to
lower the curtain.

Mrs. Ford deprecated greed, war, bullying, injustice, and domina-
tions of any kind. "Domination destroys character," she once said.
She thought indifference to the suffering of others a deadly sin. She
opposed the concept that one's character was improved by suffering.
She thought it could only be tested thereby. She was opposed at once
to imperialism and to nationalism. She thought Great Britain re-
sponsible for the destruction of one of the superb civilizations of the
world, that of the Maoris, who had not only avoided prostitution by
encouraging companionate marriages, but had also risen to telepathic
communication. She despised the priests of Amon-Ra, who destroyed
the advanced civilization introduced by the young Pharaoh Akhna-

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ton, and she was greatly concerned in the last year of her life over the
power of evil exhibited in the torture contrived to destroy the mind
and soul of Cardinal Mindszenty. She fought against injustice every-
where she saw it, for to her injustice bred war. Driving to Rye with
Mr. Ford, she once saw a group of entranced spectators watching a
big boy beating up a little boy. She ordered her car stopped. Mr.
Ford remonstrated, and suggested that she mind her own business.
"Justice is my business!" she replied, and as she came up to the group
with the fire of Quakerism in her eye, the big boy ran away, and she
took the little boy to his home.

Mrs. Ford's battles for Peace were many, and they were not
quixotic—although there were those who at times suspected that her
baiting of the British Empire had something to do with the Irish in
her. Most of the pamphlets she wrote were castigations of Britain.
Even when she attacked Japan in defense of China, Great Britain
came into the picture as a responsible party in showing Japan the way
to imperialism. Shortly before his death in 1924, E. D. Morel, the
emancipator of the Congo and a leading force for peace in the British
Parliament, sent Mrs. Ford a manuscript seven-point program which
he thought, if put into effect by the combined effort of the United
States and Great Britain, might save Europe from a second world
war. Mrs. Ford had Morel's program sent to United States senators
and other persons of responsibility, and had it read at and broadcast
from a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association. She aided Norman
Angell, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner, in arranging for American
publication of some of his writings, and she sponsored his talk before
the Cosmopolitan Club of New York. She helped sponsor *The New
Orient*, a brave periodical in the field of international understanding,
and wrote an open letter to E. D. Morel's *Foreign Affairs* as early
as 1924, urging that nations have Ministers or Secretaries of Peace
instead of War.

Mrs. Ford's most persistent campaign over the years was a fifty-
year battle against ragweed, the principal cause of that "purgatorial
menace, the devil's own inflammation," hay fever. Mrs. Ford suffered
from the devil's own inflammation herself, and she was resolved to
alleviate the suffering of others who could not, as she could, travel to
exempt places. She published a pamphlet, frequently revised, entitled

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*Suggestions for Hay Fever and Rose Cold Sufferers.* This she sent free of charge to anyone who asked for it. Annually, before the hay-fever season began, she sent to newspapers lists of exempt localities, most of which she herself had tested out. In her home was organized the Society for the Prevention of Hay Fever, and she was its honorary president and chief financial support until her death.

The campaign to eradicate ragweed became a matter of humor in Rye, but Mrs. Ford persisted in her attempts to clear the town of the pernicious weed. She was largely instrumental in having the Rye Village Board pass an ordinance making it mandatory for owners to remove weeds from their property to a certain depth from the road. There were protests, and the authorities were not agile in enforcing the ordinance. She established hay-fever clinics in Rye and at the Vanderbilt Clinic in Presbyterian Hospital, New York. She herself had been largely cured of hay fever by Admiral Stokes, surgeon in the U.S. Navy, who employed diathermy and ultra-violet light, and she was eager to share her good fortune with others.

Mrs. Ford had her own ideas on education. "You have to do things for children when they are very young," she said. Her daughter Lauren, the now celebrated artist, began to draw at three. Mrs. Ford noticed her propensity to make pictures, and placed pads and pencils all over the house in strategic positions. Mrs. Ford paid little children secretly to ask Lauren to draw them, and Lauren's beautiful child pictures today are surely the result of this early influence. Her career, Lauren Ford has said, was her mother's choice. Lauren wrote her in the last year of her life that but for her she would not know how to paint. Mrs. Ford's gift to the Yale Library, includes some pencil sketches by Lauren Ford, a water-color drawing of a little girl made by Lauren in her teens, and a small water-color Madonna and Child made in her maturity with her signature set in a cat's back.

Mrs. Ford believed in neither marks nor examinations. She thought they interfered with the purpose of learning, setting false goals which had nothing to do with the knowledge gained for its own sake, which was what was important. She put about as little faith in medals as she did in marks. She herself when at school shocked an audience by refusing to accept a gold medal for good conduct, since she knew she didn't deserve it. Mrs. Ford, at annual dinners given by the

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Poetry Society of America, used to find it somewhat ironic to see at the speakers' table some of the richest women in the land. "The gems which adorned them," she said, "must have been worth a fortune, while it was common knowledge that most of those eulogized on these occasions did not have money enough to pay their rent. And what was the mark of appreciation and recognition of America's wealth to its song-makers? MEDALS!" Mrs. Ford gave cash, and seldom publicly. She gave thousands of dollars in this way. I know one famous American poet who alone must have received over the years not less than fifty thousand dollars—a sum which, of course, made many things possible to the glory of American literature.

Mrs. Ford, was, I think, a little extreme in her pride at never having learned the multiplication table, but she dealt with people as individuals and not en masse, and simple addition and subtraction were mathematically sufficient for the needs of her charity and checkbook. Fortunately for her, however, Simeon Ford had, in his own words, studied "mathematics as far as decimal fractions," and her son Hobart, who became guardian of the family resources after Simeon's death, also knew something about the multiplication table and percentages. He had also learned how to sew under his mother's educational supervision, with the result that, during his custody of the family "bag," he was able to patch up the seams against too great wear and tear. He deserves a great deal more credit than he is likely to get for indirect services to letters and art.

Mrs. Ford's educational theories included parallel bars and ropes, the building of shacks and small houses, the simple art of mending with needle and thread, and the mysteries of cooking up to and including scrambled eggs. She believed in acting and painting as valuable exercises in the development of children. She had trunks of costumes, for rainy days and fair, to stimulate the imagination of her children and their friends, and to encourage them in creating their own plays. She herself loved charades, and many an eminent visitor to her home found himself an amateur actor before he knew it. The best toys for children were what Mrs. Ford termed the playthings of nature, the investigation of the out-of-doors, the association with flora and fauna, a friendliness with animals. Her children at one time had a goat as a companion, and it was allowed the run of the house.

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It pulled out a drawer of Mrs. Ford's desk in her upstairs study and ate her notes on Cosmic Consciousness. "It's well he did," observed Simeon, "only he could digest them!"

Mrs. Ford, with her home on the Sound, of course believed in boating for her children. Her son Ellsworth became a great amateur yachtsman as well as an accomplished painter in oils of seascapes and boats. He knew all about boats, and he knew also how to sew. Mrs. Ford was proud of the fact that once when he was sailing across the Atlantic to Spain he was the only member of the crew who was adept at patching sails that had been ripped in a gale. She considered that he had thus saved the lives of all on board. John Masefield, himself knowledgable in the rigging of ships, admired the miniature vessels that Ellsworth had fabricated. Once, when he was at Mrs. Ford's New York house, one of the ladies present said: "Oh, Mr. Masefield, speak to us about love." "Who made that boat?" said Mr. Masefield, and sought refuge in admiring one of Ellsworth's miniature ships. Mrs. Ford's son Hobart is also a yachtsman. He has been twice Commodore of the Cruising Club of America. We do not imply here that the yachting interests of Mrs. Ford's sons derive entirely from their mother's educational ideas, for it must be admitted that Simeon Ford himself was considered by many people to be the best sailor on Long Island Sound.

The interest in art in the Ford family does however derive from Mrs. Ford and the Shaw blood. The dry wit of Simeon, as exemplified in a book of his collected speeches, *A Few Remarks* (1903), is an art in itself, and indeed often a graphic one, but he would have been the first to admit that it had little to do with painting. Mrs. Ford was an able painter, although she did not take painting up as a regular activity until she was eighty; she showed her pictures in several exhibitions and won some honorable mentions. She spent a great deal of time in her late years in California, where she became an important figure in the association of the Women Painters of the West. But as a young woman she was interested in art, and not accomplished in practicing it *pour le sport*. A friend of hers in her thirties was Frederick S. Church, the well-known illustrator and painter. Originals of Church's humorous sketches adorned bathroom walls of the Ford house at Rye, and in the living room there was a large

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canvas in color of a young lady dressed in pink, seesawing with a polar bear against the green background of nature. Mrs. Ford made such a perfect copy of this painting that when she put her copy in the same frame, Church was unable to tell which was his and which hers. She did the same thing with an etching by Seymour Haden, though I don't think Sir Francis had the opportunity of distinguishing his masterpiece from its copy.

Mrs. Ford's brother, Samuel T. Shaw, was not himself an artist but he was a great patron of the arts. He and Simeon Ford were partners in law, as well as brothers-in-law, and they ran the Grand Union Hotel together. Simeon was a prominent bicyclist in his day, and Sam Shaw was the fencing champion of the United States. The doctors advised Sam to quit fencing and he took up a great interest in art. The Grand Union Hotel possessed the finest collection of old prints and lithographs of New York anywhere in the city, and Simeon Ford as well as Sam Shaw was responsible for this. Mr. Shaw was for many years a permanent vice-president of the Salmagundi Club. He established the Shaw Prize at the Society of American Artists, awarded annually from 1892 to 1906. From 1904, for forty years, he awarded a Shaw Prize each year on the occasion of the Salmagundi's Annual Oil Exhibition, and gave a dinner in honor of the winner. These prizes were among the most coveted by American artists and they were won by many famous painters. They were large cash prizes, I think of fifteen hundred dollars. Mr. Shaw also established the Julia A. Shaw Prize for women artists. He was elected to the presidency of the Art Students League for the year 1903-1904, found it suffering from desuetude and reinvigorated it.

Mrs. Ford's interest in one phase of child welfare was indicated by her establishment in 1934 of the Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation for the Encouragement of Juvenile Literature in America. For ten years this Foundation gave an annual award of two thousand dollars to the author of the best juvenile book of the year. Mrs. Ford was greatly pleased when the award for 1941 went to Babette Deutsch for her *Walt Whitman, Builder for America*. Here was her beloved Walt being brought to a new level of influence.

Mrs. Ford herself wrote successful juveniles. Two of them were illustrated by Arthur Rackham. There are nine letters from Rackham

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among Mrs. Ford's literary remains. He is very frank about what he expects to get for his pictures. For "Mermaids," one of his color illustrations in Mrs. Ford's *Imagina*, he charges a hundred and fifty dollars for the original and three hundred and fifty in addition for the book rights. "The price for the *book rights* may seem to you rather high," he wrote, "but not when I explain that for my year's book containing twelve colored drawings, I expect to get $5000 for the first year's sale." Mrs. Ford had a complete collection of all the books Rackham had illustrated. She gave them to her son Hobart, but Long Island Sound in a hurricane washed them out to sea.

A bibliography, with comment, of Mrs. Ford's own books and pamphlets—copies of which are included in her bequest to the Yale Library—follows.

## BOOKS

1904 PICTURES by George Frederick Watts; Introduction and selections by Julia Ellsworth Ford and Thomas W. Lamont. New York, Fox, Duffield & Company, 1904. [58] p. front., illus. (ports.) 22 mounted plates. 35cm.

A series of half-tone reproductions and mounted platinum prints of the most famous pictures of George Frederick Watts, accompanied by extracts from classic English prose or verse. Mrs. Ford had a great interest in the Pre-Raphaelite painters and later artists such as J. W. Waterhouse and Arthur Hacker, both of whom she knew personally. She went to Germany to meet the German painter Franz von Stuck and to get photographic reproductions of his work. She created her own wallpaper for her upstairs study by arranging on the walls as a mosaic over two hundred photographic reproductions of pictures by these artists.

1906 "A. E." A note of appreciation, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. New York, Privately Printed, 1906. 1 leaf, 12 p., 5 leaves, incl. facsims. front., port. 19½ cm.

Illustrated by two portrait sketches of "A.E." (George W. Russell) by John Butler Yeats. The frontispiece is a sketch of "A.E." reading aloud to Mrs. Ford. The original of the second sketch, signed by both artist and subject, is included in Mrs. Ford's bequest to Yale. (See reproduction.)

1908 KING Solomon and the fair Shulamite. From the "Song of Songs." [A poetic idyl arranged in sequence by Julia Ellsworth Ford.] With illustrations after drawings by Simeon Solomon. New York, Frederic Fairchild Sherman, 1908. 29, [1] p., 1 leaf. 7 plates. 20 cm.

With photogravure reproductions of seven drawings by Solomon, a promising Pre-Raphaelite who, because of scandal in the eighteen-seventies, dropped from sight. Mrs. Ford, interested in his art and not in his morals, sought him out and tried to restore his reputation. (See letters about him from W. M. Rossetti to Mrs. Ford included in her bequest to Yale.)

1908 SIMEON Solomon: An appreciation, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. New York, Frederic Fairchild Sherman, 1908. 76, [1] p., incl. 1 illus. front, 21 plates. 31 cm.

JOHN BUTLER YEATS
PORTRAIT OF GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E."), SEPTEMBER 1905

*Pencil drawing, 14 x 10 inches, signed by artist and subject.*

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In addition to Mrs. Ford's critical appreciation and selections from Solomon's prose poem "Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep," this volume contains twenty-two full-page tinted reproductions of Solomon's pictures. Along with this book are presented to Yale two portfolios and a folder containing photographic reproductions of more than one hundred and twenty drawings by Solomon, and a copy of his scarce *A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep* (London, Printed for the Author, 1871).

1912 THE Mist, a little play in three scenes, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. New York, Privately Printed, 1912. 25, [1] p. 23½ cm.

This play was produced in London at the Little Theatre, November, 1913, as a
curtain raiser to G. K. Chesterton's "Magic."

1914 IMAGINA, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. With illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Lauren Ford. New York, Duffie & Company, 1914. 5 leaves, 178 p., 1 leaf. col. front., illus., col. plate. 24½ cm.

"A tender tale of a boy in his wistful dreaming, which suggests the inner world of fancy that lives in every sensitive imaginative child." Reprinted: New York, E. P. Dutton & Company [1923], and Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Sutton-house [1935].

1919 SNICKERTY Nick, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Rhymes by Witter Bynner. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham. New York, Moffat, Yard & Co., 1919. viii, 9-78 p. col. front., plates (part col.) 25 cm.

The play is composed of two scenes, Winter and Spring, and portrays a boy and his friends who overcome by simple faith and love the cold stubbornness of a lonely giant. The idea was suggested by Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant." The play was produced at the Children's Theatre, Heckscher Foundation, New York, in March, 1923, and has been produced subsequently at schools throughout the country. While in California in her later years Mrs. Ford had four motion pictures made in technicolor and sound, called the Snickerty Nick Series, and delighted in showing them for children at schools, hospitals, and theatres. Reprinted: with fewer illustrations and with title *Snickerty Nick and the Giant, a Play for Young People in One Act...* New York, Dramatists Play Service, Inc. [1933]; and with music by Charles Arthur Ridgway, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Suttonhouse [1935].

1923 PAN and Santa Claus, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Illustration by Lauren Ford. Quotations from "A Canticle of Pan" by Witter Bynner. New York, E. P. Dutton & Company [1923]. 36 p. col. front. 20 cm.

This story tells of a mystical union of Pan and the Christ child. Pan, the personification of the world's natural beauty, in harmony with the Christ child, ushers in a new consciousness of spiritual reality. Reprinted, with illustration by V. Ulianoff in place of that by Lauren Ford, under title *Pan and the Spirit of Beauty...* San Francisco, Los Angeles, Suttonhouse [1933].

1929 CONSEQUENCES, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Introduction by John Haynes Holmes. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. [1929]. xv, 342 p. 19½ cm.

A novel of contemporary life in England and China, which exposes and excoriates the traffic in opium. Though supposedly objective, the book is a pretty personal affair. The discussion of "Great Men," held during a dinner party, contains obviously a reflection of Mrs. Ford's own views, as do the costumes of some of the women, one of whom might just as well be wearing the clothes of Ellen Terry and is so described. In the first chapter, the hero of the story, a son of a British Lord of great wealth, shocks his father with his liberal views, tells him of his resolve to be an artist and of his sympathy for the British Labor Party. It was while reading this first chapter that Simeon Ford threw the book across the floor. Reprinted, 1930, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Suttonhouse [1935]. A Chinese translation, by Chia-Teh Huang, was published in Shanghai in 1932.

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PAMPHLETS

1913 SUGGESTIONS for hay fever and rose cold sufferers... [Rye, N.Y., circa 1930.] 12 p. 15 x 8 cm.

A note by Mrs. Ford states that this is a revised edition of a pamphlet which first appeared in 1913.

1919 TAI-SHAN, the Holy Mountain in Shan-tung, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. [Rye, N.Y., The Rye Chronicle Press, 1919.] 12 p., 1 leaf. 20 cm.

Mrs. Ford expresses indignation over the possible transfer of German rights in Shan-tung to Japan.

1921 PEACE depends on Great Britain, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. [Rye, N.Y., The Rye Chronicle Press, 1921.] 11 p. 20½ cm. "Second edition."

An attack on British Imperialism in the Far East and its partial responsibility for a like imperialism on the part of Japan, all leading to eventual war.

1924 THE coming international opium conference, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. [Rye, N.Y., Rye Chronicle Press Inc., 1924.] cover-title, 6 p. 20½ cm.

Mrs. Ford urges ceaseless agitation in the American press to strengthen the cause of those fighting, at the impending conference at Geneva, for abolition of the opium traffic.

1925 OPIUM and the British policy, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Reprinted from *Unity*, March 2, 1925. [New York, White Cross International Anti-Narcotic Society, 1925.] 8 p. 20½ cm.

Mrs. Ford puts the blame for the failure of the International Opium Conference to abolish the opium traffic on the British government and the representatives from India.

1928 THE Spirit of Shu-Yuan Chang inspires China, A victory for China would be a victory for the whole world. By Julia Ellsworth Ford. [Rye, N.Y., 1928.] [12] p. 18¾ cm.

The Neutrality Act, says Mrs. Ford, is pernicious. It benefits an aggressor. War materials are permitted to go to Japan, the aggressor. When a nation is an aggressor, it should be treated as such, no matter how it may try to camouflage. Japan is bringing ruin on herself, and is her own worst enemy.

1937 ... CARRYING it too far... Rye, N.Y. [1937.] Broadside 20½ x 9 cm.
"Reprinted from *The Nation* of November 6, 1937" A letter to the Editor pro-
testing against the cruelty with which the Japanese in California were being treated.

1942 SOMETHING to think about, by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Los Angeles, 1942. 8 p. 22 cm.

Mrs. Ford warns against future peril to California and the United States if the Japanese of California, presently evacuated for safety reasons, are permitted after the war to return to California.

1942 SUPPLEMENT to "Something to think about," by Julia Ellsworth Ford. Los Angeles, 1942. cover-title, 8 p. 21 cm.

Mrs. Ford gives further proof of Japanese treachery in California.

1945 THE temple of the universal spirit. [Los Angeles, 1945.] 8 leaves. 18 cm.

An appreciation by Mrs. Ford of the Temple of the Universal Spirit at Ananda Ashrama, the retreat founded by Swami Paramananda, of the Ramakrishna Mission in India. This Ashrama is situated in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Range at La Crescenta, California.

FROM WITTER BYNNER

(EXCERPT FROM A LETTER TO THE EDITOR, DECEMBER 14, 1951)*

"Mrs. Ford was a remarkable woman,—true to herself, to her friends and the causes she espoused. Gatherings at her house were always provocative and fruitful, due not only to the usual distinction of her guests, but to her own forthright if somewhat eccentric direction of them and of their topics. Hers was a beneficent, enjoyable and frequently comic tyranny.

"In 1917 I went to Japan with Arthur Davison Ficke, his first wife, and his son Stanhope. On the same steamer, the old Empress of Asia, were Eugen Boissevain, who later became Edna Millay's husband, and also Mrs. Simeon Ford, already my good friend, together with her son and a Miss Lenhart. After our separate journeyings in Japan, Mrs. Ford invited me to join her party and be her guest on a crossing to China. In 1920, when I had again travelled to Japan with the Fickes. I proceeded to China by myself where Mrs. Ford and my mother were to join me. At the last moment, my mother could not sail, but Mrs. Ford came along on her own and I met her in Shanghai, after which we travelled considerably in China,—even as far as Chungking. I have long planned recounting from remembrances of both trips our various Chinese adventures, which were not only enlivening but in some ways sensational. When I am done with present work on the novel, perhaps I can undertake reminiscences which will cover that period."

FROM PERCY MACKAYE

(SELECTED LETTERS AND POEMS ADDRESSED TO JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD)*

CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 30 November 1908

DEAR MRS. FORD—

This last day of the month reminds me tardily that I have never written to thank you for the recreative delight of that glorious autumnal wine-clear first day of November at Rye, and for the whole-hearted welcome which you & yours gave to my sister and me there. It is a warm & friendly memory, and I am grateful to you for it. Please tell Mr. Ford that I hope he has completed the rest of those merry verses, and is already prepared to publish them. "The Fair Shulamite," in your version, is as lovely as King Solomon could desire, and has given great pleasure to my wife & me. I am not forgetting that I am going to visit you again in the new year.

With sincere regards

Yours

PERCY MACKAYE.

CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 22 Feb 1909

DEAR MRS. FORD—

My journey to the universities etc. was so strenuous that I have been remiss in letting you hear from me.

Now about New York: I don't think I shall be able to stay as late as the 12th. of March, as I have such an overwhelming amount of work which I ought to tackle & get through here this spring. You say the Duncan children dance on the 8th. Can't we go to see them then, instead of on the 12th? I want very much to see them, & that may be my only chance. That would also give us that evening together. If that can be arranged, put me down for Fri. or Sat. night (Mar. 5th. or 6th.), to meet the friends, if that's convenient for you. Kindly let me know what you arrange. I can't attempt to express, my dear friend, my deep appreciation of all your friendly doings & thinkings. Marion sends you affectionate greetings with me.

Yrs always

PERCY MACKAYE

*Printed with the kind permission of Mr. MacKaye.

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(CORNISH) WINDSOR, VERMONT, 20 March 1909

DEAR MRS. FORD—

I can't tell you how much your dear and generous thoughtfulness of me, & my work, touches me. Yours is a life that makes for life and joy in all your friends; and to be counted among your friends is a happy privilege to me.

Of course next month will do; I only hope you haven't been put to inconvenience now. . . . The Canterbury enterprise* promises excellently, & in a day or two—after I wade through a black sea of correspondence—I shall plunge into my poetic play joyously. I think, with happiness, of our talks together, & look forward to many more in the days to come.

Yours affectionately—

PERCY MACKAYE.

(CORNISH) WINDSOR, VERMONT, 17 August 1909

DEAR MRS. FORD:

My hearty thanks to you for the copy of “The Birth of the White Rose” and the pleasure I have had in reading it. The simple sweetness of the little story is very appealing. Reading it is like smelling a flower, and its images—like fragrances—live on in the memory with an atmosphere of quiet aspiration peculiarly their own. I hope you will publish it, and I suggest that, if possible, you get Mr. Howard Pyle to illustrate it, as I think that his own rare gifts will find congenial material in the symbolic and pictureable nature of your story. You have an enviable way of describing things with direct simplicity, without losing their sensuous charm.

Believe me

Yours with sincere regard

PERCY MACKAYE.

CORNISH: 23 Aug. '11

DEAR J—

I forgot to ask you:—Do you know where Synge's plays are published? Have you “The Playboy of the Western World”? Have you any spare copies of his plays you could lend me?

Yrs—

P MACK

*A reference to the performances by Charles and Ivah Coburn of my verse-play *The Canterbury Pilgrims*. P.MacK., 1951.

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26 WALKER STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 30 Dec. 1912—

DEAR JULIA:

It was very dear of you to think of sending me that book on Shakspere: I've not yet had an opportunity to read it—as I've been greatly rushed with many things—but thank you for sending it.

To-day I got my first chance to read your stories carefully. I have gone over them slowly and in detail, & I have found very little to suggest in the way of changes. That little I have marked in pencil. You see, the stories are written in your own style, & it would therefore be unwise, in my opinion, for me, or anyone, to make insertions or emendations which would be in a different style, or of a sort to alter the idea or spirit in which they are written. The changes should only be such as to help make clearer your own conceptions. These I have made, but, as you will see, there are very few that I thought needful. In short, the stories should stand for what they are. Indeed they must do so. Now I know you will want just my candid opinion, & this is it: There is a good deal of charm in the stories, but they do not compare, I think, in artistic worth with your “Imagina.” In this I entirely agree with Olive [Dargan], and I also earnestly believe and advise that you should not publish the stories first; but you should publish “Imagina” first.—Yes, you will say, but how about the Rackham pictures?—I have thought about that, of course, and this is my solution:

> If you publish “Imagina” with the Rackham pictures, it will make your reputation, my dear Julia, at one bound. But if you publish the stories with the Rackham pictures the critics, & the public, will inevitably speak of the masterly pictures, to the disparagement of your writing part of the book, which is not masterly. But your “Imagina” comes near being a little masterpiece:

Therefore

> You must write in to the text of “Imagina” some paragraphs, or perhaps a chapter, for which Rackham’s pictures would apply as illustrations.

> I cannot, of course, suggest just where & how this may be done, since I have not seen the pictures, but I am *very confident it can be done*; and when I go to New York, some time in January, I will gladly suggest the *how* and the *where* to make such insertions, and help you to

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do it. But I feel very strongly indeed, dear Julia, that you ought to publish "Imagina" *first*, before the stories.

'C'est le premier pas qui coûte,' & your first step in this must be your best one. For if your stories are not well received, your very lovely "Imagina" will never get as good a hearing; whereas, after first having published "Imagina," you could much better afford the artistic risk of publishing the stories. This advice, I think, is sound...

I do hope you will agree with me in my impression of your publication matter. "Imagina" with the Rackhams will delight everyone's heart.

A very affectionate "Happy New Year" to you, from
PERCY.—

P.S.—I'm returning the mss. by registered mail, separately.

Did you get the copy of "The Civic Theatre" which I sent?

CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 12 Aug '13

DEAR JULIA—

So many thanks for your letter. . . . I'm writing a masque for the dedication of a Bird Sanctuary near Cornish. Miss Eleanor Wilson [daughter of Woodrow Wilson] is to act the chief part in it—the Bird Spirit. Joseph Lindon Smith, of Dublin, N.H., is to play a faun, Witter Bynner a plume hunter, [Ernest Harold Baynes a naturalist] & I myself will act a poet. The Cornish Colony are to participate as birds. It will be some time in September. I do wish you weren't going away to Europe just then, for I want you so much to see it.

I have your proof, & will read it the soonest possible.

Yours affectionately—

PERCY—

(CORNISH)—WINDSOR, VERMONT, 25 July 1926

DEAREST JULIA—

Congratulations to you on your very admirable article [on Akhna-ton] in *The Orient* magazine. It seems to me the best work of the kind you have ever done, and is a very illuminating exposition of a great figure who has been too long unfamiliar to the world. You are always in the vanguard in such work.—Have you another copy of that issue

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of "The Orient" which you could let me have? I have let my brother, James,* have my copy...

I have been long in writing you, dear Julia, but you'd forgive me if you could look in on my days here. I am still working, about 18 hours a day, on my father's Biography, upon which—as you know—I've been constantly at work for three years. Just now I am strenuously trying to condense 700,000 words to 400,000 words—which means practically rewriting the whole long work of two great volumes. This will take me at least the rest of the summer in order to get it ready, if possible, for autumn publication. In addition to this, I have been sick abed, so I haven't been in good shape to write the kind of letter I'd like to, about your very significant article...

What are your plans? I hope you haven't suffered from the great heat. Where is Kahlil [Gibran]? What do you hear from Olive [Dargan]?

Felicitations to you again on your article!

Devotedly yours

PERCY.

ROLLINS COLLEGE, WINTER PARK, FLORIDA, 26 Jan. 1929

DEAR JULIA:

Here, at last, is the book of my fiftieth birthday, copies of which have just been sent to me at length printed & bound. You will find your own very gracious greeting on the page opposite Robert Frost's...

The 300 copies will go, first to those who wrote the birthday greetings, and then to a list of libraries. No copies are for sale...

With loving thanks for your interest in it, from the start,

Affectionately—

PERCY.

16 August, 1935

DEAR JULIA:

I have read your terse article on Walt Whitman and think it is admirably well done. To suggest in a thousand words the contempo-

*James MacKaye was Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth. P.MacK., 1951.

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rary influence, the present-day need, the prophetic import and the
essential philosophy of that dynamic being, in aspects national and
international, is an epitomizing task which you have accomplished
better than I have seen it done elsewhere within such condensed com-
pass. It's like setting out to gather sap in spring. For to gather the
spirit of Walt one must tap the bark of the Tree of Life itself, whose
boughs overshadow the centuries and whose roots strike down into
the eternal wellsprings.

Your little article leads us to pause quietly under that great Tree,
to listen to its "uttering" green leaves and to breathe deeply its living
wisdom like an inward fragrance, enveloped outwardly today by
the ever-darkening dust-storms of Mechanization. Thank you for
doing a thing so refreshing and timely.

Your devoted friend—

PERCY MACKAYE

THE CHART, LIMPSFIELD, SURREY, 18 March, 1938

DEAREST JULIA—

At last!!! The two volumes of *Epoch* have arrived here, safe and
sound. . . . I think that the inscription to Edith Craig which you've
pasted into *Epoch* is delightfully and graciously phrased, and I'm sure it
will please her greatly. I shall take the two volumes to her on Wednes-
day next, when I go up to London, as on that day John Gielgud (the
famous Hamlet—he's one of the Terry family, you know, and a
cousin of hers) has invited Edith Craig and me to take lunch with
him, at the Moulin d'Or. I shall go first to her apartment, where I'll
show her your inscription in the book, and where I'm going to get a
surprise for your birthday, which I know will please you. . . .

England is terribly shaken by world events—the rape of Austria
and the war in Spain. Little children are being taught how to wear
gas-masks, and the air-fleets of English airplanes roar above our
heads, all day long, here in the country, practising by day, and by
night the weird sky-search-lights dart & glow about the heavens like
demonic aurora-borealis. I have been asked to speak, several times,
before literary gatherings, from an American viewpoint, &—though
I've found it a strain—I felt I ought to: so I've spoken at the London
Poets' Club, & the P.E.N., & recently at a great luncheon—lords,

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187

duchesses, M.P.'s, authors, etc.—with 1500 attending, at Grosvenor
House. I've met interesting people—Priestley, the novelist—Laurence
Irving (Sir Henry's grandson)—Walter de la Mare, the poet, &
Arthur Rackham (who sent his cordial remembrances to you). I've
also had a letter from Bernard Shaw. . . .

Well—whatever the mad dictators may do—anyway, dear Julia
reigns in her queendom of friendship—from which Hitlers &
Mussolinis are forever banished! There, may she celebrate a joyous
birthday, surrounded by her true loyalists, & greeted—across seas
and lands—by the loving fealty of her affectionate

PERCY.

THE CHART, LIMPSFIELD, SURREY, 24 March, 1938

VERY DEAR JULIA—

Yesterday, I had a delightful time with Edith Craig, in London. I
took to her the two volumes of *Epoch* (inscribed to her by you &
me) & she was ever so much pleased & sent you her affectionate
greetings for your birthday—also a postcard, acknowledging *Epoch*.
She also inscribed for you a copy of her book, which I have posted
to you today, by registered mail, for your birthday. I hope it will
reach you by April 6th. Her book, as you will see, is Ellen Terry's
Memoirs, brought down to the date of her death, with very im-
portant notes (at the end of each chapter) written by Edith Craig
and her friend Christopher St. John, who assisted Ellen Terry in
writing her Memoirs. The Notes will be important for you to see
in writing your autobiography, for they give many interesting facts,
which answer some of the questions which you wrote to me, es-
pecially about Godwin. . . .

Edith Craig & I went to lunch with John Gielgud, before his
matinee (in Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"), & she took along
*Epoch*, & showed him the illustrations—especially of her aunt Marion
Terry, who acted Ophelia, at the age of 16, to my father's Hamlet,
in which Gielgud was particularly interested. During the course of
conversation, Gielgud asked Edith Craig several questions about
Godwin. "What was he like?" he asked. "Oh," she answered, "very
like Eddy" (i.e. her brother, Edward Gordon Craig), "who inherits
his skill in drawing, and I inherit his skill in designing costumes."

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So she referred very definitely to Godwin as her father, as she does also in the Notes in her book. . . . John Gielgud was most charming & simple. He is very fond of his country garden. Edith Craig gave him a copy of my play, *The Scarecrow* . . . which he is going to read, & was much interested that it had been produced by Reinhardt & Stanislowsky. Marion & I & Edith Craig watched Gielgud's performance in Chekhov's play from a stage box, in which it was quite cosy & sociable to have tea served between the acts, as they do here in England.

Earlier, in the morning, we had a delightful time with James Stephens, the Irish poet, & his wife, who are coming out to see us here in the country, soon.

Before you get this letter, I trust you will have received . . . my little book of poems [*The Far Familiar*], for your birthday. . . .

Your devoted—

PERCY.

DORNACH, SWITZERLAND, 27 February 1939

DEAREST JULIA:

I sent you a post-card from Paris, where I went on the invitation of my old friend, Jo Davidson, the sculptor, to make him a visit of a few days, while he painted a portrait of me there. And while there I had the happy adventure of having some rare good talks with Gordon Craig. As you probably know, he and I have corresponded with each other for nearly forty years (and we almost met, as boys, 50 years ago, the only time he was ever in America, on a tour with Henry Irving, who was an intimate friend of my father), but we never actually met each other till we met, this time, in Paris. He is delightfully charming (a good deal like his mother), is a wonderful scholar as well as genius of the theatre, and is the best living maker of woodcuts in the world. I found him in his little work-study (lined with rare theatre-books, masks and curios), hard at work at his woodcutting, & he gave me a very friendly welcome. And, before I left, I got him to inscribe for you the enclosed wood-cut print, which I'm sending to you *for your birthday*. You'll see that he inscribes himself as "E.T's son," and I send it to you, to include with your other Ellen Terry mementos. . . .

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189

In Paris also I saw Jouvet, behind the scenes in his French theatre, where he was acting a very amusing satire on doctors, entitled "Knock," by Jules Romains. He acted, years ago, in New York, in the French translation of my play, "Washington," in which Copeau acted George Washington, the year before Walter Hampden acted it in English—as I think you remember. Jouvet was most cordial and friendly.

Well, Julia dear . . . a grand, beautiful good time on your birthday, when I shall light a host of candles in my heart for you.

Yours devotedly—

PERCY.

WHERE JULIA DWELLS

(To Julia Ellsworth Ford)

Julia, your home is your own spacious heart—
Roomy to welcome all the world with jest,
Yet holding to a secret place apart
A sanctuary for the sore oppress:
An auricle of egress, where the seas
Of far adventure flash their foaming tides;
A ventricle of ingress, where the breeze
Lulls, and the racing barque at anchor rides
And peers upon her still reflection there
Painted in turquoise on the tranquil blue,
Peopling her bright spars in the dreamy air
With stormy visions she has voyaged through,
Where the wild seagulls in those imagings
Mingle their silver with the bluejay's wings.

PERCY MACKAYE.

RYE, N.Y.
Night of 7-8 November, 1941.

11.30 P.M. - 1.30 A.M.
In Julia's dining-room.

TO THE PEACOCK

Painted by Julia

Bird of rainbow, pearly crescent,
Moony orb, and beryl cloud,
Prince of beauty's pride florescent!
Peacock dear, be proud, be proud, be proud—
But not too proud!

Orb must wane when crescent waxes,
Rainbow pale in mists above:
All that turns on beauty's axis,
Peacock dear, is turned, unseen, to love—
To unseen love.

LITTLETON, MASS.

24 January, 1942

To Julia Ellsworth Ford

PERCY MACKAYE

LITTLETON, MASS., 22 January, 1943

Here I sit, darling Julia, snuggled in a cozy warm blue wrapper,
looking out upon the snowy frozen hills, where the apple-boughs
are tingling in their ice-armor, at 15 degrees below zero!—And who,
do you think, sent me that cozy warm wrapper, from far-away
California?—You could never guess, of course, and so I will tell you,
in confidence:

It's a lady, I first met, when I was a young man, because she and I
loved poetry and beauty and friendship, and we wanted to tell each
other so, and to live a life, dedicated to those lovely things: a lady of
gusto and charm and ardor of affection for her fellow-beings: a lady
of humor and teasing merriment and roguish tricks of laughter; a
lady of ideas, put into busy actions, with a whirl of enthusiasms; a
lady of pensive meditations upon how to alleviate the sorrows of
others, in little things and in great; a lady of artistry and hospitality
and downright sincerity. And so, do you wonder, that I gave to her
my lifelong friendship?—The wonder is, that she also gave me hers!
Now, isn't it surprising that she should happen to have your own
very name: Julia Ellsworth Ford.—"What a coincidence!" exclaims
my cozy, warm, blue wrapper, to

Your ever-loving, devoted friend—

PERCY MACKAYE.

For all your Julias

Our birthday
1945

When April, riding amid the stars
His heathen rain with the plattering雨
Bounding, left over March's hard,
The雨 from the curl of each delivery horn,
Far below,
Laughter of beauty, passion for peace,
Humor of kindness, and Spring's release
From boudoir of writer's座,
In a radilut, telling sunrise-shower,
On his joy, impelling home.
Julia, who barn...

Rest all the flowers up from her
the Rose up from others, in springlike honor
After April heritage.
So who will drink a toast in rye mea
To her whose smiling lip and love-lit eye
Defy
Aghast
And time??

PERCY MACKAYE

MANUSCRIPT OF A POEM WRITTEN FOR MRS. FORD'S BIRTHDAY, 1945

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TO JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD
On Her 90th Birthday

Julia dear,
What is our time of year?—
Four-score-years-and-ten,
Three-score-ten-and-four,
Let us take hands and then
Sing:
*Our time of year is Spring*
*Forevermore!*

6th of April, 1949

YOUR LOVING PERCY

IN SPECIAL REMEMBRANCE

Coincident with the Pasadena Playhouse production of the Tetralogy occurred the ninetieth birthday of JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD, to whom the directors and the author telegraphed their felicitations at that time. Herself an author of plays and poems, she has long been gracious hostess and generous friend of authors, artists and poets, as one of whom I deeply acknowledge here my own debt of gratitude to her for the zestful friendship which has been continuous throughout more than forty years. (From *The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark, or, What We Will, a Tetralogy*, by Percy MacKaye. Limited Memorial Edition, New York, 1950, p. 688.)

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TRUMBULL'S LIST OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL PAINTERS

AMONG the Trumbull papers at the Yale Library there is a draft of a letter from the painter, Col. John Trumbull, Harvard B.A. 1773, to the statesman, Edward Everett, Harvard B.A. 1811, five times Congressman from Massachusetts, later President of Harvard, remembered today as the orator who preceded Lincoln at Gettysburg. This unpublished letter, written when the painter was seventy-one, was prompted by the criticism, in and outside of Congress, of the four large, heavy-handed paintings, which the aged artist had finished in 1824 and which had been installed in the Rotunda of the rebuilt Capitol shortly after. Trumbull always insisted, like the sensible man he was, in being judged by his peers and not by ignorant politicians, laymen—and even portrait painters. The letter, a just and generous estimate of his contemporaries, is dated Washington, 12 January 1827.

From questions which have been put to me by the Speaker & other gentlemen of Congress, I am led to judge that there prevails a very general want of information on the subject of the Arts, especially of Painters—it seems to be supposed that historical painters abound in this Country. Talent does indeed abound but without study & cultivation talent avails as little in the Arts as in Literature. A man may possess admirable powers of acquiring knowledge but yet may not have acquired [ability to compose and paint historical subjects]. Portrait painters are many, but the difference between portrait & historical painting is almost the Same as that between a Cabinet-maker and an Architect—a man may produce exquisite cabinet work, who would be utterly in-

capable of combining the vast and varied Magnificence of the Capitol.

It is very probable that some members of the Committee on public buildings may entertain these erroneous notions, & it has seemed to me Not improper then for me (as President of one of the principal Academies of the Fine Arts in the Country, & at the Same time one of the Oldest Artists having commenced the regular course of Study nearly fifty years ago) to lay before you, a List of the most distinguished painters now living in this Country. I have endeavored to do it with correctness and impartiality.

List of painters who have attended to the historical branch of the profession—now living in the U.S.

Charles Wilson [i.e. Willson] Peale, Pha., aged 84 or 5 [actually 86] studied with Mr. West before the War. Painted many portraits of eminent men during the Revolution, which are to be seen in the Museum Phila., made some few attempts at history, one of which may be seen in Princeton College.*

John Vanderlyn, New York. Studied with great reputation in Paris & Italy. Painted [in 1807] Caius Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage, [then belonging to the Kip family and now at M. H. DeYoung Memorial Museum at San Francisco], which received the applause of Napoleon, Ariadne ["Ariadne on the Island of Naxos," probably painted in 1814, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia], Venus [the old Colonel was mistaken; Vanderlyn did not paint a "Venus"], made one well known attempt in modern history, "The Murder of Miss McCrea by the Indians in 1777," [painted in 1804] which is now in the Academy of Fine Arts at New York. [Now at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford].

G. W. Allston, [i.e. Washington Allston] Boston. Studied with great reputation in England & Italy, painted "the restoration of Life, to a dead man, on touching the bones of the Prophet Elijah," to be seen in the Academy at Phila. [still there]. Has been employed for some years on a painting "of Belshazzar's Feast" [deposited by the Boston

*Trumbull refers to the celebrated "Washington at the Battle of Princeton," which Peale finished in 1784 and which has been at Princeton ever since. Though the composition includes a landscape with Nassau Hall, an actual battle scene with the dying General Mercer and two other figures, it is now regarded as a portrait—one of the most important of the Revolutionary Commander-in-Chief.

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Atheneum at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston], is mostly conversant in Subjects of Classical Antiquity & Poetry, and has made no attempt in modern History, so far as I am informed.

William Dunlap, N.Y. Studied a short time under Mr. West, in early life, left the pursuit of the Arts for many years, & engaged in Commerce, Literature, the Theatre, &c; a few years ago resumed the pencil, & has painted several historical pictures, generally Ancient & Sacred Subjects, which have been generally seen, but has made no attempt at modern history so far as I know.

Daniel Sargeant, [i.e. Col. Henry Sargent, Daniel's son, whom Trumbull had known at London in his student days] Boston. Studied some time under Mr. West in London, but left the Arts on his return to America for Commerce; afterwards resumed the pencil, & has painted several subjects of Scripture history, and the "Landing of the Pilgrims at Plimouth," which have been generally seen, except the last [this, the artist's first important picture, was ruined by pitch, having been rolled on a green pine log. A replica hangs in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Mass.] Has made no attempt at Modern History, that I know of.

Rembrandt Peale, Pa., has studied in Europe—painted some years ago a fine "picture of the Court of Death" [now belonging to the Detroit Institute of Arts, deposited at the Baltimore Municipal Museum, known as the "Peale Museum"] from a poem of Dr. Porteous, late Bishop of London, [Beilby Porteus died in 1808] and more recently a "portrait of Genl. Washington on horseback" [painted in 1823 and now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington], which was shown in the Rotunda of the Capitol, & offered to Congress in 1824.

[Thomas] Sully, Phila., has studied in England, painted some years ago, "the Passage of the Delaware in 1776 by Genl. Washington," [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] well known by a very good engraving.

S. F. B. Morse, New York, has studied in England, painted some years since "the Hall of the Representatives in the Capitol," [Corcoran Gallery of Art] which has been very generally seen.

These are the principal Artists living in this Country, who have made Attempts at historical painting, ancient or modern, so far as my information goes. They all paint portraits, and in that branch of the pro-

fession, the Name of [Gilbert] Stuart, stands almost without a Rival, in this or any country, or in any Age.

Several young men in New York, and probably elsewhere, display Talent, for the higher branches of the Arts, which only need a few Years cultivation to mature, in particular Mr [Henry] Inman & Mr [Charles Cromwell] Ingham.

[Charles Robert] Leslie & [Gilbert Stuart] Newton, fr. among all these you find not one instance of any attempt to record the Glory of our Country, and but one to record any portion of our history, that, merely disgraceful to our then Enemy.

THEODORE SIZER.

AN UNRECORDED
NEW HAVEN IMPRINT

THE Library has recently acquired a hitherto unrecorded New Haven imprint of 1757. The anonymous title page reads *Poems. The Conflagration, Applied to that grand Period or Catastrophe of our World, when the Face of Nature is to be changed by a Deluge of Fire, as formerly it was by that of Water. The God of Tempest and Earthquake. New Haven: Printed by James Parker and Company, MDCCLLVII*. A little research proves this to be a reprint of an eight-page pamphlet by Mather Byles, issued in Boston most probably in 1755. There is a copy of this in the Huntington Library. Yale's new tract contains only the first six pages—"The Conflagration"; the remaining leaf no doubt contained the other poem mentioned. Both were printed in Byles' *Poems On Several Occasions*, Boston, 1744—a collection of thirty-two poems. "The Conflagration" had first appeared in the *New England Weekly Journal*, no. CXIII, May 19, 1729, and "The God of Tempest" two years earlier in the same newspaper, no. XXXIII, November 6, 1727.

D. G. W.

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195

THE Library has recently been given, by Mr. Imrie De Vegh, twenty-nine most interesting volumes. They fall into several different categories and it is difficult to choose a thread on which to string this delightful collection of pearls. The most exciting volume of all is the Froben, 1521, edition of Erasmus, *Paraphrases in Epistolas Pauli*, in a binding signed by Garrett Godfrey for Henry VIII. On the front cover is the blind stamp panel of the royal arms supported by two angels as described by Hobson on page 30. On the back cover is a similar panel with the Tudor rose as described by Hobson on page 33, with the signature "GG" on a shield with arrow.

Another early volume is the first French translation of Plutarch's "De liberis educandis" done in 1537 by Jehan Collin who later translated his essay on tranquillity. The present work was translated into Latin by Guerino da Verona about 1460 and Elyot's English version appeared as early as 1535 but the earliest French edition known to Brunet was a late reprint of this version in 1556. No copy appears to be in either the Bibliothèque Nationale or the British Museum. The translator has added to his version of Plutarch's text an interesting alphabetical dictionary of the historical and mythological characters mentioned, as well as "Hystoires plaisantes a lire, servans a l'intelligence de ce livre." The woodcut of a scholar in his study on the title page is used again in the first French edition of More's *Utopia*.

Among early Italian books of courtesy few are more scarce than the first edition of Galeazzo Flavio Capella's *Della accellenza et dignita delle donne* (Rome, 1525). The two greatest collectors of similar books, Manzoni and Cavalieri, were contented with copies

of the edition of the following year, which has erroneously printed on the title page "Opera nova non piu stampata." Capella was secretary to Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and when Milan fell into the hands of Charles V, he was appointed Secretary of State. He is best known as the author of the *Anthropologia* (1533) which includes the present tract as its second part. The unnamed printer, F. Minutius Calvus, is identified by the attractive title border, leaded pages, and excessive spacing of the colophon, as in his edition of Giovio's book on marine fishes (1527).

Included in the gift is a copy of the only sixteenth-century edition of *Le sei giornate, mandate in luce da Lod. Dolce*, by Sebastiano Erizzo (Venetia, 1567). There are also two cook books previously wanting in our collections. One is the *Tranciante* of Vincenzo Cervio (Rome, 1593), with all plates, the other the *Vollstandig Vermehrtes Trincir-Buch* (Nuremberg, 1652), with 61 engraved plates, some folding.

In French literature Mr. De Vegh has added several most significant early editions: a Rabelais printed at Lyon in 1564; the second issue of the first edition of Jean Bodin's *Six livres de la Republique* (Paris, 1577)—Yale's copy of the earlier issue of the preceding year belonged to Jonathan Swift; the first Paris edition of Montaigne's *Essais* (1587); Gomberville's *Doctrine des moeurs* (1646); and the great five-volume, 1796, edition of the *Oeuvres* of Montesquieu.

There are two editions of the *Emblematia* of Joannes Sambucus, both printed at the Plantin press, 1564 and 1566. The earlier is the regular issue of the first edition with colophon and the woodcut on page 35 correctly printed. Bound with the later edition

196

THE YALE UNIVERSITY

is the *Emblemata* of Hadrian Junius, the second issue of the first edition. Many of these emblems were used in England by Geoffrey Whitney.

The gift includes three law books—the earliest the 1566 *Recopilation de las ordenancas de... Valladolid*, a comprehensive collection of all royal ordinances relating to the audience chamber and the chancery court of Valladolid, arranged by subject; a 1570 collection of English laws (S.T.C. 9294) previously here only in our Law School Library; and a 1709 collection of statutes relating to high treason, from the Rolle Library.

There are included three volumes of Slavic interest. The first Italian edition of the first adequate history of Russia by Baron Sigmund Herberstein—*Comentari della Moscouia* (Venice, 1550), with a large folding woodcut map. The Latin original appeared the preceding year. Bound with this is *Del Gouerno de regni et delle repliche antiche et moderne* by Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1550, colophon: 1566), the second edition including at the end a summary translation of More's *Utopia*. Next in date is the Cracow, 1578, edition of the *Sarmatiae Europeae descriptio* of Alessandro Guagnini, and third the *Annales* of Sarnicius (Cracow, 1587). Also of Slavic interest are two editions of *Lettres sur la danse* by Jean Georges Noverre, called the founder of Russian ballet. The single volume of Lyon, 1760, is the second issue as it bears the "approbation" wanting in the earlier state, and there is also the handsome four-volume, most complete edition, published in St. Petersburg in 1803. Noverre was born in Paris and lived there until he went into exile at the time of the French Revolution. In Russia he found a patron in the young Tsar

Alexander I to whom this collected edition of his writings is dedicated. His friends included Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and David Garrick, who called him "the Shakespeare of the dance."

D. G. W.

## RECENT ACQUISITIONS

**ALDINE PRESS.** Seventeen volumes, including one incunable, printed by Aldus Manutius and his successors. *From Dr. Arthur E. Neergaard, 1904.*

**AMERICAN FICTION.** Thirty-eight volumes published before 1850 by authors whose names begin with B, the second installment of his collection. *From James T. Babb, 1924.*

**ARENTS TOBACCO COLLECTION.** A copy of the four-volume catalogue of the Arents Collection, and two other publications relating to it. *From Walter Beinecke, Jr.*

**BACON, LEONARD, 1909.** "An Ode for the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of Yale College": the manuscripts and typescripts of the poem in six different states, all with manuscript changes and corrections. (The copy of the sixth state is the one actually read from at the celebration in Woolsey Hall, Friday, October 19, 1951.) *From the author.*

**BECKFORD, WILLIAM.** His copy of Brillat-Savarin's *Physiologie du goût* (Paris, 1826), with manuscript notes by him in both volumes. *From Rowland Burden-Muller and James T. Babb.*

**BOSWELL, JAMES.** Autograph letter from Boswell to his gardener James Bruce, written on the verso of a letter from Bruce to Boswell, London, October 11, 1786. *From Mrs. Roy Arthur Hunt.*

**BURKE, EDMUND.** Two autograph

letters to unidentified correspondents, Beaconsfield, May 13, 1795, and March 6, 1796; together with a document signed by him, 1782, and a copy of his printed *Speech... on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775* (London, 1775). *From Oscar F. Soule, 1911 S.*

**BYNNER, WITTER.** The setting typecript, with manuscript corrections by the author, of his recent book on D. H. Lawrence, *Journey with Genius. From Mr. Bynner.*

**CANBY, HENRY SEIDEL, 1899 S.** The original typescript with manuscript corrections of his recent book on Mark Twain and Henry James, *Turn West, Turn East. From the author.*

**CLEMENS, SAMUEL L., 1888 Hon.** Twenty autograph letters to Annie Trumbull, November 4, 1885—July 4, 1896, with seven letters from Mrs. Clemens to the same correspondent; eight letters to Henry C. Robinson, July 20, 1893—November 8, 1896, with one to Mrs. Robinson, January 13, 1897, and one to Lucius Robinson, February 16, 1900. *From Barclay Robinson, 1919.*

**EDGEWORTH, MARIA.** Autograph letter to Mrs. Sneyd, Edgeworths Town, November 4, 1819, and a manuscript account, dated May 28, 1849, of Miss Edgeworth's death, un-signed. *From Miss Emily Driscoll.*

**GIBBS, JOSIAH WILLARD, 1858.** Original manuscripts of several of his short papers, manuscript notes, and printed articles, and various letters addressed to him, particularly by Longmans, Green in 1902-3 concerning the publication of his *Essays in Thermodynamics. From Dr. Ralph G. VanName, 1899, Miss Theodora VanName, 1898 Art, and Dr. Willard Gibbs VanName, 1894.*

**GOLDSMITH, OLIVER.** Copies of

seven editions and issues of *The Vicar of Wakefield*, including the first; two issues of the first edition of *The Citizen of the World; The Bee* (London, 1759) and *An History of England* (London, 1764); together with first editions of three plays by David Garrick. *From Oscar F. Soule, 1911 S.*

**GRAY, THOMAS.** *An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard* (London, 1751). *From Chauncey B. Tinker, 1899.*

**HARTLEY, MARSDEN.** An oil painting "Flaming Pool—Dogtown 1931," with, on its reverse, a poem by Hartley, "Beethoven in Dogtown," describing the scene which the painting represents. *From Mrs. Charles P. Kuntz. Ten autograph letters to Nicholas P. Brigante, September 7, 1938—April 10, 1940. From Mr. Brigante.*

**HERSEY, JOHN, 1936.** The original typescript, corrected, of *The Wall*, with the autograph manuscript of an earlier version. *From the author.*

**HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, 1881** Hon. Original typescript of his short story "A Sleep and a Forgetting," as prepared for publication in *Harper's Weekly*, with manuscript additions and corrections. *From an anonymous donor.*

**HUGHES, LANGSTON.** The original typescript of his latest book *Laughing to Keep from Crying*, together with drafts of other manuscripts, miscellaneous printed material, and correspondence, for the Langston Hughes Collection in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters. *From Mr. Hughes.*

**MILLER, JOAQUIN.** The original manuscript, chiefly in the hand of an amanuensis, of his *The Building of the City Beautiful*, with extensive additions and corrections in the author's hand. *From an anonymous donor.*

**MORSE, WILLIAM INGLIS.** Seven

LIBRARY GAZETTE

197

200 THE YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GAZETTE

FUNDS RECENTLY
ESTABLISHED AND GIFTS

DAVID WAGSTAFF MEMORIAL FUND. Established in memory of David Wagstaff, Curator of Sporting Books and Manuscripts in the University Library, the income from this fund will be used to purchase early important sporting books and classical manuscripts for addition to the Wagstaff Collection.

SUSAN A. E. MORSE AND WILLIAM INGLIS MORSE FUND. The University

has received from the estate of Susan A. E. Morse, the sum of $10,000 as an addition to the Morse Fund, the income to be used for the purchase of books on Canadian history and Canadian literature.

EDWIN J., FREDERICK W., AND WALTER BEINECKE FUND. The University has received from the Somerset Foundation the sum of $10,000 as an addition to the Beinecke Fund.

MAP FUND. Mrs. Arthur W. Butler has given the sum of $1,000 to be spent for maps.

YALE LIBRARY ASSOCIATES

THIS organization was founded in February, 1930. Its object is to increase the resources of the Yale University Library by securing gifts and by providing funds for the purchase of books, manuscripts, and other material which the Library could not otherwise acquire.

Membership is open to anyone giving an annual subscription of ten dollars or more or an equivalent gift of books or other material needed by the Library. The latter must be given specifically through the Associates. Checks should be mailed to the Treasurer, Laurence G. Tighe, Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut.

Privileges of Members: They will receive copies of the LIBRARY GAZETTE, all publications of the Associates, and the privilege of using the Library.

The Secretary will be glad to give any further information that may be desired about the organization and its work.

OFFICERS

†Edwin J. Beinecke, '07, Chairman.

†Allen E. Foster, '06, Vice-Chairman.

Laurence G. Tighe, '16, Treasurer.

James T. Babb, '24, Secretary.

Box 1603a, Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut.

TRUSTEES

§Frank Altschul, '08

*Hugh D. Auchincloss, '20

James T. Babb, '24, ex officio

§John Hampton Barnes, Jr., '31

‡Henry A. Colgate, '13

‡John F. Fulton, '29 Hon.

§Frederick W. Hilles, '22

†Wilmarth S. Lewis, '18

†Paul Mellon, '29

*Clarence W. Mendell, '04

§Douglas M. Moffat, '03

†Ray L. Murphy, '47 M.

‡Arthur E. Neergaard, '04

§Walter L. Pforzheimer, '35

†Bradford F. Swan, '29

‡Henry C. Taylor, '17

‡Chilton Thomson, '42

Chauncey B. Tinker, '99, ex officio

*Adrian Van Sinderen, '10

Alexander O. Vietor, '36, ex officio

*John Hay Whitney, '26

Donald G. Wing, '26, ex officio

HONORARY TRUSTEES

George Arents

William R. Coe, '49 Hon.

Henry Fletcher, '98

Andrew Keogh, M.A., '04

Bernhard Knollenberg, '38 Hon.

Russell C. Leffingwell, '99

William S. Mason, '88 S.

Louis M. Rabinowitz

Reeve Schley, '03

Charles Seymour, '08

Henry R. Wagner, '84

*Term expires 1952.

†Term expires 1953.

‡Term expires 1954.

§Term expires 1955.

Yale University Library,

New Haven, Connecticut

November 20, 1951

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the gift mentioned below, and I beg
you to accept our sincere thanks.

Librarian

Bequest of Julia Ellsworth Ford:

"Julia Ellsworth Ford," a Scrap-book of Disjecta Membra Hinting at
Some of Her Doings; arranged by Francis Hyde Bangs, in two volumes, 1951.

Scrap-book concerning the Julia Ellsworth Ford Foundation for the
encouragement of Juvenile literature in America, 1934-1944.

Scrap-book concerning Mrs. Ford's pamphlet "Something to Think About," with
correspondence and clippings referring to it.

Mrs. Ford's (morocco-bound) Birthday Book, with signatures and inscriptions
by many famous people whom she knew.

Notebook concerning Mrs. Ford's children's book *Imagina*.

Notebook concerning Mrs. Ford's play *The Mist*, with a copy of the privately
printed first edition (1912), program, letters, notices, etc.

Manuscript and typewritten copy of Mrs. Ford's novel, written at the
age of 15, about a heroine named "Vizlete."

Three loose-leaf notebooks containing typscripts of Mrs. Ford's
unpublished writings.

Two photograph albums containing photographs of Simeon Solomon's
paintings and drawings.

Mounted clipping of a caricature of Simeon Ford, with a comic biography
of his by Wilberforce Jenkins [pseud. of John Kendrick Bangs].

To Francis Hyde Bangs, Esq.
Ogunquit, Maine

BY FRANCIS H. BANGS

After the death of Julia Ellsworth Ford at her home in Rye, New York, August 1950, it became my task to select from her library certain books representing her interests and associations for presentation to the Yale University Library. It became my duty, also, to gather for deposit in the Yale Library such letters, papers, pictures, and general mementoes, from among her remains, as were pertinent to her literary and artistic and civic career. Some years must pass before some of this material can be made available for scrutiny. The living must be respected by the dead!

Mrs. Ford's gift of books, letters, and other material, was made to the Yale Library partly out of sentimentality and partly because of the assiduity of the writer of this appreciation. The sentimentality bases on the fact that Mrs. Ford first met William Butler Yeats when he lectured at Yale, November 16, 1903, presumably his first lecture in America. Mrs. Ford's son Ellsworth was then a freshman in the Sheffield Scientific School, and he telephoned to his mother in Rye to "pack up her toothbrush" and take the first train for New Haven. He knew of his mother's great interest in the poetry of Yeats, and she responded eagerly to his suggestion.

So impressed was Mrs. Ford with Yeats' talk, that she at once arranged through Yeats' manager, John Quinn, for an early talk in New York City. Mrs. Ford invited the guests personally to this event, which took place at The Arts Club, December 30, 1903, when Yeats spoke on "Poetry in the Old Time and in the New." Nina Wil-

Mrs. Ford had given Isadora this little book many years before, and Isadora still had it with her, despite the fact that all her possessions were in a single bag and her total resources were five francs and some centimes. Madame Yorska tried to talk practical matters with Isadora, but Isadora begged her to read Mrs. Ford's *Idylle à l'air de* to her instead. "When I had finished the book," said Madame Yorska, "she was crying." Mrs. Ford once said to somebody: "Forget Job and his boils, and read the Song of Songs." This was a philosophy that she herself practised, but dying of old age and of cancer in 1950 she turned not to Solomon but to Akhnaton.

Mrs. Ford was an intimate friend of Ellen Terry. Ellen Terry she thought the most beautiful and lovely personality among all women she had ever known. She visited Ellen Terry in England, and Ellen Terry visited her in both Rye and in New York. Ellen Terry was very fond of Mrs. Ford's now famous daughter Lauren. She always called Lauren "Karen", and when she left America after her final lecture tour she gave Lauren the chair she always used on the platform. Mrs. Ford never knew anything more beautiful than the face of Ellen Terry, the tilt of her nose and the magical slant of her eyes. Mrs. Ford thinks that as the Lady of Belmont, in the Casket Scene of *The Merchant of Venice*, Ellen Terry transcended in beauty anything she had ever seen on the stage. Mrs. Ford said that Ellen Terry was of so generous a nature that she spent her own money lavishly to help others, and practically impoverished herself. She took Ellen Terry to have her voice recorded in the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, for which recording Ellen Terry was paid $300. She at once went up town and gave the money to a needy nephew. Simeon Ford, who did not share many of Mrs. Ford's enthusiasms, shared her regard for Ellen Terry. She was so beautiful that it almost made him cry to look at her.

Laurence Housman, leaving America after his 1916 visit, wrote Mrs. Ford that he was sending a photograph: "And will you please let it say 'thank you' for all your mothering goodness to the stranger you befriended with such bountiful domesticity and warmth of heart? Believe me, I am very grateful for so much kindness. It isn't the way we do things in England I am afraid. But here your hospitality is quite wonderful to us." John Masefield, the same year, wrote two steamer letters to Mrs. Ford. He told her in one letter that her kindness to him was "beyond all power of thanks." In the other he said: "You have added a great deal to the happiness of my stay in America, and I do not know how to thank you for it all, for I never met with such kindness before, never in the wide world." Masefield's first lecture in New York City, at The Macdowell Club, was due "entirely to the energy and generosity" of Mrs. Ford. What Edwin Markham wrote Mrs. Ford, in 1919, was probably no exaggeration: "Our city has no friend of the literary folk more constant and conscientious than you are."

Mrs. Ford's relations with her men friends were truly platonic in the customary sense of that term. They were based on dignity and freedom. She was fearless of criticism, and interested in genius wherever she found it. She did not require of others the personal behavior that she imposed upon herself. She thought it ridiculous that Ellen Terry should have been black-balled by a London Club for "immorality" or that Isadora Duncan should be expected to acquire domesticity along with her children.

In a letter written from London in 1896, when she was thirty-seven years old, Mrs. Ford said of herself: "It is well that I am plain and staid looking." She had been sitting on the floor with William Michael Rossetti, looking for a picture of Circe among photographic reproductions of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings and draw-

Richard Mansfield, the great tragedian and romantic actor, lived in Rye for a time, and so did Frank Daniels, a noted comedian, but now forgotten. Both these gentlemen were often invited to use the wharf in front of the Ford house for swimming purposes on summer days. Mansfield once telephoned Mrs. Ford to please not have Daniels around when he himself was invited. He couldn't stand low comedy, even off stage. One morning Mrs. Ford espied Mansfield on the wharf in swimming habit. She lined up her children in a window as a front row seat and sauntered forth elegantly dressed and carrying a parasol. On the wharf she engaged Mr. Mansfield in conversation, and suddenly toppled off into the sound. Churning water, and with the parasol still aloft over her head, she was rescued with great aplomb by the great actor without his knowing that he had an audience. Hobart Ford, who was one of those witnessing the event, told me that Mansfield was so dexterous that he did not even lose his glasses.

in Peking, where she began her novel *Consequences*, an attack on the opium traffic. At the same time Bynner began there his translating of Chinese poems. His *The Jade Mountain*, 1929, is the first extensive collection of Chinese poetry translated by any American poet in our literature. Bynner wrote Mrs. Ford: "The longer I live the more I'll appreciate your great gift to me of China, but it's inestimable. How had we lived so long without it? How could we? Precious depths!"

The greatest influence in Mrs. Ford's life came to her through her attendance at All Souls' Episcopal Church, where the liberal preacher Heber Newton read from the pulpit Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Browning, thus achieving heresy and being brought before the bishop. The poetry of Whitman became her passion, and she made the mainspring of her life Whitman's lines:

> Go, dear friend; if need be, give up all else,
> and commence today to inure yourself to pluck,
> reality, self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness.
> Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself
> of your own Personality.

At sixteen Mrs. Ford wrote a novel, with a Jane Austen flavor, in which the heroines name was presented to her in a flash of lightning in a dream. The lightning zigzagged on a black sky the word VIZLITE, and the heroine became Vizlete, and probably the book would have been called *vizlete* had it ever got a title. For a child's story,

head-first, after she had warned them: "I may be ninety, but I can still kick!"

This spirit of independence was evident through her total career. The little Julia Shaw would not get on her knees every night before going to sleep, because she was opposed to the monotonous, objected to vain repetitions, and, also, because the floor was cold and distracted her attention. She refused to say the Lord's Prayer, because the idea of God as a father suggested to her somebody in pants, a form of vestment which she thought unworthy of divinity. She wouldn't say "Lead us not into evil"; it implied that God might practice a skin game. She said prayers of her own, however, for which her grandmother gave her a china chicken. She didn't like Sunday School, because she didn't like the way they spoke of Jesus there. She set Jesus the Man very high in her pantheon of saintly beings, but she cared not for Jesus the Second, a term she used to distinguish, from the historical Jesus, the concoction of priest and church. Once, when a little girl, she was passing by a Catholic Church, and saw the coffin of a mother carried into the edifice while a small baby's coffin was left outside on the side-walk. She rushed after the bearers of the mother's coffin to remind them that they had "forgot the baby". She did not recognize in her childlike mind that, after all, the baby had not been baptized. She can be forgiven for this irreverence, as she was really very young. It was probably harder to forgive her for the trouble she caused at the first play she attended. Someone on the stage was about to stab someone else in the back. She screamed out a warning, and it became necessary to lower the curtain.

Mrs. Ford deprecated greed, war, bullying, injustice, and dominations of any kind. "Domination destroys character," she once said.

She thought indifference to the suffering of other people a deadly sin. She opposed the concept that one's character was improved by suffering. She thought it could only be tested thereby. She was opposed at once to imperialism and to nationalism. She thought Great Britain responsible for the destruction of one of the superb civilizations of the world, that of the Maoris, who had not only avoided prostitution by encouraging companionate marriages, but had also risen to telepathic communication. She despised the priests of Amon-Ra who destroyed the advanced civilization introduced by the young Pharaoh Akhnaaton, and she was greatly concerned in the last year of her life over the power of evil exhibited in the torture contrived to destroy the mind and soul of Cardinal Mindszenty. She fought against injustice everywhere she saw it, for to her injustice bred war. Driving to Rye with Mr. Ford, she once saw a group of entranced spectators watching a big boy beating up a little boy. She ordered her car stopped. Mr. Ford remonstrated, and suggested that she mind her own business. "Justice is my business!" she replied, and as she came up to the group with the fire of Quakerism in her eye, the big boy ran away, and she took the little boy to his home.

Mrs. Ford's battles for Peace were plentiful, and they were not quixotic—although there were those who at times suspected that her baiting of the British Empire had something to do with the Irish in her. Most of the pamphlets she wrote were castigations of Britain. Even when she attacked Japan in defense of China, Great Britain came into the picture as a responsible party in showing Japan the way to Imperialism. Shortly before his death in 1924, E.D. Morel, the Emmanuel of the Congo and a leading force for peace in the British Parliament, sent Mrs. Ford, written in his own hand, a seven point program

Principal guest. I happened to be at their table for purposes having nothing to do with Peace or Politics. Shortly after Robert Cecil rose to speak, he was heckled from the balcony. He had made some complimentary reference to Britain as an imperial power. I looked up into the gallery and was not surprised to see that the heckler was Syud Hossain, exile from India and editor of the *New Orient*. I was still less surprised to see seated next him, in a green Liberty gown, Julia Ellsworth Ford. This was probably noted too by Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, who was, of course, one of the notables at the speakers' table.

Mrs. Ford had known "Tom" Lamont well, before he had risen to eminence as a great international banker. He had joined with her in 1904 in producing a handsome art-volume, *Pictures by George Frederick Watts*. She was later nothing loath to engage with him in battles. In the winter of 1927-1928 she was very active in combatting a prospective loan of $40,000,000 which was rumored to be about to be given Japan through J.P.Morgan & Company for railway development in South Manchuria. This she did in defense of China against what she deemed Japanese imperialism. Apparently *The Nation* and *The New Republic* were very much excited about the matter, and John Dewey, if not excited, was interested. Mrs. Ford's personal friendship with the Lamont family was utilized to help "stop" the loan. Mr. Lamont patiently wrote Mrs. Ford a long "Strictly Personal" letter, giving his stand in the matter and that of the House of Morgan. He ended with a postscript: "If Simeon feels like wading through this, please show it to him." This letter, and Mrs. Ford's reply, are preserved among her papers given the Yale Library. There is also a letter from Jane Adams, Nobel Prize for Peace, 1931, in which she expresses in December 1927, a "great deal of con-

ulous fortune, while it was common knowledge that most of those eu-
logized on these occasions did not have money enough to pay their
rent. And what was the mark of appreciation and recognition of
America's wealth to its song-makers? MEDALS!

Mrs. Ford, I think, was a little extreme in her pride at never
having learned the multiplication table, but she dealt with people
as individuals and not en masse, and with the respect that
a simple addition and subtraction
were mathematically sufficient for the needs of her charity and the
needs of her check-book. Fortunately for her, however, Simeon Ford
had, in his own words, studied "mathematics as far as decimal frac-
tions", and her son Hobart, who became guardian of the family re-
sources after Simeon's death, also knew something about the multi-
plication table and percentages. He had also learned how to sew un-
der his mother's educational supervision, and the result that during
his custody of the family "bag" he was able to patch up the seams
against too great wear and tear. He deserves a great deal more credit
than he is likely to get for indirect services to letters and art.

Mrs. Ford's educational theories included parallel-bars and ropes, the building of shacks and small houses, the simple art of mending with needle and thread, and the mysteries of cooking up to and including scrambled eggs. She believed in acting and painting as valuable exercises in the development of children. She had trunks of costumes, for rainy days and fair, to stimulate the imagination of her children and their friends, and to encourage them in creating their own plays. She herself loved chrades, and many an eminent vis-