JULIA ELLSWORTH FORD: AN APPRECIATION

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 will-

cox Putnam, in her autobiography, *Laughing Through*, says: "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, but perhaps it should be here recorded for posterity that Yeats once 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' sister Elizabeth and of his father, John Butler Yeats. She brought Elizabeth Yeats to this country and gave her an exhibition of 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, over which presided, as co-proprietor with Mr. Shaw, Mrs. Ford's husband, Simeon Ford, the celebrated wit and after-dinner speaker. Until John Butler Yeats' 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 City. Occasionally he visited Mr. and Mrs. Ford at Rye, but after being stung there 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 the first night she spent in the Grand Union Hotel she saw

the ghost of a man who had hanged himself in the open doorway between her room and the bathroom. She asked Simeon Ford if anyone had hanged himself in that room, and Mr. Ford told her 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, she entertained at Rye, as she did also Ronald McNeill, later First Baron Gushendun, 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 entertained in New York Shane Leslie, Lady Gregory, and Lord and Lady Dunsany,

It is impossible to deal within the compass of this appreciation extensively with Mrs. Ford's multiple interests, or with the personalities she associated with, much less with her influence upon many of them—or with the largely unknown benefits she conferred upon them. Mrs. Ford was rich enough to be a patron of the arts. She was a very generous person, and she quietly aided the causes she was interested in by giving assistance to active agents rather than to institutions. Almost all 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 Humboldt's motto: "The mission of man is to bring his highest gifts to perfection—and to help others do likewise." Throughout Mrs. Ford's 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

My relation with Mrs. Ford began when I was in my teens. The country home of Mr. and Mrs. Simeon Ford was situated on Long Island Sound, at Milton Point, Rye, New York. The dwelling they lived in was a spacious affair, being in fact two complete domiciles under a single roof. These two domiciles 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 been Mrs. Ford's mother's house, and after her mother's 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. She gave it at a later date to Mr. and Mrs. Percy Mackaye, and to Witter Bynner and his mother, and at another time to fourteen of Isadora Duncan's Dancing Children, who had fled Europe for America in August, 1914. Miss Duncan had been one of Mrs. Ford's protégés at the start of her dancing career, and Mrs. Ford rescued the Duncan School from Ellis Island and gave it a home. These girls of Isadora Duncan were of many different nationalities, and Percy Mackaye 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, 1905-1907, Mrs. Ford gave her mother's house to Mr. and Mrs. John Kendrick Bangs, both of whom had known Mrs. Ford. In fact, my father, John Kendrick Bangs, 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, and thus I came to call Mrs. Ford "Aunt Julia." To the time of her death, she always

our real life upon Ernest Thompson Seton's *Two Little Savages*. Although in the course of years Mrs. Ford came to regard me as the finest universal mind she had ever met, I was still to her "Little Frankie". She once introduced me to Edwin Arlington Robinson. "Mr. Robinson," she said, "this is Little Frankie Bangs, and he's a poet too!" As Mr. Robinson was standing at the time in Mrs. Ford's drawing-room in the presence of Mr. Masefield, Mr. Mackaye, Mrs. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Old Man Yeats, he did not seem duly impressed. He shook my hand with aridity, and said very simply: "I'm sorry for you." To speak the truth I was not particularly impressed either. I have known most of the poets of our day, and I rather agree with my Aunt Julia's asseveration that "most literary men are trivial characters."

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 Akhnaton too late for him to be the principal mainspring of her existence. He didn't become unmummified from the dead, past 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 Soci." Mrs. Ford sought greatness in Plato, although she thought him too intellectual, in Buddha, in Asoka, in Confucius, and, among the living, in Gandhi. Mrs. Ford 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.

ings. 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. She would wear hoop-skirts only if her brother Sam did likewise, and Sam wouldn't wear them. Later she refused to wear bus-tles 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 Packhard 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 was put very much to the same reaction when late III,

Beau Brummel, Shylock, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, without any of those celebrated gentlemen knowing that they had an audience. Frank Daniels, on hearing about this, thought it a pretty good skit.

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

Mr. Yeats is 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 pathetical account of a meeting Mrs. Ford had with "willie" in Dublin, probably in the summer of 1915. She notes 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

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 care-
ear. 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 applied that God might practice a skin
same. 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 Akhnaton, 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. Morrel, the Ambassador 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

Mrs. Ford established hayfever clinics in Rye and at the Vanderbilt Clinic, Presbyterian Hospital, New York City. Mrs. Ford had herself been largely cured of hayfever 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. In the last year of her mother's life Lauren wrote her 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-colored drawing of a little girl made by Lauren in her teens, and a small water-colored 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 Poetry Society of America used to find it a bit ironical 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 fab-

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 gave cash,
and seldom publicly. She gave thousands of dollars. I know one fam-
ous American poet who alone must have received, not less than fifty
thousand dollars over the years, which, of course, made many things
possible to the glory of American Literature.

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 on masse, and was a simple addition and subtraction
mathematically sufficient for the needs of her charity and the
needs of her check-book. Fortunately for her, however, Simon 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 Simon'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, 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
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 chrides, and many an eminent vis-

itor in 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. 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," said Simeon. "Only he could digest them!"

Mrs. Ford, with her domicile 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 a-dept at patching up 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 minia-ture 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 admiring Mr. Masefield, and sought refuge in a 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 from her 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

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 $1,500. Mr. Shaw also established the Julia A. Shaw prize for women artists. He was elected to the presidency of the Art Students League, 1903-04, found it suffering 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 $2000 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 Whitman 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 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 $150 for the original, and $350, 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 books Rackham had illustrated. She gave

FROM WITTER BYNNER

(Excerpt from a Letter to the Editor)

"Mrs. Ford was a remarkable woman,--true to herself, to her friends and to the causes she espoused. Gatherings at her house were always pro-vocative 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 Eugene Boissevain, who later became Edna Millay's husband, and also Mrs. Simeon Ford, already my good friend, together with her son and a Miss Len-hart. 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."