BOSTON.

America, the country of contrasts, can show none more sudden or

striking than that between New York and Boston. In New York progress and

convenience reach their zenith. A short journey carries you back into

the England of the eighteenth century. The traveller, lately puzzled by

overhead railways and awed by the immensity of sky-scrapers, no

sooner reaches Boston than he finds himself once more in a familiar

environment. The wayward simplicity of the city has little in common

with the New World. Its streets are not mere hollow tubes, through which

financiers may be hastily precipitated to their quest for gold. They

wind and twist like the streets in the country towns of England and

France. To the old architects of Boston, indeed, a street was something

more than a thoroughfare. The houses which flanked it took their places

by whim or hazard, and were not compelled to follow a hard immovable

line. And so they possess all the beauty which is born of accident and

surprise. You turn a corner, and know not what will confront you; you

dive down a side street, and are uncertain into what century you will be

thrust. Here is the old wooden house, which recalls the first settlers;

there the fair red-brick of a later period. And everywhere is the

diversity which comes of growth, and which proves that time is a better

contriver of effects than the most skilful architect.

The constant mark of Boston is a demure gaiety. An air of quiet

festivity encompasses the streets. The houses are elegant, but sternly

ordered. If they belong to the colonial style, they are exquisitely

symmetrical. There is no pilaster without its fellow; no window that

is not nicely balanced by another of self-same shape and size. The

architects, who learned their craft from the designs of Inigo Jones and

Christopher Wren, had no ambition to express their own fancy. They were

loyally obedient to the tradition of the masters, and the houses which

they planned, plain in their neatness, are neither pretentious nor

inappropriate. Nowhere in Boston will you find the extravagant ingenuity

which makes New York ridiculous; nowhere will you be disturbed by an

absurd mimicry of exotic styles; nowhere are you asked to wonder at

mountainous blocks of stone. Boston is not a city of giants, but of men

who love their comfort, and who, in spite of Puritan ancestry, do

not disdain to live in beautiful surroundings. In other words, the

millionaire has not laid his iron hand upon New England, and, until he

come, Boston may still boast of its elegance.

The pride of Boston is Beacon Street, surely one among the most majestic

streets in the world. It recalls Piccadilly and the frontage of the

Green Park. Its broad spaces and the shade of its dividing trees are

of the natural beauty which time alone can confer, and its houses are

worthy its setting. I lunched at the Somerset Club, in a white-panelled

room, and it needed clams and soft-shell crabs to convince me that I was

in a new land, and not in an English country-house. All was of another

time and of a familiar place--the service, the furniture, the aspect.

And was it possible to regard our sympathetic hosts as strange in blood

or speech?

The Mall, in Beacon Street, if it is the pride, is also the

distinguishing mark of Boston. For Boston is a city of parks and trees.

The famous Common, as those might remember who believe that America

sprang into being in a night, has been sacred for nearly three hundred

years. Since 1640 it has been the centre of Boston. It has witnessed the

tragedies and comedies of an eventful history. "There," wrote an

English traveller as early as 1675, "the gallants walk with their

marmalet-madams, as we do in Moorfields."

There malefactors were hanged; there the witches suffered in the time of

their persecution; and it is impossible to forget, as you walk its ample

spaces, the many old associations which it brings with it from the past.

For it is to the past that Boston belongs. No city is more keenly

conscious of its origin. The flood of foreign immigration has not

engulfed it. Its memories, like its names, are still of England, New

and Old. The spirit of America, eagerly looking forward, cruelly

acquisitive, does not seem to fulfil it The sentiment of its beginning

has outlasted even the sentiment of a poignant agitation. It resembles

an old man thinking of what was, and turning over with careful hand the

relics of days gone by. If in one aspect Boston is a centre of commerce

and enterprise, in another it is a patient worshipper of tradition, It

regards the few old buildings which have survived the shocks of time

with a respect which an Englishman can easily understand, but which may

appear extravagant to the modern American. The Old South Meeting-House,

to give a single instance, is an object of simple-hearted veneration

to the people of Boston, and the veneration is easily intelligible. For

there is scarcely an episode in Boston's history that is not connected,

in the popular imagination, with the Old South Meeting-House. It stands

on the site of John Winthrop's garden; it is rich in memories of Cotton

and Increase Mather. Within its ancient walls was Benjamin Franklin

christened, and the building which stands to-day comes down to us from

1730, and was designed in obedient imitation of English masters. There,

too, were enacted many scenes in the drama of revolution; there it

was that the famous tea-party was proposed; and thence it was that the

Mohawks, drunk with the rhetoric of liberty, found their way to the

harbour, that they might see how tea mixed with salt-water. If the

sentiment be sometimes exaggerated, the purpose is admirable, and it is

a pleasant reflection that, in a country of quick changes and historical

indifference, at least one building will be preserved for the admiration

of coming generations.

It is for such reasons as these that an Englishman feels at home in

Boston. He is secure in the same past; he shares the same memories, even

though he give them a different interpretation. Between the New and Old

England there are more points of similarity than of difference. In

each are the same green meadows, the same ample streams, the same wide

vistas. The names of the towns and villages in the new country

were borrowed from the old some centuries ago; everywhere friendly

associations are evoked; everywhere are signs of a familiar and kindly

origin. When Winthrop, the earliest of the settlers, wrote to his wife,

"We are here in a paradise," he spoke with an enthusiasm which is easily

intelligible. And as the little colony grew, it lived its life in accord

with the habit and sentiment of the mother-country. In architecture and

costume it followed the example set in Bristol or in London. Between

these ports and Boston was a frequent interchange of news and

commodities. An American in England was no stranger. He was visiting,

with sympathy and understanding, the home of his fathers. The most

distinguished Bostonians of the late eighteenth century live upon the

canvases of Copley, who, in his son, gave to England a distinguished

Chancellor, and whose career is the best proof of the good relations

which bound England to her colony. Now Copley arrived in England

in 1774, when his native Boston was aroused to the height of her

sentimental fury, and he was received with acclamation. He painted

the portraits of Lord North and his wife, who, one imagines, were not

regarded in Boston with especial favour. The King and Queen gave him

sittings, and neither political animosity nor professional rivalry

stood in the way of his advancement. His temper and character were well

adapted to his career. Before he left New England he had shown himself a

Court painter in a democratic city. He loved the trappings of life,

and he loved to put his sitters in a splendid environment. His own

magnificence had already astonished the grave Boston-ians; he is

described, while still a youth, as "dressed in a fine maroon cloth, with

gilt buttons"; and he set the seal of his own taste upon the portraiture

of his friends.

I have said that Boston loves relics. The relics which it loves best are

the relics of England's discomfiture. The stately portraits of Copley

are of small account compared to the memorials of what was nothing else

than a civil war. Faneuil Hall, the Covent Garden of Boston, presented

to the city by Peter Faneuil some thirty years before the birth of

"Liberty," is now but an emblem of revolt. The Old South Meeting-Place

is endeared to the citizens of Boston as "the sanctuary of freedom." A

vast monument, erected a mere quarter of a century ago, commemorates the

"Boston Massacre." And wherever you turn you are reminded of an episode

which might easily be forgotten. To an Englishman these historical

landmarks are inoffensive. The dispute which they recall aroused far

less emotion on our side the ocean than on the other, and long ago we

saw the events of the Revolution in a fair perspective. In truth, this

insistence on the past is not wholly creditable to Boston's sense of

humour. The passionate paeans which Otis and his friends sang to Liberty

were irrelevant. Liberty was never for a moment in danger, if Liberty,

indeed, be a thing of fact and not of watchwords. The leaders of the

Revolution wrote and spoke as though it was their duty to throw off the

yoke of the foreigner,--a yoke as heavy as that which Catholic Spain

cast upon Protestant Holland.

But there was no yoke to be thrown off, because no yoke was ever

imposed, and Boston might have celebrated greater events in her history

than that which an American statesman has wisely called "the glittering

and sounding generalities of natural right."

However, if you would forget the follies of politicians, you have but to

cross the bridge and drive to Cambridge, which, like the other Cambridge

of England, is the seat of a distinguished university. You are doubly

rewarded, for not merely is Cambridge a perfect specimen of a colonial

village, but in Harvard there breathes the true spirit of humane

letters. Nor is the college a creation of yesterday. It is not far short

of three centuries ago that John Harvard, once of Emmanuel College

in England, endowed the university which bears his honoured name. The

bequest was a poor £780, with 260 books, but it was sufficient to ensure

an amiable immortality, and to bestow a just cause of pride upon the

mother-college. The daughter is worthy her august parentage. She has

preserved the sentiment of her birth; she still worships the classics

with a constant heart; the fame of her scholars has travelled in the

mouths of men from end to end of Europe. And Harvard has preserved all

the outward tokens of a university. Her wide spaces and lofty avenues

are the fit abode of learning. Her college chapel and her college halls

could serve no other purpose than that for which they are designed. The

West, I believe, has built universities on another plan and to another

purpose. But Harvard, like her great neighbour Boston, has been obedient

to the voice of tradition, and her college, the oldest, remains also the

greatest in America.

Culture has always been at once the boast and the reproach of Boston.

A serious ancestry and the neighbourhood of a university are enough

to ensure a grave devotion to the things of the spirit, and Boston has

never found the quest of gold sufficient for its needs. The Pilgrim

Fathers, who first sought a refuge in New England, left their country

in the cause of what they thought intellectual freedom, and their

descendants have ever stood in need of the excitement which nothing

save pietism or culture can impart. For many years pietism held sway in

Boston. The persecution of the witches, conducted with a lofty eloquence

by Cotton Mather, was but the expression of an imperious demand, and the

conflict of warring sects, which for many years disturbed the peace

of the city, satisfied a craving not yet allayed. Then, after a long

interval, came Transcendentalism, a pleasant mixture of literature and

moral guidance, and to-day Boston is as earnest as ever in pursuit of

vague ideals and soothing doctrines.

But pietism has gradually yielded to the claim of culture. Though one

of the largest buildings which frown upon the wayfarer in Boston is

a temple raised to the honour of Christian Science and Mrs Eddy,

literature is clearly the most fashionable anodyne. It is at once easier

and less poignant than theology: while it imparts the same sense of

superiority, it suggests the same emancipation from mere world-liness.

It is by lectures that Boston attempts to slake its intellectual

thirst--lectures on everything and nothing. Science, literature,

theology--all is put to the purpose. The enterprise of the Lowell

Institute is seconded by a thousand private ventures. The patient

citizens are always ready to discuss Shakespeare, except when Tennyson

is the subject of the last discourse, and zoology remains attractive

until it be obscured by the newest sensation in chemistry. And the

appetite of Boston is unglutted and insatiable. Its folly is frankly

recognised by the wise among its own citizens. Here, for instance, is

the testimony of one whose sympathy with real learning is evident. "The

lecture system," says he, "in its best estate an admirable educational

instrument, has been subject to dreadful abuse. The unbounded appetite

of the New England communities for this form of intellectual nourishment

has tempted vast hordes of charlatans and pretenders to try their

fortune in this profitable field. 'The hungry sheep look up, and are not

fed.' The pay of the lecturer has grown more exorbitant in proportion to

the dilution of his mixture, until professional jokers have usurped the

places once graced by philosophers and poets; and to-day the lyceums

are served by a new species of broker, who ekes out the failing literary

material with the better entertainment of music and play-acting."

I am not sure whether the new species of broker is not better than the

old. So long as music and play-acting do not masquerade in the worn-out

duds of intellect, they do not inflict a serious injury upon the people.

It is culture, false and unashamed, that is the danger. For culture

is the vice of the intelligence. It stands to literature in the same

relation as hypocrisy stands to religion. A glib familiarity with names

does duty for knowledge. Men and women think it no shame to play the

parrot to lecturers, and to pretend an acquaintance with books whose

leaves they have never parted. They affect intellect, when at its best

it is curiosity which drives them to lecture hall or institute--at its

worst, a love of mental dram-drinking. To see manifest in a frock-coat

a poet or man of science whose name is printed in the newspapers fills

them with a fearful enthusiasm. To hear the commonplaces of literary

criticism delivered in a lofty tone of paradox persuades them to believe

that they also are among the erudite, and makes the sacrifice of time

and money as light as a wind-blown leaf. But their indiscretion is not

so trivial as it seems. Though every man and every woman has the right

to waste his time (or hers) as may seem good, something else besides

time is lost in the lecture hall. Sincerity also is squandered in the

grey, dim light of sham learning, and nobody can indulge in a mixed

orgie of "culture" without some sacrifice of honesty and truth.

Culture, of course, is not the monopoly of Boston. It has stretched its

long arm from end to end of the American continent. Wherever you go you

will hear, in tram or car, the facile gossip of literature. The whole

world seems familiar with great names, though the meaning of the names

escapes the vast majority. Now the earnest ones of the earth congregate

in vast tea-gardens of the intellect, such as Chautauqua. Now the

summer hotel is thought a fit place in which to pick up a smattering of

literature or science; and there is an uneasy feeling abroad that

what is commonly known as pleasure must not be unalloyed. The vice,

unhappily, is not unknown in England. A country which had the ingenuity

to call a penny reading "university extension," and to send its

missionaries into every town, cannot be held guiltless. But our poor

attempts at culture dwindle to a paltry insignificance in the light of

American enterprise; and we would no more compare the achievement of

England in the diffusion of learning with the achievement of the United

States, than we would set a modest London office by the side of the

loftiest sky-scraper in New York. America lives to do good or evil on a

large scale, and we lag as far behind her in culture as in money-making.

When I left Boston for the West, I met in the train an earnest citizen

of a not uncommon type. He was immensely and ingenuously patriotic.

Though he had never left his native land, and had therefore an

insufficient standard of comparison, he was convinced that America was

superior in arms and arts to every other part of the habitable globe.

He assured me, with an engaging simplicity, that Americans were braver,

more energetic, and richer than Englishmen; that, as their buildings

were higher, so also were their intelligence and their aspirations. He

pointed out that in the vast continent of the West nothing was lacking

which the mind of man could desire. Where, he asked, would you find

harvests so generous, mines so abundant in precious metals, factories

managed with so splendid an ingenuity? If wine and oil are your quest,

said he, you have but to tap the surface of the munificent earth. One

thing only, he confessed, was lacking, and that need a few years

would make good. "Wait," said he, with an assured if immodest

boastful-ness,--"wait until we get a bit degenerate, and then we

will produce a Shakespeare"! I had not the heart to suggest that the

sixteenth century in England was a period of birth, not of decay. I

could only accept his statement in awful appreciation. And emboldened by

my silence, he supported his argument with a hundred ingeniously chosen

facts. He was sure that America would never show the smallest sign of

decadence until she was tired of making money. The love of money was

the best defence against degeneracy of every kind, and he gasped with

simple-hearted pride when he thought of the millions of dollars which

his healthy, primitive compatriots were amassing. But, he allowed, the

weariness of satiety might overtake them; there might come a time when

the ledger and counting-house ceased to be all-sufficient, and that

moment of decay would witness the triumph of American literature. "Ben

Jonson, Goldsmith, and those fellows," he asked, "lived in a degenerate

age, didn't they?" I assented hastily. How could I contradict so

agreeable a companion, especially as he was going, as fast as the train

could carry him, to take a rest cure?

Such is one victim of the passion for culture. He had probably read

nothing in his life save the newspapers and Dickens's 'American Notes,'

a work to which he referred with the bitterest resentment. But he had

attended lectures, and heard names, some of which remained tinkling in

his empty head. To his confused mind English literature was a period of

degeneracy, one and indissoluble, in which certain famous writers lived,

devoting what time they could snatch from the practice of what he called

the decadent vices to the worship of the bottle. There was no harm in

him. He was, as the common phrase has it, his own enemy. But he would

be better employed in looking at a game of baseball than in playing with

humane letters, and one cannot but regret that he should suffer thus

profoundly from a vicious system. Another victim of culture comes to my

mind. He, too, was from Boston, and as his intelligence was far deeper

than the other one's, his unhappiness was the greater. I talked to him

for a long day, and he had no conversation but of books. For him the

visible world did not exist. The printed page was the beginning and the

end of existence. He had read, if not wisely, at least voraciously, and

he displayed a wide and profound acquaintance with modern biography.

He had all the latest _Lives_ at his finger-tips. He knew where all our

great contemporaries lived, and who were their friends; he had

attended lectures on every conceivable subject; withal he was of a high

seriousness, which nothing could daunt. For him, as is but natural, the

works of Mr Arthur Benson held the last "message" of modern literature.

He could not look upon books as mere instruments of pleasure or

enjoyment. He wanted to extract from them that mysterious quality

called "help" by the elect of the lecture hall; and without the smallest

persuasion he told me which authors had "helped" him in his journey

through the world. Shelley, of course, stood first on the list, then

came Walt Whitman, and Pater was not far from the top. And there

was nothing more strange in this apostle of aesthetics than his

matter-of-fact air. His words were the words of a yearning spirit. His

tone was the tone of a statistician. Had he really read the books of

which he spoke? Did they really "help" him in the making of money, which

was the purpose of his life, or did they minister to a mind diseased? I

do not know. But I do know that there was a kind of pathos in his

cold anxiety. Plainly he was a man of quick perception and alert

intelligence. And he seemed to have wasted a vast amount of time in

acquiring a jargon which certainly was not his own, and in attaching to

books a meaning and purpose which they have never possessed.

Such are two widely different products of the lecture hall, and it is

impossible not to see that, widely as their temperaments differ, they

have been pushed through the same mill. And thus we arrive at the worst

vice of enforced culture. Culture is, like the overhead railroad, a mere

saviour of time. It is the tramway of knowledge which compels all men to

travel by the same car, whatever may be their ultimate destination. It

possesses all the inconvenience of pleasures taken or duties performed

in common. The knowledge which is sincere and valuable must be acquired

by each man separately; it must correspond to the character and

disposition of him who acquires it, or it is a thin disguise of vanity

and idleness. To what, then, may we attribute this passion for

the lecture hall? Perhaps it is partly due to the provincialism

characteristic of America, and partly to an invincible energy, which

quickens the popular ambition and urges men to acquire information

as they acquire wealth, by the shortest route, and with the smallest

exertion.

Above all, culture is the craving of an experimental age, and America no

doubt will outgrow it domination. Even now Boston, its earliest slave,

is shaking off the yoke; and it is taking refuge in the more modern

cities of the West. Chicago is, I believe, its newest and vastest

empire. There, where all is odd, it is well to be thought a "thinker."

There, we are told, the elect believe it their duty "to reach and

stimulate others." But wherever culture is found Strange things are

done in its name, and the time may come when by the light of Chicago's

brighter lamp Boston may seem to dwell in the outer darkness.