CULTURE
I
The Boston Enchantment
Yet even as I write of the universities as the central intellectual
organ of a modern state, as I sit implying salvation by schools, there
comes into my mind a mass of qualification. The devil in the American
world drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling against
my hero, the creative mind of man, but mercantilism is not the only
antagonist. In Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find nothing but
the zenith and nadir of the dollar hunt, at a Harvard table one may
encounter nothing but living minds, but in Boston--I mean not only
Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, but that Boston of the mind and
heart that pervades American refinement and goes about the world--one
finds the human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, nor ignorant,
but mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet
does not see, having powers it achieves nothing....
I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something a little withdrawn,
as a place standing aside from the throbbing interchange of East and
West. When I hear the word Boston now it is that quality returns. I do
not think of the spreading parkways of Mr. Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead
nor of the crowded harbor; the congested tenement-house regions, full
of those aliens whose tongues struck so strangely on the ears of Mr.
Henry James, come not to mind. But I think of rows of well-built, brown
and ruddy homes, each with a certain sound architectural distinction,
each with its two squares of neatly trimmed grass between itself and
the broad, quiet street, and each with its family of cultured people
within. I am reminded of deferential but unostentatious servants,
and of being ushered into large, dignified entrance-halls. I think
of spacious stairways, curtained archways, and rooms of agreeable,
receptive persons. I recall the finished informality of the high tea.
All the people of my impression have been taught to speak English with
a quite admirable intonation; some of the men and most of the women are
proficient in two or three languages; they have travelled in Italy,
they have all the recognized classics of European literature in their
minds, and apt quotations at command. And I think of the constant
presence of treasured associations with the titanic and now mellowing
literary reputations of Victorian times, with Emerson (who called Poe
"that jingle man"), and with Longfellow, whose house is now sacred, its
view towards the Charles River and the stadium--it is a real, correct
stadium--secured by the purchase of the sward before it forever....
At the mention of Boston I think, too, of autotypes and then of plaster
casts. I do not think I shall ever see an autotype again without
thinking of Boston. I think of autotypes of the supreme masterpieces
of sculpture and painting, and particularly of the fluttering garments
of the "Nike of Samothrace." (That I saw, also, in little casts and
big, and photographed from every conceivable point of view.) It is
incredible how many people in Boston have selected her for their
æsthetic symbol and expression. Always that lady was in evidence about
me, unobtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride pursued
me into my dreams. That frozen stride became the visible spirit of
Boston in my imagination, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive
fine resolution that took no heed of any contemporary thing. Next
to that I recall, as inseparably Bostonian, the dreaming grace of
Botticelli's "Prima vera." All Bostonians admire Botticelli, and
have a feeling for the roof of the Sistine chapel--to so casual and
adventurous a person as myself, indeed, Boston presents a terrible,
a terrifying unanimity of æsthetic discriminations. I was nearly
brought back to my childhood's persuasion that, after all, there is
a right and wrong in these things. And Boston clearly thought the
less of Mr. Bernard Shaw when I told her he had induced me to buy a
pianola, not that Boston ever did set much store by so contemporary a
person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. The books she reads are toned and seasoned
books--preferably in the old or else in limited editions, and by
authors who may be lectured upon without decorum....
Boston has in her symphony concerts the best music in America, and
here her tastes are severely orthodox and classic. I heard Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony extraordinarily well done, the familiar pinnacled Fifth
Symphony, and now, whenever I grind that out upon the convenient
mechanism beside my desk at home, mentally I shall be transferred
to Boston again, shall hear its magnificent aggressive thumpings
transfigured into exquisite orchestration, and sit again among that
audience of pleased and pleasant ladies in chaste, high-necked,
expensive dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, bald, or
iron-gray men....
II
Boston's Antiquity
Then Boston has historical associations that impressed me like
iron-moulded, leather-bound, eighteenth-century books. The War of
Independence, that to us in England seems half-way back to the days of
Elizabeth, is a thing of yesterday in Boston. "Here," your host will
say and pause, "came marching" so-and-so, "with his troops to relieve"
so-and-so. And you will find he is the great-grandson of so-and-so, and
still keeps that ancient colonial's sword. And these things happened
before they dug the Hythe military canal, before Sandgate, except for
a decrepit castle, existed; before the days when Bonaparte gathered
his army at Boulogne--in the days of muskets and pigtails--and erected
that column my telescope at home can reach for me on a clear day. All
that is ancient history in England and in Boston the decade before
those distant alarums and excursions is yesterday. A year or so ago
they restored the British arms to the old State-House. "Feeling,"
my informant witnessed, "was dying down." But there were protests,
nevertheless....
If there is one note of incongruity in Boston, it is in the gilt dome
of the Massachusetts State-House at night. They illuminate it with
electric light. That shocked me as an anachronism. It shocked me--much
as it would have shocked me to see one of the colonial portraits, or
even one of the endless autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo replaced, let
us say, by one of Mr. Alvin Coburn's wonderfully beautiful photographs
of modern New York. That electric glitter breaks the spell; it is
the admission of the present, of the twentieth century. It is just
as if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an exchange of badinage with
search-lights, or the King mounted an illuminated E.R. on the Round
Tower at Windsor.
Save for that one discord there broods over the real Boston an immense
effect of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part
of the States, that the intellectual movement has ceased. Boston is
now producing no literature except a little criticism. Contemporary
Boston art is imitative art, its writers are correct and imitative
writers the central figure of its literary world is that charming old
lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel
Higginson in the midst of an authors' society that is not so much
composed of minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture. There
are an admirable library and a museum in Boston, and the library is
Italianate, and decorated within like an ancient missal. In the less
ornamental spaces of this place there are books and readers. There is
particularly a charming large room for children, full of pigmy chairs
and tables, in which quite little tots sit reading. I regret now I did
not ascertain precisely what they were reading, but I have no doubt it
was classical matter.
I do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe and good in the past
should carry with it this quality of discriminating against the present
and the future. The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively. I
found myself by some accident of hospitality one evening in the company
of a number of Boston gentlemen who constituted a book-collecting club.
They had dined, and they were listening to a paper on Bibles printed
in America. It was a scholarly, valuable, and exhaustive piece of
research. The surviving copies of each edition were traced, and when
some rare specimen was mentioned as the property of any member of the
club there was decorously warm applause. I had been seeing Boston,
drinking in the Boston atmosphere all day.... I know it will seem
an ungracious and ungrateful thing to confess (yet the necessities
of my picture of America compel me), but as I sat at the large and
beautifully ordered table, with these fine, rich men about me, and
listened to the steady progress of the reader's ever unrhetorical
sentences, and the little bursts of approval, it came to me with a
horrible quality of conviction that the mind of the world was dead, and
that this was a distribution of souvenirs.
Indeed, so strongly did this grip me that presently, upon some slight
occasion, I excused myself and went out into the night. I wandered
about Boston for some hours, trying to shake off this unfortunate idea.
I felt that all the books had been written, all the pictures painted,
all the thoughts said--or at least that nobody would ever believe this
wasn't so. I felt it was dreadful nonsense to go on writing books.
Nothing remained but to collect them in the richest, finest manner one
could. Somewhere about midnight I came to a publisher's window, and
stood in the dim moonlight peering enviously at piled copies of Izaak
Walton and Omar Khayyam, and all the happy immortals who got in before
the gates were shut. And then in the corner I discovered a thin, small
book. For a time I could scarcely believe my eyes. I lit a match to be
the surer. And it was _A Modern Symposium_, by Lowes Dickinson, beyond
all disputing. It was strangely comforting to see it there--a leaf of
olive from the world of thought I had imagined drowned forever.
That was just one night's mood. I do not wish to accuse Boston of any
wilful, deliberate repudiation of the present and the future. But I
think that Boston--when I say Boston let the reader always understand
I mean that intellectual and spiritual Boston that goes about the
world, that traffics in book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I have
dined with and wrangled with in my friend W.'s house in Blackheath,
dear W., who, I believe, has never seen America--I think, I say, that
Boston commits the scholastic error and tries to remember too much, to
treasure too much, and has refined and studied and collected herself
into a state of hopeless intellectual and æsthetic repletion in
consequence. In these matters there are limits. The finality of Boston
is a quantitive consequence. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was
just sufficient but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole
achievement of the human intellect up, let us say, to the year 1875
A.D. Then an equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston
filled up.
III
About Wellesley
It is the peculiarity of Boston's intellectual quality that she cannot
unload again. She treasures Longfellow in quantity. She treasures his
works, she treasures associations, she treasures his Cambridge home.
Now, really, to be perfectly frank about him, Longfellow is not good
enough for that amount of intellectual house room. He cumbers Boston.
And when I went out to Wellesley to see that delightful girls' college
everybody told me I should be reminded of the "Princess." For the life
of me I could not remember what "Princess." Much of my time in Boston
was darkened by the constant strain of concealing the frightful gaps in
my intellectual baggage, this absence of things I might reasonably be
supposed, as a cultivated person, to have, but which, as a matter of
fact, I'd either left behind, never possessed, or deliberately thrown
away. I felt instinctively that Boston could never possibly understand
the light travelling of a philosophical carpet-bagger. But I hid--in
full view of the tree-set Wellesley lake, ay, with the skiffs of "sweet
girl graduates"--own up. "I say," I said, "I wish you wouldn't all be
so allusive. _What_ Princess?"
It was, of course, that thing of Tennyson's. It is a long, frequently
happy and elegant, and always meritorious narrative poem, in which a
chaste Victorian amorousness struggles with the early formulæ of the
feminist movement. I had read it when I was a boy, I was delighted to
be able to claim, and had honorably forgotten the incident. But in
Boston they treat it as a living classic, and expect you to remember
constantly and with appreciation this passage and that. I think that
quite typical of the Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the clever
high-school girl, it is the mistake of the scholastic mind all the
world over, to learn too thoroughly and to carry too much. They want to
know and remember Longfellow and Tennyson--just as in art they want to
know and remember Raphael and all the elegant inanity of the sacrifice
at Lystra, or the miraculous draught of Fishes; just as in history they
keep all the picturesque legends of the War of Independence--looking up
the dates and minor names, one imagines, ever and again. Some years ago
I met two Boston ladies in Rome. Each day they sallied forth from our
hotel to see and appreciate; each evening, after dinner, they revised
and underlined in Baedeker what they had seen. _They meant to miss
nothing in Rome._ It's fine in its way--this receptive eagerness, this
learners' avidity. Only people who can go about in this spirit need,
if their minds are to remain mobile, not so much heads as _cephalic
pantechnicon vans_....
IV
The Wellesley Cabinets
I find this appetite to have all the mellow and refined and beautiful
things in life to the exclusion of all thought for the present and
the future even in the sweet, free air of Wellesley's broad park,
that most delightful, that almost incredible girls' university,
with its class-rooms, its halls of residence, its club-houses and
gathering-places among the glades and trees. I have very vivid in
my mind a sunlit room in which girls were copying the detail in the
photographs of masterpieces, and all around this room were cabinets of
drawers, and in each drawer photographs. There must be in that room
photographs of every picture of the slightest importance in Italy,
and detailed studies of many. I suppose, too, there are photographs
of all the sculpture and buildings in Italy that are by any standard
considerable. There is, indeed, a great civilization, stretching over
centuries and embodying the thought and devotion, the scepticism and
levities, the ambition, the pretensions, the passions, and desires of
innumerable sinful and world-used men--_canned_, as it were, in this
one room, and freed from any deleterious ingredients. The young ladies,
under the direction of competent instructors, go through it, no doubt,
industriously, and emerge--capable of Browning.
I was taken into two or three charming club-houses that dot this
beautiful domain. There was a Shakespeare club-house, with a delightful
theatre, Elizabethan in style, and all set about with Shakespearean
things; there was the club-house of the girls who are fitting
themselves for their share in the great American problem by the study
of Greek. Groups of pleasant girls in each, grave with the fine gravity
of youth, entertained the reluctantly critical visitor, and were
unmistakably delighted and relaxed when one made it clear that one was
not in the Great Teacher line of business, when one confided that one
was there on false pretences, and insisting on seeing the pantry. They
have jolly little pantries, and they make excellent tea.
I returned to Boston at last in a state of mighty doubting, provided
with a Wellesley College calendar to study at my leisure.
I cannot, for the life of me, determine how far Wellesley is an aspect
of what I have called Boston; how far it is a part of that wide forward
movement of the universities upon which I lavish hope and blessings.
Those drawings of photographed Madonnas and Holy Families and
Annunciations, the sustained study of Greek, the class in the French
drama of the seventeenth century, the study of the topography of Rome
fill me with misgivings, seeing the world is in torment for the want of
living thought about its present affairs. But, on the other hand, there
are courses upon socialism--though the text-book is still _Das Kapital_
of Marx--and upon the industrial history of England and America. I
didn't discover a debating society, but there is a large accessible
library.
How far, I wonder still, are these girls thinking and feeding mentally
for themselves? What do they discuss one with another? How far do
they suffer under that plight of feminine education--notetaking from
lectures?...
But, after all, this about Wellesley is a digression into which I fell
by way of Boston's autotypes. My main thesis was that culture, as it
is conceived in Boston, is no contribution to the future of America,
that cultivated people may be, in effect, as state-blind as--Mr.
Morgan Richards. It matters little in the mind of the world whether
any one is concentrated upon mediæval poetry, Florentine pictures, or
the propagation of pills. The common, significant fact in all these
cases is this, a blindness to the crude splendor of the possibilities
of America now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded issues that
blunder towards solution. Frankly, I grieve over Boston--Boston
throughout the world--as a great waste of leisure and energy, as a
frittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too
much to the past. New York is not simply more interesting than Rome,
but more significant, more stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the
idea that to be concerned about the latter in preference to the former
is a mark of a finer mental quality is one of the most mischievous and
foolish ideas that ever invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed by
the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness. Over
against unthinking ignorance is scholarly refinement, the spirit of
Boston; between that Scylla and this Charybdis the creative mind of man
steers its precarious way.