I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am
aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge
and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from
neighborhood was just begun.
Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He
was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He
was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he
was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing
in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might
happen that his foibles would escape Whipple’s censure. He wrote
strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely
and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if
he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an
author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than
what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and
he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly
grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered
him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen
perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
than his sense of it.
I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat
of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square
features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,
and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of
out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable
qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the
memory of all who ever knew him.