in presence of the weirdest collection of ugly statues that I had ever
beheld. Which impression, the result of shock, was undoubtedly false. On
reflection I am convinced that those statues of the worthies of the
different States are not more ugly than many statues I could point to in
no matter what fane, museum, or palace of Europe. Their ugliness is only
different from our accustomed European ugliness. The most crudely ugly
mural decorations in the world are to be found all over Italy--the home
of sublime frescos. The most atrociously debased architecture in the
world is to be found in France--the home of sober artistic tradition.
Europe is simply peppered everywhere with sculpture whose appalling
mediocrity defies competition. But when the European meets ugly
sculpture or any ugly form of art in the New World, his instinct is to
exclaim, "Of course!" His instinct is to exclaim, "This beats
everything!" The attitude will not bear examination. And lo! I was
adopting it myself.
"And here's Frances Willard!" cried, ecstatically, a young woman in one
of the numerous parties of excursionists whose more deliberate paths
through the Capitol we were continually crossing in our swift course.
And while, upon the spot where John Quincy Adams fell, I pretended to
listen to the guide, who was proving to me from a distance that the
place was as good a whispering-gallery as any in Europe, I thought: "And
why should not Frances Willard's statue be there? I am glad it is there.
And I am glad to see these groups of provincials admiring with open
mouths the statues of the makers of their history, though the statues
are chiefly painful." And I thought also: "New York may talk, and
Chicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it is these groups of
provincials who are the real America." They were extraordinarily like
people from the Five Towns--that is to say, extraordinarily like
comfortable average people everywhere.
We were outside again, under one of the enormous porticos of the
Capitol. The guide was receiving his well-earned dollar. The faithful
fellow had kept nicely within the allotted limit of half an hour.
"Now we'll go and see the Congressional Library," said my particular
friend.
But I would not. I had put myself in a position to retort to any
sight-seeing American in Europe that I had seen his Capitol in thirty
minutes, and I was content. I determined to rest on my laurels.
Moreover, I had discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a very
exhausting form of activity. I would visit neither the Library of
Congress, nor the Navy Department, nor the Pension Bureau, nor the
Dead-Letter Museum, nor the Zoological Park, nor the White House, nor
the National Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the Smithsonian
Institution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great spectacles of
Washington. We just resumed the sea-going hack and drove indolently to
and fro in avenues and parks, tasting the general savor of the city's
large pleasantness. And we had not gone far before we got into the
clutches of the police.
"I don't know who you are," said a policeman, as he stopped our
sea-going hack. "I don't know who you are," he repeated, cautiously, as
one accustomed to policing the shahs and grand viziers of the earth,
"but it's my duty to tell you your coachman crossed over on the wrong
side of the lamp-post. It's not allowed, and he knows it as well as I
do."
We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no special "pull" in
Washington; the wise negro said not a word; and we crept away from the
policeman's wrath, and before I knew it we were up against the
Washington Monument--one of those national calamities which ultimately
happen to every country, and of which the supreme example is, of course,
the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.
[Illustration: ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO--THE CAPITOL]
When I drove into the magnificent railway station late that
night--true American rain was descending in sheets--I was carrying away
with me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of public
edifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth of thoroughfares: which
seemed proper for a legislative and administrative metropolis. I was
amused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had extended in
precisely the direction in which its founders had never imagined it
would extend; and naturally I was astonished by the rapidity of its
development. (One of my friends, who was not old, had potted wild game
in a marsh that is now a park close to the Capitol.) I thought that the
noble wings of the Capitol were architecturally much superior to the
central portion of it. I remembered a dazzling glimpse of the White
House as a distinguished little building. I feared that ere my next
visit the indefatigable energy of America would have rebuilt
Pennsylvania Avenue, especially the higgledy-piggledy and picturesque
and untidy portion of it that lies nearest to the Capitol, and I hoped
that in doing so the architects would at any rate not carry the cornice
to such excess as it has been carried in other parts of the town. And,
finally, I was slightly scared by the prevalence of negroes. It seemed
to me as if in Washington I had touched the fringe of the negro problem.
* * * * *
It was in a different and a humbler spirit that I went to Boston. I had
received more warnings and more advice about Boston than about all the
other cities put together. And, in particular, the greatest care had
been taken to permeate my whole being with the idea that Boston was
"different." In some ways it proved so to be. One difference forced
itself upon me immediately I left the station for the streets--the
quaint, original odor of the taxis. When I got to the entirely admirable
hotel I found a book in a prominent situation on the writing-table in my
room. In many hotels this book would have been the Bible. But here it
was the catalogue of the hotel library; it ran to a hundred and
eighty-two pages. On the other hand, there was no bar in the hotel, and
no smoking-room. I make no comments; I draw no conclusions; I state the
facts.
The warnings continued after my arrival. I was informed by I don't know
how many persons that Boston was "a circular city," with a topography
calculated to puzzle the simple. This was true. I usually go about in
strange places with a map, but I found the map of Boston even more
complex than the city it sought to explain. If I did not lose myself, it
was because I never trusted myself alone; other people lost me.
Within an hour or so I had been familiarized by Bostonians with a whole
series of apparently stock jokes concerning and against Boston, such as
that one hinging on the phrase "cold roast Boston," and that other one
about the best thing in Boston being the five o'clock train to New York
(I do not vouch for the hour of departure). Even in Cambridge, a less
jocular place, a joke seemed to be immanent, to the effect that though
you could always tell a Harvard man, you could not tell him much.
[Illustration: UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL]
Matters more serious awaited me. An old resident of Boston took me
out for privacy onto the Common and whispered in my ear: "This is the
most snobbish city in the whole world. There is no real democracy here.
The first thing people do when they get to know you is to show you their
family tree and prove that they came over in the _Mayflower_." And so he
ran on, cursing Boston up hill and down dale. Nevertheless, he was very
proud of his Boston. Had I agreed with the condemnation, he might have
thrown me into the artificial brook. Another great Bostonian expert,
after leading me on to admit that I had come in order to try to learn
the real Boston, turned upon me with ferocious gaiety, thus: "You will
not learn the real Boston. You cannot. The real Boston is the old Back
Bay folk, who gravitate eternally between Beacon Street and State Street
and the Somerset Club, and never go beyond. They confuse New England
with the created universe, and it is impossible that you should learn
them. Nobody could learn them in less than twenty years' intense study
and research."
Cautioned, and even intimidated, I thought it would be safest just to
take Boston as Boston came, respectfully but casually. And as the
hospitality of Boston was prodigious, splendid, unintermittent, and most
delightfully unaffected, I had no difficulty whatever in taking Boston
as she came. And my impressions began to emerge, one after another, from
the rich and cloudy confusion of novel sensations.
What primarily differentiates Boston from all the other cities I saw is
this: It is finished; I mean complete. Of the other cities, while
admitting their actual achievement, one would say, and their own
citizens invariably do say, "They will be ..." Boston is.
Another leading impression, which remains with me, is that Boston is not
so English as it perhaps imagines itself to be. An interviewer (among
many) came to see me about Boston, and he came with the fixed and sole
notion in his head that Boston was English. He would have it that Boston
was English. Worn down by his persistency, I did, as a fact, admit in
one obscure corner of the interview that Boston had certain English
characteristics. The scare-head editor of the interviewing paper,
looking through his man's copy for suitable prey, came across my
admission. It was just what he wanted; it was what he was thirsting for.
In an instant the scare-head was created: "Boston as English as a
muffin!" An ideal scare-head! That I had never used the word "muffin" or
any such phrase was a detail exquisitely unimportant. The scare-head was
immense. It traveled in fine large type across the continent. I met it
for weeks afterward in my press-cuttings, and I doubt if Boston was
altogether delighted with the comparison. I will not deny that Boston is
less strikingly un-English than sundry other cities. I will not deny
that I met men in Boston of a somewhat pronounced English type. I will
not deny that in certain respects old Kensington reminds me of a street
here and there in Boston--such as Mount Vernon Street or Chestnut
Street. But I do maintain that the Englishness of Boston has been
seriously exaggerated.
And still another very striking memory of Boston--indeed, perhaps, the
paramount impression!--is that it contains the loveliest modern thing I
saw in America--namely, the Puvis de Chavannes wall-paintings on the
grand staircase of the Public Library. The Library itself is a beautiful
building, but it holds something more beautiful. Never shall I forget my
agitation on beholding these unsurpassed works of art, which alone would
suffice to make Boston a place of pilgrimage.
When afterward I went back to Paris, the painters' first question was:
"_Et les Puvis à Boston--vous les avez vus? Qu'est-ce que vous en
dites?_"
It was very un-English on the part of Boston to commission these austere
and classical works. England would never have done it. The nationality
of the greatest decorative painter of modern times would have offended
her sense of fitness. What--a French painter officially employed on an
English public building? Unthinkable! England would have insisted on an
English painter--or, at worst, an American. It is strange that a
community which had the wit to honor itself by employing Puvis de
Chavannes should be equally enthusiastic about the frigid
theatricalities of an E.A. Abbey or the forbidding and opaque intricate
dexterity of a John Sargent in the same building. Or, rather, it is not
strange, for these contradictions are discoverable everywhere in the
patronage of the arts.
It was from the Public Library that some friends and I set out on a
little tour of Boston. Whether we went north, south, east, or west I
cannot tell, for this was one of the few occasions when the extreme
variousness of a city has deprived me definitely of a sense of
direction; but I know that we drove many miles through magnificent
fenny parks, whose roads were reserved to pleasure, and that at length,
after glimpsing famous houses and much of the less centralized wealth
and ease of Boston, we came out upon the shores of the old harbor, and
went into a yacht-club-house with a glorious prospect. Boston has more
book-shops to the acre than any city within my knowledge except Aberdeen
(not North Carolina, but Scotland). Its book-shops, however, are as
naught to its yacht clubs. And for one yacht club I personally would
sacrifice many book-shops. It was an exciting moment in my life when,
after further wandering on and off coast roads, and through curving,
cobbled, rackety streets, and between thunderous tram-cars and under
deafening elevated lines, I was permitted to enter the celestial and
calm precincts of the Boston Yacht Club itself, which overlooks another
harbor. The acute and splendid nauticality of this club, all fashioned
out of an old warehouse, stamps Boston as a city which has comprehended
the sea. I saw there the very wheel of the _Spray_, the cockboat in
which the regretted Slocum wafted himself round the world! I sat in an
arm-chair which would have suited Falstaff, and whose tabular arms would
have held all Falstaff's tankards, and gazed through a magnified
port-hole at a six-masted schooner as it crossed the field of vision!
And I had never even dreamed that a six-masted schooner existed! It was
with difficulty that I left the Boston Yacht Club. Indeed, I would only
leave it in order to go and see the frigate _Constitution_, the ship
which was never defeated, and which assuredly, after over a hundred and
ten years of buoyant life, remains the most truly English thing in
Boston. The afternoon teas of Boston are far less English than that grim
and majestic craft.
[Illustration: THE PROMENADE--CITY POINT, BOSTON]
We passed into the romantic part of Boston, skirting vast
wool-warehouses and other enormous establishments bearing such Oriental
signs as "Coffee and Spices." And so into a bewildering congeries of
crowded streets, where every name on the walls seemed to be Italian, and
where every corner was dangerous with vegetable-barrows, tram-cars, and
perambulators; through this quarter the legend of Paul Revere seemed to
float like a long wisp of vapor. And then I saw the Christopher Wren
spire of Paul Revere's signal-church, closed now--but whether because
the congregation had dwindled to six or for some more recondite reason I
am not clear. And then I beheld the delightful, elegant fabric of the
old State House, with the memories of massacre round about it, and the
singular spectacle of the Lion and the Unicorn on its roof. Too proudly
negligent had Boston been to remove those symbols!
And finally we rolled into the central and most circular shopping
quarter, as different from the Italian quarter as the Italian quarter
was different from Copley Square; and its heart was occupied by a
graveyard. And here I had to rest.
The second portion of the itinerary began with the domed State Capitol,
an impressive sight, despite its strange coloring, and despite its
curious habit of illuminating itself at dark, as if in competition with
such establishments as the "Bijou Dream," on the opposite side of the
Common. Here I first set eyes on Beacon Street, familiar--indeed,
classic--to the European student of American literature. Commonwealth
Avenue, I have to confess, I had never heard of till I saw it. These
interminable and gorgeous thoroughfares, where each massive abode is a
costly and ceremonial organization of the most polished and civilized
existence, leave the simple European speechless--especially when he
remembers the swampy origin of the main part of the ground.... The
inscrutable, the unknowable Back Bay!
Here, indeed, is evidence of a society in equilibrium, and therefore of
a society which will receive genuinely new ideas with an extreme, if
polite, caution, while welcoming with warm suavity old ideas that
disguise themselves as novelties!
It was a tremendous feat to reclaim from ooze the foundation of Back
Bay. Such feats are not accomplished in Europe; they are not even
imaginatively conceived there. And now that the great business is
achieved, the energy that did it, restless and unoccupied, is seeking
another field. I was informed that Boston is dreaming of the
construction of an artificial island in the midst of the river Charles,
with the hugest cathedral in the world thereon, and the most gorgeous
bridges that ever spanned a fine stream. With proper deference, it is to
be hoped that Boston, forgetting this infelicitous caprice, will
remember in time that she alone among the great cities of America is
complete. A project that would consort well with the genius of Chicago
might disserve Boston in the eyes of those who esteem a sense of fitness
to be among the major qualifications for the true art of life. And, in
the matter of the art of daily living, Boston as she is has a great deal
to teach to the rest of the country, and little to learn. Such is the
diffident view of a stranger.
* * * * *
Cambridge is separated from Boston by the river Charles and by piquant
jealousies that tickle no one more humorously than those whom,
theoretically, they stab. From the east bank Cambridge is academic, and
therefore negligible; from the west, Boston dwindles to a mere quay
where one embarks for Europe.
What struck me first about Cambridge was that it must be the only city
of its size and amenity in the United States without an imposing hotel.
It is difficult to imagine any city in the United States minus at least
two imposing hotels, with a barber's shop in the basement and a world's
fair in the hall. But one soon perceives that Cambridge is a city apart.
In visual characteristics it must have changed very little, and it will
never change with facility. Boston is pre-eminently a town of
traditions, but the traditions have to be looked for. Cambridge is
equally a town of traditions, but the traditions stare you in the face.
My first halt was in front of the conspicuous home of James Russell
Lowell. Now in the far recesses of the Five Towns I was brought up on
"My Study Windows." My father, who would never accept the authority of
an encyclopedia when his children got him in a corner on some debated
question of fact, held James Russell Lowell as the supreme judge of
letters, from whom not even he could appeal (It is true, he had never
heard of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern fad.) And
there were the study windows of James Russell Lowell! And his house in
its garden was only one of hundreds of similar houses standing in like
old gardens.
It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-Revolution houses
had not yet left the occupation of the families which built them.
Beautiful houses, a few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on the
other side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris always maintain that
wood was and forever would be the most suitable material for building a
house? On the side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses,
whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge architecture, blown
clean over by the gale. But the gale that will deracinate Cambridge has
not yet begun to rage.... I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow. In
spite of the fact that he wrote "The Wreck of the _Hesperus_," he seems
to keep his position as the chief minor poet of the English language.
And the most American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge was that
the children of Cambridge had been guided to buy and make inalienable
the land in front of his house, so that his descendant might securely
enjoy the free prospect that Longfellow enjoyed. In what other country
would just such a delicate, sentimental homage have been paid in just
such an ingeniously fanciful manner?[1]
[Footnote 1: This story was related to me by a resident of Cambridge.
Mr. Richard H. Dana, Longfellow's son-in-law, has since informed me that
it is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue. It ought to have
been quite true. The land in question was given by Longfellow's children
to the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city of
Cambridge. The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow an
arm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic "spreading
chestnut-tree," under which stood a certain historic village smithy; and
with this I suppose I must be content.--A.B.]
[Illustration: THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB--OVERLOOKING THE RIVER]
After I had passed the Longfellow house it began to rain, and dusk
began to gather in the recesses between the houses; and my memory is
that, with an athletic and tireless companion, I walked uncounted
leagues through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward a promised
club that seemed ever to retreat before us with the shyness of a fawn.
However, we did at length capture it. This club was connected with
Harvard, and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the present
chapter.
* * * * *
The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my recollection as
being among the most characteristic and comfortable of "real" American
phenomena. And one reason why I insisted, in a previous chapter, on the
special Americanism of Indianapolis is that Indianapolis is full of a
modified variety of these houses which is even more characteristically
American--to my mind--than the Cambridge style itself. Indianapolis
being by general consent the present chief center of letters in the
United States, it is not surprising that I, an author, knew more people
from Indianapolis than from any other city. Indeed, I went to
Indianapolis simply because I had old friends there, and not at all in
the hope of inspecting a city characteristically American. It was quite
startlingly different from the mental picture I had formed of it.
I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly one should approach
it as I approached it--in an accommodation-train on a single track, a
train with a happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in its
restaurant-car, a train that halts at every barn-door in the vast flat,
featureless fields of yellow stubble, rolling sometimes over a muddy,
brown river, and skirting now and then a welcome wooded cleft in the
monotony of the landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full of
the picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun and a brace of
rabbits and a dog leaping up at them, while two young women talked to or
at the farmer from a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch
frock, cleaning outside windows with the absorbed seriousness of a
grandmother; a group of boys dividing their attention between her and
the train; an old woman driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating and
running after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearing
gloves--presumably as a protection against the strong wind that swept
through the stubble and shook the houses and the few trees. Those
houses, in all their summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded one
of the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of the
pre-Revolution style.
And then you come to the inevitable State Fair grounds, and the environs
of the city which is the capital and heart of all those plains.
And after you have got away from the railroad station and the imposing
hotels and the public monuments and the high central buildings--an
affair of five minutes in an automobile--you discover yourself in long,
calm streets of essential America. These streets are rectangular; the
streets of Cambridge abhor the straight line. They are full everywhere
of maple-trees. And on either side they are bordered with homes--each
house detached, each house in its own fairly spacious garden, each
house individual and different from all the rest. Few of the houses are
large; on the other hand, none of them is small: this is the region of
the solid middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques itself
on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too timid to be luxurious.