How often does it happen here in New England that we come away from a
funeral with a feeling that the service has been insufficient. If it
be purely ritual, the individuality of the departed friend seems to
play too small a part in it. If the minister conducts it in his own
fashion, it is apt to be too thin and monotonous, and if he were not an
intimate friend, too remote and official. We miss direct discourse of
simple human affection about the person, which we find so often in
those lay speeches at the grave of which in France they set us nowadays
so many good examples. In the case of the friend whose memory brings
us together on the present occasion, it was easy to organize this
supplementary service. Not everyone leaves musical compositions of his
own to fill the hour with. And if we may believe that spirits can know
aught of what transpires in the world which they have forsaken, it must
please us all to think how dear old Francis Boott's shade must now be
touched at seeing in the Chapel of this university to which his
feelings clung so loyally, his music and his life at last become the
subjects of cordial and admiring recognition and commemorated by so
many of his neighbors. I can imagine nothing at any rate of which the
foreknowledge could have given him deeper satisfaction. Shy and
sensitive, craving praise as every normal human being craves it, yet
getting little, he had, I think, a certain consciousness of living in
the shadow. I greatly doubt whether his daydreams ever went so far as
to let him imagine a service like this. Such a cordial and spontaneous
outgoing towards him on our part would surprise as much as it would
delight him.
His life was private in the strongest sense of the term. His
contributions to literature were all anonymous, book-reviews chiefly,
or letters and paragraphs in the New York Nation on musical or literary
topics. Good as was their quality, and witty as was their form,--his
only independent volume was an almost incredibly witty little book of
charades in verse--they were too slight in bulk for commemoration; and
it was only as a musical composer that he touched on any really public
function. With so many of his compositions sounding in your ears, it
would be out of place, even were I qualified, to attempt to
characterize Mr. Boott's musical genius. Let it speak for itself. I
prefer to speak of the man and friend whom we knew and whom so many of
us loved so dearly.
One of the usual classifications of men is into those of expansive and
those of conservative temper. The word conservative commonly suggests
a dose of religious and political prejudice, and a fondness for
traditional opinions. Mr. Boott was a liberal in politics and
theology; and all his opinions were self-made, and as often as not at
variance with every tradition. Yet in a wider sense he was profoundly
conservative.
He respected bounds of ordinance, and emphasized the fact of limits.
He knew well his own limits. The knowledge of them was in fact one of
the things he lived by. To judge of abstract philosophy, of sculpture
and painting, of certain lines of literary art, he admitted, was not of
his competency. But within the sphere where he thought he had a right
to judge, he parted his likes from his dislikes and preserved his
preferences with a pathetic steadfastness. He was faithful in age to
the lights that lit his youth, and obeyed at eve the voice obeyed at
prime, with a consistency most unusual. Elsewhere the opinions of
others might perplex him, but he laughed and let them live. Within his
own appropriated sphere he was too scrupulous a lover of the truth not
to essay to correct them, when he thought them erroneous. A certain
appearance comes in here of a self-contradictory character, for Mr.
Boott was primarily modest and sensitive, and all his interests and
pre-occupations were with life's refinements and delicacies. Yet one's
mind always pictured him as a rugged sort of person, opposing
successful resistance to all influences that might seek to change his
habits either of feeling or of action. His admirable health, his sober
life, his regular walk twice a day, whatever might be the weather, his
invariable evenness of mood and opinion, so that, when you once knew
his range, he never disappointed you--all this was at variance with
popular notions of the artistic temperament. He was indeed, a man of
reason, no romancer, sentimentalist or dreamer, in spite of the fact
that his main interests were with the muses. He was exact and
accurate; affectionate, indeed, and sociable, but neither gregarious
nor demonstrative; and such words as "honest," "sturdy," "faithful,"
are the adjectives first to rise when one thinks of him. A friend said
to me soon after his death: "I seem still to see Mr. Boott, with his
two feet planted on the ground, and his cane in front of him, making of
himself a sort of tripod of honesty and veracity."
Old age changes men in different ways. Some it softens; some it
hardens; some it degenerates; some it alters. Our old friend Boott was
identical in spiritual essence all his life, and the effect of his
growing old was not to alter, but only to make the same man mellower,
more tolerant, more lovable. Sadder he was, I think, for his life had
grown pretty lonely; but he was a stoic and he never complained either
of losses or of years, and that contagious laugh of his at any and
every pretext for laughter rang as free and true upon his deathbed as
at any previous time of his existence.
Born in 1813, he had lived through three generations, and seen enormous
social and public changes. When a carpenter has a surface to measure,
he slides his rule along it, and over all its peculiarities. I
sometimes think of Boott as such a standard rule against which the
changing fashions of humanity of the last century might come to
measurement. A character as healthy and definite as his, of whatsoever
type it be, need only remain entirely true to itself for a sufficient
number of years, while the outer conditions change, to grow into
something like a common measure. Compared with its repose and
permanent fitness to continue, the changes of the generations seem
ephemeral and accidental. It remains the standard, the rule, the term
of comparison. Mr. Boott's younger friends must often have felt in his
presence how much more vitally near they were than they had supposed to
the old Boston long before the war, to the older Harvard, to the older
Rome and Florence. To grow old after his manner is of itself to grow
important.
I said that Mr. Boott was not demonstrative or sentimental.
Tender-hearted he was and faithful as few men are, in friendship. He
made new friends, and dear ones, in the very last years of his life,
and it is good to think of him as having had that consolation. The
will in which he surprised so many persons by remembering them--"one of
the only purely beautiful wills I have ever read," said a
lawyer,--showed how much he cared at heart for many of us to whom he
had rarely made express professions of affection.
Good-by, then, old friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure,
the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in
that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours
forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and
their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and
that ancient human loves will never lose their own.
[1] An address delivered at the Memorial Service to Francis Boott in
the Harvard Chapel, Sunday, May 8, 1904. Printed in 38 _Harvard
Monthly_, 125.
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