II

Let me at all events say for the Park Street Church, while I may still,

on my hilltop, keep more or less in line with it, that this edifice

persistently “holds the note,” as yet, the note of the old felicity, and

remains by so doing a precious public servant. Strange enough,

doubtless, to find one’s self pleading sanctity for a theological

structure sanctified only by such a name—as who should say the Park

Street Hotel or the Park Street Post-office; so much clearer would the

claim seem to come were it the case of another St. Clement Danes or of

another St. Mary-le-Strand. But in America we get our sanctity as we

can, and we plead it, if we are wise, wherever the conditions suffer the

faintest show of colour for it to flush through. Again and again it is a

question, on behalf of the memorial object (and especially when

preservation is at stake), of an interest and an appeal proceeding

exactly _from_ the conditions, and thereby not of an absolute, but of a

relative force and weight; which is exactly the state of the matter with

the Park Street Church. This happy landmark is, in strictness, with its

mild recall, by its spire, of Wren’s bold London examples, the

comparatively thin echo of a far-away song—playing its part, however,

for harmonious effect, as perfectly as possible. It is admirably placed,

quite peculiarly _present_, on the Boston scene, and thus, for one

reason and another, points its moral as not even the State House does.

So we see afresh, under its admonition, that charm is a flower of wild

and windblown seed—often not to be counted on when most anxiously

planted, but taking its own time and its own place both for enriching

and for mocking us. It mocks assuredly, above all, our money and our

impatience, elements addressed to buying or “ordering” it, and only asks

that when it does come we shall know it and love it. When we fail of

this intelligence it simply, for its vengeance, boycotts us—makes us

vulgar folk who have no concern with it. Then if we ever miss it we can

never get it back—though our deepest depth of punishment of course is to

go on fatuously not missing it, the joy of ourselves and of each other

and the derision of those who know. These reflections were virtually

suggested to me, on the eve of my leaving Boston, by ten words addressed

to my dismay; the effect of which was to make Park Street Church, for

the hour, the most interesting mass of brick and mortar and (if I may

risk the supposition) timber in America.

The words had been spoken, in the bright July air, by a friend

encountered in the very presence of the mild monument, on the

freshly-perceived value of which, for its position, for its civil

function, I had happened irrepressibly to exclaim. Thus I learned that

its existence might be spoken of as gravely menaced—menaced by a scheme

for the erection of a “business-block,” a huge square of innumerable

tiers and floors, thousands of places of trade, the trade that in such a

position couldn’t fail to be roaring. In the eye of financial envy the

church was but a cumberer of the ground, and where, about us, had we

seen financial envy fail when it had once really applied the push of its

fat shoulder? Drunk as it was with power, what was to be thought of as

resisting it? This was a question, truly, to frighten answers away—until

I presently felt the most pertinent of all return as if on tiptoe. The

perfect force of the case as a case, as an example, that was the answer

of answers; the quite ideal pitch of the opportunity for virtue. Ideal

opportunities are rare, and this occasion for not sacrificing the high

ornament and cynosure of the town to the impudence of private greed just

happens to be one, and to have the finest marks of the character. One

had but to imagine a civilized community reading these marks, feeling

that character, and then consciously and cynically falling below its

admirable chance, to take in the impossibility of any such blot on the

page of honour, any such keen appetite for the base alternative. It

would be verily the end—the end of the old distinguished life, of the

common intelligence that had flowered formerly, for attesting fame, from

so strong a sap and into so thick and rich a cluster. One had thought of

these things as one came and went—so interesting to-day in Boston are

such informal consultations of the oracle (that of the very air and

“tone”), such puttings to it of the question of what the old New England

spirit may have still, intellectually, æsthetically, or for that matter

even morally, to give; of what may yet remain, for productive scraping,

of the formula of the native Puritanism educated, the formula once

capacious enough for the “literary constellation” of the Age of Emerson.

Is that cornucopia empty, or does some handful of strong or at least

sound fruit lurk to this day, a trifle congested by keeping, up in the

point of the horn? What, if so, are, in the ambient air, the symptoms of

this possibility? What are the signs of intellectual promise, poetic,

prosaic, philosophic, in the current generations, those actually

learning their principal lesson, as one assumes, from the great

University hard by? The old formula, that of Puritanism educated, has

it, in fine, except for “business,” anything more to communicate?—or do

we perhaps mistake the case in still speaking, by reason of the

projected shadow of Harvard, of “education” as at all involved?

Oh, for business, for a commercial, an organizing energy of the first

order, the indications would seem to abound; the air being full of them

as of one loud voice, and nowhere so full perhaps as at that Park Street

corner, precisely, where it was to be suggested to me that their meaning

was capable on occasion of turning to the sinister. The commercial

energy at least was educated, up to the eyes—Harvard was still caring

for that more than for anything else—but the wonderments, or perhaps

rather the positive impressions I have glanced at, bore me constant

company, keeping the last word, all emphasis of answer, back as if for

the creation of a dramatic suspense. I liked the suspense, none the

less, for what it had in common with “intellectual curiosity,” and it

gave me a light, moreover, which was highly convenient, helping me to

look at everything in some related state to this proposition of the

value of the Puritan residuum—the question of whether value is

expressed, for instance, by the little tales, mostly by ladies, and

about and for children romping through the ruins of the Language, in the

monthly magazines. Some of my perceptions of relation might seem forced,

for other minds, but it sufficed me that they were straight and clear

for myself—straight and clear again, for example, when (always on my

hilltop and raking the prospect over for memories) I quite assented to

the tacit intimation that a long æsthetic period had closed with the

disappearance of the old Museum Theatre. This had been the theatre of

the “great” period—so far as such a description may fit an establishment

that never produced during that term a play either by a Bostonian or by

any other American; or it had at least, with however unequal steps, kept

the great period company, made the Boston of those years quite

complacently participate in its genial continuity. This character of its

_being_ an institution, its really being a theatre, with a repertory and

a family of congruous players, not one of them the baleful

actor-manager, head and front of all the so rank and so acclaimed

vulgarities of our own day—this nature in it of not being the mere empty

shell, the indifferent cave of the winds, that yields a few nights’

lodging, under stress, to the passing caravan, gave it a dignity of

which I seemed to see the ancient city gratefully conscious, fond and

jealous, and the thought of which invites me to fling over it now

perhaps too free a fold of the mantle of romance. And yet why too free?

is what I ask myself as I remember that the Museum had for long years a

repertory—the repertory of its age—a company and a cohesion, theatrical

trifles of the cultivation of which no present temple of the drama from

end to end of the country appears to show a symptom. Therefore I spare a

sigh to its memory, and, though I doubtless scarce think of it as the

haunt of Emerson, of Hawthorne or of Mr. Ticknor, the common conscience

of the mid-century in the New England capital insists on showing, at

this distance of time, as the richer for it.

That then was one of the missed elements, but the consequent melancholy,

I ought promptly to add, formed the most appropriate soil for stray

sprouts of tenderness in respect to the few aspects that had not

suffered. The old charm of Mount Vernon Street, for instance, wandering

up the hill, almost from the waterside, to the rear of the State House,

and fairly hanging about there to rest like some good flushed lady, of

more than middle age, a little spent and “blown”—this ancient grace was

not only still to be felt, but was charged, for depth of interest, with

intenser ghostly presences, the rich growth of time, which might have

made the ample slope, as one mounted, appear as beautifully peopled as

Jacob’s Ladder. That was exactly the kind of impression to be desired

and welcomed; since ghosts belong only to places and suffer and perish

with them. It was as if they themselves moreover were taking pleasure in

this place, fairly indeed commending to me the fine old style of the

picture. Nothing less appeared to account for my not having, in the

other age, done it, as the phrase is, full justice, recognized in it so

excellent a peace, such a clear Boston bravery—all to the end that it

should quite strike me, on the whole, as not only, for the minor stretch

and the domestic note, the happiest street-scene the country could show,

but as pleasant, on those respectable lines, in a degree not surpassed

even among outland pomps. Oh, the wide benignity of brick, the goodly,

friendly, ruddy fronts, the felicity of scale, the solid _seat_ of

everything, even to the handful of happy deviations from the regular

produced, we may fancy, by one of those “historic” causes which so

rarely complicate, for humanization, the blankness of the American

street-page, and the occasional occurrence of which, in general, as I am

perhaps too repeatedly noting, excites on the part of the starved

story-seeker a fantastic insistence. I find myself willing, after all,

to let my whole estimate of these mere mild monuments of private worth

pass for extravagant if it but leave me a perch for musing on the oddity

of our nature which makes us still like the places we have known or

loved to grow old, when we can scarcely bear it in the people. To walk

down Mount Vernon Street to Charles was to have a brush with that truth,

to recognize at least that we like the sense of age to come, locally,

when it comes with the right accompaniments, with the preservation of

character and the continuity of tradition, merits I had been admiring on

the brow of the eminence. From the other vision, the sight of the

“decline in the social scale,” the lapse into shabbiness and into bad

company, we only suffer, for the ghosts in that case either refuse to

linger, or linger at the most with faces ashamed and as if appealing

against their association.

Such was the condition of the Charles Street ghosts, it seemed to

me—shades of a past that had once been so thick and warm and happy; they

moved, dimly, through a turbid medium in which the signs of their old

life looked soiled and sordid. Each of them was there indeed, from far,

far back; they met me on the pavement, yet it was as if we could pass

but in conscious silence, and nothing could have helped us, for any

courage of communion, if we had not enjoyed the one merciful refuge that

remained, where indeed we could breathe again, and with intensity, our

own liberal air. Here, behind the effaced anonymous door, was the little

ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks

over the water and toward the sunset, with a seat for every visiting

shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on

its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple

to memory. Ah, if it hadn’t been for _that_ small patch of common

ground, with its kept echo of the very accent of the past, the

revisiting spirit, at the bottom of the hill, could but have muffled his

head, or but have stifled his heart, and turned away for ever. Let me

even say that—always now at the bottom of the hill—it was in this

practical guise he afterwards, at the best, found himself roaming. It is

from about that point southward that the new splendours of Boston

spread, and will clearly continue to spread, but it opened out to me as

a tract pompous and prosaic, with which the little interesting city, the

city of character and genius, exempt as yet from the Irish yoke, had had

absolutely nothing to do. This disconnection was complete, and the

southward, the westward territory made up, at the most, a platform or

stage from which the other, the concentrated Boston of history, the

Boston of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,

Ticknor, Motley, Prescott, Parkman and the rest (in the sense either of

birthplace or of central or sacred city) could be seen in as definite,

and indeed now in almost as picturesquely mediæval, a concretion, appear

to make as black and minute and “composed” a little pyramidal image, as

the finished background of a Durer print. It seemed to place itself

there, in the middle distance, on the sharp salience of its commingled

Reforms and Reserves—reformers and reservists rubbing shoulders in the

common distinctness of their detachment from an inexpressive generation,

and the composition rounding itself about as with the very last of its

loose ends snipped off or tucked in.