USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 21
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55
LESSER LIGHTS
An anthology of American poetry will reveal a number of lesser poets who in single pieces are memorable and rivalled poets of wider productivity and reputation. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," an occasional in- spiration, became an American classic. In 1832 Samuel Francis Smith (Holmes's classmate) wrote "America," bad verse but imperishable. If Bryant is to be included in the Massachusetts lyre (certainly his youth was spent in the Commonwealth), then the young "Thanatopsis" and "To a Waterfowl" are in our record. William Wetmore Story, better remembered by his sculptures, is at least a name in poetry. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man of great parts, also tried his pacific sword hand at verse.
OTHER LITERARY FORCES
Literature is a broader affair than the productions of in- dividual authors. It depends on a general culture in a vague way and on means of distribution in a practical way, and also on a central source of distribution. In this period the college became a power not for theology but for culture. The ideal of the college was not to produce divines as before or stock-
221
OTHER LITERARY FORCES
brokers as later, but teachers, writers and thinkers. Many of the men in this period were graduates of Harvard and of smaller colleges like Bowdoin, the cradle of Hawthorne and Longfellow, which though geographically outside Massachu- setts, is of the same timber.
This was a humanistic age in which scholars were plunder- ing Europe peacefully and bringing back spoils. By 1850 the Harvard Library had more than three hundred thousand volumes. Outside the academies grew the public library. In Massachusetts the greatest is the Boston Public Library, which was opened in 1854 and has the distinction of being the first in the United States to be established by act of legislature. But even more important is the small town library which be- gan to grow in this germinal period until now Massachusetts is the only state or political unit in the world in which every town has a public library.
There is no doubt that the people did read of winter nights. And they read not only books but newspapers and journals, which had influence and authority such as the modern paper with a circulation of a million cannot command. Many of these papers were devoted to a special propaganda like Garri- son's Liberator, and even the general newspaper of the time was an avowed or disguised party organ. Most of the eminent New England journalists went to New York, where the thriving metropolitan newspapers offered prosperity and the opportunity for national influence, whereas New England journalism remained provincial. One newspaper, The Spring- field Republican under the second Samuel Bowles, became a permanent local institution in western Massachusetts and achieved a national reputation.
The periodicals came and went. A few proved permanent at least in name, and were valuable for literature because they gave young writers, who later became famous and expressed themselves in books, a chance to say their early say. In this respect The North American Review, founded in Boston in 1815, was of great service. How many times do we read, say, that Prescott contributed to The North American Review his essay on Irving's Granada? The Atlantic Monthly is so important that from its early volumes the literary life of the period might be reconstructed. It skimmed the cream of the
222
NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
New England mind, and if it dipped amply below the cream, that is only what every magazine must do to keep its covers from collapsing.
If Holmes's Autocrat and Lowell's editorial flair made The Atlantic, it is also fair to say that The Atlantic made The Autocrat and gave Lowell a new opportunity. Authors cannot live without publishers, and at that time the relations between author and publisher were very close. Literature owes much to Ticknor and Fields, who were scholars and gentlemen as well as business men. It is significant that Hawthorne's last journey from home was in the company of his publisher, William Ticknor, whose death on the way was a shock and an intense personal loss. The Old Corner Book- store was more than a mercantile establishment; it was a club where the best minds met, gossiped, and so struck out ideas.
SUMMARY
The period is full of ideas and fortunate in the possession of men with power to express them. Some of these ideas are transient and obsolete, the voice of the time that is silenced when the time is past. Nobody now cares much about Tran- scendentalism, and the contest with Calvinism has passed out of civilization to be succeeded in remote places by an amusing war on Fundamentalism. But the essential issues of slavery and liberty and democracy are far from dead, and in that period every idea, every principle pertinent to those issues was uttered, not finally but so well that the utterance is still alive. Above all-and this is literature-the utterance, romantic or realistic, grave or gay, in prose or in verse, is often lastingly beautiful.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTE .- The fund of published volumes relating to a chapter of this character is so large that works by Massachusetts literary men are not listed here, and the bibliography is confined to works about them.
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS .- Richard Henry Dana; a Biography (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1890).
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS, JR .- Charles Francis Adams (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1900)-A son's biography of his father.
ADAMS, HERBERT BAXTER .- The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1893)-Comprises selections from Sparks's letters and correspondence. .
223
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDISON, DANIEL DULANY .- Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1894).
AUSTIN, GEORGE LOWELL .- The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips (Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1884).
BRIDGE, HORATIO .- Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (N. Y. Harper, 1893).
BROWNELL, WILLIAM CRARY .- American Prose Masters: Cooper, Hawe- thorne, Emerson, Poe, Lowell, Henry James (N. Y., Scribner's, 1925) . BROWNSON, ORESTES AUGUSTUS .- Literary, Scientific and Political Views (N. Y., Benziger, 1903)-Edited by H. F. Brownson.
CABOT, JAMES ELLIOTT .- A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1888)-The official biography.
CAIRNS, WILLIAM B .- A History of American Literature (N. Y., Oxford University Prass, 1912)-Intended to meet the wants of the general reader.
CHADWICK, JOHN WHITE .- William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1900).
CHADWICK, JOHN WHITE .- William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1903).
CROTHERS, SAMUEL MCCHORD .- Oliver Wendell Holmes: the Autocrat and his Fellow-Boarders (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1909).
CURTIS, GEORGE TICKNOR .- Life of Daniel Webster (2 vols., N. Y., Apple- ton, 1893).
CURTIS, GEORGE WILLIAM .- From the Easy Chair (3 vols., N. Y., Harper, 1892)-Contains essays on Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and other topics.
FISHER, GEORGE SYDNEY .- The True Daniel Webster (Phila., Lippincott,
1911).
FROTHINGHAM, OCTAVIUS BROOKS .- George Ripley (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1882).
FROTHINGHAM, OCTAVIUS BROOKS .- Theodore Parker: a Biography (Boston, Osgood, 1874). GARNETT, RICHARD .- Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (N. Y., Whittaker, 1888).
GARRISON, WENDELL PHILLIPS, AND GARRISON, FRANCIS JACKSON .- William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the Story of his Life Told by his Children (4 vols., N. Y., Century, 1885-1889).
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT .- James Russell Lowell and his Friends (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1897).
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT .- Memories of a Hundred Years (N. Y., Macmil- lan, 1904)-See especially in Part II the chapters on the historians whom he knew and on the history of magazines.
HALL, ARETHUSA .- Life and Character of the Rev. Sylvester Judd (Boston, Colesworthy, 1857).
HAWTHORNE, JULIAN .- Hawthorne and his Circle (N. Y., Harper, 1903). HAWTHORNE, JULIAN .- Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife; a Biography (2 vols., Boston, Osgood, 1885).
HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH .- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1902).
HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH .- Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1884).
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL .- Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Lothrop Motley: Two Memoirs (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906).
HOWE, MARK ANTONY DE WOLFE .- The Life and Letters of George Ban- croft (N. Y., Scribner's, 1908).
HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN .- Literary Friends and Acquaintances (N. Y .. Harper, 1911)-Includes essays on Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell. JAMES, HENRY .- Hawthorne (N. Y., Harper, 1880).
224 NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE
JAMES, HENRY .- William Wetmore Story and his Friends (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1903).
JOHNSON, OLIVER .- William Lloyd Garrison and his Times (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1885).
LODGE, HENRY CABOT .- Daniel Webster (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1911). LONGFELLOW, SAMUEL .- Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with Ex- tracts from his Journals and Correspondence (3 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1891).
MACY, JOHN .- The Spirit of American Literature (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, Page, 1912)-Deals with eminent authors only.
MORSE, JOHN TORREY .- Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1896).
MOTLEY, JOHN LOTHROP .- John Lothrop Motley and his Family: Further Letters and Records (N. Y., Lane, 1910)-Edited by his daughter Susan and Herbert St. John Mildmay.
NORTON, CHARLES ELIOT .- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; a Sketch of his Life (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1907).
OGDEN, ROLLO .- William Hickling Prescott (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1904).
PECK, HARRY THURSTON .- William Hickling Prescott (N. Y., Macmillan, 1905).
PICKARD, SAMUEL THOMAS .- Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1894).
PIERCE, EDWARD L .- Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, Roberts, 1877-1893).
PLUNKETT, MRS. HARRIETTE MERRICK HODGE .- Josiah Gilbert Holland (N. Y., Scribner's, 1894).
SALT, HENRY STEPHENS .- The Life of Henry David Thoreau (London, Scott, 1896).
SANBORN, FRANKLIN BENJAMIN .- The Life of Henry David Thoreau, In- cluding Many Essays Hitherto Unpublished, and some Account of his Family and Friends (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1917).
SANBORN, FRANKLIN BENJAMIN .- Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, Small, Maynard, 1901).
SCUDDER, HORACE ELISHA .- James Russell Lowell; a Biography (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1901).
SEARS, LORENZO .- Wendell Phillips, Orator and Agitator (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, Page, 1909).
TICKNOR, GEORGE .- Life, Letters, and Journals (2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1909)-Edited by G. S. Hillard, Mrs. Anna Ticknor and Miss Anna Ticknor.
TICKNOR, GEORGE .- Life of William Hickling Prescott (Phila., Lippincott, 1903).
TRENT, WILLIAM PETERFIELD, AND ERSKINE, JOHN .- Great Writers of America (N. Y, Holt, 1912)-Includes essays on New England poets, the transcendalists, Webster, and Hawthorne.
VAN DOREN, MARK .- Henry David Thoreau; a Critical Study (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1906).
WEISS, JOHN .- Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (2 vols., N. Y., Appleton, 1864).
WENDELL, BARRETT .- A Literary History of America (N. Y., Scribner's, 1901)-See especially the section on the renaissance of New England. WHIPPLE, EDWIN PERCY .- Character and Characteristic Men (Boston,
Houghton Mifflin, 1894)-See pp. 218-242 for the essay on Hawthorne, pp. 243-252 for that on Edward Everett.
WOODBERRY, GEORGE EDWARD .- Ralph Waldo Emerson (N. Y., Macmillan, 1907).
CHAPTER VIII ARTISTIC MASSACHUSETTS (1820-1929)
BY C. HOWARD WALKER Architect
ARCHITECTURAL ORIGINS
In any summary of art in New England, the account must be necessarily varied to the point of confusion, as it is diffi- cult to make coherent many influences, at first traditional and gradually becoming individual in character. These inter- woven influences are constantly preventing steady consecutive growth, and the best that can be anticipated is a mosaic of which the pieces are of various sizes and often poorly related to each other and ill arranged.
In the early days of the United States of America, the established cities of the eastern seaboard followed in their arts the lead of their ancestors; i.e., that of the English, with here and there an inspiration from the Dutch. The leaders of the Republic were men of cultivated tastes, and the rich land- holders of the South and the merchants and owners of ship- ping in the northern ports built their dwellings from Georgian antecedents. Having imported their furniture and household silver from England, they began early to imitate these in local work. Little inspiration occurred from France or elsewhere in Europe. The colonial governors set an excellent example of good taste. The neoclassicism of the latter part of the eigh- teenth century and of the Napoleonic period was slightly re- flected in minor objects ; and the returning New England ships from the East brought back Oriental examples.
One or two definite outstanding facts are evident. First, that all work up to the Civil War was imitative of contem- poraneous work in Europe, and the earliest work was con- trolled by the consistent classicism of the time of the Georges and of a taste that dulled as the decades followed each other. The commonplace bourgeois quality of the Brunswickers made
225
226
ARTISTIC MASSACHUSETTS
progress torpid. With the advent of the Victorian era, a gen- eral desire to break what at least threatened to become an apathy, caused unintelligent experiment in many directions, always stylistic.
Greek revivals, Gothic revivals, Italian villas and Mansard roofs, French revivals-each had advocates in England; and we, like good children, followed the mother country. Good taste was unknown, unconsidered, or ignored. The result was a deplorable and abysmal parade of mediocrity. The desire was one for change only. At present, so-called modernism is proceeding along the same course-experimental, uncontrolled -excepting that it virtuously desires the exploitation of new possibilities of structure and use of materials, which the Vic- torians did not possess.
This condition lasted until the Civil War. The Civil War created a hiatus, of value for two reasons : one that it checked a habit of action, the other that it cleared the road for material progress. But it was only a check. New work, gradually in- creasing, was still burdened by the propinquity of existent examples at hand. The dependence upon English precedent grew less, but its object lessons throughout the land were stulti- fying, and still are to too great an extent. But the organized teaching of the Beaux Arts began to be felt : a teaching which is criticized as being artificial (what is architecture but an artificial art?), but which was in reality that of large studied arrangement, organic and not necessarily mannered. At first the Beaux Arts men were as imitative as the colonial archi- tects, but a logical treatment of individual conditions made its appearance. The sequence of Thackeray's drawings of Ludo- vicus, Rex, and Ludovicus Rex was occurring. The problem, the man, always was existent; we had been creating the cos- tume. Now we began first to fit the man to the costume, and later to fit the costume to the man.
POST-BELLUM ADVANCES
These experiments often created a camouflaged harlequin. Meantime, wealth, opportunity, and complication of grouped requirements increased enormously. In the 'sixties we were a conglomeration of ill-related units; in thirty years we had outgrown the demand of individual factors and were ready for
227
COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE
more metropolitan and megalopolitan expression. And we had on this side of the water no object lesson.
In 1893 that deficiency was supplied by the Chicago Ex- position. The men were ready, and the work of their hands set an example. At the same time steel skeleton structure and the elevator absolutely divorced American solutions from for- eign tradition; and the epoch of great enterprises began. It is still in its infancy. It takes a long time to overcome tradi- tion; and its opponents, ignoring the value of the recognition of fundamental laws, entertain themselves with license. Fundamentals have a persistence that overwhelms license, and an expectation that the unexampled opportunities of today will be adequately undertaken is not optimistic but justifiable.
BASIS OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE
In architecture especially New England was fortunate: on the one hand, she had skilled artisans, many of them trained in England; and on the other hand, the work of Sir Chris- topher Wren in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- turies and the designs of his successors, such as Gibbs, were put into book form for the use of cabinet makers, stairbuilders, and carpenters. Wren's work had been largely influenced in its details by the delicacy of Palladio's buildings; and in fact early eighteenth-century England was Palladian in its tastes. Palladio in his Vicenza palaces had maintained, however, the grandiose manner, although upon a smaller scale, of the post- Renaissance of Rome. This quality was less evident in the houses of America, as befitting a government more simple in its manners.
The planters and landowners of the Southern States more closely followed the English breadth of scale than did the men of the North, who were shipowners and sea captains. It is interesting to note, however, that the details of moldings, of cornices, and mantels are much more delicate than those of the South; and at first view this fact is an enigma, as the carpenters (there were few architects) drew their inspiration from the same pattern books, such as that by Batty Langley.
The craftsmen of these delicate designs, such as McIntire in Salem, had been ship carpenters; the sea had taught them stream lines and to avoid unnecessary materials, and their
228
ARTISTIC MASSACHUSETTS
productions had the qualities of the training of those exigent masters, the winds and the waves. When they turned their hands to building houses, the result was never heavy nor dull, but had life in it. In the later work it has been called Georg- ian, but it had not Georgian pomposity. Wren's church spires, unique and graceful, became the symbol of the colonial church, and to this day beautify New England villages and towns. There were English master builders early in the eighteenth century who exercised the powers of architects more than creditably, and occasionally there appeared a young Eng- lish architect who aspired to professional success in a new country. Such an one was Peter Harrison, who built the Old Market and the Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and King's Chapel in Boston, each of which is inspired from Wren's work.
COLONIAL DWELLINGS
The classic orders of architecture were derived from wood structure; and whereas in America-which in its early days was largely dependent upon wood-the buildings were erected of wood, they were translated from the stone classicism of Europe to the wooden colonial type naturally, being perfectly adapted to the material from which they had sprung. The work before the Revolution had not been of as imposing a character in the North as in the South, the houses of the co- lonial governors alone having set the pace. Immediately after that war, when the colonists began to increase their fortunes, private houses of dignity appeared in every town, as did small town halls, churches, etc. The families of the South, many of them younger sons of nobility, established an aristocracy -- what the negro learned to call the "quality"- which had no exact counterpart at the North. Their estates were large, their houses isolated. The merchants of the North, gaining their wealth largely from shipping, as the back country itself had not been fully developed, built their fine houses in the towns from which their ships sailed.
The early houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were in many cases covered with gambrel roofs, often with a long slope to the north, and with no roof decks. After the Revolution, when the shipowners became prosperous, these houses became as imposing in effect as had been the previous
229
BULFINCH THE ARCHITECT
colonial governors' mansions (such as the Governor Langdon house in Portsmouth), all of which had been inspired by Pal- ladian work.
In all the seaport towns in New England, along the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, were built spacious and dignified houses, admir- able in design and proportions. In many cases these houses had hopper roofs and roof decks, with balustrades and cupo- las or lanterns, assumed to have been places of lookout for the sea captains to scan the harbors. Being harmoniously academic in type, they gave an unusually dignified character to the towns. Few more impressive streets of dwellings exist than Chestnut Street in Salem, and the main streets of New- buryport, Portsmouth, and elsewhere. The Vassall-Craigie- Longfellow house in Cambridge is a distinguished example of a fine private dwelling. Later, similar houses were erected upon the post roads as they were extended westerly.
BULFINCH THE ARCHITECT
Boston was especially fortunate in the work of Charles Bulfinch, a man of fine taste and of architectural genius. He was studying to be a physician in England at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Unable to return home, he went to France to study, became interested in architecture, and on his return built as a speculation the so-called Tontine Build- ings upon a quarter circle on Summer Street. The experi- ment was financially unsuccessful and forced him into adopt- ing architecture as a profession. He was a born architect, and his buildings made him famous. He was employed by Monroe upon the rebuilding of the Capitol at Washington, and built churches and private houses, the State capitols of Massachusetts and of Maine, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Strict economies of material were necessary, yet his work has distinction, is finely proportioned, and has a delicate sense of scale and of detail.
At about the time of his death in the 'thirties, England, from whose buildings American work was principally inspired, was undergoing a so-called Gothic revival, in most cases unintel- ligent and crude. Gothic and Italian villas, interspersed with mansard-roofed boxes and Greek Doric facades, created a
230
ARTISTIC MASSACHUSETTS
heterogeneous collection of buildings in American towns which lasted until after the Civil War. The civic architecture of government buildings maintained a certain dignity of clas- sicism; though at Hartford, Connecticut, Upjohn, an English- man, imported Victorian Gothic for the State Capitol. The Victorian epoch expressed itself with a confusion of desires too often accompanied by a mediocrity of achievement. It was natural in the making of a democracy that the average taste of the people should not be high, and it was equally to be expected that it should be best in the older settlements in which a cultivated tradition existed. These were Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England.
PAINTING (1789-1840)
Throughout the American colonies, painting was for many decades dependent upon foreign teaching and foreign importa- tion. There was no art instruction, for there were few if any instructors and the great educational energies had little to build upon. In a pioneer country material prosperity must necessarily antedate artistic achievement. Buildings must needs be, and architecture imitatively progressed ; but painting was confined largely to portraiture, of which the demand was constant by official characters and by private families.
From the fifteenth century portraiture has occupied a very considerable place in painting, and perpetuation of the appear- ance of celebrities has been constantly desired. There was no photography until 1850, and therefore portrait painting was in constant demand.
The Americans who desired to become portrait painters went to England. As soon as 'Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Royal Academy in London, American students appeared. Some, such as Smibert, antedated this group; but West, Stuart, Copley, Allston, and others received their training in Eng- land and on their return painted in the English manner. Of these Gilbert Stuart was preeminent, a master of the brush, and a colorist of distinction. Copley, while more dry in man- ner, admirably epitomized the family pride of his sitters. Benjamin West attempted historical and Biblical scenes, rather bombastic in expression and inferior to the work of English painters of his time.
231
AMERICAN GOTHIC PERIOD
With these exceptions, the painters in America of this pe- riod did not rise to high rank, though Peale, and Healy who painted the large canvas in Faneuil Hall, are well considered. The landscape school of New York, the so-called Hudson River school, had few if any followers in New England.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.