USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 39
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Barrett Wendell and Arlo Bates had both failed as novelists in the James and Howells manner and were engaged in teaching English, at Harvard and Technology respectively. Barrett Wendell's book, "English Composition," published in 1894, is the classic volume in this field. Professor Bates' novels, "The Philistines," "The Puritans," and "The Pagans," are admirable examples of what prevented the Boston of that day from writing any effective fiction. Many competent story-tellers wrote simply as a sideline, such as Frederic Jesup Stimson ("J. S. of Dale"), whose historical romances, "King Noanett" and "Pirates' Gold," were admirable.
Among men of letters in other fields were Henry Cabot Lodge, editor of "The North American Review" and a competent biographer; Henry Adams, the historian, and Nathan Haskell Dole, that indefatigable linguist, translator, essayist and poet, whose edition of "The Rubaiyat" (L. C. Page and Company, 1896) made his reputation. His brother, Charles F. Dole, was also known as an essayist on religious and philosophical subjects. The clergymen of literary influence were George Willis Cooke, George A. Gordon of the Old South, Samuel MeChord Crothers, the Lamb-like essayist of Cambridge, William Lawrence, successor of Phillips Brooks, and Francis Greenleaf Peabody of Harvard. Rev. A. M. Rihbany, a native of Syria, author of "A Far Country" and other books, came later. To Syria we owe also the mystical religious writer, painter and sculptor, the late Khalil Gibran, who has been compared to William Blake.
In Cambridge, Basil King, the novelist, was beginning to make his reputa- tion. Connected with Harvard among the younger men who wrote, at least on the side, were Albert Bushnell Hart, the historian; Josiah Royce, the friendly antagonist in philosophy of William James; Hugo von Münsterberg, the psychologist, new from Gerinany; George Santayana, philosophic poet; Charles
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Townsend Copeland, author of a slim life of Edwin Booth; LeBaron Russell (Dean) Briggs, of "Routine and Ideals," and Nathaniel S. Shaler, who wrote geological treatises and Elizabethan drama with equal zest.
Of this group the two greatest, as time has decided, were undoubtedly George Santayana, humanistic philosopher of great literary charm and poet in the classical tradition, now retired and living abroad, and William James, psychologist and "pragmatist," brother of Henry James the novelist, and our most influential American philosopher.
There were two poets of genuine distinction and national reputation, both women, Louise Chandler Moulton and her greater sister, Louise Imogen Guiney, who was postmistress in Auburndale, literary hack in Boston, research scholar in Oxford, England, and always a poet.
Two other women must not be forgotten for their extraordinarily valuable work in criticism and translation and publishing. The quarterly magazine, "Poet Lore," founded in Boston in 1889 by Charlotte Porter and Helen Archibald Clarke, was unique among American publications. It brought the modern poetry and drama of Europe to America at a time when little was being imported. Their translation of Maeterlinck was the first to be published in America, and their critical work in Browning is classic.
In 1900 the new writers who were beginning to make their mark included several women of later serious achievement. Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland and Evelyn Dix were both interested in drama and romance. Miss Sutherland dramatized "Monsieur Beaucaire" for Mansfield and Miss Dix wrote "A Rose of Plymouth Town"; they collaborated on "The Road to Yesterday." Another young woman of the period was Mary Devereux, author of "From Kingdom to Colony." Caroline Ticknor was assisting Nathan Haskell Dole in "The International Library of Famous Literature," the beginning of a long career in letters, and Mary Caroline Crawford, biographer and antiquarian, was starting her work. In Cambridge was Mary Tappan Wright, novelist. In children's books and poetry, Abbie Farwell Brown was beginning to be known, and her lesser known contemporary, Kate Louise Brown, who wrote for little children.
The most distinguished of the younger women was Josephine Preston Peabody (who later married Professor Lionel Marks), the finest woman poet of this intermediate generation. Her first volume of poems was "Wayfarers." Her dramatic poems, "Fortune and Men's Eyes" and "Marlowe," were fore- runners of the power she exhibited in "The Piper," the Stratford prize drama of 1910.
And, seeing that Boston had no male poet of any distinction at this time, it is good to remember that William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in a Time of Hesita- tion," the last of the great classic odes, was written in Boston around 1900 and published in "The Atlantic."
The above list contains all the names that have any claim to distinction, although there is a plethora of names of Boston "authors" to be found in the publishing lists and the membership of the Authors' Club. This is the weakest period of Boston literature, but it must be remembered that everywhere in America, so far as literature was concerned, the 90's were weak, insignificant, derivative and genteel. Boston was no worse than New York, even in its
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addiction to pinchbeck "historical" romance, "magazine" verse, and con- ventional fiction. Belletristic works, celebrating a dying culture, were much tasted in Boston, however, and the general tone of the writing was strongly feminized. Intellectual strength, originality and creative power werc con- spicuously absent.
I shall quote, not unfairly, the judgment rendered by H. G. Wells on his visit to Boston in 1906, as found in the chapter "Culture" of his book, "The Future in America" (Harper and Brothers). If we agree that in this period Boston was at a dead center, it will seem not unduly harsh in its pleasant irony.
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"In Boston - I mean not only Beacon street and Commonwealth avenue but that Boston of the mind and heart that pervades American refinement and goes about the world - one finds the human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, not ignorant, but mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet does not see, having powers it achieves nothing.
"I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something a little with- drawn, as a place standing aside from the throbbing interchange of East and West.
"I do not think I shall ever see an autotype again without thinking of Boston autotypes of the supreme masterpieces of sculpture and painting, and particularly of the fluttering garments of the Nike of Samothrace. Always that lady was in evidence about me, unobtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride pursued me into my dreams. That frozen stride became the visible spirit of Boston in my imagination, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive fine reso- lution that took no heed of any contemporary thing.
"Boston presents a terrible, terrifying unanimity of æsthetic discriminations.
"There broods over the real Boston an immense sense of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part of the States, that the intellectual movement has ceascd. Boston is now producing no literature except a little criticism. Contemporary Boston art is imitative art, its writers are correct and imitative writers, the central figure of its literature world is that charming old lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel Higginson in the midst of an authors' society that is not so much composed of minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture.
"I do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe and good in the past should carry with it this quality of discriminating against the present and the future. The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively.
"I do not wish to accuse Boston of any wilful, deliberate repudiation of the present. But I think that Boston (the intellectual and spiritual Boston) commits the scholastic error and tries to remember too much, to treasure too much, and has refincd and studied and collected herself into a state of hopeless intellectual and æsthetic repletion in con-
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sequence. In these matters there are limits. The finality of Boston is a quantitative consequence. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was just sufficient but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole achievement of the human intellect up, let us say, to the year 1875 A. D. Then an equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston filled up."
There were many other names well known in Boston, if not to the world, in this prolific middle period of our letters. Among the novelists were Charles Felton Pidgin, author of "Quincy Adams Sawyer" and "Blennerhassett"; Jane Goodwin Austen, author of "Standish of Standish"; and Lucretia Hale, daughter of E. E. Hale and author of the immortal "Peterkin Papers," one of the few children's classics of America. Helen Keller was beginning her remarkable career.
Other writers for young people were Charles Carleton Coffin and Elbridge Streeter Brooks, well-known writers of boys' stories; "Grace LeBaron" Upham, May Alden Ward, and Elizabeth Wesselhoeft.
Sam Walter Foss, librarian of the city of Somerville, was the popular poet of "The House by the Side of the Road"; Charles Follen Adams celebrated "Leetle Yawcob Strauss" in German dialect. Philip Henry Savage and his friend, George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge, were poets who died too young for accomplishment.
In literary criticism, belles-lettres, etc., the list is headed by George E. Woodberry, prolific poet and critic, never so well known to the public at large as he deserved to be. Then there were Henry Dwight Sedgwick, biographer and essayist, and Frank Preston Stearns, the latter the founder of the "Harvard Advocate" and a critic of the anti-Howells school; Justin Winsor, editor of the monumental history of Boston published after the 1880 celebration; Lindsay Swift, long connected with the Boston Public Library, author of "Literary Landmarks of Boston," an indispensable reference book. Clara Clement Waters, art critic, and Thomas Sergeant Perry and Leon H. Vincent, critics and writers upon literature, the former a scholar of great distinction, a great-grand- son of Franklin and grandson of Commodore Perry, deserve to be mentioned. Edwin Reed, authority on the Baconian heresy, and Oscar Fay Adams, light and graceful essayist, belong here also, as does Isabel Florence Hapgood, copious and competent translator of Russian and other literatures.
In writers upon music Boston has always been particularly rich. Heading the list are Louis C. Elson, author of "National Music of America," and William Foster Apthorp, first editor of the famous program books of the Boston Sym- phony Orchestra, an achievement in what H. L. Mencken calls "musical Tal- mudism", which Philip Hale carries on so magnificently today. Other writers on music were Arthur Elson, son of Louis C. Elson, and Henry C. Lahee, both living still. John Sullivan Dwight was a well-known inusic critic and H. T. Parker was beginning his long and splendid service on the Transcript.
Writers upon natural history in Boston, following the great tradition of Thoreau, were well represented at this time by Dallas Lore Sharp, a writer of singular charm and humanity. Others in the field were the veteran, Bradford
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Torrey, E. H. Forbush and F. Schuyler Mathews. Frank Bolles had died before the opening of the century. Ernest H. Wilson, botanist of the Arnold Arboretum, has only just passed away.
Among the historians of the day were John Codman Ropes, writer upon Napoleon and Waterloo, and Edward Jackson Lowell, historian of the Revo- lutionary War.
The public figures of literary ability were Sylvester Baxter, creator and first secretary of the Metropolitan Park Commission, and early advocate of Greater Boston, with whom were associated Frederic Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot, landscape architects; Henry Demarest Lloyd, economist, anti-trust leader, author of "Wealth Versus Commonwealth"; Robert A. Woods, long head of South End House, author of "The City Wilderness"; Albert P. Langtry, former Secretary of State, editor and recent publisher of "Metropolitan Boston"; John Henry Edwards, chief archivist of Massachusetts and well-known antiquarian, and Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of "The Woman's Journal," feminist and reformer.
The journalists of the middle period were headed by E. H. Clement, editor of the Boston Transcript, Col. Charles H. Taylor of the Globe, Edwin Munroe Bacon, antiquarian and editor of the Post. We should remember also Lewis C. Strang of the Journal, Henry Austin Clapp, famous dramatic critic and Shake- spearean scholar, Charles E. L. Wingate of the Globe, writer on the stage and its people. There were also James Jeffrey Roche of the Pilot, James Morgan of the Globe, writer of political biography, and William Adolphus Wheeler, editor of the "Dictionary of Noted Names in Fiction." Kate Sanborn, a woman journalist, and W. D. Quint, historian of Dartmouth College and now chief editorial writer of the Post, were also at work. For a time Charles Hoyt, writer of satiric comedies, "A Temperance Town" and "A Milk White Flag," was editor of "All Sorts" on the Post, a position now held by the veteran, Newton Newkirk.
The versatile culture of Boston has expressed itself in art criticism of no mean order. Ralph Adams Cram, Louis H. Sullivan and Bernhard Berenson have been path-breakers in their several fields. To Philip L. Hale we owe the standard work on Vermeer and to William H. Downes the authorized biog- raphies of Winslow Homer and John S. Sargent. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly's book on the French Cathedrals shows more than a flash of her father's poetic vision, fortified by ample knowledge and extensive personal research. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy is an authoritative and expert interpreter of Hindu art to the Occident. Dean George H. Edgell rises above schools and parties in his excellent work on American Architecture. The too infrequent writings of Charles D. Maginnis reveal a subtle insight and fine discrimination. Men- tion may be made here also of the modest and genial autobiography, "My Three Score Years and Ten," published in 1891 by the most famous of Boston- born sculptors, Thomas Ball. Several of these writers belong to the present rather than to the earlier period, but it is convenient to group them here.
In this middle period the most important event in magazine publishing was the sale of the "Atlantic Monthly" by Houghton Mifflin Company to a new publisher, Ellery Sedgwick, associated with MacGregor Jenkins, whose
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first issue appeared in August, 1908. A new and more wide-awake policy soon resuscitated the old magazine, which had begun to go to sleep, and the new venture was so successful that it presently gathered to itself "The House Beauti- ful," "The Youth's Companion" and "Littell's Living Age." The "Atlantic" has since disposed of "The Youth's Companion" and "The Living Age," and with the retirement of Mr. Jenkins Mr. Sedgwick is now in sole control.
It will be seen that this period of Boston letters is hardly of national impor- tance. And yet it must be said that in the year 1900 the Boston Authors' Club, with a membership list limited to one hundred resident members and actually numbering only eighty-five, shows some thirty-five names, or forty per cent, of writers with a national reputation. Shortly afterwards the number of resident members was raised to one hundred and fifty. Membership lists of the year 1910, 1913 and 1916, the only ones available in the Boston Public Library, show a constant average of twenty-five to thirty writers of national reputation, or about sixteen to twenty per cent. The latest available list, that of 1928, to which I have had access through the courtesy of the present president, Dr. H. Addington Bruce, shows about the same percentage, twenty per cent of writers with a national reputation out of a membership of one hun- dred and fifty, but with a strong and greatly increased list of nonresident mem- bers and an undoubtedly stronger list of members who, although they may not be distinguished in letters, are serious professional workers of considerable local reputation. The majority of the membership, however, has always been made up of the writers of juvenile books, travel and art books, literary hack work of the better sort, compilations and factual books, minor historical and critical works, academic work in general, minor poetry and popular fiction. There has been during this entire period very little important fiction, drama or poetry written in Boston.
In the transition to the present day, three names of highest importance are to be noted. First, Henry Adams, son of Lincoln's minister to England, who taught history at Harvard in the 70's and thereafter and wrote history in Washington. He cared little for Boston and Boston knew little of him. Fol- lowing his death at the age of eighty in 1918, not merely America but even Boston became aware that he had left behind him two masterpieces, "Mont St. Michel and Chartres," a brilliant synthesis of mediaeval civilization, pub- lished in 1904, and "The Education of Henry Adams," a philosophical auto- biography in the third person, one of the great books of the century.
Second, Gamaliel Bradford of Wellesley. When America went crazy over Strachey's "Queen Victoria" in 1918, Boston suddenly became aware that the first of Bradford's "psychographs," entitled "Types of American Character," dated from 1895 and that "Lee, the American," antedated Strachey by six years, Ludwig's "Goethe" by eight, and Maurois's "Shelley" by eleven. Mr. Bradford is without question America's foremost writer of biography.
Third, Amy Lowell, one of the big six of the "modern poetry" movement, the only Massachusetts poet of power since Emily Dickinson, that is to say, during the whole period of our study. Literary Boston could not understand her and belittled her, but she did more to put literary Boston on the map than any single writer of her generation. As controversial critic, patron of poets
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and biographer of Keats, no less than as author of some eight volumes of poetry, Amy Lowell is perhaps the most important single figure in Boston letters during the half-century.
Two others of the movement, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, respectively from Maine and New Hampshire, are thoroughly New England although not of Boston.
Any attempt to weed the unimportant living writers from their important contemporaries is dangerous and unsatisfactory. The following consideration of living persons is based somewhat on the Boston Authors' Club membership list and the names classified under Massachusetts in a somewhat undiscrim- inating volume called "Who's Who Among North American Authors."
Among novelists we have still with us of the elder generation Alice Brown and Judge Robert Grant, the one mistress of the older New England local color story, the other a writer of social comedy. To this generation also belongs Caroline Atwater Mason. Then come Frederick Orin Bartlett and William Dana Orcutt, Florence Converse, long connected with our magazines, and James B. Connolly, writer of sea stories. Although a confirmed Cape Codder, Joseph Lincoln, if he belongs to any literary center, belongs to Boston. So does John D. Barry, now a journalist in San Francisco. Of this generation, and only recently dead as generations go, is the author of one of the most remarkable best sellers of our times, Eleanor H. Porter, who wrote "Pollyanna."
Others now or recently writing fiction are Ralph W. Bergengren and his wife, Anna Farquhar, Cornelia Stratton Parker, Olive Higgins Prouty, Henri- etta Dana Skinner, Sara Ware Bassett and Doris Peel, John P. Marquand, and H. W. W. Powel, Jr. Four successful women novelists are Emily D. Loring, Cornelia James Cannon, Esther Forbes, and Dorothy Speare. Arthur Somers Roche, a son of James Jeffrey Roche, is, of course, a Boston man by birth and training. The most important novelist of today whose name is con- nected with Boston letters is Ben Ames Williams, author of "All of the Brothers Were Valiant," "Evered" and other stories.
In juvenile fiction we have, besides Eva March Tappan, recently deceased, and Amy Brooks, present-day writers of national reputation such as Arthur Stanwood Pier, Trentwell Mason White, Allen French, Henry Beston (Sheahan), Russell Gordon Carter and the late Charles Boardman Hawes.
As might be expected, the list of writers of literary criticism, general belles-lettres, and essays, is long and distinguished. Among them are Irving Babbitt of Harvard, leader of the "Humanist" movement, the best-known conservative critic in the country; Ralph Adams Cram, architect and writer upon architecture and social problems; Bliss Perry, beloved editor and college teacher; Isaac Goldberg, authority on South American literature, biographer of Mencken and Havelock Ellis; Charles Hall Grandgent, Dante scholar and charming essayist; Charles Donagh Maginnis, architect and writer, recipient of the Laetare medal of Notre Dame; Heloise Hersey, dean of women reviewers, and her successor, Dorothea Lawrence Mann; Annie Russell Marble of Worcester, Vida D. Scudder of Wellesley; Mrs. William Lowell Putnam, Isabel (Mrs. Larz) Anderson and Clara Endicott Sears, three society women of literary
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accomplishment; Rollo Walter Brown, and John Livingston Lowes, author of "Convention and Revolt in Poetry" and "The Road to Xanadu" and biographer of Amy Lowell.
Boston has also one of the richest lists of writers upon history and biog- raphy in the country. Albert Bushnell Hart and the late Edward Channing and James Ford Rhodes are in the front rank of historians, and their places are being filled by Charles Howard Mellwain and Samuel Eliot Morison. William Roscoe Thayer attained national fame as historian and biographer before he died. His successor seems to be Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, biographer of Barrett Wendell and historian of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Gamaliel Bradford we have already spoken of, chief of American writers of biography. Charles K. Bolton of the Athenaeum is a distinguished antiquarian, and Francis R. Hart, the banker, is an authority on old maritime history. Philip Ainsworth Means, anthropologist and historian, is in his productive prime. Professor Henry G. Pearson is the author of many privately pub- lished biographies of notable Americans.
Of writers on scientific subjects too numerous to classify there are many known nationally as writers, including Dr. H. Addington Bruce, the psychol- ogist and journalist, president of the Boston Authors' Club; the famous explorers, Charles W. Furlong and Alexander Hamilton Rice; William Trufant Foster, economist, co-author with Waddill Catchings of "The Road to Plenty"; Kirtley Mather of Harvard and Hervey W. Shimcr of Technology, writers on geology and evolution; Dr. Richard C. Cabot, eminent in medicine and a sociologist; Kirsopp Lake, theologian and historian of religions; Worthington C. Ford, statistician; William Z. Ripley, authority on railroad economics and at the same time author of the standard ethnological volume, "The Races of Europe"; Dr. Harvey Cushing, author of the "Life of Sir William Osler."
Of writers on social questions there are the late James Phinney Munroe, biographer of Francis Amasa Walker and writer on education; Edwin D. Mead, long-time editor of the old "New England Magazine," founder of the Twentieth Century Club, social reformer; his wife, Lucia Ames Mead, writer upon world peace; George W. Coleman, founder of the Forum movement in America; Lothrop Stoddard, son of John Lawson Stoddard of travel lecture famc, author of "The Rising Tide of Color" and other world studies; Roger Babson, statistician and social diagnostician, and Dr. Fannie Fern Andrews, student of world affairs.
Among recent poets there is the late Katherine Lce Bates of Wellesley, whose immortality, like that of Samuel F. Smith, is assured by one poem, " America the Beautiful," which, set to a familiar psalm tune, is the official anthem of the American Federation of Women's Clubs; Robert Hillyer, latest local representative of Harvard's long line of poets; Nancy Byrd Turner, author of the Lindbergh poem; Henry Copley Greene, medical investigator and poet; Nixon Waterman and Denis A. McCarthy, writers of lyrics and light verses in the old, popular tradition; E. E. Cummings, the modernist; Edward J. H. O'Brien, verse writer as well as annual anthologist of American and British short stories. Also, critic, prophet, and anthologist of them all
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is William S. B. Braithwaite, who for years has published his annual survey of American poetry, perhaps the most useful work of the sort that any American has done.
In journalists, most of whoin, in accordance with Boston tradition, are content to remain journalists and not burst out annually between covers, which is the fashion in New York, we have a strong representation: Joseph E. Chamberlin of the Transcript; Robert Lincoln O'Brien, retired editor of the Herald, and F. Lauriston Bullard, still of the Herald; Albert Edward Winship, veteran editor of "The Journal of Education"; Edward E. Whiting, the Herald columnist; Philip Hale of the Herald and H. T. Parker of the Transcript, two nationally known authorities on music and the drama; in literary criticism, E. E. Edgett of the Transcript and John Clair Minot of the Herald; in art, Fred W. Coburn of the Herald and A. J. Phillpot of the Globe; in editorial writing, Clifton B. Carberry (John Bantry) of the Post, James Ernest King of the Transcript and Lucien Price and James H. Powers of the Globe. Olin Downes, music critic, received his training in Boston, and Kenneth L. Roberts, author of the superb historical novel, "Arundel," learned his job as special writer on the Post. Frank Sibley of the Globe is one of New England's best- known newspaper men and Bill Cunningham of the Post one of the most brilliant of the youngsters.
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