Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 12

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802

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Paradoxical though it may seem, the contemporary movement in architecture began in Boston; in Richardson's audacious use of element- ary masonry forms, gestation of modern architecture began. Not since Wren has an architect left such a profound impress of his own personality, both through his work and that of his successors. With few exceptions, Richardson's successors were a parade of puppet kings wielding the monarch's scepter. Their work was bold, unabashed, and ugly, and its manifestations were not joyous; nonetheless it had promise. Of this work Montgomery Schuyler wrote, 'It is more feasible to tame exuber- ances than to create a soul under the ribs of death. The emancipation of American architecture is thus ultimately more hopeful than if it were put under academic bonds to keep peace.'

A healthily pregnant architecture such as this was being designed in the office of Furness and Hewitt at Philadelphia when a young Bostonian - fresh from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and bound for the École des Beaux Arts in Paris - began work there. Louis Henry Sullivan is the internationally recognized father of the radical school of archi- tecture. On Richardson's foundation he laid the cornerstone of modern architecture. He was the link between two great masters, Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright. It is not unreasonable to believe that Richard- son saw before him in Boston too much tradition to overcome and that this influenced him to go West to start the radical school. In Sullivan's work we see the transition from Richardson's masonry to the lighter and more supple forms of steel construction. Yet Sullivan is probably more significant as Frank Lloyd Wright's Liebermeister than for his own designs. Sullivan's best ideas found expression in Wright more con- vincingly than in his own work. It was in Wright's architecture that the transition from old to new was completed. From it the world movement evolved.

Massachusetts: The General Background

Of contemporary work in Massachusetts there are few strictly modern buildings of merit. More significant is her work in keeping alive the traditional New England Georgian architecture. Prominent in this im- portant phase of American architecture has been the work of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott, with such superior designs as Lowell and Dunster Houses at Harvard. The recently completed restoration at Williamsburg, Virginia - the largest project of this nature ever under- taken in the country - was done by Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, a Boston firm. Recent buildings at Radcliffe College in Cambridge are among other important works by the Boston architects. In these we feel a strain of the Southern influence, absorbed by the designers, no doubt, during their intimacy with this strain of Georgian at Williamsburg.

Strictly modern architecture in Massachusetts is negligible. The Motor Mart Garage, in Boston, and Rindge Technical High School, in Cambridge, by Ralph Harrington Deane are more truly functional than others of the modern type. Boston has its share of mechanically good structures, a few of which are even clothed in pseudo-modern shells. Heading this group is the new Federal Building by Cram and Ferguson. Credit, or blame - according to one's taste - is not wholly due to the Boston firm, for its design was subjected to regimentation at the hands of the Federal Architect's Office in Washington, as are designs for all Federal Buildings. One is inclined to wonder, if the ardent medievalist had been given a free hand to indulge his fancy, whether the resultant structure would not have been more compatible with the functions within.

Evidence that Boston architects have been able to lift themselves out of their stultifying environment and do modern work elsewhere is seen in the superior designs of the New York Hospital and Cornell Medical School Building in New York, completed in 1932 by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbott. In this mammoth project, the Boston architects demanded a frank and independent solution, with an inflexible insistence upon adjustment of means to end. The result set a precedent in modern hospital-design.

Thus the reactionary trend in Massachusetts architecture is attribut- able not so much to poverty of thought on the part of its architects as to a lack of fortunate opportunities and an intrenched conservatism on the part of patrons.

LITERATURE

IT MUST have been with some astonishment, to put it mildly, that the first settlers of Boston - who of course actually, to begin with, had planted themselves in Charlestown - found Boston itself to be already an English city, with a population of exactly one soul. This city, to be precise, consisted of William Blackstone or Blaxton, B.A., a graduate of Cambridge University, and one of the most curious and suggestive figures in the whole early history of the colonization of America. A member of the ill-starred Gorges expedition of 1625, Blackstone had spent two years in Wessagussett, now Weymouth. It appears that he had cast in his lot with Gorges not much more for reasons of Puritan conscience than be- cause he simply wanted to be alone. At any rate, in what is now Boston, in the year 1630, 'William Blackstone, a solitary, bookish recluse, in his thirty-fifth year, had a dwelling somewhere on the west slope of Beacon Hill, not far from what are now Beacon and Spruce Streets, from which he commanded the mouth of the Charles. Here he had lived ever since his removal from Wessagussett, in 1625 or 1626, trading with the savages, cultivating his garden, and watching the growth of some apple trees.' Further, it is known that in 1634, reserving only six acres of land for himself - a parcel bounded roughly by Beacon, Charles, Mount Vernon, and Spruce Streets - he sold to the colonists the whole of Boston peninsula, which he himself had previously bought from the Indians; and 'being tired of the "lord brethren," as he had before his emigration been wearied of the "lord bishops,"' he then removed himself to an estate in Rhode Island, of which he was thus the first white inhabitant. This estate - to which he had presumably brought his books, as well as seeds and cuttings from his garden - he called Study Hill, and here he was destined to spend the rest of his life. Just once did he reappear in Boston, a good many years later, and then only for long enough to acquire a wife. He took this lady off to the wilderness with him, and Bostonians saw him no more.

It is an arresting and delightful figure, this young Cambridge graduate with his books and his apple trees, his conscience, and his passionate desire for privacy; and one cannot think of his perpetual centrifugal retreat from civilization, whenever it managed to catch up with him,

Massachusetts: The General Background

without visualizing him as a symbol, or a charming figurehead, of the individualism which was to be so striking a characteristic of New England in the centuries to come. It was not that he was a misanthrope - not in the least. For it was at his own express invitation and because of his real concern for their plight that the wretched half-starved settlers of Charlestown were first brought across the river to the healthier slopes and the better springs on his own land. No, he was simply the first exemplar, the prototype of that profound individualism which has so deeply marked the American character ever since, and of which Mass- achusetts - especially in the field of letters - has been the most prodigal and brilliant source.

Of that fact, surely, there can be little question. In any summary, no matter how brief, of America's contribution to the world's literature, Massachusetts would be seen to have contributed most, not only in sheer quantity and quality, but - and this is much more important - in that particular searching of the conscience and the soul, and of the soul's relationship to the infinite, which has almost invariably been the dominant feature of American literature at its best. Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, Holmes, Whittier, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adams, and the brothers Henry and William James - not to mention the historians Parkman, Prescott, and Motley - the mere recital of the names is quite enough to prove that without the Massachusetts authors American literature would amount to very little. It is a wonderful galaxy; and it is no exaggeration to say that the only absentees from it who are of comparable stature are Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain, and possibly Howells - and of these, Poe was himself at least a native of the State, for he was born in Boston.

This amazing outburst fell almost wholly within the confines of the nineteenth century; and in fact, within about a half of that, the years from 1830 to 1880. But if the quality of it is even more astonishing than the quantity and the range, what is more interesting, whether to the historian of morals and customs or to the psychological student of the origins and function of literature, is precisely the William Blackstone motif, which, as was mentioned above, has so persistently given it its character. New England individualism - and that is tantamount, of course, to saying Massachusetts individualism - has often enough been referred to, but one wonders whether it has ever been given quite its due as the real mainspring of New England letters. One reason for this has been the very widespread notion that it should simply be seen as

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the natural obverse of the excessive Puritanism and Calvinism from which it was in part a reaction; the individualists, in short, were nothing but small boys who had managed to escape from a very strict school. But this is a very superficial view of the individualist, and an equally superficial view of the Puritan. It might be fruitful to consider whether in point of fact the New England individualist was not just our old friend the Puritan writ large; and conversely, whether also the Puritan was not a good deal of an individualist.

The truth is, of course, that the two terms need not at all be mutually exclusive, and that we are facing here one of those charming but mis- leading over-simplifications with which the history books so constantly regale us. It is so much easier, and so much more flattering to the nine- teenth century and all its works, to ascribe everything, en bloc, to the final overthrow of a sort of crippling Frankenstein monster, and to make out Puritanism as one of the most diabolical repressive hypocrisies with which a misguided mankind ever afflicted itself. Much can be said in support of this point of view, and much has been said; and it would be idle to deny that at its worst New England Puritanism became a dread- ful thing; if the witch-hanging hysteria of the seventeenth century was the most violent culmination of it, it brought also in its train other forms of spiritual disaster which, if less conspicuous, were scarcely less terrible. The free Protestantism which the Pilgrims had brought with them from England had gradually hardened, under the influence of John Cotton and his descendants the Mathers, into a theocracy. 'None should be electors nor elected, ... except such as were visible subjects of our Lord Jesus Christ, personally confederated in our churches. In those and many other ways, he propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of Israel.' So remarks Cotton Mather of his grandfather, whose advice had been asked as to a revision of the 'civil constitution' of the State.

But the fact is, that though the theocrats had their way a good deal, they did not have it entirely: and this for the very simple reason that the Protestantism of New England, as it had been based to begin with on the passionate belief of the individual in his right to believe and worship in his own way, still carried in itself these stubborn seeds of freedom. Roger Williams, 'first rebel against the divine church-order in the wilderness' (again to quote Cotton Mather), submitted to a charge of heresy, and abandoned Salem, rather than surrender the tolerance which had outraged the church fathers. Another William Blackstone, he escaped to Rhode Island, and there wrote the first liberal document

Massachusetts: The General Background

in American history, 'The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace.' 'A spiritual Crusoe, the most extreme and outcast soul in all America,' he was, like Blackstone, though for very different reasons, a direct fore- bear of the great individualists of the nineteenth century. It is indeed essential that we should bear in mind this passionate belief in the freedom of conscience which underlay from the very beginning the foundations of New England culture. Its defeats and obscurities at the hands of the theocrats and zealots were at most only temporary; and there was never a time, even in the darkest passages of Massachusetts history, when it was not somewhere in evidence. It is as evident in Jonathan Edwards's fierce conviction that the sacrament should be administered only to those who had had a radical experience of conversion - and who could properly judge of this save the individual himself? - as in the North- ampton congregation which dismissed him, after twenty-three years, be- cause it did not agree with him. And it is as evident again in the calm fortitude with which Edwards accepted his exile, devoting the last six years of his life to a mission among the Indians of Stockbridge - the years, incidentally, during which he somehow managed to write his great philosophical treatise on the freedom of the will.

It was a period - the years from 1620 until the end of the Revolu- tion - during which we must remember, in fact, that the congregation never surrendered its power both to choose and to dismiss its minister: it scrutinized his thought, and indeed his conduct, quite as closely as he scrutinized theirs. He might be tyrannical in his pursuit of his particular idea or ideal, but so, just as well, might they. Since God's grace was so arbitrarily bestowed, might it not fall upon Smith and Jones? Smith and Jones certainly thought so; and the result was a fierce co-operative and communal search for absolute truth, with a powerful clergy some- times leading, but almost as often led by a powerful Church. The clergy might and did ally themselves and form a caste; but despite all their efforts, the Church remained essentially democratic, and essentially dictated - even when most misguided - by the original Puritan belief in freedom of conscience.

Meanwhile, during this period of nearly two hundred years it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the liberal arts or anything even remotely like a literature simply did not exist in Massachusetts; and indeed it is difficult to conceive of their finding a place in a community so passionately surrendered to religious and moral preoccupations. But intellectual and spiritual and esthetic sinews were there, none the less ;.

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the elements were ready; and it needed only the right catalyst, and the right moment, to release them in forms which probably nobody could have foreseen. The catalyst, or at any rate the most important of the catalysts, was the gradual rise of Unitarianism during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and then the phenomenal swiftness with which, early in the nineteenth, it effected an almost complete social conquest of Massachusetts. Here once more, but more clearly voiced than ever, was the Puritan insistence on freedom of conscience; but along with it also the revivifying force, almost impossible to gauge, of the Unitarian discovery that man's nature was not inevitably evil and in- evitably doomed, but actually perhaps contained in itself the seeds of virtue. 'How mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity,' wrote William Ellery Channing in 1809, in the course of a frontal assault on Calvinism, and, 'We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth.' What must have been the effect of this all-liberating doctrine on the subtle-minded New Englander, after his long winter of Calvinism? It was a blaze of sunlight, of course, and such a warming and thawing and freeing of locked energies as from this distance we perhaps cannot possibly conceive. And it was into this sudden summer, this sudden blossoming of New England into something almost like gaiety, with its wonderful discovery that virtue might go hand in hand with happiness, that the group of children were born who were destined to become the flower - and the end - of Massachusetts individualism. Prescott in 1796, Alcott in 1799, Emerson in 1803, Hawthorne in 1804, Longfellow and Whittier in 1807, Holmes in 1809, Motley in 1814, Dana in 1815, Thoreau in 1817, Melville in 1819, Emily Dickinson in 1830 - these great-grandchildren of the New England genius were born by an inevitable conspiracy of time into just such an air as they needed for their purpose. What had shaped them - the ghost of William Blackstone, the proud and frontier-seeking independence of the Puritan conscience - they would themselves turn and shape to its final and beautiful mortal perfection.

The first quarter of the nineteenth century was for Massachusetts its period of greatest prosperity- nothing like it had been seen before, nothing like it has been seen since. The shipping trade was at its height, Boston and Salem had become great international ports, and in these and in New Bedford, where the whale trade had become a thriving industry, family fortunes were being founded almost overnight. Along miles of Cape Cod roadside, almost every cottage or house contained a blue- water sea captain, who knew St. Petersburg and Canton as well as he

Massachusetts: The General Background

knew India Wharf in Boston. Everybody began to travel, Massachusetts had suddenly become cosmopolitan, and what for two centuries had been a queerly isolated and in many respects an extraordinarily innocent community on the way to nowhere, now began for the first time to feel itself in very close contact with the rest of the world. A new and in- finitely richer sense of background became the common property of the people; the whole world was at Boston's door; new ideas were as common and as exciting as the exotic spices brought from Java and China.

An immense advantage, this, for the young Emerson and the young Hawthorne, who, if they were caught willy-nilly in the new liberalism which was sweeping New England, were also caught in strange currents of rumor and echo from abroad. From England, from France, from Ger- many, came news of extraordinary developments in the literary world: the great secondary wave of romanticism, which followed by a generation the French Revolution, had begun to break in its thousand forms. What Channing's bold religious teaching had begun, the riotous brilliance and variety of the English romantic poets and the heady philosophy of Ger- many, at its most metaphysical, were to complete. The New England individualist who had first been a Puritan, and then a Unitarian, was now to reach his logical end in the lovely transparent butterfly hues of Transcendentalism.

When Emerson, who had been trained for the church and who preached for three years at the Second Church in Boston, resigned his pastorate in 1832 because he no longer believed in the communion and could not bring himself to administer it even in the abbreviated form then in use among the Unitarians - remarking characteristically that he simply 'was not interested in it' - he was dedicating himself to the new wilder- ness and the new freedom, exactly as Roger Williams had done before him. Once more a frontier had been reached, but this one the most perilous of all - that frontier within man's consciousness where the soul turns and looks fearlessly into itself, where the individual, like a diver, plunges into his own depths to sound them, and in so doing believes himself effectually to have sounded the world. Man, according to Emerson, was to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, for his divinity was within himself. He must trust his instincts and his intuitions absolutely, for these were his direct communion with the Over-Soul, or God, with which he was in a sense identifiable. This direct knowledge of the divinity was not through the senses - not at all. It was a mode of apprehension that transcended one's sensory knowledge of the phenomenal world and all the experience of the senses, and it was this notion of a 'transcendental'

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knowledge which gave its name to the little group which, after the pub- lication of his first book 'Nature' in 1836, formed itself about Emerson in Concord and Boston. 'If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.' 'For solace, the perspective of your own infinite life' - this was almost or could easily be, the reductio ad absurdum of individualism, for it im- plied a negation of all authority, whether religious or social, and the complete autonomy of the individual soul.

Patently, this doctrine with its ancillary notions bore within itself the seeds of an intellectual and utopian anarchy; and it is interesting to notice, in this connection, how very flimsy and impractical, how absurdly and charmingly innocent, were such ideas of social awareness as this group entertained. It is hardly an exaggeration, in fact, to say that they were none of them concerned with society as such at all. The passionate search for a moral and religious center, a significance, a meaning, had led them steadily inward, never outward; and if they thought of the social problem at all, it was only to wave it away with the sublime assurance that, as man was essentially good, the social problem would quite nicely take care of itself. If the relationship of the Ego to God was satisfactory, then everything else would follow of course. The experiment at Brook Farm and Bronson Alcott's lesser adventure in a Utopia at Fruitlands were the natural, if humiliating, outcome of such beliefs, quite as much as Thoreau's attempt at a formal secession from society. Even the sole apparent exception to this indifference toward social problems, the anti- slavery agitation, in which practically without exception the tran- scendentalist joined, turns out on inspection to be not quite all that it purports to be. For here again the problem was looked at from the point of view, not of society, but of the individual; even the Negro should bow to no authority save God's, which was the authority within himself.

Emerson's influence, nevertheless, in spite of a good deal of misunder- standing, not to mention occasional downright derision, was immense and profoundly fructifying, both on his own generation and on that which followed. He was the real center of his time, and his mark is everywhere. Thoreau's 'Walden,' both the experiment and the book, were but the carrying into practice of Emersonian self-sufficiency; and if they add a literary and speculative genius which is Thoreau's, the spirit of Emerson is indelibly in them. Not least, either, in the very conspicuous indifference, not to say contempt, for form. The method could hardly be more wayward; it is as wayward as Emerson's, who admittedly when he wanted an essay or a lecture just ransacked his copious notebooks, ex-

Massachusetts: The General Background

tracted a random selection of observations and gnomic sayings, and strung them together on a theme as best he could. And it is as well to observe in this connection that a comparative indifference to form was a perhaps inevitable attribute of vatic individualism - everything must be spontaneous, a direct and uncontrolled uprush from the divine well of the soul; one was merely a medium for the divine voice, and in conse- quence there could not logically be any such thing as a compromise with so external and strictly phenomenal an affair as form or style. Com- munication - yes, but only such as came naturally. Nor need one bother overmuch with consistency.

This individualist attitude to form is noticeable everywhere in the literature of the Massachusetts renaissance, as much in the work of the conservative Boston and Cambridge group - Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell - as in that of the Concord radicals. To consider a poem or an essay or a novel as a work of art, was this not to yield oneself to a kind of outside authority, and to compromise or adulterate the pure necessity and virtue of revelation? Revelation was the thing; and everything de- pended on the swiftness with which one brought it up from the depths of one's awareness, so that not a spark of the light should be lost. The result was a kind of romantic mysticism which was at its most lucid in Emerson, at its sunniest and serenest in Thoreau, at its profoundest in Herman Melville, and at its most vapid and ridiculous in the orphic sayings of Bronson Alcott. And the result also was a pervading looseness and raggedness, a kind of rustic and innocent willfulness, whether in prose or verse, in practically all the work of the Massachusetts galaxy. It is evident in Emerson's crabbed and gnomic free verse and his home- spun couplets quite as much as in his prose, where image follows image and idea idea with little or no regard for nexus or pattern, to say nothing of rhythm. It is evident again in that cryptic unintelligibility, the sibyl- line phrase, which, if it has a meaning, sometimes guards it all too well from the bewildered reader. The poor reader, indeed, was given no quarter, he must simply shift for himself; and presumably it was Emer- son's idea, as it was Alcott's and Thoreau's, that it was a sufficient privi- lege for the reader that he thus overheard, as it were, the words of the oracle at all. The words were the words of the divinity, and must not be altered: all that was needed was that they should be received with an understanding equally instinctive and divine.

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Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people, Part 12

Author: Publication date: 1937 Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company Number of Pages: 802

Author:
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Number of Pages: 802