USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people > Part 14
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After the Civil War and the economic depression which followed, a different tone came into Massachusetts letters. The precursors of this new spirit were perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' the poems of Whittier and of Lucy Larcom, and the novels and tales of Herman Melville - that powerful realist who warned himself of the fate of those who 'fell into Plato's honey head and sweetly perished there.'
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Barrett Wendell, lecturing on literature at Harvard, and popularly sup- posed to base his critical estimates on the family trees of authors rather than on their writings, solemnly warned a generation of Harvard students against 'democracy overpowering excellence.' Yet, despite Wendell, cur- rents of the Populist movement, of industrial unrest, of new social doc- trines, were flowing into Massachusetts.
In 1885 a shabby traveler emerged from the old Hoosac Station in Boston and, clutching an imitation-leather valise, turned his face, brown from the Dakota sun, toward the Common. This was Hamlin Garland, come (like Ravignac to another city) to capture Boston, the cradle of liberty, the home of literature. Alas, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne were dead, and the Reverend Doctor Cyrus Augustus Bartol, of the old West Meeting House, remained the sole survivor of the Concord school. Undaunted, young Garland sought out the literary giants of the day. Holmes, Whittier, and Lowell were still living, but none of these did he contrive to meet. Living on forty cents a day, battling the cockroaches in his six-dollar-a-month room, he consoled himself with reading 'Progress and Poverty,' 'at times experiencing a feeling that was almost despair.'
Garland's ingenuous narrative, 'A Son of the Middle Border,' contains many valuable indications of intellectual currents of the 1880's in Mas- sachusetts. He soaked himself in the writings of the evolutionists - Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Haeckel. In the reading-room of the Boston Public Library the universe resolved itself into harmony and secular order, as it had done a generation before for the European realists, as it was doing for the new generation of American writers. Literature in Massachusetts during the 1880's, for the first time since the eighteenth century, was motivated by science and invigorated by political revolt. This new temper was expressed directly and artlessly by Edward Bellamy in 'Looking Backward,' which, published in 1888, had sold more than 370,000 copies by 1891; realistically by William Dean Howells; triply- distilled in Henry James's cerebral novels.
Howells was a transplanted Bostonian, born in Ohio in 1837. 'The most vital literary man in all America at this time,' Garland thought him, adding that Boston was divided as to the worth of this American disciple of Balzac, Zola, and Tolstoi. Howells turned the minds of his contem- poraries from Europe back upon America, satirizing the worship of European places and ideas so common among the middle class, indicating in his novels that America was a land of new hopes - a country with a greater future than Europe. He cut through the sentimental treacle
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Massachusetts: The General Background
in which the 'golden age' was now immersed, turning Massachusetts into the stream of the new realism which answered the readers' sudden cry, 'Give us people and places as they are!' Half of Boston stood aghast at this coarse new literature, but the other half applauded. The West was coming East, and the old traditions were finally shattered when in 1871 Howells became editor-in-chief of the organ of New Eng- land Brahmanism, The Atlantic Monthly. Yet with all his democratic ideas, Howells stood for careful art, and his own style was finished and pure.
Realism brought forth regionalism - which again Mrs. Stowe had foreshadowed, in 'Poganuc People' and 'Oldtown Folks.' Her approach was sentimental, however, while the regionalist's was scientific. Bred in a generation which exalted scientific method, the regionalists applied science in a special way. The novel was conceived of, though not always consciously, as a scientific experiment, and an experiment to be scien- tific must be controlled in all its particulars. Hence the deliberate narrowness of range, the careful naturalism of style, the absence of vagueness, fancy, or mysticism, the conscientious documentation. A regionalist chooses a narrow geographical sector, as Henry James chose a narrow stratum of society; he revives his memories of that sector, checks his memories with facts, employs real characters rather than invented ones, and never once allows his tale to stray from under the bell-glass. Mary E. Wilkins (1852-1930), Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), and Alice Brown (b. 1857), are representatives of this school in the novel, as James Herne (1839-1901), the author of 'Shore Acres,' is its representative in the drama. All of them were careful recorders of New England's decline.
The rather large body of persons who have always believed, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that virtue is inevitably rewarded and that poverty can always be conquered, found an exponent in one of Massachusetts' most widely read authors. Horatio Alger, Jr., born in 1834, the son of a clergyman of Revere, was known throughout his boyhood as 'holy Horatio.' After attending Harvard Divinity School he spent a season in Paris, where he performed some naughty deed, never divulged, for which he was sorry all his life. He never married. In all, he produced some one hundred and nineteen boys' books, among them 'Ragged Dick,' 'Luck and Pluck,' 'Tattered Tom,' 'From Canal Boy to President,' 'From Farm Boy to Senator.' Like the heroes of his books, he acquired riches; unlike them, he died in poverty.
The revolt against the genteel tradition, 1912-16, had its seeds in the 'muck-raking era.' Massachusetts furnished one muck-raker - Thomas
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W. Lawson, who made and lost a fortune on the stock market, then pilloried the market in 'Frenzied Finance' (1902). To the poetry renais- sance which began in Chicago about 1912 Massachusetts contributed several poets - T. S. Eliot, S. Foster Damon, Conrad Aiken, Robert Hillyer, among others - who were at first encouraged by Amy Lowell (1874-1925) and then satirized in 'A Critical Fable,' patterned after her great-uncle James Russell Lowell's satire. Miss Lowell introduced to young American poets the French symbolists and impressionists of the 1890's along with the Imagists, and her free verse and polyphonic prose forms had direct influence on many of them. The entire move- ment of 1912-16, so promising in its inception, was fatally cut off by the World War.
In 1937, literary prognosticators in Massachusetts were wetting their fingers and testing the wind. Some faint signs of a literary revival were evident in the air. Massachusetts writers again began to preoccupy themselves with contemporary Massachusetts material - an encourag- ing sign. Impressive gains of organization among industrial workers offered a hint of a new audience of hundreds of thousands. The New England renaissance of the 1840's had coincided with an upsurge of organization among workers, and in the social, economic, and political ferment of that decade many writers of the 'golden age' were directly concerned. The direction of the Massachusetts labor movement in 1937 was perhaps symptomatic of what might occur in literature - not as cause and effect, but as twin manifestations of the same forces. Critics dared predict a new literary renaissance in New England - unless war again intervened to blast it at the roots.
MUSIC AND THE THEATER
WHEN one considers the early evolution of the fine arts in New England - and especially music and the drama - it is essential to remember that whereas in England Puritanism was never wholly without opposition, in the New England Colonies it very early established a pseudo-theocracy which in its fundamentals was to remain unshaken for nearly two hundred years. With the Restoration, the opposition came back to power in England, and with it the enormous release of energies which was to pro- duce the second great period of English drama. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, no such development was even remotely possible. When Henry Vane failed of re-election as Governor in 1637 and returned to England, defeated in his struggle with Winthrop and the town fathers for a more liberal policy, it was really the end of any chances there might still have been for a gentler and more humanistic New England culture. The decision of the General Court in the same year 'that none should be re- ceived to inhabite within this Jurisdiction but such as should be allowed by some of the magistrates' - which was tantamount to saying that they could exclude or banish anyone whose customs or opinions they dis- liked - became exactly what it was intended to be: a drastically effective social filter. The little Puritan community was henceforth to be on one pattern, heresy was to be a crime, and liberalism was to go underground for a hundred and fifty years.
Small wonder, therefore, that the Restoration could export little of its brilliance and gaiety to a shore so inhospitable. Music, the theater - these reached the ears of the Bostonians only as rumors of dreadful un- bridled license. In 1686, Increase Mather, stern upholder of the pro- prieties and decorums, published a 'Testimony Against Profane and Superstitious Customs,' in the course of which he bemoaned the fact that there 'is much discourse now of beginning Stage Plays in New England.' He need not have worried; the 'much discourse' came to nothing; and the drama, like music and dancing - 'gynecandrial' dancing was their wonderfully contemptuous word for dancing between the sexes - re- mained an alien and unknown quantity. The truth is, of course, that our admirable forefathers knew nothing whatever about the arts, cared little for them, and brought into the world children who 'had but an imperfect
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Music and the Theater
idea of their bearing, and in their ignorance deemed the theater the abode of a species of devil, who, if once allowed to exist, would speedily make converts.' In such a situation, any liberalizing influences from without had perforce to wait on the Puritans' gradual self-liberalization from within; and the few early attempts to import stage plays into Massa- chusetts - even after the theater had begun to make headway in New York, Philadelphia, and Providence - served only to enforce the re- strictions against them. Plays were occasionally given in the first half of the eighteenth century, but only privately, and seldom; and perhaps with a fear that they might, if indulged in too often, lead to the building of a playhouse - an outcome too terrible to think of.
It was probably some such consideration which led, in 1750, to the passage of 'An Act to Prevent Stage Plays and Other Theatrical Enter- tainments,' as likely to 'occasion great and unnecessary expense, and discourage industry and frugality,' and as also tending to 'increase im- morality, impiety, and a contempt for religion.' The occasion for this was a performance of Otway's 'Orphan, or Unhappy Marriage' at a coffee house in State Street, Boston, by two enterprising young English actors, 'assisted by some volunteer comrades from the town.' The General Court, fearing this might be the entering wedge, made the provisions of the act extremely stringent. Twenty pounds was the fine to be paid by anyone who let or permitted the use of his premises for such a purpose. And any actor or spectator present 'where a greater number of persons than twenty shall be assembled together' was subject to a fine of five pounds. The law was effective, and effectively enforced; and on the whole it was supported by public sentiment. The more so, perhaps, as it did not make strictly 'private' performances, or very un- remunerative ones, absolutely impossible.
But the tide of public opinion was steadily if imperceptibly rising. The more liberal elements in the community, and those whose business took them occasionally to New York, where the theater was already well established, pressed for the repeal of the act many times in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Such an attempt failed in 1767; and more daunting still was the resolve of the Continental Congress, in 1778, that any officeholder under the United States who should be so neglectful of his duties as to attend a play should at once lose his position. Despite this, however, and despite the fact that in 1784 the anti-theater act of 1750 was re-enacted in Massachusetts, the moment was at hand when the law was simply to be allowed to become a dead letter. As a test case, the New Exhibition Room - a theater in everything but name - was
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opened in what is now Hawley Street, Boston, in 1792, with a performance in the nature of a variety show. 'Monsieur Placide will dance a hornpipe on a Tight-Rope, play the Violin in various attitudes, and jump over a cane backwards and forwards.' This was followed by Garrick's 'Lethe,' and that by Otway's 'Venice Preserved,' which was announced, with the customary bland hypocrisy of the times, as 'A Moral Lecture in Five Parts.' And subsequent performances were given - likewise billed as 'moral lectures' - of 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Othello.' Rhymed couplets, in the handbills, drove home the moral lessons, lest they be missed: from the bill of 'Othello', for example:
Of jealousy, the being's bane,
Mark the small cause and the most dreaded pain.
With these performances, and with the consequent arrest and discharge - on a technicality - of the manager, Joseph Harper, the real history of the theater as such in Massachusetts may be said to have begun. The worthy citizens of Boston were now well persuaded that the drama was actually of great social benefit; and accordingly many of the most in- fluential people took an active part in the financing, planning, and build- ing - with Bulfinch as architect - of the Boston Theatre, which was completed at the corner of Federal and Franklin Streets in 1794. They must, presumably, have closed their eyes to such unedifying sights as were billed at Mr. Bryant's Hall, a temporary theater during this period, where one might see, for example, Mr. Manly 'balance his whole body on the edge of a candlestick, pick up two pins with his eyes, and a dollar at the same time with his mouth' - all the while, moreover, rolling like a whale in the sea. Culture was to be the thing; and they pursued it with characteristic zeal. Despite the bankruptcy of the Boston Theatre at the end of its first season, a second theater, the Haymarket, was built a year later; and until 1803, when the Haymarket was torn down, a lethal competition made prosperity impossible for either.
And in fact it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the theater was never destined, in Boston, to very great prosperity, and that in a sense Boston has never been really a 'theater' city. The Boston Theatre did moderately well for a quarter of a century - with a very fine stock company to play around such visiting stars as Kean, Macready, Forrest, and Junius Booth - and later in the century, from 1860 to 1880, the Boston Museum, in Tremont Street, maintained one of the finest stock companies in the country. But the 'star' system, lamented as early as 1880 by William Clapp, one of the leading dramatic critics of the period,
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Music and the Theater
was gradually to make Boston what it is today, a theatrical dependency of New York. And attempts in the present century to run stock com- panies in Boston, despite the temporary successes of John Craig and Mary Young at the Castle Square, and of Leon Gordon, Edmund Clive, and Henry Jewett, have invariably ended in failure. More interesting to record, in an otherwise somewhat drab history, is the vigor of the Little Theater movement in Massachusetts, with the famous Provincetown Players and the People's Theater of Northampton conspicuous for their contribution; and the very great influence of Professor George Pierce Baker's '47 Workshop' on the American theater at large. Of Massachu- setts playwrights, it is perhaps sufficient, if melancholy, to quote William Clapp, who fifty years ago remarked that 'no Boston author has as yet written a play which is likely to keep the stage.'
II
If music has fared better in Massachusetts - and especially in the past fifty years, when Boston has deservedly taken its place as one of the fore- most musical centers of the world - its early history in the State was quite as humble as that of the drama, and if anything even more in- conspicuous. Music had, and could have, no place in a strictly Puritan community - even its controversial value was less considerable than that of the drama, for it was clearly less of a 'temptation.', Copies of Henry Ainsworth's psalter, published in 1612, were aboard the 'May- flower,' and the first book to be printed in America - the 'Bay Psalm Book' (Cambridge, 1640) - was to go through eight editions before 1698; but neither of these actually contained any music. The psalms were sung by rote, to one of the five or six tunes then in use, the precentor chanting the psalm line by line, the congregation echoing him - a dreary business at best. And this - literally - was all the music the Puritan fathers knew.
So dreadful, however, did this rote-singing finally become that a move- ment arose in the Church itself - not without furious opposition - to introduce singing by note; and in 1698 the ninth edition of the 'Bay Psalm Book' contained thirteen tunes in two-part harmony - the 'oldest existing music of American imprint.' A year later, 1699, the Brattle Street Church voted unanimously 'that ye psalms in our public Worship be sung without reading line by line.' In 1714 or 1715 appeared what may be described as the first musical textbook to come out of
.
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America -'A very plain and easy Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm Tunes: With the Cantus, or Trebles, of Twenty-eight Psalm Tunes contrived in such a manner as that the Learner may attain the Skill of Singing with the greatest Ease and Speed imaginable,' by the Reverend John Tufts. This book was published in Boston, and ran through ten editions by 1744. It was the forerunner of other such instruction books, and coincided with the formation of the first singing schools - one such is said to have existed as early as 1717.
Thus far, the psalm-singing was unaccompanied. But in 1714, when the first pipe-organ in America was installed in King's Chapel, the organist, Edward Enstone, just arrived from England, brought with him a 'choice Collection, of Musickal Instruments, consisting of Flageolets, Flutes, Hautboys, Bass-Viols, Violins, Bows, Strings, Reads for Haut- boys, Books of Instruction for all these Instruments, Books of ruled paper.' Clearly, there was already a definite interest in instrumental music, and it was not long before the first concerts began to be given - usually for the benefit of the poor. The first advertisement of a concert in America seems to have been that in the Boston News-Letter, December 16-23, 1731: 'There will be a Concert of Music on sundry instruments at Mr. Pelham's great Room, being the House of the late Doctor Noyes near the Sun Tavern.' In 1732 the New England Weekly Journal ad- vertised 'Conserts of Musick performed on sundry instruments at the Concert Room in Wing's Lane near the Town Dock' - a room in the George Tavern, in what is now Elm Street. In 1744 a vocal and instru- mental concert was given in the newly built Faneuil Hall; and from this time on concerts became frequent, and instrumental music began to take a natural place in the home.
Perhaps the opening of the theaters, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, did much to stimulate the public interest in music, and to im- prove its taste - at all events, it is not without significance that there was on the program for the opening night of the Boston Theatre, Feb- ruary 3, 1794, 'to precede the drawing up of the curtain,' a 'grand sym- phony by Signor Haydn,' amongst other pieces. Here, too, the custom was introduced of 'allowing the audience to call upon the orchestra for such pieces of music as suited the popular taste,' a custom which pre- vailed for many years. Obviously, the Puritan terror of music had at last broken down, music was beginning to come out of the church, and all that now was needed was organization - a creative discipline and direction.
For this, some of the spade-work had already been done by the gradual
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formation and training of the church choirs, the founding of singing schools, partly to the same end, and the development of musical societies. Among the latter may be mentioned one of the earliest, still in existence, the Stoughton Musical Society, 1786, founded by America's first native composer, William Billings. Billings's 'New England Psalm Singer' (1770), and subsequent collections, may be said to be the beginning of American composition; and his spirited 'fuguing' style did much to free church music from the everlasting Puritan drone.
But these were modest beginnings at best, and it was really with the nineteenth century that things began to happen. In 1808 a group of students at Harvard founded the Pierian Sodality, and with it 'an un- broken chain of cause and effect' which was to lead, via the Harvard Musical Association - founded by graduates of the Pierian in 1837 - to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This little society, for the encourage- ment of instrumental music, may be said to have been of the profoundest significance in the development of music, not only at Harvard, but throughout the country. Two years later came a similar venture, though not so lasting, when Gottlieb Graupner, music publisher and engraver, ex-oboist in Haydn's Orchestra in London, formed a group of professional musicians, together with a few amateurs, for weekly concerts of an in- formal character. This, the Philharmonic Society, lasted till 1824, thus overlapping the Handel and Haydn Society, 1815, in the founding of which Graupner again had a hand.
With the Philharmonic Society playing the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, and the Handel and Haydn giving a performance of the whole of Handel's 'Messiah' as early as 1818, progress was clearly being made; but the discipline and training for precision-playing was to come a good deal later. A further step in this direction came with the establishment of the Boston Academy of Music, in 1833, by Lowell Mason. This ad- mirable institution - long since defunct - gave free vocal instruction to upwards of a thousand children, and five hundred adults, a year; and in 1837 it succeeded in introducing music into the Boston public schools. Its services to the teaching of music were inestimable, but perhaps even more fraught with consequence was its decision, in 1840, under the leadership of Samuel A. Eliot, its president, then Mayor of Boston, to give up teaching and 'to engage the best orchestra it can afford and give classical instrumental concerts.' The immediate result was the first hearing of Beethoven in Boston, the First and Fifth Symphonies being performed by the Academy of Music Orchestra in its first season of eight concerts. The orchestra was small - twenty-five to forty - and by no
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Massachusetts: The General Background
means perfect; but its seven-year existence made the coming of the Boston Symphony Orchestra inevitable.
Other stages were to intervene - the visits of the Germania Orchestra, from 1848 to 1854; the foundation of the Harvard Musical Association in 1837, and its seventeen years of symphony concerts, from 1865 onward, under Carl Zerrahn; the popularization of chamber music by the Men- delssohn Quintette Club - but everything now tended obviously to the obvious thing, the foundation of a Boston Symphony Orchestra. This, finally made possible by the generosity and unflagging devotion of Henry Lee Higginson, began in 1881 the career which was to make it for many years the finest orchestra in the United States, and to make Boston famous for its music. Its history, under such leaders as Nikisch, Gericke, Muck, Rabaud, Monteux, and Serge Koussevitzky, is a story in itself, beyond the scope of these pages; it must be sufficient to note that out of it have come such notable institutions as the Kneisel Quartet, the Longy Club and Longy School of Music, and the Flute-Players' Club, and that as a great orchestra it continues to give Boston precisely the creative focus for music that it needs.
It remains simply to note that in the New England Conservatory of Music - founded in 1867 by Doctor Eben Tourjee - Massachusetts possesses one of the most famous schools of music in the country, and that in the field of musical composition the State stands almost alone. Among those born in the State or resident there have been such composers as George Chadwick, C. M. Loeffler, F. S. Converse, Arthur Foote, Edward Burlingame Hill, Walter Piston, Carl Ruggles, Bainbridge Crist, and Roger Sessions, to mention but a few. As a creative musical center, Boston is today in many respects unrivaled.
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