Part 1 (1/2)

The Old Coast Road.

by Agnes Rothery.

BOSTON: A FOREWORD

[Ill.u.s.tration]

To love Boston or to laugh at Boston--it all depends on whether or not you are a Bostonian. Perhaps the happiest att.i.tude--and the most intelligent--is tinged with both amus.e.m.e.nt and affection: amus.e.m.e.nt at the undeviating ceremonial of baked beans on Sat.u.r.day night and fish b.a.l.l.s on Sunday morning; at the Boston bag (not so ubiquitous now as formerly); at the indefatigable consumption of lectures; at the Bostonese p.r.o.nunciation; affection for the honorable traditions, n.o.ble buildings, distinguished men and women. Boston is an old city--one must remember that it was settled almost three centuries ago--and old cities, like old people, become tenacious of their idiosyncrasies, admitting their inconsistencies and prejudices with complacency, wisely aware that age has bestowed on them a special value, which is automatically increased with the pa.s.sage of time.

To tell the story of an old city is like cutting down through the various layers of a fruity layer cake. When you turn the slice over, you see that every piece is a cross-section. So almost every locality and phase of this venerable metropolis could be studied, and really should be studied, according to its historical strata: Colonial, Provincial, Revolutionary, economic, and literary. All of these periods have piled up their a.s.sociations one upon the other, and all of them must be somewhat understood if one would sincerely comprehend what has aptly been called not a city, but a ”state of mind.”

It is as impossible for the casual sojourner to grasp the significance of the multifarious historical and literary events which have transpired here as for a few pages to outline them. Wherever one stands in Boston suggests the church of San Clemente in Rome, where, you remember, there are three churches built one upon the other. However, those who would take the lovely journey from Boston to Plymouth needs must make some survey, no matter how superficial, of their starting-place. And perhaps the best spot from which to begin is the Common.

This pleasantly rolling expanse, which was set aside as long ago as 1640, with the decree that ”there shall be no land granted either for houseplott or garden out of y^e open land or common field,” has been unbrokenly maintained ever since, and as far as acreage goes (it approximates fifty acres) could still fulfill its original use of pasturing cows, a practice which was continued until 1830. It was here that John Hanc.o.c.k's cattle grazed--he who lived in such magnificence on the hill, and in whose side yard the State House was built--and once, when preparations for an official banquet were halted by shortage of milk, tradition has it that he ordered his servants to hasten out on the Common and milk every cow there, regardless of owners.h.i.+p. Tradition also tells us that the little boy Ralph Waldo Emerson tended his mother's cow here; and finally both traditions and existing law declare that yonder one-story building opening upon Mount Vernon Street, and possessing an oddly wide door, must forever keep that door of sufficient width to let the cows pa.s.s through to the Common.

Let us stand upon the steps of the State House and look out over the Common. To our right, near the intersection of Boylston and Tremont Streets, lies the half-forgotten, almost obliterated Central Burying Ground, the final resting-place of Gilbert Stuart, the famous American painter. At the left points the spire of Park Street Church, notable not for its age, for it is only a little over a century old, but for its charming beauty, and by the fact that William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first address here, and here ”America” was sung in public for the first time. It was the windiness of this corner which was responsible for Tom Appleton's suggestion (he was the brother-in-law of Longfellow) that a shorn lamb be tethered here.

The graceful spire of Park Street Church serves not only as a landmark, but is also a most fitting terminal to a street of many a.s.sociations. It is on Park Street that the publis.h.i.+ng house of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

(now Houghton Mifflin Company) has had its offices for forty years, and the bookstores and the antique shops tucked quaintly down a few steps below the level of the sidewalk have much of the flavor of a bit of London.

Still standing on the State House steps, facing the Common, you are also facing what has been called the n.o.blest monument in Boston and the most successfully placed one in America. It is Saint-Gaudens's bronze relief of Colonel Robert G. Shaw commanding his colored regiment, and if you see no other sculpture in a city which has its full quota you must see this memorial, spirited in execution, spiritual in its conception of a mighty moment.

If we had time to linger we could not do better than to follow Beacon Street to the left, pausing at the Athenaeum, a library of such dignity and beauty that one instinctively, and properly, thinks of it as an inst.i.tution rather than a mere building. To enjoy the Athenaeum one must be a ”proprietor” and own a ”share,” which ent.i.tles one not only to the use of the scholarly volumes in scholarly seclusion, but also in the afternoon to entrance to an alcove where tea is served for three pennies. Perhaps here, as well as any other place, you may see a characteristic a.s.sortment of what are fondly called ”Boston types.”

There is the professor from Cambridge, a gentleman with a pointed beard and a noticeably cultivated enunciation; one from Wellesley--this, a lady--with that keen and paradoxically impractical expression which marks pure intellectuality; an alert matron, plainly, almost shabbily, dressed (aristocratic Boston still scorns sartorial smartness); a very well-bred young girl with bone spectacles; a student, shabby, like the Back Bay matron, but for another reason; a writer; a business man whose hobby is Was.h.i.+ngtonia. These, all of them, you may enjoy along with your cup of tea for three cents, if--and here is the crux--you can only be admitted in the first place. And if you are admitted, do not fail to look out of the rear windows upon the ancient Granary Burying Ground, where rest the ashes of Hanc.o.c.k, Sewall, Faneuil, Samuel Adams, Otis, Revere, and many more notables. If you have a penchant for graveyards, this one, entered from Tremont Street, is more than worthy of further study.

This is one of the many things we could enjoyably do if we had time, but whether we have time or not we must pay our respects to the State House (one does not call it the Capitol in Boston, as in other cities), the prominence of whose golden dome is not unsuggestive, to those who recall it, of Saint Botolph's beacon tower in Boston, England, for which this city was named. The State House is a distinctively American building, and Bulfinch, the great American architect, did an excellent thing when he designed it. The dome was originally covered with plates of copper rolled by no other than that expert silversmith and robust patriot, Paul Revere--he whose midnight ride has been recited by so many generations of school-children, and whose exquisite flagons, cups, ladles, and sugar tongs not only compared with the best Continental work of that period, but have set a name and standard for American craftsmans.h.i.+p ever since.

If you should walk up and down the chessboard of Beacon Hill--taking the knight's move occasionally across the narrow cross-streets--you could not help treading the very squares which were familiar to the feet of that generation of authors which has permanently stamped American literature. At 55 Beacon Street, down near the foot of the hill and facing the Common, still stands the handsome, swell-front, buff-brick house where Prescott, the historian, lived. On Mount Vernon Street (which runs parallel to Beacon, and which, with its dignified beauty, won the approval of that connoisseur of beautiful streets--Henry James) one can pick out successively the numbers 59, 76, 83, 84, the first and last being homes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the other two distinguished by the residence of William Ellery Channing and Margaret Deland. Pinckney Street runs parallel with Mount Vernon, and the small, narrow house at number 20 was one of the homes of the Alcott family. It seems delightfully fitting that Louisburg Square--that very exclusive and very English spot which probably retains more of the quaint atmosphere and customs of an aristocratic past than any other single area in the city--should have been the home of the well-beloved William Dean Howells. One also likes to recall that Jenny Lind was married at number 20. Chestnut Street--which after a period of social obscurity is again coming into its own--possesses Julia Ward Howe's house at number 13, that of Motley the historian at 16, and of Parkman at 50. In this hasty map we have gone up and down the hill, but the cross-street, Charles, although not so attractive, is nevertheless as rich in literary a.s.sociations as any in Boston. Here lived, for a short time, at 164, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131--also for a short time--Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men of letters; he who entertained d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, and practically every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the ”Scarlet Letter,” and he, who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and editor, probably did more to elevate, inspire, and sustain the general literary tone of the city than any other single person. In these stirring days facile American genius springs up, like brush fires, from coast to coast. Novels pour in from the West, the Middle West, the South. To superficial outsiders it may seem as if Boston might be hard-pressed to keep her laurels green, but Boston herself has no fears. Her present may not s.h.i.+ne with so unique a brilliance as her past, but her past gains in l.u.s.ter with each succeeding year. Nothing can ever take from Boston her high literary prestige.

While we are still on Beacon Hill we can look out, not only upon the past, but upon the future. Those white domes and pillars gleaming like Greek temples across the blue Charles, are the new buildings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, and surely Greek temples were never lovelier, nor dedicated to more earnest pursuit of things not mundane. Quite as beautiful and quite as Grecian as the Technology buildings is the n.o.ble marble group of the School of Medicine of Harvard University, out by the Fenlands--that section of the city which is rapidly becoming a students' quarter, with its Simmons College, the New England Conservatory of Music, art schools, gymnasiums, private and technical schools of all descriptions, and its body of over 12,000 students. Harvard is, of course, across the river in Cambridge, and preparatory schools and colleges dot the suburbs in every direction, upholding the cultural traditions of a city which has proved itself peculiarly fitted to educational interests.

All this time we have, like _bona-fide_ Bostonians, stayed on Beacon Hill, and merely looked out at the rest of the city. And perhaps this is as typical a thing as we could have done. Beacon Hill was the center of original Boston, when the Back Bay was merely a marsh, and long after the marsh was filled in and streets were laid out and handsome residences lined them, Beacon Hill looked down scornfully at the new section and murmured that it was built upon the discarded hoopskirts and umbrellas of the true Bostonians. Even when almost every one was crowded off the Hill and the Back Bay became the more aristocratic section of the two, there were still enough of the original inhabitants left to scorn these upstart social pretensions. And now Beacon Hill is again coming back into her own: the fine old houses are being carefully, almost wors.h.i.+pfully restored, probably never again to lose their rightful place in the general life of the city.

But if Beacon Hill was conservative in regard to the Back Bay, that district, in its turn, showed an equal unprogressiveness in regard to the Esplanade. To the stranger in Boston, delighting in that magnificent walk along the Charles River Embankment, with the arching spans of the Cambridge and Harvard bridges on one side, and the homes of wealth and mellow refinement on the other--a walk which for invigorating beauty compares with any in the cities of men--it seems incredible that when this promenade was laid out a few years ago, the householders along the water's edge absolutely refused to turn their front windows away from Beacon Street. Furthermore, they ignored the fact that their back yards and back windows presented an unbecoming face to such an incomparably lovely promenade, and the inevitable household rearrangement--by which the drawing-rooms were placed in the rear--was literally years in process of achievement. But such conservatism is one of Boston's idiosyncrasies, which we must accept like the wind and the flat A.

Present-day Bostonians are proud--and properly so--of their Copley Square, with its Public Library, rich with the mural paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, with Abbey's ”Quest of the Holy Grail,” and Sargent's ”Frieze of the Prophets”; with its well-loved Trinity Church and with much excellent sculpture by Bela Pratt. Copley Square is the cultural center of modern Boston. The famous Lowell lectures--established about seventy-five years ago as free gifts to the people--are enthusiastically attended by audiences as Bostonese as one could hope to congregate; and in all sorts of queer nests in this vicinity are Theosophical reading-rooms, small halls where Buddhism is studied or New Thought taught, and half a hundred very new or very old philosophies, religions, fads, fas.h.i.+ons, reforms, and isms find shelter. It is easy to linger in Copley Square: indeed, hundreds and hundreds of men and women--princ.i.p.ally women--come from all over the United States for the sole purpose of spending a few months or a season in this very place, enjoying the lectures, concerts, and art exhibitions which are so easily and freely accessible. But in this bird's-eye flight across the historical and geographical map of a city that tempts one to many pleasant delays, we must hover for a brief moment over the South and the North Ends.

Skipping back, then, almost three centuries, but not traveling far as distance goes, the stranger in Boston cannot do better than to find his way from Copley Square to the Old South Church on Was.h.i.+ngton Street--that venerable building whose desecration by the British troops in 1775 the citizens found it so hard ever to forgive. It was here that Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706; here that Joseph Warren made a dramatic entry to the pulpit by way of the window in order to denounce the British soldiers; and here that momentous meetings were held in the heaving days before the Revolution. The Old South Church Burying Ground is now called the King's Chapel Burying Ground, and King's Chapel itself--a quaint, dusky building, suggestive of a London chapel--is only a few blocks away. Across its doorsill have not only stepped the Royal Governors of pre-Revolutionary days, but Was.h.i.+ngton, General Gage, the indestructibly romantic figures of Sir Harry Frankland and Agnes Surriage; the funeral processions of General Warren and Charles Sumner.

The organ, which came from England in 1756, is said to have been selected by Handel at the request of King George, and along the walls of the original King's Chapel were hung the escutcheons of the Kings of England and of the Royal Governors.

The Old State House is in this vicinity and is worthy--as are, indeed, both the Old South Church and King's Chapel--of careful architectural study and enjoyment. There are portraits, pictures, relics, and rooms within, and without the beautifully quaint lines and truly lovely details of the facade infuse a perpetual charm into the atmosphere of the city. It was directly in front of this building that the Boston Ma.s.sacre took place in 1770, and from this second-story balcony that the repeal of the Stamp Act was read, and ten years later the full text of the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps the next most interesting building in this section of old Boston is Faneuil Hall, the ”Cradle of Liberty” whose dignified, old-fas.h.i.+oned proportions were not lost--thanks to Bulfinch--when it was enlarged. A gift of a public-spirited citizen, this building has served in a double capacity for a hundred and seventy-seven years, having public market-stalls below and a large hall above--a hall which is never rented, but used freely by the people whenever they wish to discuss public affairs. It would be impossible to enumerate the notable speakers and meetings which have rendered this hall famous, from General Gage down to Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, and Marshal Joffre.