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CHAPTER XVI THE BACK BAY AND THE
STUDENTS' QUARTER The main artery of the Back
Bay is Commonwealth Avenue, and it is so proudly boulevarded, in noble sweep
and breadth, that one is almost ready to forget the brown-stone monotony of its
houses. The avenue is two hundred and twenty feet in width, from house-front to
house-front, and is free of street cars. Down its center is a great, generous,
tree-lined, well-shaded parkway, with a path down the middle for pedestrians;
there are pleasantly placed benches by which the park-like character is
increased; and this long central greenery has a series of admirably placed
statues, with the equestrian Washington, excellently done by Ball, at the
beginning of the line; although Bostonians themselves long ago pointed out that
he has turned his back on the State House and is riding away! This avenue is so
successful, so notable, as to have served as a model for other boulevards
throughout the United States, and it has also given inspiration to Boston for
her recent development of home-bordered parkways running out toward outlying
suburbs. One of the statues is of
John Glover of Marblehead, who commanded a thousand men of his town, whom he
formed into a redoubtable Marine Regiment, "soldiers and sailors
too"; and this monument perpetuates his skill and bravery in getting
Washington's army across to New York after the defeat at Long Island, and his
even more remarkable success in boating the army across the Delaware on a
certain bitter winter's night at a place still called Washington's Crossing. He
died in his beloved Marblehead; but Boston has placed his statue here, feeling
that in this city such a valiant son of New England should be forever
remembered. His hand firmly grasps his sword hilt – but the sword itself has
gone! Was it the act of some vandal, one wonders, some one with a degenerate
idea of relic hunting? But at least nobody ever took his sword away from John
Glover living. Another of the line of
statues is that of Alexander Hamilton, and it looks odd because it is minus the
familiar queue. On the lower part of this monument is a medallion, of three
profiles, apparently of Hamilton; not quite understandable this, and one can
think only of the two skulls of Saint Peter shown by the Roman guide, one of the
saint in early manhood and the other in later life. This triple representation,
if of Hamilton, does not have the reason for being of the wonderful triple
portrait, by Gilbert Stuart, of Madame Bonaparte. The great expanse of water
that is really the Back Bay, and which borders the section of land that Boston
perversely calls the Back Bay, is one of the glories of Boston. Although
broadened by a dam, it is not water that is lifeless and dull, but water that
is cheerful, wimpling, sparkling, very much alive. And when a winter storm
comes the water dashes over its broadening embankment with all the appearance
of a real sea. Along the waterside, and for a broad space back from the water,
a parkway has been made that at any season of the year offers most admirable
waterside walking. Surely, no other modern city is so thoughtful of its
pedestrians, in these days of motor-cars, as is Boston. You may walk on Charles
Bank for a long distance, on a broad concrete walk, with grass and shrubs on
one side and the dancing water on the other. The long line of houses built on
the Back Bay extension of Beacon Street looks out over the water, and the
people who live in these houses prize the view, with its sunset glories; but
all along the water-front one sees only the backs of the houses – the back
windows! To the Bostonian, the proper fronting of a house is on a conventional
two-sided street, and the architectural temptation of a fine front toward a
fine water-view does not alter propriety. "We have the view from our rear
windows," they tell you; not even willing to adopt double-fronted houses,
which would give architectural finish toward the water as well as toward the
street. Between Charles Bank and
Beacon Hill, the city had become unattractive in development, whereupon, a few
years ago, the property-owners banded together cooperatively and did a fine
thing which would have been quite impossible to them acting as individual
owners. They united in a comprehensive plan for improvement, and. there has
already been the most delightful success, for houses have been built that are
mutually protected and protecting, notably on the cleverly arranged Charles
Street Square, with its broad opening out toward the water, and its houses all
balanced architecturally in the Colonial style. So successful has this been
that there will shortly be an adjoining group of houses, which is to bear the
name of Charles Street Circle. To people outside of Boston,
the words "Back Bay" represent social domination, but Boston itself
knows that social supremacy has remained with Beacon Hill. Although "the
sunny street that holds the sifted few" stretches into the Back Bay, and
although the author of that line, Holmes, moved off into the levels, on that
extended street – his last home was the ordinary-looking house at 296 Beacon
Street – and although Silas Lapham and many another have built or bought in the
Back Bay, most of the "sifted few" remain on Beacon Hill. Even the
wealth that went to the Back Bay found that it "cannot buy with gold the
old associations"; and the Back Bay is, after all, just street after
street filled with houses, representative of comfortable living, which are too
ordinary to praise and yet not bad enough to criticise. It is not altogether
clear why one feels resentment toward the houses and streets of the Back Bay,
for they seem innocent enough: but when Henry James impatiently wrote of their
"perspectives of security," he expressed, by this curious phrase,
that the Back Bay somehow gets on the nerves. But this region does at
least spread out with a luxury of space, as if the city, released from the
cramping of its original bounds – hemmed in as it originally was by bay and
river and swamp, and therefore built with repression, with tightness, with
narrowness of streets – rejoices in its new-found freedom. And here there is something
typically and pleasantly Bostonian. Beginning with the cross-streets of the
Back Bay, the street names are in alphabetical sequence, with two-syllabled
names alternating with three; or, I should say, being in Boston, dissyllables
alternating with trisyllables; and the Bostonians take a nice pride in it.
There are Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield,
Gloucester – and it would seem that Boston, differing from the rest of America
and from England, deems Gloucester a trisyllable and will have none of the
elided "Gloster." That the present home of
Margaret Deland is in the Back Bay is one of its pleasantest features, and the
house, 35 Newbury Street, shows a great frontage of mullion-windowed glass,
being even more marked in respect to glass than her former home on Mt. Vernon Street. And this window frontage is for the sake of
the jonquils and spring flowers that she loves and which she personally plants
and watches. The creator of Doctor Lavendar, the author who has filled Old
Chester with fascinating life, is almost as notable a flower-grower as she is a
novelist, and once a year, in this comfortable, sunny home, she holds a winter
sale of these jonquils that she has grown and gives the proceeds to a vacation
home for girls, a project dear to her heart. A fine daylight view of the
sky-line of the Back Bay may be had from the center of the Cambridge Bridge; I
do not remember any similar view in any other city; and it possesses the
additional peculiarity of being a view of levels: the level of the water, the
level of the parkway, then the generally level line of house roofs. But the
finest view that the Back Bay offers is of the water itself and not the land,
and at night instead of in the daytime. For this view, stand far out on Harvard
Bridge, and the effect is beautiful in the extreme. You are hemmed in by the
rows of city lights that surround the water on all sides; a mile away the view
is finely ended, in one direction, by the arching curve of lights that mark the
Cambridge Bridge; about as far in the other direction, the bordering lights
converge as the water narrows; down the long sides are the unbroken lines of
lights; you see nothing whatever but these lights, and the dark water dimly
illumined by their gleam, and the restless reflections of the myriad lights
struck waveringly down into the water, and the bands of light that royally make
a diadem of the great dome on the height of Beacon Hill. The social rivalry of Beacon
Hill and the Back Bay may be left to the Bostonians, just as the social rivalry
of south and north of Market Street may be left to Philadelphians; and Beacon
Hill and the Back Bay are quite at one on the most Bostonian of all subjects,
that of "family." For in Boston, every one of the worth while is a
descendant; no one who is only an ascendant is for a moment worthy of
comparison with a descendant! One of the cleverest Bostonians once remarked
that although politically there should be equality, socially there should be
"the" quality. As the verse of exclusiveness has it: "The good old city of Boston,
And there are endless
developments. A famous Bostonian, commenting on the great fire of 1872, clearly
indicated that the important feature was, not that he had suffered by this
fire, but that his grandfather had lost 40 buildings in the big fire of 1760!
Boston conversation is apt to be sprinkled thick with Bible-like genealogy; I
have heard, as typical dinner-table conversation, such things as: "James
was the son of John, you know, who was the son of Thomas, the cousin of
William. " Most Bostonians are not much interested in any conversation
unless they can naturally put in an ancestor
or so, and always, in speaking of any happening of the past, Bostonians are
bound to remember that some ancestor or connection was concerned. The traveler
need not journey to China to find ancestor worship. One would no more have
Boston without its naive flavor of family talk than have Maarken without its
typical costumes: family belongs to Boston, as costumes belong to Maarken: and
it is not in the least a boastful pride in ancestors who have done great deeds:
the important thing is to be descended from certain stocks and lines,
arbitrarily decided upon in the course of generations, with no reference
whatever to merit or achievement; it is, indeed, no disadvantage for an
ancestor to have done distinguished deeds for the nation or to have written
distinguished books, but on the other hand it is no disadvantage for the
ancestor to be without distinction. And there is at the same time a fine
breadth and liberality about it all; when one of the oldest and finest families
goes into the making of sausages, and makes them for many, many years and makes
millions of dollars out of them, it does not hurt its social standing in the
least, as it might in some more narrow city. The intense feeling for
family also works out rather oddly in the frequent tying up of family property
to be held undivided by quite a number of heirs; and the fact that such cases
often work hardship through the inability of the heirs either to dispose of the
property or to receive incomes from it, does not at all tend to discourage the
custom. A friend mentioned in casual conversation the other day that she was
born on Mount Vernon Street and had only recently sold her one-ninth part of
her old family home, and that she had done it with a keen wrench of feeling.
You will not infrequently see in the newspapers advertisements offering to lend
money to heirs on their undivided estate or their future inheritance. Family is the common
possession and talk of youth and age, of men and women and boys and girls.
Ancestors are mulled over in all ordinary conversations. Only this evening, as
I walked on Beacon Street beside the Common – literally this evening, and I
quote literally what I chanced to overhear; indeed, even if I wished to I could
not invent anything that would so well illustrate what I am setting down – only
this evening, as two men passed me, one was saying: "His great-grandfather
--"! That was all. It was but a few words caught in passing. But in no
other city could such altogether delightful words have been beard. I was led one day by a
Boston friend to a lecture; It was a lecture on spiders; and the very first
words of the lecturer were: "The Lycosidae is the most prominent family
we have in Boston." And there came to mind a verse I had somewhere heard,
a verse excellent because so really illustrative: "Little Miss Beacon Street Lectures are themselves the
very essence of Boston, and this comes from the time when lecturers, mostly
Bostonians, went forth throughout the country, up-lifting and instructing eager
audiences. In those days, lecturers were held to be representative of the
highest wisdom and lecturing was still deemed the most admirable way of
delivering wisdom-and these two beliefs are still devoutly held in Boston.
Where two or three are gathered together there is sure to be a lecturer in the
midst of them; every Bostonian is a lecturer or a listener; the excellent habit
is unescapable. Nothing else interests Bostonians as lectures do. The summer
course, the fall course, the winter course, the spring course, the lectures of
this, that and the other prophet, are always occupying their time. As a
Bostonian said to me: "If you just sit down anywhere in Boston a lecture
will be poured into your ears." There are lectures on astronomy and
atavism and art; there are lectures on batrachians and Buddhism and
butter-making; there are cooking lectures, cosmos lectures, curtain lectures,
culture lectures; there are lectures on duty and digestion, on philosophy and
Plato, on how to eat and sleep and think and dream; there are lectures on
everything practical and impractical. In fact, the lectures and the lecturers
are innumerable, and the Bostonians have many local authorities to whom they
listen as oracles. As winter comes on the true Bostonian gathers together his
lecture cards and sorts them, and hoards them, and gloats over them, just as a
squirrel gathers and hoards his winter nuts. Lectures are nuts to Bostonians. I remember an acquaintance
saying one afternoon, and I mention it because it is simply typical:
"Aren't you going to So-and-so's lecture at four o'clock?" and when I
replied that I was not, he said promptly: "Then, of course, you are going
to Thus-and-so's lecture this evening?" It would take the last sting from
death if a Bostonian could be assured of courses of lectures through futurity. Holmes loved to sit down and write a poem after any lecture that especially interested him. Turn the leaves of his volumes of verse and you will see quite a number of lengthy poems with titles declaring them to have been written on his return from lectures. A Venetian Palace in the Fenlands The entire idea was
amazingly helped on its way by the foundation of the Lowell lectures, three
quarters of a century ago. A great sum was left by one of the Lowell family for
the sole purpose of paying lecturers to talk to Bostonians, with the typically
Bostonian request that the manager should always, if possible, be a Lowell.
Scores of free lectures are delivered, annually, to Bostonians under the
direction of the Lowell Institute, and the pace thus set is followed so
enthusiastically by all sorts of enthusiasts and associations that there are
hundreds of lectures every year. Second only to lectures in
popularity are concerts. Nothing, indeed, is so held to represent real culture,
in Boston, as a devoted knowledge of music. There is an interest which amounts
almost to a gentle pathos in a Boston musical night – any one of the many
nights at which elect music is worshiped by the elect. The hall itself (there
are many halls in Boston where music may be heard, but there is only one that
is "the" hall), the hall itself is angular and rectangular, with an
effect of the gaunt and the gray, and there is a gentle general effect of age,
of gray-haired women and of men with domes as bare as that of their own State
House, and an interspersing of eye-glassed students holding big black books in
which they devotedly follow the score. If, as to the music itself,
there is satisfaction with a high degree of technical correctness, without the
coincident loveliness of which the composers dreamed, it would simply indicate
that this is the way in which Boston prefers music to be given; if the music is
a shade or so more percussive than is deemed desirable elsewhere, and if the
drum, played passionately, is permitted to stand most markedly for music, it is
all as it should be, and the young students beam with critical joy, and there
is a gentle nodding of elderly heads. And, after all, Boston comes naturally by
a love of the percussive, for at her Peace Jubilee, at the close of the Civil
War, a mighty orchestra and a choir of ten thousand enthralled audiences of
fifty thousand, while twelve cannon thundered in unison and fifty anvils
clanged as one. I should never think of criticising Boston music any more than
I should think of criticising Boston brown bread: each is something
interestingly typical and loyally honored. I remember a French lady, a visitor,
who, not quite getting the Boston viewpoint, asked wonderingly, "Why do
they go to so much trouble to make it?" She was referring to the bread,
but I notice, as I set it down, that the words seem equally to apply to the
music. If Boston should ever lose her charming idiosyncrasies, her brown bread,
her baked beans, her fish balls, her music, her lectures, she would cease to be
Boston. Lectures and music are
naturally included in the subject of the Back Bay because it is at the edge of
the Back Bay that most of the halls for music and lectures are located, and
especially along Huntington Avenue. At Copley Square, where Huntington Avenue
begins, there begins also the most interesting development of modern Boston,
present-day Boston, for, ranging and spreading out, through and beyond the Back
Bay and into the adjoining Fenlands, is building after building, educational or
institutional; hospital buildings, philanthropic buildings, and, most notable
of all, a wide range of school and college buildings; and the average of
architectural beauty is admirably high. Facing into Copley Square is
the Boston Public Library, and, "Built by the people and dedicated to the
advancement of learning" is the noble motto over the main entrance of this
truly beautiful building. And it is a thoroughly good American library, ready
to give due honor to the literature, the science, the art of America as well as
of Europe. Set into the sides of the building are panels giving famous names in
groups of similar kinds, and American names are honored with a quiet
matter-of-factness. With Titian and Velasquez and Hogarth, one sees the name of
West. With Boyle is joined the name of Rumford. With Sterne and St. Pierre and
Chateaubriand stands the name of Irving. Macaulay is between Prescott and
Bancroft. Calvin and Wesley keep company with the New England Mather. And with
Palladio and Wren the name of the Bostonian architect Bulfinch is conjoined. The building is not only
admirable in proportions, but extremely fine in details, and one need not pay
attention to such minor points as the confusion of Strozzi lanterns at the
entrance or to the pedestaled marble lady who, as Bostonians like to point out,
is offering you a marble grape-fruit. Even finer than the exterior
is the interior, with its welcoming stairway with its splendor of tawny marble,
and as you mount the stairs you pass by those dignified memorials to the Civil
War Volunteers of Massachusetts, two great marble lions, one of them with a
broken marble tail that has been so cleverly mended as in itself to represent
positive art! Mounting to the upper
hallway you move past a series of exquisite mural panel paintings by Puvis de
Chavannes; decorative figures in soft lavenders and greens, figures walking or
floating against backgrounds of soft gray or in an ethereal blue that is only
like the perfect blue of the clear sky of a wonderful morning; and all is so
soft and easy and sweet and graceful as to make these murals an achievement in
repression and beauty. Turning from the upper hall to the right, one comes to
glorious pictures by Abbey, high-set, frieze-like, around all the upper part of
a great room that is pilastered and paneled with dark oak, and ceilinged with
dark oak beams picked out with gold. It is a shadowy room, a room intentionally
dark, to give relief and foreground to the pictures, which, representing the
Quest of the Holy Grail, are glories of vivid coloring; knights and ladies and
churchmen in pomp of purple and gold and bright scarlet. And on the floor above
this is Sargent's "Frieze of the Prophets." Within the quadrangle of the
library is an inner court that is so reposeful, so charming, so delightful,
with its arcaded space around its central fountain, as to make it an esthetic
architectural triumph. Facing the library, at the
opposite end of Copley Square (and like the squares of most cities this is not
at all a square in shape), is a building which, some years ago, was looked upon
as an architectural wonder. It is a huge church, a massive pile of yellows and
browns, and, built in mid-Victorian times, was meant to follow some of the
ancient churchly architecture of Europe. Until recent years, Bostonians dwelt
with pride on every detail of this great Trinity Church, and would insist on
pointing out to visitors every detail of design and workmanship. But a change
of taste has gone over the entire country, including Boston, and now it is
quite realized that the church is not beautiful, in spite of the fact that its
great central tower is tantalizingly remindful of that of Tewksbury and that
its little outside stairway is tantalizingly remindful of a Norman stair of
remarkable beauty at Canterbury – tantalizingly, but how different they are! The Back Bay and the
Fenlands, one merging imperceptibly into the other, are really one great flat
region recovered from the swamps, the Fenlands possessing the great advantage
of having a great part kept as parkways, with water and bridges. The residences
of the Fenland are of a more interesting average than those of the Bay – and it
is over here, in the Fen country, that Robert Grant the novelist lives, at 211
Bay State Road. How delightfully the words "Fen" and
"Fenlands" bring up memories of the Boston of Old England, set as it
is in the great flat region of the English Fens! Also in the Fen country, and
not far from Huntington Avenue, is Fenway Court, one of the most remarkable
homes in America, built by Mrs. Isabella Gardner, who dreamt of erecting a
Venetian palace on this level Brenta-like land, and realized her dream. It was
a romantic plan romantically carried out. Mrs. Gardner brought across the ocean
actual parts and fragments of old Italian buildings, that the basis should be
actually Italian, and here she built her Venetian palace, and filled it with
rare and costly examples of old-time European art. Not far from this are the
buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts, impressive of front toward Huntington
Avenue, and positively beautiful in the façade that looks out over the water of
the Fenway, for this face is stately with a long colonnade of great pillars.
The contents of the museum are of admirable average; much is of high interest,
notably the paintings of distinguished Americans of the past by distinguished
American painters of their time. Much of antique furniture is here, largely
American, and it is displayed as if befitting the title of the museum, as if
worthy, as it is, of place among other beautiful products of the fine arts. The
rooms where the furniture is displayed are arranged with wise harmony; a table
of a certain period is likely to be in the center, with furniture of the same
period – sideboard, cupboard, chairs – around the sides; and portraits of the
men and women of the period, by painters of the period, are on the walls. And there is here the most
notable collection of old American silver in America, admirable examples,
including much of the finest work of that admirable silversmith, Paul Revere. A great area, throughout
this general region, is so thick-dotted with educational institutions that it
has begun to be called the Students' Quarter, or, as some Bostonians love to
call it, "Our Latin Quarter." And all this has no reference to
Cambridge, which is across the river and outside the city limits; all this is
actually within Boston, and Boston is very proud of it. In this great clump of Back
Bay and Fenland schools there are already some twelve thousand students in
addition to the Boston-born; and the students and the buildings are constantly
increasing in numbers. It is fine, too, that most of these educational
buildings are as noteworthy, architecturally, as are the numerous buildings
that philanthropic and endowed organizations have built in this general
quarter. With the influence of all
these schools, added to the admitted culture of generations, one might expect a
complete fastidiousness in general speech: and yet, throughout all Boston there is a general and amusing treatment of
"r's". In the first place, Bostonians eliminate this letter
altogether from a host of words such as "Bunker," which is always
given as if it were spelled "Bunkah." For this they will probably
say, and rightly, that there is
good authority. And I presume that, after all, they can show excellent
authority for their thriftiness with these discarded "r's," for they
do not really throw them away or really mislay them, but use them on words that
do not show the letter. It is fascinating to hear them add an "r" to
the end of "area," or say that their dog "nors" a bone; it
is fascinating to hear them speak of "standing in awr"; it is
fascinating to hear a highly-cultured Bostonian, a Brahmin of Brahmins, call his
wife "Bewler" for Beulah or say "Anner" for Anna. It was a Bostonian, who,
having traveled and observed and realized, remarked quaintly, of the succession
of Quincys called Josiah – pronounced, of course, "Josiar " – that
the line did not go on from sire to son but "from 'Siar to 'Siar"! Most notable of all the
educational buildings of the Fenland are those of the School of Medicine of
Harvard University; for Harvard, instead of having all its buildings in
Cambridge, came here to build its school for doctors. The buildings are of marble;
a group of five, fronted and united by terraces and balustrades, and all facing
into a central plaza large enough to give stately architectural relief. The
pillared administration building is flanked on either side by laboratory
buildings and the entire group forms a simple and beautiful whole, with an air
of noble permanence. One Sunday afternoon I was
walking near these buildings when I noticed people running; men well garbed and
women well gowned were running; a limousine drew up at the curb and two men and
a woman leaped from it and ran; a street car stopped and men and women tumbled
from it and ran; it was not mere hurrying, but actual running, and all ran
around the open end of the Medical School plaza. It was clear that there was
either a terrible accident or a fire – most likely one of those noble
buildings, apparently fireproof, was aflame! – so I hurried with the others and
rounded the corner, and all were rushing for a doorway – beside which was a
notice declaring that there was to be a Free Public Lecture, that the doors
were open at 3, and that they were absolutely to be closed at 4:05! I looked at
my watch – it was 4:03 1/2 – and I understood the running. But I think I never
shall be able to understand what they expected the people to do who should enter
at 3, nor why the closing time was so oddly fixed at precisely 4:05! As I looked and read and
turned away, men and women, but in diminishing number, were still running up,
darting past me, and plunging through the door. I halted, for it came to me
that the notice did not mention either the lecturer's name or his subject – and
what a fascinating subject it must be to draw these prosperous men and women
literally on the run! I asked a man of well over sixty, as he flew by. He glanced at me reproachfully, he did not check his speed, but he flung back over his shoulder as he plunged at the door some words that absurdly seemed to end in "fat." Clearly, I must inquire further and must not, again, try to check any one near the door. It was 4:041/2. I saw a youth come bounding on. I hurried toward him and turned beside him and, falling into his stride, asked him what was to be the lecture. We strode together; and he gasped, "The Assimilation of Fats"! With that he dashed at the door – he was the last one in – instantly it was locked – the next comer, a moment too late, tried the handle in grieved futility – it was five minutes after four. |