The Book of Boston

Robert Shackleton

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783849649241
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Mr. Shackleton finds Boston a "very human city, with pleasantly piquant peculiarities." Of course he tells interestingly the things to be seen in Boston, but he deals still more with that Boston which is "a state of mind"—the literary tradition of the city, its lecture habit, its ancestor worship, the "Boston Bag" and the "Sacred God"—and the things that make it a "woman's city." This is not only a guide to Boston sights—it's a pilot to Boston prejudices and fine beliefs. Sprinkled with anecdote and flavored with personal adventure, it is a book to cherish, to lend, to read aloud.

 

Chapter I - Taking Stock Of The City

 

I SHALL write of Boston. I shall write of the Boston of to-day; of what Boston has retained, and what it has become and what it has built; and I shall write, to use the quaint old Shakespearean phrase, of the memorials and the works of art that do adorn the city. I shall write of the Boston to which thousands of Americans annually pilgrimage. And if, in writing of the Boston of to-day, there is mention of the past, it will be because in certain aspects, in certain phases, the past and the present are inextricably blended. Boston is dear to the hearts of Americans.

A city of interest, this: a city with much of charm, with much of beauty, with much of dignity. A city of idols as well as of ideals, and with some of the idols clay. For, indeed, it is a very human city, with pleasantly piquant peculiarities. On the whole, in its development, a comfortable city. A city of traditions that are fine and traditions that are not so fine. A city of beliefs and at the same time of prejudices. A city rich in associations, rich in its memories of great men and great deeds, rich in its possession of places connected with those men and deeds. No other American city so richly and delightfully summons up remembrance of things past.

I shall write of the people as well as of their city, and of their character and peculiarities and ways. Boston, with its prosperous present and its fine, free relish of a history that is like romance, is a likable city, a pleasing city, a city to win the heart.

And it still has the aspect of an American city. Hosts of foreigners have come in, but something in the spirit of the place tends finely to assimilation. Some portions of the city are altogether foreign, but on the whole the American atmosphere has persisted. There is constantly the impression that Americans are still the dominant and permeative force, and one comes to realize that by their influence, and by a splendid system of day schools and night schools, they are steadily making Americans of foreigners and even more so of the children of foreigners. The early Bostonians, by means of the forces of a thoughtful civilization, and constantly by earnest work and profound sacrifices, expended their energies in fitting their country for the citizens of the future. The Bostonians of to-day find it necessary to fit those citizens for our country!

Boston is a mature city, a mellow city, a city of experience and experiences, a city of amenities, a city of age. Never was there a greater fallacy than the still-continuing one that ours is a new country! It is generations since this was true. When one remembers that the Pilgrims came three centuries ago, and that the Bostonian settlers closely followed them, it is strange that there should still be an impression that this means youth. Clearly, undoubtedly, the city of Boston is old. If one should say that it is not old because it is younger than London, then neither is London old because it is younger than Rome. Age is necessarily a relative term, and three centuries of vivid, earnest, eager, glowing life give age to Boston.

Yet it is not merely because of its age that Boston holds one. A city, like a building or like a person, must have much more than mere age to arouse interest. A city must have charm or beauty or grace, or brave associations with a long-past time; and Boston, with the soft twilight into which its more distant history vaguely merges and with its possessions of beauty and delightfulness and dignity, assuredly possesses these requisites. History and buildings, great achievements, picturesque events — Boston may point to them all.

But I shall not attempt to tell everything, or even every important thing, in Boston's present or Boston's past. He who writes of Boston must, from necessities of time and space, leave much untold and undescribed; but in selecting what seem the essential and most notable features one ought, at least, to present the piquant city in a fair and rounded way.

And Boston ought not to be considered in a narrow geographical sense. To write properly of Boston is to write also of the neighboring towns that have come to be associated with her in common acceptance and common thought; the places over which the mantle of Boston has been flung and which stand hand in hand with her in the light of tradition and history.

Chapter II - Boston Common

BOSTON COMMON has given to Boston individuality. Standing practically untouched and unbroken, in the very heart of the city, it represents the permanence of ideals. And it has always represented liberty, breadth, uniqueness of standpoint. One gathers the impression that the people of Boston will retain their liberty so long as they retain their Common, and will sink into commonplaceness only if they give up their Common. It is, in a double sense, a Common heritage.

Utilitarianism would long ago have taken this great central space to make way for the natural development of business; this great opening, in the ordinary course of city growth, would long ago have been cut by streets and covered with buildings. But Boston has held loyally to her ideals: she has held the Common; from the first, she seems to have had a subconscious sense of its indispensability to her.

One might begin, in writing of the Common, with naming the streets that bound it, and setting down the precise area — which, by the way, is not far from fifty acres — but the vital fact about it is that for almost three hundred years, almost from the beginning of Boston, the Common has been a common in fact as well as in name, held for public use throughout these centuries. No street has ever been put through it; no street car line has been allowed to cross. To some extent the subway has been permitted to burrow beneath, but that has itself been for public use without affecting the surface. The long-ago law of 1640 declared that " There shall be no land granted either for houseplott or garden, out of ye open ground or common field," and this inhibition, broadly interpreted for the Common preservation, has held through the centuries. In 1646 — how long, long ago! — a law was passed, further to strengthen the matter, declaring that the Common should forever be held unbroken until a vote of the majority of the people should permit it to be sliced or cut; and this very year in which I write, the people, on account of this ancient law, voted on a proposition to reduce the Common in order to widen bordering streets, and by a big majority voted it down.

The ordinary American impression of a common is of a shadeless and cheerless expanse, a flat, bare space. But Boston Common is crowded thick with old trees, it is light and cheerful and alive with happiness; instead of being flat it is delightfully diversified, and instead of being bare it has, over all of its surface excepting the playground spaces, an excellent covering of grass — and this in spite of the fact that there are no keep-off-the-grass prohibitions. The Common is a space to be freely used, but the people love it and do not ruin it with use.

Those whom one ordinarily meets on the Common are of the busy, earnest, clean-cut types. Many of them, one sees at a glance, have grandmothers. All are well-dressed, alert, genially happy — and the fancy persistently comes that the very air of the Common diffuses a comfortable happiness.

Among the pleasantest of the many pleasant associations with the Common is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and of how, as a small boy, he used to tend his mother's cow here! There is a fine and simple breeziness in the very thought of it. What a picture — the serious, solemn little boy so solemnly and seriously doing his part to aid his widowed mother in the time of her straitened fortunes! I think it much more than a mere fancy that the influences of that time had much to do with making Emerson a patient and practical and kindly philosopher instead of merely a cold and theoretical one. And I associate with those early days a tale of his later years, a tale of his coming somewhere upon a young man who was vainly struggling to get a mild but exasperating calf through a gate: pushing would not do, pulling would not do, and, "Oh, don't beat her!'' said a gentle voice, and the by -that-time famous Emerson tucked a finger into the corner of the calf's mouth and the little beast trotted quietly along, sucking hard! I think that Emerson, personally lovable man that he was, owed to his experience with the cow on the Common the possession of so great a share of the milk of human kindness, and to his living for a time at the very edge of the Common much of his open outlook on life. And there comes to mind a letter in which someone mentioned his writing, as a boy, a scholarly composition on the stars, because of thoughts that came to him from looking up at the stars from the Common. That is the sort of thing that represents Boston Common. Perhaps " Hitch your wagon to a star!'' came to Emerson from the inspiration of those early days.

Cows were freely pastured on the Common until about 1830; and one thinks of the delightful story of Hancock, he of the mighty signature, who, having on hand a banquet for the officers of some French warships, at a time when the friendship of the French meant much to us, and learning that his own cows had not given milk enough, promptly sent out his servants to milk every cow on the Common regardless of ownership! And the very owners of the cows liked him the better for it. And the fact that Hancock's splendid mansion looked out over the Common had, doubtless, much to do with giving him the cheerfully likable qualities that he possessed, in spite of qualities not so likable. For this is such a human Common! You cannot help feeling it every time you cross it or walk beside it or look out over it. It is a place where people are natural, even though you no longer see cows there. And there is a building on fashionable Mount Vernon Street, close by, a low one-story studio building, which not only, though the inhibition is ancient indeed, is kept down to one-story height as an incorporeal hereditament of the houses opposite, which did not wish their view interfered with, but which also possesses, opening upon the street, a broad door which — so you are told, and you have no desire to risk the chances of disproval by unearthing old documents — must forever remain a broad door so as to let out the cows for the Common!

The Common is not all a level, nor is it all a hill, for it is freely diversified with levels and slopes. It is a pleasantly rolling acreage and possesses even a big pond. And there are a great many trees, in spite of the difficulties that trees face in their fight for existence against city air and smoke, and in spite of the ravages of the gypsy moth, and in spite of serious lopping. The trees still cast a royal shade and give a fine, sweet air to it all.

It is pleasant, too, to notice the system adopted here many years ago, and now in use in some other cities also, of marking carefully the different trees with both their popular and botanic names. For my own part, I remember that it was as a youth, on Boston Common, that I first learned to differentiate the English elm from the American and the linden from the English elm.

One may get somewhat of real beauty on the Common too, as, the glorious yellow and green effect of the great gold dome of the State House seen through and beyond the trees.

The paths, whether of asphalt or earth, are rather shabby, and the Common has nothing of the aspect of gardens or of trimmed lawns. There is an excellent Public Garden just beyond the Common, if that is what one is looking for.

I know of no other open space in America so genially and generally used. And no one, except once in a while for some special event or reason, ever goes to the Common — no one needs to — for it is simply right here at the center of things, and doesn't need going to! It is crossed and passed and looked at in the daily routine of life.

In its complete exclusion of vehicles, the Common is the pedestrian's paradise; and never were there paths that lead on such unexpected tangents. Never were there paths which so puzzlingly start you in apparent good faith for one destination only to make you find yourself most surprisingly headed in another. Yet these perplexing paths are all straight! The uneven and vari-angled sides which make the Common neither round nor oblong nor square nor anything at all, are responsible for leading even the oldest citizen away from his objective if he for a moment forgets what a lifetime of familiarity with these paths has taught him.

Many of the Common walks, as winter approaches, are made to look amusingly like the sidewalks of some village, for interminable lengths of planking, full of slivers and holes, are dragged from their summer's hiding places and laid down here, on crosspieces that raise them a few inches above the level of the walks.

A prettily shaded path is the one known as the Long Path, leading far on under tall and overarching trees from the steps opposite Joy Street to the junction of Boylston and Tremont, and this is the path followed by the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress in the charming love episode that was long ago so charmingly told. One may almost think that the human touch of this pretty romance, with its simple glow of love and life, is the most delightful bit of humanity about the Common, and the fact that it was a love affair of fiction does not make the story the least particle unreal, for everyone remembers it as if it was lovemaking of the real and actual kind.

Although the Common has been held immune from homes or streets for these three centuries, a part of it was long ago given over to a graveyard. It is a large graveyard, too, and, although it is directly across from thronged sidewalks and sparkling shops and theaters, it is just as attractively gloomy in appearance as a good old-fashioned graveyard ought to be! Central as it is, and befitting its name of Central Burying Ground, it has all the interest of aloofness. It is practically hidden, it is almost forgotten and overlooked; and this effect is really remarkable.

One of the many who are buried here was the inventor of a soup that promises to keep his name in perpetual remembrance — of such varied possibilities does Fame make use to hold men's names alive! Many years ago a certain Julien was a cook and a caterer in Boston, an excellent cook and caterer whose finest achieved ambition was the making of a certain soup which so hugely tickled the palates of the elect that by general consent the name of Julien was lovingly attached to it. Well, he deserves his fame, as does any man who adds to the happiness and health of humanity. And here his body lies.

And in this lonely and melancholy cemetery, with the brilliant shops and theaters so incongruously looking out over it, there is buried the artist admittedly honored as the greatest of early American portrait painters; perhaps the greatest, even including the best of modern days; and of course I refer to Gilbert Stuart. This son of a snuff grinder was honored abroad as well as at home, and gave up a triumphant career in England, in the course of which he painted King George the Third and the Prince of Wales, who was to become George the Fourth, in order to satisfy his intense desire to return to America to paint a greater George than either.

It is fitting that he should be buried here in New England's greatest city, for he was New England born, and he lived in Boston throughout the...

Table of contents

• Chapter I - Taking Stock Of The City
• Chapter II - Boston Common
• Chapter III - Boston Preferred
• Chapter IV - On The Prim, Decorous Hill
• Chapter V - The City Of Holmes
• Chapter VI - A House Set On A Hill
• Chapter VII - A Picturesque Bostonian
• Chapter VIII - A Woman's City
• Chapter IX - The Distinctive Park Street Corner
• Chapter X - Two Famous Old Buildings
• Chapter XI - To The Old State House
• Chapter XII -Faneuil Hall And The Waterside
• Chapter XIII - The Streets Of Boston
• Chapter XIV -. In The Old North End
• Chapter XV - Down Wapping Street And Up Bunker Hill
• Chapter XVI - The Back Bay And The Students Quarter
• Chapter XVII - Heights Reached And Kept
• Chapter XVIII - Colleges Red And Common Green
• Chapter XIX - An Adventure In Pure Romance
• Chapter XX - A Town That Washington Wanted To See
• Chapter XXI - The Famous Old Seaport Of Salem
• Chapter XXII - The Most Important Road In America
• Chapter XXIII - Plymouth And Provincetown
• Chapter XXIV - The Night Shall Be Filled With Music