Literary Boston As I Knew It | Page 9

never
think them other than what they appeared: the emanations of a rarely
gifted and singularly poetic mind. I feel better than I can say how

necessarily they were the emanations of a New England mind, and how
to the subtler sense they must impart the pathos of revolt from the
colorless rigidities which are the long result of puritanism in the
physiognomy of New England life.
Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life in
many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they
could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. From
time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that earlier
strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding
faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.

V.
I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am
aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at
Cambridge and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the
celebrity of Boston. I would also like him to think of it as still a great
town, merely, where every one knew every one else, and whose
metropolitan liberation from neighborhood was just begun.
Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions.
He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned.
He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men
as he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one
writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it
might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He
wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was
solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I
doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was
good in an author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically
bad than what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New
England, and he was of New England in a certain general intelligence,
which constantly grew with an interrogative habit of mind.

He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which
made such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes
rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen
perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
than his sense of it.
I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently
renewed. Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a
slight, short, ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth
and a silk hat of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with
square features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large
glasses, and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was
a type of out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in
the hospitable qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept
fondly in the memory of all who ever knew him.
Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym
as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized
Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking,
and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to
London, with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or
five years before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We
had met in Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless
well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since
shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in
front of