VI
Boston
As one in tranquillity gazes into the crystal depths called Memory, in search of sights and sounds and colors long since physically passed out from what is otherwise called memory; when one is intent, not upon recalling but upon reentering, he finds a double motion setting in. While out of the gray surface-obscurity of supposed oblivion, there emerges to his view, as through a thinning haze, a broad vision assuming the color and movement of a life once lived, of a world once seen and felt to be real, so likewise, the intensive soul moves eagerly forward descending through intervening atmospheric depths toward this oncoming solid reality of time and place, a reality growing clearer, more colorful, more vibrant, more alluring, more convincing—filling the eye, the ear with sound and color and movement, with broad expanses, with minute details, with villages and cities, farms and work shops, men and women densely gathered or widely scattered, and children, little children always and everywhere. So moving, the two great illusions, the two dreams of the single dreamer, accelerating, rush onward, and vanish both into a single life which is but a dream;—the dream of the past enfolding and possessing the dreamer of today; the dreamer of today enveloping, entering and possessing the dream-reality of the past; all within the inscrutable stillness of a power unknown, within which we float, with our all, and believe ourselves real. We believe in our reality in our strenuous hours, in our practical doings, in our declamatory moments, and even in our hours of silence.
In sleep there come images before us, floating by, irretrievable, or steadfastly convincing; and these we speak of casually as dreams. We are willing even to extend the idea of dream to man’s ambition. We say such or such a man had or has dreams of empire, of dominion, of achievement, of fulfilment of this or that sort. And occasionally we acknowledge, upon information, that such dream had taken full possession not of a man we read about, or see in the plenitude of his power, but that the dream arose within a child, in broad daylight—as night-dreams do in their way—and aroused in him a passionate desire.
We do not associate the idea of dream with our strenuous hours of thought and deed in the selfsame broad daylight. Nor do we see the stars at noon—but they are there. So is a dream there, within every human, ever—day and night unceasingly.
We impeach the dream idea, calling certain men “Dreamers.” We do this in derision—much as the pot might call the kettle black. We do not suspect that we could not put one foot forth before the other were we not dreaming; so artificial and sophisticated are we in our practical moments. And it is even so as we forget that each of us was once a child; even as we banish the thought, as crude, that out of that very child we have grown inevitably to be what we are; that the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the reactions, the waking dreams of that child have governed and determined us, willy-nilly, through the course of our lives and careers with compelling power—that what the child accepted we accept; that what the child rejected we reject.
Thus from the abysm of Memory’s stillness, that child comes into being within Life’s dream, within the dream of eternal time and space; and in him we behold what we were and still are. Environment may influence but it cannot alter. For it is the child in multiple and in multiple series that creates the flowing environment of thought and deed that shall continuously mature in its due time. It is the moving child-in-multiple of long ago that created for us the basic environment within which we now live. Thus in a memory-mirror may we rediscover ourselves. Expecting to find therein a true reflection of ourselves as we believe we are, the image dissolves as the features of a long forgotten child confront us. Deny him, we dare not.
Turning about from self-contemplation we find children everywhere. We see the tidal wave of children moving on and on, we partly under their dominion, they partly under ours. But theirs is the new, ours the old; and, as ancients, we move on, unchanged from the children that we were—leaving our thoughts and deeds as a beaten trail behind us.
With this image in view the narrator has laid extended stress upon an authentic study of child life. Maturing years have made it but too clear that only on such foundation, resting deep within the vast-moving and timeless heritage of Instinct and Intellect, might a valid superstructure be reared into the light of our day. Men in their fatuity believe that they cause replicas of themselves to be born of woman; that they create children like themselves for themselves. They are picturesquely unaware, in mass, that they are but instrumental, normally, in bringing forth full grown men and women whom they may never see, but who, it must be so, are in essence of being with them at birth, specifically differing from them. Hence the unceasing flood of child personalities, accepting or rejecting influences in an environment they had no share in making. Historically, and in mass, victims of Fate rather than Masters of Destiny. For Destiny and Fate alike have birth in what is accepted or rejected by the child.
With this digression as a commentary we may now resume in its natural course the story of a growing child well known to us, and proceed to extend that series of rejections and acceptances—beginning in his infancy—into an ever enlarging world of fact and fiction until we may perchance obtain a glimpse of what they really were, and of their significance in determining his onward drift—a drift that as yet has developed no self-defined momentum.
Shortly after their return to Boston from Newburyport, the father, for reasons of his own, whatever they were, decided to move his family to Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were away six months.
A small boy stood on the dock at Eastport, Maine, holding in his hand a huge greengage plum. The same small boy suffered and saw the agonies of those who cross the Bay of Fundy. He saw and lived in a hotel in Halifax, where an Academy was opened. Later he endured in patience the terrible discipline of his father, who in below zero weather walked him for miles along the bleak “Northwest Arm,” to return with white cheeks and nose, only to be told to wash his face in snow—the father doing the like. He saw his gods blasting a deep trench for water pipe through the solid slate ledge, and again he marvelled at what men could do. He saw the great citadel crowning the heights, and from it, he viewed the harbor. Then came calamity. Mamma was taken down with diphtheria; and he saw the great and grand Newfoundland dog, that had welcomed them effusively on their arrival and had adopted them at once, lying day after day, night after night, faithfully guarding her chamber door. Mamma recovered; but her illness was prophetic of change.
In the spring they returned to Boston, and Louis was sent to live with his grandparents in South Reading, as before, with the proviso that he was to return to his parents in the fall. He became at once deeply immersed in the miniature activities of the farm, taking the initiative wherever he could, doing small things with large enthusiasm. He did not consider such things work, but joy. He was physically active and mentally active too. He was always excited in his work and always constructive. As Grandpa also worked, they became great pals, and planned and worked together. His natural surroundings became less mystical to him. He held them in affection, but no longer in dreamy wonder. The delicate bloom of early childhood was passing, while the vigor and aggressiveness of budding boyhood were rising as branches from the same deep root. His love of the open remained constant and intense. He was developing pride, ambition, and a sense of growing power over material things. The desire some day to exercise such power to the full became in him a definitive dream, within which, unnoticed, was resident the glow of a deeper power—a power that had suffused a swiftly-moving, vocal springtime, which he had seen and heard and lived in this same spot.
Grandpa did not bother about the child’s education, for, being wise, he knew the child was daily self-acquiring an education exactly suited to his temperament and years. But Grandmamma believed otherwise. She thought her grandson needed polish, and that he should now begin a systematic study of the French language. Louis was willing enough and started in gaily. He liked the sound, and the words in italics looked pretty; all went well for a while. As he got in deeper he began to be oppressed by the inanities of the grammar-book, and the imbecilities of a sort of first reader in which a waxwork father takes his wax children on daily promenades, explaining to them as they go, in terms of unctuous morality, the works of the Creator, and drawing therefrom, as from a spool, an endless thread of pious banalities. Louis rebelled. He declared he was an American boy!—that none of his playmates spoke French—why should he? Grandmamma, in habitual indulgence, discontinued polishing. She could not enter the child-mind. To her, her grandson was an object of boundless love—and little more; and yet this little more was an impassable gulf, lying as a chasm between old age gently petrifying in the thoughts of her own childhood, and a vigorous young animal with thoughts and an impetuous will of his own. And he in turn held his grandmamma to be the sweetest of mortals—and little more.
Thus summer passed on broad pinions sweeping, and Louis saw it moving thus. He saw such things. Beneath all the overlay the child was a mystic; inarticulate, wondering, believing. These fleeting revelations of Life came and went as interludes within the chosen practicalities of his realistic and material activity. He had rather help build a stone wall than listen to a poem—all except the fairy tales that Julia told—for here was Romance—and romance he could not withstand.
One morning;—it happened to be September 3rd of that year—Louis Henri Sullivan arose early and sallied forth in pomp and pride. On the Stoneham road he met a farmer friend:
“Hello! Do you know I am eight years old today?”
“No, wall, wall, that’s fine. Heow old did yeh say yeh be?”
“I am Eight! Don’t you think I’m a big boy now? Do you want to feel my muscle?”
“My sakes—but yeh aire strong!”
“Yes I am. I can lift a stone almost as big as my grandfather can; but of course he’s older.”
“How old did yeh say yeh be?”
“I say I am eight years old today and I want you to know it. Do you want to pound my chest?”
“Can’t say’s I do.”
“You may pound my chest as hard as you like and I won’t say a word. Have you noticed my new boots? It’s my first pair. My grandma gave them to me for my birthday.”
“No I hadn’t saw them.”
“Well, look at them now. See; they’re copper-toed and have red tops. Don’t you think they’re fine?”
“Yaas; how old did yeh say yeh be? I think yeh got a mighty fine granny t’give yeh them boots.”
And the Ancient doddered down the road dustily regurgitating the thoughts of his childhood now become decayed and senile; while bounding boyhood clattered on, from house to house, from field to field, wherever might be found man, woman, or child to whom he might sing his own saga in vainglory. For was he not right? Was he not Eight? Was he not heroically aware that that day he was crossing the invisible line between childhood and boyhood? Were not the gaudy boots his plain certificate of valor and of deeds done and to be done? Were they not for him symbols of that manhood toward which he so ardently yearned that his pride might come to the full? He said it was so. In this joyous mood was his saga sung, as of one with a growing faith.
Then came, as it were, a bugle call from the south. He answered the call in person. Boston City swallowed him up.
The effect was immediately disastrous. As one might move a flourishing plant from the open to a dark cellar, and imprison it there, so the miasma of the big city poisoned a small boy acutely sensitive to his surroundings. He mildewed; and the leaves and buds of ambition fell from him. In those about him, already city-poisoned, even in his own kin, he found no solace, and ceased openly to lament. Against the big city his heart swelled in impatient, impotent rebellion. Its many streets, its crooked streets, its filthy streets, lined with stupid houses crowded together shoulder to shoulder like selfish hogs upon these trough-like lanes, irritated him, suffocated him; the crowds of people, and wagons, hurrying here and there so aimlessly—as it appeared to him—confused and overwhelmed him, arousing amazement, nausea and dismay. As he thought of the color, the open beauty of his beloved South Reading, and the great grand doings of Newburyport, where men did things; where there was obvious, purposeful action; an exhibit of sublime power; the city of Boston seemed a thing already in decay. He was so saddened, so bewildered, so grieved, that his sorrow, his bitter disappointment, could find no adequate utterance and relief. Hence he kept it all within himself, and became drugged to the point of lassitude and despair. The prospect of a whole winter to be spent within these confines, shut out from the open world that had been growing so large and splendid for him, filled him at times with a sudden frantic desire to escape. Had not his father at once taken up again the rigorous training of cold baths and outdoor exercise, had he not taken him on long walks to Roxbury, to Dorchester, even to Brookline, where the boy might see a bit of green and an opening-up of things, the boy would surely have carried out his resolution to run away. To run where? Anywhere to liberty and freedom!
He had partly revived from the first shock, when his ruthless father placed him in the Brimmer School on Common Street. Louis found it vile; unspeakably gloomy; a filthy prison for children. He learned nothing. There was no one to teach him, and what he saw there shall not be recorded here. So passed the winter; Louis looking, ever aimlessly, yearning, for a teacher. As a rose springs upward from the muck and puts forth gracious blooming, even so out of the muck of this school a reaction sprang up, a fervent hungered yearning within, for a kindred spirit to arise that might illumine him and in whom he might rejoice; a spirit utterly human that would break down the dam made within him by sanctioned suppressions and routine, that there might pour out of him the gathered cesspool, and the waters of his life again flow on. Of such a nature was the hunger of a well-fed child.
As the Boston winter of ’64 was groaning on its way to the tomb of all winters, Mamma was again stricken with diphtheria; and again she recovered. The city winter passed, a city springtime passed. With vacation at hand, Louis returned to his grandparents, resumed his activities now enlarged in scope, and in the fall returned to the City, his wounds somewhat healed. He was immediately placed in the newly organized Rice School—temporarily housed in another gloomy structure, but not so foul—at that time situated on the west side of Washington Street and a short distance south of Dover Street. Here he learned nothing at first except in-so-far as there was a sort of mechanical infiltration going on. But, at a nearby book store, Beadle’s Dime Novels appeared in a whirlwind of popularity. Louis Sullivan pounced upon them. He devoured the raw melodramas and cried for more. Here at last was Romance! Here again were great men doing great deeds. Here was action in the open. He could live these scenes. He could visualize these acts even within the deadly philistine air of Washington Street and its Rice School where he was supposed to know that 2 ∶ 4 ∶∶ 4 ∶ 8. He did not especially care for the standardized lady in the case who was always ravishingly beautiful and always eighteen; and to the villain he was sometimes lenient, but the hero, that magnificent man-god whose ear had just been grazed by the arrow of a huge red savage—him he took to his bosom. He got a thrill out of every page, which was more than he ever got out of the school. He was to remain at this school for several years, during which time he slowly became citified. His activities naturally spread over an ever widening field; and these years were filled with multifarious details large and small. His geographical ventures extended from South Reading as a center to Stoneham, Woburn, North Reading, Saugus and Ipswich; and from Boston as a center to Rockport, Gloucester, Marblehead, Salem, Lynn and Nahant; and southward into Jamaica Plain. Between Boston and South Reading were dotted, as villages or hamlets, Somerville, Malden, Melrose, Greenville and South Reading Junction. West of the Junction was a small affair called Crystal Lake, with bare and sterile surroundings, including an icehouse on its northern shore. The big pond to the north of South Reading—then a village of possibly two thousand souls—was officially known as Lake Quannapowitt. From the western shore of this lake projected a promontory, and within this promontory was a cemetery.
During these years, Louis Sullivan, always inquisitive and foolhardily curious, had ferreted out every street, alley and blind court, and dock and wharf from end to end and crosswise within the limits of Boston, and had made partial explorations of Charlestown, Chelsea, and South Boston. Thus there gradually arose within his consciousness a clearing sense of what a city meant objectively as a solid conglomerate of diverse and more or less intricate activities. He began indeed to sense the city as a power—unknown to him before—a power new-risen above his horizon; a power that extended the range and amplified the content of his own child-dream of power as he had seen it manifested in the open within the splendid rhythm of the march of the seasons. Nevertheless, he saw, in his boy-way, and felt it strongly, a great mysterious contrast between the two. In the open all was free, expansive and luminous. In the city all was contraction, density, limitation, and a cruel concentration. He felt that between himself and the city, as such, lay a harsh antagonism that seemed forever insoluble; as though men had made the city when they were mad; and that as it grew under their hands it had mastered and confined them. Yet men, women and children seemed to move about freely enough at certain hours. These waves of doubt and apprehension came and passed at intervals, but each wave left its precipitate, in solution as it were, in the boy’s quizzical mind. He became less and less unfriendly toward the school, as sporadic knowledge crept out of his books and took on a certain segregated appearance of validity, having slight connection, however, with his own world. He ceased to be wholly rebellious, and took his small doses of formal routine education much as he might take a medicine supposedly for his good. Thus far his father had been his only successful teacher.
The boy had acquired and was continuing to acquire the education he possessed partly through a series of shocks—frequently humiliating—which inverted his illusions into realities; partly through his own keen powers of observation, and perhaps something in the way of intuition; but mainly and fundamentally through his high sensitiveness to externals which, always with him, took on character, definition and, as it were, a personality. He was now ripe for another shock.
One day his father took him on a walk to South Boston, and made him run up a high hill on the top of which was a reservoir. This altitude reached, a great view spread before them. The boy at once became exalted with awe at the living presence and expanding power of Mother Earth. Never—since the long forgotten days of Halifax—had he reached such a peak of observation. His father’s love for “scenery” had taken them there. As the boy gazed in thrilling wonder, his father called attention, one after another, to special points of beauty in the land and waterscape, finally coming around to the Blue Hills, which indeed were blue and enchanting against the far horizon and its haze. After explaining the nature of the haze, father called attention to two outstanding peaks, near together but differing in size, and asked his son a point-blank question: Which of the two hills is the larger? His son walked straight into the trap, saying that of course the larger one was the larger—why did Papa ask? Then the trap fell—knocking Louis senseless—for Papa said, (beyond a doubt maliciously he said it) that the smaller was the larger. When Louis came to, he protested vehemently; but Papa said he had been there and knew. Then, relenting, believing he had carried his practical joke far enough, he told his son, seriously, that the effect, the appearance, the illusion was, in fact, due to what he called perspective; and the nature of this particular perspective, and perspective in general, he explained with notable skill, simplicity, and with many objective instances. But Louis instead of receiving this information with acclaim and joy, as a new world opening before him, was deeply saddened and perturbed. His father, sincerely believing he was educating his own, came near to destroying him. He was no psychologist, he had indeed but little human sympathy or insight—hence he had no suspicion of what was going on beneath the surface of his own son. For had not that son built up a cherished world all his own, a world made up of dreams, of practicalities, of deep faith, of unalloyed acceptance of externals, only now to find that world trembling and tottering on its foundations, threatening to collapse upon him, or to vanish before this new and awful revelation from the unseen. This ghostly apparition which his father called “perspective” terrorized him. What his father said about it did not help. For behind the perspective that the father saw was a perspective that the child saw—invisible to the father. It was mystery—a mystery that lay behind appearances, and within appearances, and in front of appearances, a mystery which if penetrated might explain and clarify all, as his father had explained and clarified a little. Did this mystery reside also in his lovely slender elm tree? Was his great friend the ash tree involved in mystery? Was the sunrise that had glorified him and the earth around him part of this mysterious perspective that lay behind appearances, that lay behind even the clear apparition his father called perspective? Must he lose his faith in what seemed real? Was Boston itself and all within it but a mask and a lie? Was there within it and behind it a perspective, a mystery which if understood might reveal and clarify it, making it intelligible? Could this mystery be penetrated? He was determined it should be, soon or late—and that he would do it. Thus had a father’s playful joke set up in a child a raging fermentation. Such high-pitched emotion could not last. Such vision was bound to fade. Such fear must pass. And so it happened. The turmoil, the chaos lasted but as the span of a daydream. But within that dream, within that turmoil, there awakened a deeper dream that has not passed. Thus Louis Sullivan accepted and rejected; rejected and accepted.
He returned to the school and the streets which were much the same thing to him. At recess he promptly announced that he could lick any boy of his size. Whereupon “his size” knocked him in the eye, and the two “sizes” went at it, according to regulations which consisted in beginning fairly and ending foully—two boys rolling over and over in the middle of the street, in the center of an eager, urging, admiring circle of excited ruffians of varied sizes, who cried at the proper time: “He’s had enough; let him up.” Sometimes Louis’s prophecies were verified. Sometimes they proved unfortunate. But it was all the same, all in the game; and there was established in the school a “Who’s Who” that never reached print. Moreover there was established a Hierarchy in which each “who” was definitely ranked according to the who’s he could lick, and the who’s and sizes who could lick him. And while all this was going on, Louis picked up, in addition to a bit of geography and arithmetic, every form of profanity, every bit of slang, and every particle of verbal garbage he could assimilate. In other words he was one of the gang and a tough. But his honor required that he refrain from licking the good boys just because they were good—which could not be said of some.
He was progressing so well at school, his mother thought—for his teacher so certified for reasons unknown—perhaps to conceal the truth—that she believed it time he learn to play the piano. Louis thought otherwise. Mamma was stern, Louis yielded. Mamma promised it should be half an hour only, every day. She placed her watch in good faith on the piano shelf—fatal error—and the series began. It was not that Louis disliked music; quite the contrary. Had not his parents but recently taken him to Boston Music Hall, there to hear a great Oratorio rendered by the Handel and Haydn Society? Had he not been overwhelmed by the rich volume and splendor of choral harmonies—again a new and revealing world? Had he not thrilled to the call: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in.”
Was he not always teasing his mother to play for him any one of a group of brilliant five-fingered exercises arranged as stately composition? No; Louis loved his Mamma but hated the piano when annexed to himself. So the series moved on to disaster. The five-finger work bored him, the dinky tunes enraged him; he watched the watch, he kicked the piano, he struck false notes, he became utterly unruly; and at the agonizing end of one especially bad half-hour, Mamma burst into hysterical tears; and Louis, seeing the damage he had done, threw his arms about her neck and cried his heart out with her. Thus the series ended, by mutual understanding and Mamma’s forgiveness—as Mamma’s tears still flowed from bitterly swollen eyes, as she gazed blindly in unspeakable sorrow at her repentant but incorrigible son. But—let it be said in a whisper—Mamma should have known that Louis’s hands were not made for the piano. Louis did not know it; yet there lay all the trouble.
Then the father thought he would teach his son drawing. His son thought otherwise. His son detested drawing. The prospect of copying a lithographic plate setting forth a mangle, a stepladder, a table, a mop and a pail, was not alluring. Louis demurred. Father thought a thrashing would help along some. He started in. A she-wolf glared. He quailed—End of stillborn drawing lesson. No series.
Meanwhile the name of the village of South Reading was, by popular vote, changed to Wakefield. Cyrus Wakefield, rattan magnate, thought it good business to offer a new town hall in exchange for his name. The townspeople thought so too. The deed was done; both deeds were done; and, as if on a magic carpet the farm that Louis had lived on floated from South Reading into Wakefield—meanwhile remaining stationary as of yore. This occurred in the summer of 1868 when Louis was in his twelfth year.
Meanwhile, also, in 1868, a new school building was in course of construction on new made land in the Back Bay district. It was to be up to date in all respects, and was to be called The Rice Grammar School Building.
In the winter of this year, Mamma, for the fifth time, was stricken with diphtheria and her life despaired of. She pulled through on a perilous margin. Father, now thoroughly frightened, finally got it through his head that the east winds meant death. So in the summer of 1869 he moved his family to Chicago—leaving Louis behind, to live with his grandparents, and continue his education. Louis sobbed on his mother’s shoulder, but was much relieved to say to his father: Goodbye! Now he was free!