Boston and the Boston Legend

THIS is a shot at a biography of Boston by a Bostonian who runs a chatter column on a New York newspaper. But anyone who dismisses it on the latter account had better read it and apologize, or, better yet, apologize and then read it. There are no wisecracks, and little piffle. It is an astute and honest book.

Enough of Boston’s legend is implicit in Mr. Beebe’s account of modern Boston so that a lot of the early history, which is equally available elsewhere anyhow, could have been dispensed with. However, he does make the legend clear—that legend which has given Boston its continuity and enabled it to survive the rattling and banging which each of its religious and political and legal crazes has given it; a continuity which has enabled it to accept, and cherish, its eccentricities. More than that, Mr. Beebe makes it clear that the legend is not only something which Boston once had, but something which Boston now is. A something as truly exemplified in the idealisms of Brook Farm as in the lustiness of the good food and good wine which seem to have distracted some of the reviewers into dismissing Mr. Beebe’s book as a mere guide to eating in Boston; something as characteristic of Abbott Lawrence’s welcome when John Brown came to Boston, and his support of Free Kansas, as of the precautions which some Boston trustees took when they moved their securities to Worcester during the Spanish War.

Its mistakes of fact are really irrelevant. It does n’t matter that Mr. Beebe makes the Revolutionary’ mobs a lot more aristocratic than they were, because the Boston he is describing got to think of them as such. It makes little odds that he plants Fruitlands in Concord instead of Harvard. Commencement is held in Sanders only when it rains. Never, never could Nappy carry members between the Porcellian and the A. D.; he drives them in town. So far as the facts go, the book’s real failing is in undertelling its stories rather than in inaccuracy. For example, when President Lowell got the broken pieces of the Harvard china out of excavations in the Yard, it was from excavations, it might have been added, made on the site of the ancient University Minor. And the Dr. Holmes of the verses and novels was also the man who dared to tell the doctors that it was they who were communicating puerperal fever among their patients.

It is often said that the best accounts of the social and political manners of a place or people are written by foreigners. This would be applicable here had not Mr. Beebe once been a native of Boston. But, curiously enough, in Boston and the Boston Legend the sympathy and affection, and in the end sentimentality, which he shows for his subject are discernible those of the outsider, whereas the perspicacity which illuminates the book is that of a member of the family who, sometimes caustically and sometimes snobbishly, is shrewdly and happily conscious of the vagaries and excellencies of the rest of the family.

CHARLES P. CURTIS, JR.