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$P £ N C \ S P O W7 MAY R$ am L P £ N C \ s P O W7 MAY r Pi ROYAL% FAMILY Building Truscon's complete line of quality building products Industry of steel—steel windows and doors, metal laths, steel joists, roofdeck, structural steel, and a host of others—blanket the requirements of the building in dustry and meet every architectural specification. See Sweet's or write for individually bound catalogs. YOUNGSTOWN OHIO NEW ENGLAND BY RALPH WALKER, F. A. I. A. Two books have appeared recently which Learning, in New England, has had a long greatly add to an understanding of New background. England thinking and ways—"The Flowering In the New York Hernld-Tribitiie recently, of New England" by Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis Gannett made this statement concern• "The Late George Apley" by John P. Mar- ing Waldo Frank—"A son of a private library quand. They sum up the nineteenth century. in a land which knows only public and circu• New England developed a peculiarly ro• lating libraries." This was not true of New mantic culture, considering that the New England, for the private library was universal Englander has had the reputation of being and generally quite large. Even in very early "close." Not only close in regard to money days and in more than one community this matters, but close-mouthed as well. But your would have been true—"Learning was omni• New Englanders are provincial in much the present. In a population wholly derived from same way that any people are who have pro• England, one counted the foreigners on a duced a good life of their own, and which they single hand: two Scotch gardeners, a hair- recognize as such, in that they are more happy cutter of nebulous antecedents, one Irishman, in their own home surroundings. the master of a spade. And the Irishman knew The New Englander readily appreciates the his Latin, like everyone else: He had learned feeling of George Apley who, while in Rome, his Horace at a hedge school and was always opined: "It seems to me that Mrs. Gardner has ready to lean on his spade and test a boy's brought back to us all that is really best of knowledge of the Quo me, Baccbe"** Rome and Italy and has considerately left the The learning and culture, however, has al• rest behind. A visit to her Fenway Palace really ways been based on that of Europe. It had, suffices to show one everything. The head of definitely, a classical background tinged with Aphrodite in our Museum is superior to any• an English point of view. thing I have seen in the Vatican. I also think Noah Webster, for example—"Already an that we have by far the better half of the so- elderly man, he had lived through the Revo• called Ludovici Throne. I wish the Coliseum lution; and, filled as he was with patriotic was situated in a more open space as is our fervour, he had not failed to note that, while Harvard Stadium, so that one could view its the Americans boasted of their freedom, proportions at a single glance. I have been, of nevertheless their arts, their dress, their cus• course, to see the grave of Keats, but that toms still aped the ways of the mother coun• burying ground does not seem to me as inter• try."* * esting as our own Granary burying ground While there was a serious attempt to de• which one can see so comfortably from the velop a purely American literature, those who upper windows of our own Athenjeum."* tried—Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, and Not only is your New Englander provincial Hawthorne—realized the constant difficulties in a homey way, but he is ostentatious only in which were encountered in the Colonial aspect so far as learning is concerned, and a belief of their efforts. such as the following seems well worth noting: Hawthorne exclaimed: "I want my place, "Who would have respected wealth in Boston my own place, my true place in the world, if wealth had not, in turn, respected learn- my proper sphere, my thing which Nature ing?"** intended me to perform when she fashioned It reminds me of a subject on which Hil- me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought dreth Meiere and Kimon Nicolaides did so all my lifetime."** beautiful a job—"The only reason for wealth And Samuel Ward in a paper on criticism is to aid in creating beauty, and the only way wrote: "Our first misfortune is, that there is to conserve wealth is through the creation of a reference to a standard from without, viz., beauty." England. As the spirit that dictates it is, from many causes, unfair and depreciating, a nat• *"Tbe Lite George Apley" published by E. P. Dn/toii •>»"jhc Flouering of Neu England" published by Little, Broun ural consequence has been to cause all our own 267 PENCIL POINTS criticism to take the opposite ground, to over• storm. With but few exceptions the hitching praise that which is felt to be undervalued or posts have been removed from the curbs of invidiously regarded . Although all original these sidewalks, but here and there an iron literature comes from and refers to the heart ring set in the curbing is a silent reminder of of the people, it cannot, except in a rude age, the days of the horse, when a child might coast address itself to that people except through a down Mt. Vernon Street. The covered alley• class capable of receiving it. If great works ways and the lanes which lead from Mt. Ver• do not find such a class in their own age, they non toward Beacon Street are still extant, and wait time and their own influence create it .. the property deeds still include their clauses We believe a conscious greatness, inseparable for the right to lead through these lanes one from critical literature, and such, therefore, or more cows for pasturage on the Common. we look for in this country—a literature and Such matters as these, of course, were curi• art based on thorough criticism, and thorough osities—like the purple windowpanes in some knowledge of what already exists in the of the Beacon Street houses—even in the early world."** seventies. But this was not so with the iron Nevertheless, there was a flowering of New scrapers on the Cape Ann granite steps. They England, and while the aroma was reminiscent stood alone on Beacon Hill as memorials to a of England, especially, it had a definite char• muddier Boston, a Boston of blacksmiths and acter of its own which came from the strongly cobblestones. The details of these bits of iron• expressed desire to make a culture native to work vary in design, and, if one observes them this land. closely, one may detect something of the spare grace of line which is so manifest in the door• In the world of architecture and the ap• ways and fagades above them."* plied arts, the Colonial spirit persisted until such time as materialism began its revival with "The spare grace of line"—an unusual and the greatly increased use of the machine. haunting phrase, and full of suggestions as to There was a post bellum protest, however, what design should be. It does mean simplicity, against a belief which has long since become but it does not mean poverty of thought; it so internationally strong in our modern world, does mean refinement and not brutality. In that utility has a supreme importance of its that phrase lie the fundamental possibilities own, and yet—"Utility lies at the bottom of of a beautiful architecture. No architecture our village architecture. The structure springs can continue with an utter disregard of grace from that. The simple edifice you see, created or depend wholly on spareness. The so-called out of white-pine boards, a mere casing of international style, with its frank ugly ap• shingles and clapboards, as it appears to its proach of materialism, stems from the same owner, who built it and lives in it, anything but disregard for human sensibilities that is found ugly or unpicturesquc. It fits him like a shell. in Nazi Germany. They are evidently blood Comfort, economy, use, a dry, warm cellar, brothers. a sweet, airy milk-room, a barn with its cellars The castor oil of materialism has been thor• and accommodations, all in the solidest style oughly sugar-coated with propaganda, but the —these matters make the study of the farmer. castor oil is still there, and this materialism I say that beauty must have an equal place has reached a sterility based on a dogma of in- with utility, if not the first place. Your farmer tellectualized ugliness. shirks architecture and landscape-gardening, To state that a belief in the desirability of with his one leg in the barn and his other in beauty is just sentimental nonsense, that our the kitchen, and the compost-heap in the whole job is to bring material welfare to our midst. And his highest ambition is to have a people, has the familiar ring of the constant patent-leather top to his carriage."** high-pitched oratory of poverty - stricken How modern all that sounds. Europe. There was fine architecture, however, and it New materials and new methods do not had a flavor of its own, and in the community necessarily aid the creation of beauty. It is of Boston, while it was growing away from its very evident, as one motors through New best traditions, still—"One can turn the clock England, that they have more recently aided back without great difficulty as one ascends in the creation of ugliness and squalor, that Mt.

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