The Plainstyle In Three Dimensions

Quoth John Calvin, "Men should not paint or carve anything but such as can be seen with the eye; so that God's majesty which is too exalted for human sight may not be corrupted by fantasies which have no true agreement therewith." All of which is the puritanical way of expressing the ancient adage, "I know nothing about art but I know what I like."

It was John Calvin's way and the way of his followers and the way of the New World experiment. The only embellishments of the day were made for tombstones and portals, and one John Hunt reflected the colony's aesthetic esprit when he complained that the stained glass of popish cathedrals kept out the light.

Still, there was an ingenuous purity to anything touched by the spiritually ardent when the spiritually ardent are blessed with an absence of vulgarity. The founders of the Massachusetts Commonwealth were so blessed and their architectural legacy is one of an austere and untainted beauty. Their creations were above all functional.

A More Dogmatic Day

Today the children of Cantabrigian heresy who pass the Garden Street church en route to the hands of an angry God are offered quotations from the works of our day's most heretical apostates, out of context, of course. But the great gray walls of the edifice look down with the same unflinching austerity, lovely in its own right, which it lavished upon the person of a more dogmatic day and age.

Nevertheless, the yen for warmer graces dwelled in the New England bosom, plus a nostalgia for the London of old, plus a prophetic desire for the bigger and better. It demanded houses which were to be passing fayre, in the language of the time, houses which were to represent social status. And so, when the satanic redmen had at last been driven from Beacon Hill, and the kinddom of God more firmly established, the seeds of a Londonesque Boston began to sprout forth.

Order in Disorder

The quiet elegance of Louisburg Square reflects perhaps the most Bostonian of Bostonian characteristics. Its proportions are the most graceful and a charmingly untypical consistancy creates a kind mis en scene, a vignette of times past. The lack of proportion which marks the Hub, ill-grown and non-planned, is Roman in a way. No other traits unite the two cities, but both mushroom and expand with extraordinary nonchalance, and order survives where it may.

This, in short, is the past-present, one which began with the Republic and which ended with the more rotund enormities of the Civil War period. Most of it, with its uncompromising verticality, its clinging ivy, its jutting, discreetly windows, survives in a comparatively limited area.

Other Bostons

There are, of course, other Bostons within the city; but it would be difficult and probably unkind to impose the idea upon a public whose impressions of the unchanged aspects of American culture revolve about Boston and Brooklyn.

There is the great wasteland effect of Huntington Ave., better forgotten perhaps, and the histrionics of Washington Street, of a more recent vintage. There are the outlying districts, the products of a new economy, functional in their own way. None the less, the antique shimmer of a Brahman past has always represented Boston qua Boston, and most likely it always will.. . . Stained glass keeps out the light . . .