After lunch Harry Dana rescued me and took me to his aunt’s house where he lives, and which is called “Longfellow House.” It is of historic interest as having been the residence of Washington and also of Longfellow whose grandson Harry Dana is. The house was quaintly and attractively Georgian and full of dead memories, marble busts and musty laurel wreaths. We retired to his book lined sanctum and with us was an Indian, a follower of Gandhi, who was lecturing at Harvard. We lit a fire and sat before it on the floor while the follower of Gandhi talked to us of Eastern philosophy and oriental serenity. He was not calm in spite of all he said about it, but his restlessness was not the impatient unrest of the West, it had the dignity of the tiger. As he paced back and forth, talking the while, his talk was full of poetry and imagery. I realised what had been lacking in the composition of one’s days: Here there is no poetry (with apologies to Johnny Weaver!). There is not time, they say, and dreams are not for practical people. But the follower of Gandhi combined all the practicability and all the activity, restlessness and humor of the West with the force of Eastern imagery. They are great artists, the descendants of a great culture. They, not we, know how to live, and how to love life.
Incidentally I gathered that a hot place to be in, next December, is India! This Indian revolution interests me very much. I believe that before long all eyes will be turned on India.
If Gandhi’s methods of passive resistance are successful, and India is liberated by a comparatively bloodless revolution, it may mark the epoch of a new era and a new religion.
To-day, the majority of people one meets are expressing the desire that Jews and Bolsheviks, and Germans, too, should be wiped out. The Christian peoples whose religion is based on forgiveness, love and tolerance, have been killing each other mercilessly. It is just possible that Christianity is over, that it “went out” in blood and war. Maybe the renaissance of the world will come in the Orient.
Spirit is unquenchable and inextinguishable. When crushed in one part of the world it will reappear elsewhere. I make no pretense of prophecy. I only say: Watch India!
I spent the week-end in the family circle and was overwhelmed with kindness and hospitality. I, who have grown socialistic and Bohemian, suddenly went back to being a perfect lady, and as a novelty enjoyed it. What beautiful manners they had, the Bostonians I met, just naturally beautiful old world manners. They seemed like those well bred people one knows in Europe who are so absolutely “placés,” so deep rootedly aristocratic, that they can afford to be tolerant without fear of losing caste.
I have wondered a good deal about America and Americans during the year I have spent here. They have amused, surprised and bewildered me, but it was not until I came to Boston that I felt I was at home. Even the town is English. There was Beacon Street with its long row of individual small houses just as in London, and every one had a street door. I never went into an apartment. Peoples’ rooms seemed to be full of books instead of American beauty roses. It was in one of these houses, after luncheon one day, that the women left alone together discussed the immortality of the soul without any semblance of effort or affectation.
On Sunday afternoon my host took me to the Public Library as I wanted to see the Sargent mural paintings. Crowds were pouring in. The reading rooms were packed full of silent studious figures. People came, apparently not to look at the Sargent’s and few of them lingered over the Puvis de Chevannes that lined the staircase walls. They came, as people long accustomed to their own, and went straight for the reading rooms. This interested me more even than the paintings I went to see. I felt that all my expectations of Boston were being fulfilled, as if it had been staged for me. Boston could not have been more magnificently Bostonian. Here resplendent in the winter sunlight stood the imposing Library Building, and people kept pouring into it from every direction. It seemed emblematical of all that Boston stands for.
I am glad I have been to Boston, it seems to complete one’s great perplexity concerning the United States. Here is a country that is composed of such widely different towns as Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all as different from one another as they are different from New York, and as different as New York is from Boston.
I wonder there is any co-ordination of movement or feeling at all in such a country. I wonder there is any political unity, any fraternity, and yet there is more than all that; there exists a national patriotic spirit.