As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary Editor of the Transcript, came at once to call, and so did Flower of the Arena, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.
By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres" and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty propaganda!
To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr. Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain, were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to imagine it wider than it was.
Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the unimportant events of the past.
Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing The Atlantic Monthly, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New York, I confessed to a feeling of sadness, of definite loss.
Naturally, inevitably the Boston of my early twenties had vanished. My youthful worship of the city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was no escape from the conclusion.
"Little that is new is coming out of Boston," I sadly remarked to Zulime. "Her illustrious poets of the Civil War period are not being replaced by others of National appeal. Her writers, her artists, like those of Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, are coming to New York. New England is being drained of talent in order that Manhattan shall be supreme."
While we were away on this trip my friends Grace and Ernest Thompson-Seton had sent out cards for a party "in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin Garland," but when, a few nights later, a throng of writers, artists and musicians filled the Seton studio, I was confirmed in a growing suspicion that I was only the lesser half of a fortunate combination. A long list of invitations to dinner or to luncheon testified to the fact that while they tolerated me, they liked my wife, and in this judgment I concurred.
One day while calling on a charming friend and fellow-fictionist, Juliet Wilbur Tompkins, we met for the first time Frank Norris, another California novelist, who captivated us both, not merely because of his handsome face and figure, but by reason of his keen and joyous spirit.
He had been employed for some time in the office of Doubleday and Page, and though I had often passed him at his desk, I had never before spoken with him. We struck up an immediate friendship and thereafter often dined together. He told me of his plan to embody modern California in a series of novels, and at my request read some of his manuscript to me.