Massachusetts College of Art and Design - Palette and Pen Yearbook (Boston, MA)

Page 24 text:

The Senior Class W E always intended, when the time came to tell our story, to write a simple history of our progress from Smock Day to Commencement. It was to describe how we gradually laid down our early fallacies and took up lasting truths and prin- ciples; and it might have been a useful gift and guide to coming classes. But we were plainly not the class to write it. We have never advanced with any annual regularity. Our pilgrim jour- ney has been without a beginning and without an end, as intricate and roundabout as a Victorian wallpaper. We are still engaged upon it; our years have run together, and we are even now inno- cently discovering great guiding principles of life and the use of poster paint that we forgot when we were sophomores, vowing the same resolutions, arguing the old questions. Our story is as much a present indicative as a history, a confession of the faiths we have sometimes mislaid but never outgrown. And if we have been always voyaging, never arriving, if we have traveled a great way around to reach our original starting point, we have at least seen far lands and many strange delights. On dark winter afternoons, as if to prove the poetry of earth is never dead, we used to ride past our street-car stop deep in the nineteenth century British poets. The castles and the cypress and the damsels richly clad rose up before us in unending splen- dor, English firelight mingled with Italian sunlight, the red roses of Omar shone like a dayspring; and for all that they were dead, long dead, for all their yearnings after yesterday which made them seem twice old, the poets floated back to us miraculously young and eager. We discovered Boston, walked up and down her streets by day and night, in snow and sunshine. We knew the lamplit gloom of Bates Hall, we fed the ducks on Muddy River, we went down to paint the tulips gravely nodding in the grass by General Washington’s horse. Our way led past the State House dome

Page 23 text:

H U N D R R D NINE

Page 25 text:

and thick-set Trinity, past bargain basements and ancient grave- yards. We stared into bookstore windows and beyond the har- bor, and we could never see far enough and wide enough. We stood in museum rooms where the years fell back to Spain of 1400 or Restoration England; we looked at blackened wood and gleaming silver, glass and stone and amber, rows of Greek vases, walls of French paintings; and we chose our favorites as care- fully as buyers. Then there were movies that afforded us, more than entertainment, the secret pleasures of disguise. Whenever we sat in a theatre we were no longer artists, no longer even of Boston, but dark and nameless symbols, part of an audience. We saw fewer plays, and they were sharp and bright to remember like a painting; but the movies were a long procession, gray and hazy, a continual superimposition of familiar faces and settings and gestures. We had each some purely private classics, like “Smilin’ Thru” or “The Unfinished Symphony,” that we loved so well and saw so often we could turn them on in our minds and see them over from beginning to end as often as we chose. And of course we read books all the time, passionately dis- covered the Russians and the Transcendentalists, Thomas Wolfe and G. K. Chesterton ; and it was often one of these instead of an assigned author that spoke to us most clearly. The Lippis and the Memmis and the Della Robbias, the Guelfs and the Ghibel- lines were a darkly beautiful undertone, while we could plainly hear the sighing in the shrub oaks and the glassy tinkling of the weeds where Thoreau was walking with the emerald fires of spring already burning in his head. No one could tell what might capture and lay hold of our imagination. We were easily moved by a figure of speech. We collected quotations and gloated in pri- vate over the shining words. And in time we used them all ; they found their way into English themes and history notebooks, into headlines and slogans; we used them over and over, so that any one watching might have traced our progress and accurately placed our literary periods. And while we made intellectual conquests the days were running on in the world outside. We noticed newspaper headlines like a dream within a dream. We saw I litler rise to power and heard Edward abdicate. We read