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Farewell to Boston
During the two years Louis dwelt in the home of the John A. Tompsons, in Wakefield, he was very busy in thought and deed. A certain materialistic clarification of intellect was proceeding within a new light which enabled him to see things superficially and to share in that state of illusion concerning realities which was the common property of the educated and refined. The dreams of childhood—that form of mystical illumination which enables the little one to see that upon which the eyes of its elders seldom focus—were thereby eclipsed; and, in one less romantic and willful by nature, would have vanished permanently from active consciousness in the usual and customary way. For this very period of imaginative childhood is by most adults relegated to obscurity; and if referred to at all, dismissed as inconsequential and “childish.” But childhood, thus banished, remains sequestered within us unchanged. It may be obscured by an overlay of our sophistication, our pride and our disdain; we, the while, unaware that to disdain our fertile childhood is precisely equivalent to disdain of our maturity. Hence the illusion that we are no longer the child; the delusion that we are any other than grown children. For where lives the man who does not firmly believe in magic and in fairy tales; who does not worship something with a childlike faith, who does not dream his dreams, however sordid or destructive, however high, however nobly altruistic? And Louis thus dared to disdain and eclipse his own childhood. For was he not rising now like a toy balloon into the rarefied atmosphere of intellect? And what had intellect to do with childhood? Intellect, indeed, was the cachet of manhood, in whose borderland he was now wandering, making ready to cross the frontier, some day to enter what men called “real life.” This mood began when Louis was well settled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—familiarly known as “Tech”—pursuing his special course in Architecture.
To John A. Tompson’s tutelage Louis owed many pirouettes, particularly some knowledge and some understanding and misunderstanding of the great oratorios. Under the sway of their beauty, the sensuous allure of the sacred music, Louis would return again and again to his childhood’s sensibilities and faith. But there came a telling change when he had acquired from John A. some knowledge of their structure, some definition and labelling of the wondrous chords and modulations that had exalted him to an agony, and had borne him along in a great resplendent stream of song, which became a stream of wonder upon wonder, that men had made these things—had made them all out of their heads. And in this maze of hero-worship he had dreamed again and again his natal dream of power, of that power within man of which no one had told him; for he had heard only of the power of God. And in this special dream he had in truth and noble faith seen man as magician bringing forth from nothingness, from depths of silence of a huge world of sleep, as though, by waving of some unknown unseen wand, he had evoked this sublime, this amazing fabric; which equally would pass away and vanish with the sound of the last note, even as the bare thought of such passing left a haunt within.
It was then John A. Tompson, he of the precise, the articulate, the exact, the meticulous, the hard intelligence—who bit by bit led Louis on. He dispelled for him the music-world of enchantment wherein simple faith had seen the true substance and value of results; he substituting therefor a world of fact and technique. It was all subtly done, bit by bit. The first effect of this was to arouse in Louis a new interest—an interest in technique—in the how. John A. Tompson, himself, indeed loved these oratorios, with a fanaticism peculiarly his own, somewhat as though he were impersonating a machinist’s vise. He clung to them indeed as though imagining he was a shipwrecked mariner and they a saving raft; yet he was quiet and gleeful amid the dangers of the open sea of sound.
He used to grit his teeth when he was pleased and he frequently was pleased when on shore he was giving Louis a hypodermic of technique. Louis’s utter innocence of music’s artful structure, form and content was John A.’s joy, his secret delight. Thus Louis learned, concerning chords, that the one in particular that had overwhelmed him with a sort of gorgeous sorrow was called the dominant seventh, and another that seemed eerie and that gave him a peculiar nervous thrill and chill was named the augmented fifth. Louis had been very curious concerning these two chords; and furthermore he was insistent to know why certain parts of the music filled him with joyful, inspiriting and triumphant pleasure, while other parts made him sad even to melancholy and despair. He was told that these opposites were known as the major and the minor modes and he was much concerned too, regarding what he later learned were the diatonic and the chromatic scales—and further concerning that strange swaying and turning of surging harmonies—that it was a movement technically known as a modulation from one key into another. Now Louis became avariciously curious concerning all the remaining technicalities and names, and amassed them as one might collect precious curios. It seemed to him that in giving names to all these sounds and movements he had heard and felt, it was much like giving names to the flowers and shrubs and trees he had loved so well. But this difference he marked: That while his plants and trees in spite of names lived on in mystery, and slept their winter sleep, to be
