Arts and Letters

Robert Grant was a man of many books. Thirty-one titles are listed under his name in the 1940-41 volume of Who's Who, and there are always fugitive writings which escape tabulation. It was, of course, in his capacity as a writer that he became in 1915 a member of this Academy, to which he proved his devotion through the later years of his life as a most active and energetic member of its Board of Directors. It is not enough, however, to recall his books and his effective interest in the affairs of the Academy. His identification with the life of his time is no less to be remembered.

His books and his life, be it noted, stood in a close relation to each other. This is not merely another way of saying the style was the man, for in Robert Grant's case the substance of his writings, no less than their style, marked them distinctively as his own. It is a truism that every writer is conditioned in greater or less degree by his personal background of experience. With Grant the degree was more than commonly great. Born and bred in the tradition of that Boston which extended itself in his time from Beacon Hill to the Back Bay, and knew not other regions, he was, through his own associations and tastes, a true representative of it, and, in The Chippendales, he pictured it to the life.

This book may be regarded as a milestone on the road at one end of which stood The Bostonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and at the other The Late George Apley. James and Howells in the 1880s and Mr. Marquand in the 1930s conducted their social studies of Boston, each on terms of his own, and with perceptions and methods quite other than those of Robert Grant. No one of them, however, was so indigenous to Boston as he, and none of them sought more honestly and sympathetically to depict the typical Bostonian of his period—in The Chippendales the final decade of the nineteenth century. In his Fourscore: an Autobiography (1934) he could write of his young hero, Henry Chippendale Sumner: "I recognized enough of myself in him to be able to depict him exactly as he was, even when prevented by unworthiness from following him." Thus he may be said to have been both the writer and in some measure the hero of one of his most widely read books.

Born January 24, 1852, he first saw the light of day on Beacon Hill. The Boston Latin School, coasting and fighting on the Common, summers at Nahant—through life as in boyhood—Harvard College, with four undergraduate years, three more for a Ph.D. in Philology and three beyond these for the degree of LL.B.—ten years in all—these experiences, as if not enough, were followed in later decades by twenty-four years on the Harvard Board of Overseers. In spite of all this exposure to learning, he was more a thoughtful, and most agreeable, man of the world than a profound scholar. He took much pleasure in his clubs, his cards, his salmon-fishing and golf, his close contacts, through kinship and friendship, with large segments of the circle to which he belonged. As he took pleasure, so he gave it—through the charm of personality that makes for ease in the relations between human beings in every generation.

Like the typical Bostonian of his own fiction he was not merely a private citizen, practising his profession of the law. As a young man he served for a time as Secretary to a Mayor of Boston, the learned Dr. Samuel A. Green, best known for his long, scholarly service to the Massachusetts Historical Society. After five years as Water Commissioner of Boston, Grant was appointed, in 1893, Judge of the Probate Court and Court of Insolvency for Suffolk County, and here he served for thirty years. Each of these posts had for him the advantage that its duties did not prevent a man of native energy and self-imposed industry from following his bent as a writer.

With Grant this was truly a life-long bent. He began to pursue it in college, became an early editor of the Harvard Lampoon while in the Law School, and found himself launched as a popular writer when three of his ventures in satiric verse, first printed in the Lampoon, were published in a pamphlet, The Little Tin-Gods-on-Wheels, or Society in our Modern Athens, illustrated by Francis G. Attwood, famous thereafter for his drawings in Life. A year later, in 1880, came The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl, the first of many prose studies of the social scene—light as air, now definitely "dated," but notable in retrospect as a starting-point for a long and steady development. Various aspects of the society he knew served as themes for a number of later books, of fiction and of genial observation, as in the Reflections, Opinions, and Convictions, respectively, of a Married Man, a Philosopher, and a Grandfather.

Within the narrow limits of this sketch it would be impossible even to name all these books. One of the best of them, The Chippendales (1909), an authentic treatment of that irresistible theme of novelists, Boston and its inhabitants, has already been mentioned. Its validity as a picture of life in Robert Grant's Boston is only confirmed by the last of all his books, Fourscore: an Autobiography, a narrative of fact which provides many bits of documentation both for The Chippendales and for other pieces of the author's fiction. It should be said, however, that the relation between personal experience and imaginative writing is least discernible of all in the novel generally, and rightly, regarded as Grant's best, and most widely read.

This was his Unleavened Bread, published in 1900. Here the scene is laid in a "western city with an eastern exposure," in New York, and in Washington. Boston is not remotely included in its map. Its central figure, Selma White—of a period in which "the war" was still our Civil War—represented a type still new when the nineteenth century was ending, the American clubwoman, humorless and ruthless in the pursuit of her own ambitions, and, thanks to the author's rejection of all sentimentality in dealing with her, triumphantly winning everything she set out to attain. "The novel was written," Grant declared in Fourscore, "with more intensity of conviction than any other book of mine. I detested my heroine, but was fascinated by her, for I knew her to be a true creation not hitherto portrayed in fiction." So indeed she was, a detestable figure, relentlessly presented, and standing as a permanent contribution to the gallery of American womanhood in one of its least attractive forms. The satirist whose prentice hand was tried on Frivolous Girls created in Selma White a character who cannot be overlooked by any realistic social historian of the United States at the time when Robert Grant was at the height of his powers.

It was a far cry for him, at seventy-five years of age, retired from the Probate Court, and nearly at the end of his creative writing, to turn to a brief employment which fixed the eyes of the world upon him in an entirely unaccustomed light. This was his service on the Commission appointed in 1927 by Governor Fuller of Massachusetts to report to him upon the fairness of the murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was an assignment which Grant had neither sought nor desired, and it took him into a field of law in which he and his two colleagues were without direct experience. This is no place to discuss the case or the report of the Commission. Controversy was bound to follow any settlement of the matter. Grant himself discussed it at length in his Fourscore. His nature would not permit him to dismiss it as a fait accompli calling for no afterthoughts. His frank recital of the facts as they remained in his mind after the passage of seven years stands in clear witness of his personal integrity through an affair of portentous moment.

In the spring of 1938 it was my good fortune to sail from Southampton to New York on the same ship with him. His wife, whom, as Amy Galt of Montreal, he had married in 1883, had recently died, after a singularly happy union of more than fifty years. Accompanied by his secretary, he had been spending a winter on the Riviera. His eyesight and hearing were failing, but an unbreakable spirit of youth and friendliness made him the most congenial of shipmates, and won the hearts of many who had never seen him before. So it was to the end of his days—with old friends encountered in the usual meeting-places, and with new, for even after visiting the Mediterranean at eighty-six he journeyed to Hawaii, with all the zest of a young traveller. He died in Boston May 19, 1940, in his eighty-ninth year, survived by three of his four sons.