Untitled Document

Childe Hassam II

Bill Long 12/12/04

"Emotive" Criticism

The two paintings of Hassam that first fired my enthusiasm for him in the 1970s were Boston Common at Twilight (1885-86) and the Church at Old Lyme (CT--1905). I was newly-married at the time and living in Boston's South End while commuting to Providence RI for my doctoral program. I would frequently take walks along the Common from Park Street Church along Tremont Street all the way to the South End. Hassam's "Boston Common" painting depicts a woman walking along the snowy sidewalks on the Common as darkness approached. Gas street lamps fought against the enveloping darkness. Bundled against the winter cold, the young woman headed along Tremont Street.

So did I, and each time I have seen that painting since 1977, I have returned to the feelings that dominated me in those days: gratitude to be young and living in a vibrant city, happy with being newly-married to a seminary classmate, brimming with hope that my studies would launch me into a meaningful career in bibilcial scholarship. I also remember the biting cold of the Boston winters, the fading light of a December night, the hopefulness I felt at Christmastide, the haste which stalked all my steps as I hurried along the paths of my own life. I "read" all of this into Hassam's painting, I am sure. I filled it with my own meaning, using his suggestive lines, colors and figures as an invitation to let memory play with me.

The Parish Church at Old Lyme, CT

I had a slightly different reaction when I first saw this painting in the late 1970s, probably in an art history book. I was reviewing the works of some American Impressionists and was getting bored with just seeing countless outdoor scenes with shimmering water and floating lilies and trees with multi-colored bark. My eyes fell on Hassam's painting of the Congregational Church at Old Lyme. Old Lyme is a town in Eastern CT which at the time (around 1910) boasted a sizable artistic community. Immediately upon seeing the Church, I was forced back into deeper historical memories and yearnings than with Boston Common.

Here the memories were those of my familiy of origin, which traces its American sojourn to the founding of Stratford, CT in 1639 and before. In the genealogical record of my familiy, there was a certain Robert Nichols, 13 generations removed from my maternal grandmother, who was a member of the founding company of Stratford and listed his religion as "Puritan." More than three centuries of my American forebears, then, were nurtured in the womb of the kind of Congregational Church depicted by Hassam.

The simple architectural design, with four Ionic columns welcoming worshippers into the "adyton" not of Zeus or Athena but of the Trinitarian God of Christianity, brought back not simply the family memories of my own congregational heritage (described in my 2004 autobiography, 52 and Strangely Found: An Autobiography Intellectual and Intimate) but also the ways that I studied in college and, especially, seminary to make the Puritan tradition of my forebears my own. While the piety of most of New England Congregationalism in Hassam's day, in addition to my own, had a tepid quality to it, a quality that bore little relationship to the manly Calvinism of Edwards in the 18th century or the fighting Puritanism of Cotton Mather in the 17th, before the onslaught of Deism, Unitarianism and German biblical criticism had eroded the inner Ionic intellectual foundations of New England Congregationalism, the piety I wanted was different.

I wanted to digest the marrow of Puritan divinity, to memorize the Westminister Confession and Shorter Catechism, to master the arguments for a Calvinist theology, the practices of prayer and biblical study that would break more truth from the Word of God. Hassam's painting of the Church in Old Lyme brought back this flood of memories. It reminded me who I was and that however far I go or however deeply I explore other subjects, I will be doing so with the inner motivation for knowledge, the desire for order, the inclination for mastery, the restlessness to relate all things to an ultimate explanation of life, that would have been characteristic of the best minds of New England Puritanism.

As I have lived my life, I have seen the fault lines in the Calvinistic and Puritan theological program. I have mastered the methods and goals of German biblical criticism and know it well enough to turn it on its head. I have gutted the conceptual foundations and torn away the exterior scaffolding of a Puritan world view. But still, every time I look at Hassam's painting of the Parish Church at Old Lyme, I can't help but yearn for that time of my life when the intellectual foundations were as secure as the Ionic pillars on which the church rests in the painting. The Apostle Paul, in his great love chapter (I Cor 13) speaks of putting away childish things when he grew up and became a man. I, too, would like to do that. But there is something in me which will not allow me to lay aside this part of my earlier days. Something in me still yearns for a kind of kingdom of God, a kind of simple time when faith and explanations for life were as clean and sharp as the spire of the Old Lyme church.

However, I deeply believe in nuance now, in shadow sides of all phenomena, of partial explanations, of multi-valent truth, of variant explanations, of the "cherry-tomato" view of texts (where meaning "explodes" in your mouth), but I would like, for just a moment, to have the kind of clarity and sureness, of simple grandeur and proportion, of neatness and orderliness, that the Old Lyme church represents.

Conclusion

So, this is the "baggage" with which I approached Childe Hassam as I walked into the Portland Art Museum on Saturday, December 11, 2004. It is my "emotional" response to art, a response that doesn't disable me from examining Hassam in Oregon (1904, 1908), but does explain why even after I see his wondrous sketches of thunderstorms over the Eastern Oregon desert, I will still return to in my mind's eye to a simple church and a hurried walker along Tremont Street.

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