No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell, who reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee.

Helen Choate Bell

In the late nineteenth century, a horse-drawn carriage carrying Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr.—the heralded “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”—and the famed Bostonian wit Helen Olcott Choate Bell clopped through oceanside Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Boston’s North Shore, with its rocky coastline and cool Atlantic winds, drew summering writers, poets, artists, businessmen, and statesmen as moths to bright light. Holmes, Lodge, Longfellow, and Henry Adams stayed there and in later years Presidents Taft and Coolidge opened their summer White Houses along what Thomas Gold Appleton called “Boston’s Cold Roast.” Mrs. Bell (as she was commonly known) came for literary company, although she missed the city’s buzz and hubbub compared to bland Beverly Farms. On this ride, the Autocrat expressed surprise prim Bostonians liked Wagner’s De Valkyrie in which a man falls in love with his sister. Bell wryly replied, “Isn’t that what you Jacksons and Cabots have been doing for years?” Few could get away with such sarcasm among the New England intelligentsia (whom she dubbed the “Literati and Tutti-Frutti”), but they deeply admired Bell’s learning and sharp tongue. “She was Boston’s greatest talker,” Cleveland Amory wrote in Proper Bostonians, “the most famous Society wit in the city’s history, and until her death in 1918 she reigned supreme over the city’s smart set.” Yet having written nothing but private letters, Mrs. Bell appears but fleetingly in histories.[1]

There was something about Boston and Eastern New England—the temperamental climate, the diverse geography of seacoast, forest, and mountains, the omnipresent weight of history and tradition—that gave Boston Brahmins (later complemented by the loquacious Boston Irish) a terrific sense of irony and wit. Van Wyck Brooks located it in New England’s Scottishness:

Boston was another Edinburgh, with marked variations of its own. It resembled Edinburgh in many ways, as New England resembled Scotland. The bitter climate and hard soil, the ice, the granite and the Calvinism, yielding to more gracious forms of faith, the common schools, the thrifty farmer-folk, the coast-line, with its ports and sailors’ customs, the abundant lakes and mountains, the geological aspects of the region, all suggested the land of Sir Walter Scott, as well as the adjacent land of Wordsworth.… There were many strains in the Boston mind, a warm and chivalrous Tory strain, a passionate strain of rebelliousness, a strain of religious fervor, a marked and even general disposition—despite the sybaritic Mr. [Harrison Gray] Otis, who, for the rest, was public-spirited—to sacrifice at other than mundane altars. The town abounded in quixotic souls, ‘unmanageable’ Adamses, younger sons who refused the social uniform, visionaries, exaltés, non-conformists.

Upon a bed of rock, sand, and rusty pine needles, Boston wit thrived on brevity and plain speak, often sarcastic and cutting, that impatiently peeled away affectation and pretentiousness to expose the truth of matters. New England literature might be long-winded, but its conversation remained forthright. [2]

No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell. She well fit Walter Bagehot’s description of the Tory mind: “The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy that state of things. Over the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at the feast.” Mrs. Bell reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee. Her extreme “Bostonness” and witticisms exemplified that fierce Tory rootedness to family, hearth, and home, her love for New England as the “other Eden, demi-paradise.” Indeed, she became such a symbol of the town “all distinguished strangers were brought to worship at her shrine.”[3]

Mrs. Bell was the daughter of the great Whig lawyer Rufus Choate, whose legal intelligence and mastery of language propelled him into national politics in the 1840s and 1850s. He became a US senator, an acolyte and confidante of Daniel Webster, and America’s premier advocate for the conservative and order-maintaining role of law. Choate joined his magisterial professional life with a vibrant and loving home. With his wife Helen Olcott – whom he met while a student at Dartmouth—they raised four children (the only four who survived to adulthood), the oldest of whom was Helen Olcott Choate, born in Salem in 1830. The Choate home shone with culture, as his children shared a love of books and repartee and inherited the keen dry wit that made Rufus Choate an effective barrister and Boston character. They lived a childhood of bookstores, lectures, museums, and family lessons by their father. “There was often a play of wits between [Choate] and his daughters,” a biographer noted, as father and children quizzed one another on literature and opera. Helen and her sister Miriam learned to play the piano and sing and memorized poetry voraciously. The Brownings remained Helen’s lifetime favorite, despite teasing by her father who called them the “Brownriggs” after a notorious eighteenth century British murderess. The ribbing was good-natured and in later years, photos and portraits of Rufus Choate adorned Bell’s Beacon Hill home. “You could not be in her presence for an hour without hearing her speak of her father with an exceeding pride,” her friend Paulina Cony Drown remembered.[4]

The young Helen buried herself in books. “I read so much that I feel as if I were bound in covers with my name on the back,” she quipped and reading served as an escape from everyday anxieties. Her home education was supplemented by a stint at boarding school near her mother’s family in Hanover, New Hampshire. Now a young woman, she began to demonstrate the Choate edge and independent spirit. She disliked school and “hated the rigidity of the rules.” The quietude of the New England countryside bothered her, and she lamented rural snobbery and mocked country stores which “sold only raisins and nails.” Although raised a Congregationalist, she lost patience with its medley of superficial sternness and doctrinal flabbiness. She compared a humorless Sunday school teaching uncle to “people who have no Saturday afternoon to their minds.” The Choates worshipped at the Union Congregational Church of Dr. Nehemiah Adams, whose 1854 book A South-Side View of Slavery scandalized Boston abolitionists with its kindly treatment of the South’s peculiar institution. Listening from the pews, Ms. Choate believed Adams’s theology too loose and echoing another Bostonian Thomas Starr King (who pithily observed, “The Universalist believes that God is too good to damn us forever; and you Unitarians believe that you are too good to be damned”) she observed, “Dr. Adams believes in hell, but he doesn’t believe there is anyone in it.” Theological liberalism exceeded her tolerance and she eventually adopted High Church Episcopalianism. “My blood and brain and education are opposed to them and yet I think they have a most tenable position,” she explained decades later. Besides, as she aged her religious senses changed: “I can’t see and I can’t hear, so I like to smell my religion.”[5]

Helen Choate married her father’s law partner (and her cousin) Joseph Bell in 1852, but the marriage was childless and lasted only sixteen years. Major Bell joined the military staff of General Benjamin Butler during the Civil War and acted as Judge Advocate for New Orleans during Union occupation. When Butler relocated to Virginia in 1863, Bell followed and tragically suffered a stroke while presiding at a trial. Partially paralyzed, he returned to Boston and died in 1868, leaving Mrs. Bell a relatively young widow. She never remarried, but instead moved in with her sister Miriam’s family on Beacon Hill, remaining there the rest of her life.[6]

The years after 1868 propelled Mrs. Bell into the Boston lights. Living on snug Chestnut Street with neighbors like the Parkers, Welds, Danas, Coolidges, Wheelwrights, Lothrops, Parkmans, and Tudors, her home became a sought-after salon for Brahmin elite. Visitors demanded her company, sought commentaries on culture, and eagerly awaited opinions on books, art, and music. She counted Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Sarah Orne Jewett as close friends, sang for Charles Dickens on his American tour, and bewitched Matthew Arnold during his 1883 Boston sojourn. “But the people I particularly fancy are two daughters of Rufus Choate,” Arnold wrote his wife, “a Mrs. Bell and a Mrs. Pratt; they are called the twins, though twins they are not; but they are twins in a real genius for lively, spirituel, enjoué talk.” Since she knew everyone, Bell’s friendship meant entrance into Boston society and disapproval closed doors. When asked of the social ubiquity of one cocky Harvard man, a friend asked her, “Does he know anything?” Bell replied “Know anything! Why he doesn’t even suspect!”[7]

With her wide knowledge and command of language, Mrs. Bell became “the Complete Boston Woman” and her book recommendations were “universally sought.” She loved classical Greek and Roman works (particularly Greek dramas), adored Herodotus but did not care for Thucydides, whom she called “duller than the vexed earth.” Bell devoted herself to Shakespeare, but warned a friend “If you get it, don’t read Macbeth before bedtime, for you will find it has ‘murdered sleep’ for the whole summer.” She also greatly admired Sir Walter Scott and Dickens’ novels and the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emily Dickinson, and could recite them on request.[8]

The books Mrs. Bell loved she called “delicious,” but her hates were equally passionate. She detested Goethe and most French writers and could not abide the poetry of fellow Bostonian Amy Lowell. When she returned home from holiday to find her library rearranged by the housekeeper, she quipped “Think of Amy Lowell and [Henry] Vaughan standing side by side on the shelf! No one to introduce them, fortunately for Vaughan.” Her good friend William Dean Howells sent a basket of poetry books from New York with a Lowell work included. “He asked me humbly if I would glance at them and criticise them a little,” she told a friend. “I sent them back with the words, ‘I forgive you,” written on the basket.” She also never understood the popularity of Henry James, thinking him ponderous and obscure. She reported one of his books “so dull we couldn’t stop, but went on and on like the man with the cork-leg who went on and on to places he hated just because he couldn’t stop!” She remarked to another friend that James named his novel Wings of the Dove “because you can’t make head or tail of it.” When the novelist became a British citizen, she wrote “I do not believe Henry James is so silly as to pompously announce that he is no longer an American. He probably said it was a pleasant day in such a roundabout way that no one knew what he was driving at.” She added, a bit unkindly, “Why, Amy Lowell will go next.”[9]

Mrs. Bell haunted the Boston Athenaeum stacks every day while in town and became the library’s most notable patron. “No sight was more familiar on Beacon Hill than the little figure going with a quick step to the Boston Athenaeum, with a sheaf of books under her arm,” Drown recalled after Bell’s death. Many library workers only knew she returned from holiday by her signature reappearing to sign out books. “It was like the reassurance of waking from a grotesquely painful nightmare to see that Mrs. Bell had written her name under a date still recent, on the slip in a book still new.” Beyond novels and poetry, she devoured works of history and these books fired her historical imagination: “All the world of the past was present to her by the power of a retentive memory; through human understanding and sympathy personages of history and romance were living to her, and when she awoke from Carlyle’s French Revolution to say to her astonished maid: “Is the tumbril at the door?” she had been living in the Eighteenth Century as vividly as she passed the succeeding hours in the Twentieth.”[10]

From an early age, Bell mastered the piano and in their Beacon Hill parlor she and her sister played for callers. She also possessed a beautifully deep contralto voice that moved listeners to tears. “I told Mrs. Bell it was like being cut adrift from my aching old body for a while and allowed to drift on an ocean of beauty and light,” Drown reported. “What their music must have meant to those two in the midst of anxiety and sorrow and disappointment – a new world above the dust and turmoil, and wings to reach it with.” Another Boston friend recalled a Beacon Hill evening: “To listen to the deep tones of that pathetic voice, song after song, coming through the twilight, was an emotional experience never to be forgotten.” Bell was devoted to music in an almost mystical sense, denying she could ever be a professional musician since it “carried her into such an ideal world that it took the color out of real life.” Like literature, she harbored strong preferences for certain composers. Wagner transfixed many Bostonians—like the young architect Ralph Adams Cram and the heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner—but not Mrs. Bell. “It takes a genius to be as dull as Wagner,” she dryly observed. “Think of that scene in Siegfried where the two dwarfs scream for an hour in Q sharp about the forging of a sword. And that first act of Tristan and Isolde, on the ship. The journey only from England to Brittany! Why, I thought we had reached the Cape of Good Hope by this time.” Her loyalties lay with Franz Schubert.[11]

Tales of these and other Mrs. Bell quips spread beyond Boston and sealed her fame. Examples were plentiful and repeated by friends. She preferred not to attend parties at other homes, saying she had “a fear of waking up dead in some strange house.” She also disliked house guests, telling a friend: “I wrote to Miss — to ask her to visit me. I told her not to come if it was hot and not to come if it was rainy. In fact, I gave her such a narrow margin of weather that I hope she won’t be able to come at all.” When seated among a gaggle of Brahmin women complaining of various illnesses, she informed them “I feel as if I had been listening to an organ recital.” Similar frustrations spurred her impatience with Christian Scientists who headquartered in Boston: “These people should remember that the mind has already ample work in dealing with love, jealousy, envy, hatred, and malice, and all the other passions. Why should it be forced to saddle itself with the stomach-ache too?”[12]

Bell offered droll remarks about everything. When a Bostonian complained of a German visitor’s bad table manners, she answered “What do you suppose he does? Do his feet fly up over his head, after every mouthful, or does he throw the tender vegetables about?” Upon visiting Paris, she noticed the conspicuous lack of street cats, remarking “I think they must all have been guillotined in the revolution.” She loved Paris (“Paris is a modern city. It is like Albany with the streets running with blood”) but as a stubborn Anglophile detested the French: “The French are a low lot. Give them two more legs and a tail and there you are! I think they have an original nastiness that beats original sin.” Although she visited Europe, ocean voyages terrified her and the boats looked dangerous. “They say you are safer at sea than anywhere else, but I notice, wherever you look, there are arrangements made for instant drowning.” Bell also suffered horrible seasickness, telling a correspondent “My stomach has been quiet for ten minutes. I think it must be dead” and “My remains send love.”[13]

The inherited Choate wit thrived within Mrs. Bell and made her a Boston institution. Some of her more legendary quips and comments:

Thoroughly citified and among those who believed Boston the center of American civilization (she could easily be the anonymous Beacon Hill woman who famously remarked “Why should I travel anywhere when I’m already here”) some of Bell’s most famous bon mots came from a genuine loathing for Nature. Her hysterical dislike marked her as a female precursor to H.L. Mencken’s similar distaste for those he considered country rubes. “Like Dr. Johnson, she was a lover of the city, of men and women, books, and music, and talk over the fire,” Drown related. Something about Nature saddened her and made her lonely.[15]

The march of time and seasons, the cycles of life and death, and Nature’s beautiful brutality lead to bouts of discouragement, perhaps filled with memories of Bell’s beloved parents, husband, and departed siblings. “The passing of the seasons is a hard thing to face, and I almost hate the goldenrod when it flaunts its happiness in my face,” she wrote gloomily. On autumnal Cape Cod, she told a friend “The dead leaves are dancing a ‘dance macabre’ down here and shrieking as they do it.” Even safely ensconced at Chestnut Street, she observed the world somberly from her window: “It has that Thanksgivingy snowy look. I cuddle by the fire with a cat at each corner of my body and forget Nature and all her awful doings in a book—it makes little difference so long as it is a book.” When the Atlantic winds howled, Bell described it like “a drunken Santa Claus trying to get down my chimney.” Thunderstorms particularly frightened her—with good reason, as lightning once struck her house and destroyed the chimney while she was away—and she resorted to self-medication with what she called “Choate’s Pills” to calm her nerves.[16]

Mrs. Bell’s aversion to Nature led to some of her pithier moments. She mocked the preening self-display of wealthy Boston women who feigned a love of nature because they read a little Emerson and Thoreau and ringed their mansions with the garden trappings of nature worship. “Talk of the carpet of nature! Give me a three-ply Chestnut Street garage.” When a friend announced a trip to the countryside, Bell replied memorably, “Go kick a tree for me.” On another occasion she declared “Slap Nature’s green face for me.” Upon hearing mice ate a friend’s plants, she replied “I was glad of it & wished they’d eat all nature up!” Holidays on the Cape bored her: “The atmosphere here is so tainted with donothingness that I believe if Romeo and Juliet were alone here for the summer, September would find her still Juliet without a thought of becoming Mrs. Romeo.” Cities had libraries, dinner parties, and friends, while the country had the solitude of beaches and forests leaving you alone with your thoughts. If places like Walden Pond were heaven for Thoreau, they struck Bell as the epitome of Hell. “In the country, one is given a string and told to make one’s pleasures,” she complained. Her ignorance of Nature reached periodic absurdity, like seeing asparagus growing in a field and telling a companion “I always thought the cook braided the ends.” Yet, few sensations were more pleasurable to Mrs. Bell than coming home to Boston. Returning in autumn, her companions celebrated the great lady’s return. She reflected with relief, “24 Chestnut Street and a good oil lamp are a fairer sight to me than any mountain or seashore, and the Athenaeum is just around the corner.”[17]

Late in life, Mrs. Bell’s melancholia deepened as an old world faded away. World War One clouded everything in Boston, even before American entry into the conflict. Her patriotism never wavered, however, as she was “Yankee to the core” and deeply read in American history. She proudly told a friend, “I have given myself up body and soul to the history of New England, and the words ‘Taxation without representation’ sound in my ears like one of Beethoven’s symphonies.” When an associate declared self-hatred for being American, Bell answered, “She ought to be ashamed of herself, and I told her so with great eloquence. It seemed to make little impression on her. Perhaps she would like to swap George Washington for the Kaiser.” Yet the war’s shocking human cost rattled her. War news subsumed all conversation and even retreating into her library offered no escape: “Do you not find that a kind of infernal dust from the battle sifts into every book you read and every thought you have?” Newspapers overflowed with nothing but “rancid facts” and gory battlefield photos. Images of dead horses particularly haunted her. “Looking at horrid war pictures (which I seldom do) I always groan over the horses, for the men need not have gone into it, and the beasties were not consulted.” Mrs. Bell never lived to see the War’s conclusion and she died on July 13, 1918 at the age of eighty-eight, the last surviving child of Rufus Choate.[18]

The learned Mrs. Bell was treasured in her time, missed heartily when she passed away, then largely forgotten beyond Harvard University’s annual Helen Choate Bell prizes for student writing in American Literature. Perhaps we can miss her once again in an age increasingly suspicious of wittiness beyond the reach of official pieties. There is a certain ironic vindication in the manner of her death. She departed safe Chestnut Street confines for a Maine coastal holiday in June 1918, where Nature and pneumonia tracked her down. “Why should mortals tempt the gloom and dangers of the country when the safe padded walls of the city might enfold them,” she once asked. Perhaps Mrs. Bell should have stayed home.[19]

Notes:

[1] Paulina Cony Drown, Mrs. Bell (Boston, 1931), 64-66, 76; Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York, 1947) 126. Two wonderful accounts of social life north of Boston are Joseph E. Garland’s Boston’s North Shore (New York, 1978) and Boston’s Gold Coast (New York, 1981).

[2] Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (New York, 1936) 7-9.

[3] Walter Bagehot, “Thomas Babington Macaulay” in Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. I (Hartford, CT, 1889) 70; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 38.

[4] Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories, and Experiences, Volume One (New York, 1904) 158-59; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 3, 30.

[5] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 5-8, 19, 64-66, 83-85; Richard Frothingham, A Tribune to Thomas Starr King (Boston, 1865) 121.

[6] Samuel Gilman Brown, The Life of Rufus Choate (Boston, 1879) 416, 491-92.

[7] Clark’s Boston Blue Book (Boston, 1898) 52-53; Edward F. Payne, Dicken’s Days in Boston (Boston, 1927) 175; The Works of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888, ed. George W. E. Russell, Vol. 3 (London, 1904) 149; Amory, Bostonians, 126.

[8] Amory, Bostonians, 126; Mary Jane Regan, Echoes from the Past (Boston, 1927) 58; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 21-29.

[9] Amory, Bostonians, 126-127; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 20, 30-33, 59.

[10] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 20; Regan, Echoes, 59-60n1.

[11] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 45-47; Florence Howe Hall, Memories Grave and Gay (New York, 1918) 172-73.

[12] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 74; Regan, Echoes, 59-60; Mary Caroline Crawford, Famous Families of Massachusetts, Vol. 2 (Boston, 1930) 280-281.

[13] Hall, Memories, 172; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 47, 51-53, 76; Amory, Bostonians, 128.

[14] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 64-66, 76-77; Amory, Bostonians, 127.

[15] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 13.

[16] Ibid, 13-14.

[17] Amory, Bostonians, 127; Drown, Mrs. Bell, 13, 17; Regan, Echoes, 59-60n1.

[18] Drown, Mrs. Bell, 49-50, 57-59, 60-61, 82.

[19] Ibid, 13-14.

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The featured image is “New England Woman” (1895) by Cecilia Beaux, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The photograph of Helen Choate Bell is courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.