'The Grand or Beautiful Streets'

Sunday morning, while driving my youngest son to a friend’s house, we passed through the grid of streets named for poets – Shakespeare, Swift, Addison, Goldsmith, Chaucer, Dryden, Wordsworth, Lanier. The neighborhood is just to the west of Rice University, which may account for the high-toned allusions. A little further north and west is Auden Street and to the northeast, Waugh Drive and Hawthorne and Kipling streets.

Like most citizens, I’m largely indifferent to the names of the streets paved and maintained with our tax money, though some names reek of ego or bad poetry. My son’s friend lives on Jim West Street. The parallel streets to the north are Betty and Lula; to the south, Wendell, Verone and Mildred. Some contractor’s family is immortalized in signage and on maps.

Our house, built in 1962, is on the second of four parallel cul-de-sacs named “courts.” Ours is Moss Hollow Court (wrong on all three counts) and the others are Leafy Hollow, Shady Nook and Hollow Bend – someone’s notion of pastoral urban living. But as Max Beerbohm reminds us in “The Naming of Streets” (Yet Again, 1909):

“[A] name cannot (in the long-run) make any shadow of difference in our sentiment for the street that bears it, for our sentiment is solely according to the character of the street itself; and, further, a street does nothing at all to keep green the memory of one whose name is given to it.”

For once, I quibble some with Beerbohm. While driving west on Bissonnet and crossing Auden, I thought of the poet and not of billboards and motorcycles. Something similar occurred on Goldsmith Street. Here I agree with Beerbohm and not with his friend:

“And I doubt not that for him, as for me, the mere sound or sight of a street's name conjures up the sensation he feels when he passes through that street. For him, probably, the name of every street has hitherto seemed to be also its exact, inevitable symbol, a perfect suggestion of its character. He has believed that the grand or beautiful streets have grand or beautiful names, the mean or ugly streets mean or ugly names. Let me assure him that this is a delusion. The name of a street, as of a human being, derives its whole quality from its bearer.”

In fact, Lanier Street is quite attractive.