September 5, 1870
The Point, Newport, Rhode Island, ca. 1878.
THE SEASON AT NEWPORT HAS AN OBSTINATE LIFE. September has fairly begun, but as yet there is small visible diminution in the steady stream—the splendid, stupid stream—of carriages which rolls in the afternoon along the Avenue. There is, I think, a far more intimate fondness between Newport and its frequenters than that which in most American watering-places consecrates the somewhat mechanical relation between the visitors and the visited. This relation here is for the most part slightly sentimental. I am very far from professing a cynical contempt for the gaieties and vanities of Newport life: they are, as a spectacle, extremely amusing; they are full of a certain warmth of social color which charms alike the eye and the fancy; they are worth observing, if only to conclude against them; they possess at least the dignity of all extreme and emphatic expressions of a social tendency; but they are not so far from “was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine” that I do not seem to overhear at times the still, small voice of this tender sense of the sweet, superior beauty of the local influences that surround them, pleading gently in their favor to the fastidious critic. I feel almost warranted in saying that here this exquisite natural background has sunk less in relative value and suffered less from the encroachments of pleasure-seeking man than the scenic properties of any other great watering-place. For this, perhaps, we may thank rather the modest, incorruptible integrity of the Newport landscape than any very intelligent forbearance on the part of the summer colony. The beauty of this landscape is so subtle, so essential, so humble, so much a thing of character and impression, so little a thing of feature and pretension, that it cunningly eludes the grasp of the destroyer or the reformer, and triumphs in impalpable purity even when it seems to condescend. I have sometimes wondered in sternly rational moods why it is that Newport is so loved of the votaries of idleness and pleasure. Its resources are few in number. It is emphatically circumscribed. It has few drives, few walks, little variety of scenery. Its charms and its interest are confined to a narrow circle. It has of course the unlimited ocean, but seafaring idlers are of necessity the fortunate few. Last evening, it seemed to me, as I drove along the Avenue, that my wonderment was quenched for ever. The atmospheric tone, the exquisite, rich simplicity of the landscape, gave mild, enchanting sense of positive climate—these are the real charm of Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You are melted by the admirable art of the landscape, by seeing so much that is lovely and impressive achieved with such a masterly frugality of means—with so little parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, with so narrow a range of color and form. I could not help thinking, as I turned from the great harmony of elegance and the unfathomable mystery of purity which lay deepening on the breast of nature with the various shades of twilight, to the motley discord and lavish wholesale splendor of the flowing stream of gentility on the Avenue, that, quite in their own line of effect, these money-made social heroes and heroines might learn a few good lessons from the daily prospect of the great western expanse of rock and ocean in its relations with the declining sun. But this is a rather fantastic demand. Many persons of course come to Newport simply because others come, and in this way the present brilliant colony has grown up. Let me not be suspected, when I speak of Newport, of the untasteful heresy of meaning primarily rocks and waves rather than ladies and gentlemen.
The ladies and gentlemen are in great force—the ladies, of course, especially. It is true everywhere, I suppose, that women are the central animating element of “society”; but you feel this to be especially true as you pass along the Newport Avenue. I doubt whether anywhere else women enjoy so largely what is called a “good time” with so small a sacrifice, that is, of the luxury of self-respect. I heard a lady yesterday tell another, with a quiet ecstasy of tone, that she had been having a “most perfect time.” This is the very poetry of pleasure. In England, if our impression is correct, women hold the second fiddle in the great social harmony. You will never, at the sight of a carriage-load of mild-browed English maidens, with a presiding matron, plump and passive, in the midst of them, suspect their countrywomen of enjoying in the conventional world anything more than a fictitious and deputed dignity. They neither speak nor act from themselves, but from their husbands and brothers and lovers. On the Continent, women are proclaimed supreme; but we fancy them, with more or less justice, as maintaining their empire by various clandestine and reprehensible arts. With us—we may say it without bravado—they are both free and unsophisticated. You feel it most gratefully as you receive a confident bow from a pretty young girl in her basket-phaeton. She is very young and very pretty, but she has a certain delicate breadth of movement which seems to you a pure gain, without imaginable taint of loss. She combines, you reflect with respectful tenderness, the utmost of modesty with the least possible shyness. Shyness is certainly very pretty—when it is not very ugly; but shyness may often darken the bloom of genuine modesty, and a certain feminine frankness and confidence may often incline it toward the light. Let us assume, then, that all the young ladies whom you may meet here are the correctest of all possible young ladies. In the course of time, they ripen into the delightful women who divide your admiration. It is easy to see that Newport must be a most agreeable sojourn for the male sex. The gentlemen, indeed, look wonderfully prosperous and well-conditioned. They gallop on shining horses or recline in a sort of coaxing Herculean submission beside the lovely mistress of a phaeton. Young men—and young old men—I have occasion to observe, are far more numerous than at Saratoga, and of vastly superior quality. There is, indeed, in all things a striking difference in tone and aspect between these two great cities of pleasure. After Saratoga, Newport seems really substantial and civilized. Aesthetically speaking, you may remain at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at Saratoga, you linger on under passionate protest. At Newport, life is public, if you will; at Saratoga, it is absolutely common. The difference, in a word, is the difference between a group of three or four hotels and a series of cottages and villas. Saratoga perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being characteristically democratic and American; let us, then, make Saratoga the heaven of our aspiration, but let us yet a while content ourselves with Newport as the lordly earth of our residence.
The villas and cottages, the beautiful idle women, the beautiful idle men, the brilliant pleasure-fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps, to Newport life a faintly European expression, in so far as they suggest the somewhat alien presence of leisure—“fine old Leisure,” as George Eliot calls it. Nothing, it seems to me, however, can take place in America without straightway seeming very American; and, after a week at Newport, you begin to fancy that, to live for amusement simply, beyond the noise of commerce or of care, is a distinctively national trait. Nowhere else in this country—nowhere, of course, within the range of our better civilization—does business seem so remote, so vague and unreal. Here a positive organic system of idleness or of active pleasure-taking has grown up and matured. If there is any poetry in the ignorance of trade and turmoil and the hard processes of fortune, Newport may claim her share of it. She knows—or at least appears to know—for the most part, nothing but results. Individuals here, of course, have private cares and burdens, to preserve the balance and the dignity of life; but these collective society conspires to forget. It is a singular fact that a society that does nothing is decidedly more picturesque, more interesting to the eye of sentiment, than a society which is hard at work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more picturesque than Saratoga. There you feel that idleness is occasional, empirical. Most of the people you see are asking themselves, you imagine, whether the game is worth the candle, and work is not better than such toilsome play. But here, obviously, the habit of pleasure is formed, and (within the limits of a generous morality) many of the secrets of pleasure are known. Do what we will, on certain lines Europe is ahead of us yet. Newport falls altogether short of Baden-Baden in her presentment of the improprieties. They are altogether absent from the picture, which is therefore signally destitute of those shades of color produced by the mysteries and fascinations of vice. But idleness per se is vicious, and of course you may imagine what you please. For my own part, I prefer to imagine nothing but the graceful and the pure; and, with the help of such imaginings, you may construct a very pretty sentimental counterpart to the superficial movement of society. This I lately found very difficult to do at Saratoga. Sentiment there is pitifully shy and elusive. Here, the multiplied relations of men and women, under the permanent pressure of luxury and idleness, give it a very fair chance. Sentiment, indeed, of masterly force and interest, springs up in every soil, with a sovereign disregard of occasion. People love and hate and aspire with the greatest intensity when they have to make their time and privilege. I should hardly come to Newport for the materials of a tragedy. Even in their own kind, the social elements are as yet too light and thin. But I can fancy finding here the plot of many a pleasant sentimental comedy. I can almost imagine, indeed, a transient observer of the Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a great American novel, in which the heroine shall be infinitely realistic, and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast. I say intentionally the “transient” observer, because I fancy that here the suspicion only is friendly to dramatic peace; the knowledge is hostile. The observer would discover, on a nearer view, I rather fear, that his possible heroines have too unexceptionally a perpetual “good time.”
This will remind the reader of what he must already have heard affirmed, that to speak of a place with abundance you must know it, but not too well. I feel as if I knew the natural elements of Newport too well to attempt to describe them. I have known them so long that I hardly know what I think of them. I have little more than a simple consciousness of vastly enjoying them. Even this consciousness at times lies dumb and inert. I wonder at such times whether, to appeal fairly to the general human sense, the prospect here has not something too much of the extra-terrestrial element. Life seems too short, space too narrow, to warrant you in giving in an unqualified adhesion to a paysage which is two-thirds ocean. For the most part, however, I am willing to take the landscape as it stands, and to think that, without its native complement of sea, the land would lose much of its beauty. It is, in fact, a land exquisitely modified by marine influences. Indeed, in spite of all the evil it has done me, I could find it in my soul to love the sea when I consider how it co-operates with the Newport promontories to the delight of the eye. Give it up altogether, and you can thus enjoy it still, reflected and immobilized—like the Prussian army a month hence.
Newport consists, as the reader will know, of an ancient and honorable town, a goodly harbor, and a long, broad neck of land, stretching southward into the sea, and forming the chief habitation of the summer colony. Along the greater part of its eastward length, this projecting coast is bordered with lordly cliffs and dotted with seaward-gazing villas. At the head of the promontory the villas enjoy a magnificent reach of prospect. The pure Atlantic—the Old World westward tides—expire directly at their feet. Behind the line of villas runs the Avenue, with more villas yet—of which there is nothing at all to say, but that those built recently are a hundred times prettier than those built fifteen years ago, offering a modest contribution to our modern architectural Renaissance. Some years ago, when I first knew Newport, the town proper was considered extremely “picturesque.” If an antique shabbiness that amounts almost to squalor is a pertinent element, as I believe it is, of the picturesque, the little main street at least—Thames Street by name—still deserves the praise. Here, in their crooked and dwarfish wooden mansions, are the shops that minister to the daily needs of the expanded city; and here of a summer morning, jolting over the cobble-stones of the narrow roadway, you may see a hundred superfine ladies seeking with languid eagerness what they may buy—to “buy something,” I believe, being a diurnal necessity of the American woman of substance. This busy region gradually melts away into the grass-grown stillness of the Point, in the eyes of many persons the pleasantest quarter in Newport. It has superficially the advantage of being as yet uninvaded by fashion. When I first knew it, however, its peculiar charm was even more undisturbed than at present. The Point may be called the old residential, as distinguished from the commercial, town. It is meagre, shallow, and scanty—a mere pinch of antiquity—but, as far as it goes, it retains an exquisite tone. It leaves the shops and the little wharves, and wanders close to the harbor, where the breeze-borne rattle of shifted sails and spars alone intrudes upon its stillness, till its mouldy-timbered quiet subsides into the low, tame rocks and beaches which edge the bay. Several fine modern houses have recently been erected on the water-side, absorbing the sober, primitive tenements which used to maintain the picturesque character of the place. They improve it, of course, as a residence, but they injure it as a spectacle. Enough of early architecture still remains, however, to suggest a multitude of thoughts as to the severe simplicity of the generation which produced it. It is picturesque in a way, but with a paucity of elements which seems to defy all effect. The plain gray nudity of these little warped and shingled boxes seems utterly to repudiate the slightest curiosity. But here, as elsewhere, the magical Newport atmosphere wins half the battle. It aims at no mystery. It clothes them in a garment of absolute light. Their homely notches and splinters twinkle in the sun. Their steep gray roofs, barnacled with lichens, remind you of old scows, overturned on the beach to dry. They show for what they are—simple houses by the sea. Over-darkened by no wealth of inland shade, without show or elegance or finish, they patiently partake of the fortunes of the era—of the vast blue glare which rises from the bay, and the storms which sweep inward from the ocean. They have been blown free of all needless accretion of detail—scorched clean of all graceful superfluities. Most of the population of this part of Newport is, I believe, of Quaker lineage. This double-salted Quakerism is abundant motive for this soundless and colorless simplicity.
One of the more recent movements of fashion is the so-called “New Drive”—the beautiful drive by the sea. The Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has been made to prolong itself to the west, and to wander for a couple of miles over a lovely region of beach and lowly down and sandy meadow and salt brown sheep-grass. This region was formerly the most beautiful part of Newport—the least frequented and the most untamed by fashion. I by no means regret the creation of the new road, however. A walker may very soon isolate himself, and the occupants of carriages stand a chance of benefit quite superior to their power of injury. The peculiar charm of this great westward expanse is very difficult to define. It is in an especial degree the charm of Newport in general—the combined lowness of tone, as painters call it, in all the earthy elements, and the extraordinary elevation of tone in the air. For miles and miles you see at your feet, in mingled shades of yellow and gray, a desolate waste of moss-clad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left surges and shines the mighty presence of the vast immediate sea. Above the broken and composite level of this double-featured plain, the great heavens ascend in innumerable stages of light. In spite of the bare simplicity of this prospect, its beauty is far more a beauty of detail than that of the average American landscape. Descend into a hollow of the rocks, into one of the little warm climates of five feet square which you may find there, beside the grateful ocean glare, and you will be struck quite as much by their fineness as by their roughness. From time to time, as you wander, you will meet a lonely, stunted tree, into the storm-twisted multiplicity of whose branches all the possible grace and grotesqueness of the growth of trees seem to have been finely concentrated. The region of which I speak is perhaps best seen in the late afternoon, from the high seat of a carriage on the Avenue. You seem to stand just without the threshold of the west. At its opposite extremity sinks the sun, with such a splendor, perhaps, as I lately saw—a splendor of the deepest blue, more luminous and fiery than the fiercest of our common vespertinal crimsons, all streaked and barred with blown and drifted gold. The whole vast interval, with its rocks and marshes and ponds, seems bedimmed into a troubled monotone of glorious purple. The near Atlantic is fading slowly into the unborrowed darkness of its deep, essential life. In the foreground, a short distance from the road, an old orchard uplifts its tangled stems and branches against the violet mists of the west. It seems strangely grotesque and enchanted. No ancient olive grove of Italy or Provence was ever more hoarily romantic. This is what people commonly behold on the last homeward bend of the drive. For such of them as are happy enough to occupy one of the villas on the cliffs, the beauty of the day has even yet not expired. The present summer has been emphatically the summer of moonlights. Not the nights, however, but the long days, in these agreeable homes, are what specially appeal to my fancy. Here you find a solution of the insoluble problem—to combine an abundance of society with an abundance of solitude. In their charming broad-windowed drawing-rooms, on their great seaward piazzas, within sight of the serious Atlantic horizon, which is so familiar to the eye and so mysterious to the heart, caressed by the gentle breeze which makes all but simple, social, delightful then and there seem unreal and untasteful—the sweet fruit of the lotus grows more than ever succulent and magical. You feel here not more a man, perhaps, but more a passive gentleman and worldling. How sensible they ought to be, the denizens of these pleasant places, of their peculiar felicity and distinction! How it should purify their tempers and refine their intellects! How delicate, how wise, how discriminating they should become! What excellent manners and fancies their situation should generate! How it should purge them of vulgarity! Happy villeggianti of Newport!