SARATOGA

1870

The sentimental tourist makes images in advance; they grow up in his

mind by a logic of their own. He finds himself thinking of an unknown,

unseen place, as having such and such a shape and figure rather than

such another. It assumes in his mind a certain complexion, a certain

colour which frequently turns out to be singularly at variance with

reality. For some reason or other, I had supposed Saratoga to be buried

in a sort of elegant wilderness. I imagined a region of shady forest

drives, with a bright, broad-terraced hotel gleaming here and there

against a background of mysterious groves and glades. I had made a

cruelly small allowance for the stem vulgarities of life--for the shops

and sidewalks and loafers, the complex machinery of a city of pleasure.

The fault was so wholly my own that it is quite without bitterness that

I proceed to affirm that the Saratoga of experience is sadly different

from this. I confess, however, that it has always seemed to me that

one's visions, on the whole, gain more than they lose by being

transmuted into fact. There is an essential indignity in indefiniteness;

you cannot allow for accidents and details until you have seen them.

They give more to the imagination than they receive from it I frankly

admit, therefore, that the Saratoga of reality is a much more

satisfactory place than the all-too-primitive Elysium I had constructed.

It is indeed, as I say, immensely different. There is a vast number of

brick--nay, of asphalt--sidewalks, a great many shops, and a magnificent

array of loafers. But what indeed are you to do at Saratoga--the morning

draught having been achieved--unless you loaf? "Que faire en un gîte à

moins que l'on ne songe?" Loafers being assumed, of course shops and

sidewalks follow. The main avenue of Saratoga does not scruple to call

itself Broadway. The untravelled reader may form a very accurate idea of

it by recalling as distinctly as possible, not indeed the splendours of

that famous thoroughfare, but the secondary charms of the Sixth Avenue.

The place has what the French would call the "accent" of the Sixth

Avenue. Its two main features are the two monster hotels which stand

facing each other along a goodly portion of its course. One, I believe,

is considered much better than the other,--less of a monster and more of

a refuge,--but in appearance there is little choice between them. Both

are immense brick structures, directly on the crowded, noisy street,

with vast covered piazzas running along the façade, supported by great

iron posts. The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly

informed, is the largest "in the world." There are a number of objects

in Saratoga, by the way, which in their respective kinds are the finest

in the world. One of these is Mr. John Morrissey's casino. I bowed my

head submissively to this statement, but privately I thought of the blue

Mediterranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, and the

silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view across the outer sea toward

the bosky cliffs of Italy. The Congress waters, too, it is well known,

are excellent in the superlative degree; this I am perfectly willing to

maintain.

The piazzas of these great hotels may very well be the biggest of all

piazzas. They have not architectural beauty; but they doubtless serve

their purpose--that of affording sitting-space in the open air to an

immense number of persons. They are, of course, quite the best places to

observe the Saratoga world. In the evening, when the "boarders" have all

come forth and seated themselves in groups, or have begun to stroll in

(not always, I regret to say; to the sad detriment of the dramatic

interest, bisexual) couples, the big heterogeneous scene affords a great

deal of entertainment. Seeing it for the first time, the observer is

likely to assure himself that he has neglected an important item in the

sum of American manners. The rough brick wall of the house, illumined by

a line of flaring gas-lights, forms a natural background to the crude,

impermanent, discordant tone of the assembly. In the larger of the two

hotels, a series of long windows open into an immense parlour--the

largest, I suppose, in the world, and the most scantily furnished in

proportion to its size. A few dozen rocking-chairs, an equal number of

small tables, tripods to the eternal ice-pitcher, serve chiefly to

emphasise the vacuous grandeur of the spot. On the piazza, in the outer

multitude, ladies largely prevail, both by numbers and (you are not slow

to perceive) by distinction of appearance. The good old times of

Saratoga, I believe, as of the world in general, are rapidly passing

away. The time was when it was the chosen resort of none but "nice

people." At the present day, I hear it constantly affirmed, "the company

is dreadfully mixed." What society may have been at Saratoga when its

elements were thus simple and severe, I can only vaguely and mournfully

conjecture. I confine myself to the dense, democratic, vulgar Saratoga

of the current year. You are struck, to begin with, at the hotels, by

the numerical superiority of the women; then, I think, by their personal

superiority. It is incontestably the case that in appearance, in manner,

in grace and completeness of aspect, American women surpass their

husbands and brothers; the relation being reversed among some of the

nations of Europe. Attached to the main entrance of the Union Hotel, and

adjoining the ascent from the street to the piazza, is a "stoop" of

mighty area, which, at most hours of the day and evening, is a favoured

lounging-place of men. I should add, after the remark I have just made,

that even in the appearance of the usual American male there seems to me

to be a certain plastic intention. It is true that the lean, sallow,

angular Yankee of tradition is dignified mainly by a look of decision, a

hint of unimpassioned volition, the air of "smartness." This in some

degree redeems him, but it fails to make him handsome. But in the

average American of the present time, the typical leanness and

sallowness are less than in his fathers, and the individual acuteness is

at once equally marked and more frequently united with merit of form.

Casting your eye over a group of your fellow-citizens in the portico of

the Union Hotel, you will be inclined to admit that, taking the good

with the bad, they are worthy sons of the great Republic. I have found,

at any rate, a great deal of entertainment in watching them. They

suggest to my fancy the swarming vastness--the multifarious

possibilities and activities--of our young civilisation. They come from

the uttermost ends of the Union--from San Francisco, from New Orleans,

from Alaska. As they sit with their white hats tilted forward, and their

chairs tilted back, and their feet tilted up, and their cigars and

toothpicks forming various angles with these various lines, I seem to

see in their faces a tacit reference to the affairs of a continent They

are obviously persons of experience--of a somewhat narrow and monotonous

experience certainly; an experience of which the diamonds and laces

which their wives are exhibiting hard by are, perhaps, the most

substantial and beautiful result; but, at any rate, they have _lived_,

in every fibre of the will. For the time, they are lounging with the

negro waiters, and the boot-blacks, and the news-vendors; but it was not

in lounging that they gained their hard wrinkles and the level impartial

regard which they direct from beneath their hat-rims. They are not the

mellow fruit of a society which has walked hand-in-hand with tradition

and culture; they are hard nuts, which have grown and ripened as they

could. When they talk among themselves, I seem to hear the cracking of

the shells.

If the men are remarkable, the ladies are wonderful Saratoga is famous,

I believe, as the place of all places in America where women adorn

themselves most, or as the place, at least, where the greatest amount of

dressing may be seen by the greatest number of people. Tour first

impression is therefore of the--what shall I call it?--of the abundance

of petticoats. Every woman you meet, young or old, is attired with a

certain amount of richness, and with whatever good taste may be

compatible with such a mode of life. You behold an interesting, indeed a

quite momentous spectacle; the democratisation of elegance. If I am to

believe what I hear--in fact, I may say what I overhear--many of these

sumptuous persons have enjoyed neither the advantages of a careful

education nor the privileges of an introduction to society. She walks

more or less of a queen, however, each uninitiated nobody. She often

has, in dress, an admirable instinct of elegance and even of what the

French call "chic." This instinct occasionally amounts to a sort of

passion; the result then is wonderful. You look at the coarse brick

walls, the rusty iron posts of the piazza, at the shuffling negro

waiters, the great tawdry steamboat-cabin of a drawing-room--you see the

tilted ill-dressed loungers on the steps--and you finally regret that a

figure so exquisite should have so vulgar a setting. Your resentment,

however, is speedily tempered by reflection. You feel the impertinence

of your old reminiscences of English and French novels, and of the

dreary social order in which privacy was the presiding genius and women

arrayed themselves for the appreciation of the few. The crowd, the

tavern-loungers, the surrounding ugliness and tumult and license,

constitute the social medium of the young lady you are so inconsistent

as to admire; she is dressed for publicity. The thought fills you with a

kind of awe. The social order of tradition is far away indeed, and as

for the transatlantic novels, you begin to doubt whether she is so

amiably curious as to read even the silliest of them. To be dressed up

to the eyes is obviously to give pledges to idleness. I have been

forcibly struck with the apparent absence of any warmth and richness of

detail in the lives of these wonderful ladies of the piazzas. We are

freely accused of being an eminently wasteful people; and I know of few

things which so largely warrant the accusation as the fact that these

conspicuous _élégantes_ adorn themselves, socially speaking, to so

little purpose. To dress for every one is, practically, to dress for no

one. There are few prettier sights than a charmingly-dressed woman,

gracefully established in some shady spot, with a piece of needlework or

embroidery, or a book. Nothing very serious is accomplished, probably,

but an æsthetic principle is recognised. The embroidery and the book

are a tribute to culture, and I suppose they really figure somewhere out

of the opening scenes of French comedies. But here at Saratoga, at any

hour of morning or evening, you may see a hundred rustling beauties

whose rustle is their sole occupation. One lady in particular there is,

with whom it appears to be an inexorable fate that she shall be nothing

more than dressed. Her apparel is tremendously modern, and my remarks

would be much illumined if I had the learning necessary for describing

it I can only say that every evening for a fortnight she has revealed

herself as a fresh creation. But she especially, as I say, has struck me

as a person dressed beyond her life and her opportunities. I resent on

her behalf--or on behalf at least of her finery--the extreme severity

of her circumstances. What is she, after all, but a "regular boarder"?

She ought to sit on the terrace of a stately castle, with a great

baronial park shutting out the undressed world, and bandy quiet

small-talk with an ambassador or a duke. My imagination is shocked when

I behold her seated in gorgeous relief against the dusty clapboards of

the hotel, with her beautiful hands folded in her silken lap, her head

drooping slightly beneath the weight of her _chignon_, her lips parted

in a vague contemplative gaze at Mr. Helmbold's well-known advertisement

on the opposite fence, her husband beside her reading the New York

_Herald_.

I have indeed observed cases of a sort of splendid social isolation

here, which are not without a certain amount of pathos--people who know

no one, who have money and finery and possessions, only no friends. Such

at least is my inference, from the lonely grandeur with which I see them

invested. Women, of course, are the most helpless victims of this cruel

situation, although it must be said that they befriend each other with a

generosity for which we hardly give them credit I have seen women, for

instance, at various "hops," approach their lonely sisters and invite

them to waltz, and I have seen the fair invited surrender themselves

eagerly to this humiliating embrace. Gentlemen at Saratoga are at a much

higher premium than at European watering-places. It is an old story that

in this country we have no "leisure-class"--the class from which the

Saratogas of Europe recruit a large number of their male frequenters. A

few months ago, I paid a visit to an English "bath," commemorated in

various works of fiction, where, among many visible points of difference

from American resorts, the most striking was the multitude of young men

who had the whole day on their hands. While their sweethearts and

sisters are waltzing together, our own young men are rolling up

greenbacks in counting-houses and stores. I was recently reminded in

another way, one evening, of the unlikeness of Saratoga to Cheltenham.

Behind the biggest of the big hotels is a large planted yard, which it

is the fashion at Saratoga to talk of as a "park," and which is perhaps

believed to be the biggest in the world. At one end of it stands a great

ballroom, approached by a range of wooden steps. It was late in the

evening; the room, in spite of the intense heat, was blazing with light

and the orchestra thundering a mighty waltz. A group of loungers,

including myself, were hanging about to watch the ingress of the

festally-minded. In the basement of the edifice, sunk beneath the

ground, a noisy auctioneer, in his shirt and trousers, black in the face

with heat and vociferation, was selling "pools" of the races to a dense

group of frowsy betting-men. At the foot of the steps was stationed a

man in a linen coat and straw hat, without waistcoat or necktie, to take

the tickets of the ball-goers. As the latter failed to arrive in

sufficient numbers, a musician came forth to the top of the steps and

blew a loud summons on a horn. After this they began to straggle along.

On this occasion, certainly, the company promised to be decidedly

"mixed." The women, as usual, were much bedizened, though without any

constant adhesion to the technicalities of full-dress. The men adhered

to it neither in the letter nor the spirit. The possessor of a pair of

satin-shod feet, twinkling beneath an uplifted volume of gauze and lace

and flowers, tripped up the steps with her gloved hand on the sleeve of

a railway "duster." Now and then two ladies arrived alone; generally a

group of them approached under convoy of a single man. Children were

freely scattered among their elders, and frequently a small boy would

deliver his ticket and enter the glittering portal, beautifully

unembarrassed. Of the children of Saratoga there would be wondrous

things to relate. I believe that, in spite of their valuable aid, the

festival of which I speak was rated rather a "fizzle." I see it

advertised that they are soon to have, for their own peculiar benefit, a

"Masquerade and Promenade Concert, beginning at 9 P.M." I observe that

they usually open the "hops," and that it is only after their elders

have borrowed confidence from the sight of their unfaltering paces that

the latter dare to dance. You meet them far into the evening, roaming

over the piazzas and corridors of the hotels--the little girls

especially--lean, pale, formidable. Occasionally childhood confesses

itself, even when maternity resists, and you see at eleven o'clock at

night some poor little bedizened precocity collapsed in slumber in a

lonely wayside chair. The part played by children in society here is

only an additional instance of the wholesale equalisation of the various

social atoms which is the distinctive feature of collective Saratoga. A

man in a "duster" at a ball is as good as a man in regulation-garments;

a young woman dancing with another young woman is as good as a young

woman dancing with a young man; a child of ten is as good as a woman of

thirty; a double negative in conversation is rather better than a

single.

An important feature in many a watering-place is the facility for

leaving it a little behind you and tasting of the unmitigated country.

You may wander to some shady hillside and sentimentalise upon the vanity

of a high civilisation. But at Saratoga civilisation holds you fast. The

most important feature of the place, perhaps, is the impossibility of

carrying out any such pastoral dream. The surrounding country is a

charming wilderness, but the roads are so abominably bad that walking

and driving are alike unprofitable. Of course, however, if you are bent

upon a walk, you will take a walk. There is a striking contrast between

the concentrated prodigality of life in the immediate neighbourhood of

the hotels and the pastoral solitudes into which a walk of half an hour

may lead you. You have left the American citizen and his wife, the

orchestras, the pools, the precocious infants, the cocktails, the

importations from Worth, but a mile or two behind, but already the

forest is primeval and the landscape is without figures. Nothing could

be less manipulated than the country about Saratoga. The heavy roads are

little more than sandy wheel-tracks; by the tangled wayside the

blackberries wither unpicked. The horizon undulates with an air of

having it all its own way. There are no white villages gleaming in the

distance, no spires of churches, no salient details. It is all green,

lonely, and vacant. If you wish to enjoy a detail, you must stop beneath

a cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly-troubled air,

or follow upward the scaly straightness of their trunks to where the

afternoon light gives it a colour. Here and there on a slope by the

roadside stands a rough unpainted farmhouse, looking as if its dreary

blackness were the result of its standing dark and lonely amid so many

months--and such a wide expanse--of winter snow. It has turned black by

contrast. The principal feature of the grassy unfurnished yard is the

great wood-pile, telling grimly of the long reversion of the summer. For

the time, however, it looks down contentedly enough over a goodly

appanage of grain-fields and orchards, and I can fancy that it may be

amusing to be a boy there. But to be a man, it must be quite what the

lean, brown, serious farmers physiognomically hint it to be. You have,

however, at the present season, for your additional beguilement, on the

eastern horizon, the vision of the long bold chain of the Green

Mountains, clad in that single coat of simple, candid blue which is the

favourite garment of our American hills. As a visitor, too, you have for

an afternoon's excursion your choice between a couple of lakes. Saratoga

Lake, the larger and more distant of the two, is the goal of the regular

afternoon drive. Above the shore is a well-appointed tavern--"Moon's" it

is called by the voice of fame--where you may sit upon a broad piazza

and partake of fried potatoes and "drinks;" the latter, if you happen to

have come from poor dislicensed Boston, a peculiarly gratifying

privilege. You enjoy the felicity sighed for by that wanton Italian lady

of the anecdote, when, one summer evening, to the sound of music, she

wished that to eat an ice were a sin. The other lake is small, and its

shores are unadorned by any edifice but a boat-house, where you may hire

a skiff and pull yourself out into the minnow-tickled, wood-circled

oval. Here, floating in its darkened half, while you watch on the

opposite shore the tree-stems, white and sharp in the declining sunlight,

and their foliage whitening and whispering in the breeze, and you feel

that this little solitude is part of a greater and more portentous

solitude, you may recall certain passages of Ruskin, in which he dwells

upon the needfulness of some human association, however remote, to make

natural scenery fully impressive. You may recall that magnificent page

in which he relates having tried with such fatal effect, in a

battle-haunted valley of the Jura, to fancy himself in a nameless

solitude of our own continent. You feel around you, with irresistible

force, the eloquent silence of undedicated nature--the absence of

serious associations, the nearness, indeed, of the vulgar and trivial

associations of the least complete of all the cities of pleasure--you

feel this, and you wonder what it is you so deeply and calmly enjoy. You

make up your mind, possibly, that it is a great advantage to be able at

once to enjoy Mr. Ruskin and to enjoy Mr. Ruskin's alarms. And hereupon

you return to your hotel and read the New York papers on the plan of the

French campaign and the Nathan murder.