NEWPORT

1870

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 colour

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 untouched with Philistinism that I do not seem to overhear at times

the still, small voice of this tender sense of the sweet, superior

beauty of the natural things that surround them, pleading gently in

their favour to the fastidious critic. I feel almost warranted in saying

that here the background of life has sunk less in relative value and

suffered less from the encroachments of pleasure-seeking man than the

scenic dispositions of any other 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 expression, 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 make concessions. I have sometimes wondered, in

rational moods, why it is that Newport is so much appreciated by the

votaries of idleness and pleasure. Its resources are few in number. It

is extremely 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 not true

Newporters, for any other sea would suit them as well. Last evening, it

seemed to me, as I drove along the Avenue, that I guessed the answer to

the riddle. The atmospheric tone, the careful selection of ingredients,

your pleasant sense of a certain climatic ripeness--these are the real

charm of Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You are affected by

the admirable art of the landscape, by seeing so much that is lovely and

impressive achieved with such a frugality of means--with so little

parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, with so narrow a range of

colour and form. I could not help thinking, as I turned from the

harmonies and purities which lay deepening on the breast of nature, with

the various shades of twilight, to the heterogeneous procession in the

Avenue, that, quite in their own line of effect, the usual performers in

this exhibition 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 asking too much. 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

animating element of "society;" but you feel this to be especially true

as you pass along Bellevue Avenue. I doubt whether anywhere else so many

women have a "good time" with so small a sacrifice 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. It is a part of our complacent tradition

that in those foreign lands where women are supposed to be socially

supreme, they maintain their empire by various clandestine and

reprehensible arts. With us--we say it at Newport without bravado--they

are both conspicuous and unsophisticated. You feel this most gratefully

as you receive a confident bow from a pretty girl in her basket-phaeton.

She is very young and very pretty, but she has a certain habitual

assurance which is only a grace the more. She combines, you reflect with

respectful tenderness, all that is possible in the way of modesty with

all that is delightful in the way of facility. Shyness is certainly very

pretty--when it is not very ugly; but shyness may often darken the bloom

of genuine modesty, and a certain 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 of the highest modern type. In the

course of time they ripen into the delightful matrons 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 curricle. 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 centres of pleasure. After Saratoga,

Newport seems really substantial and civilised. Æsthetically speaking,

you may remain at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at Saratoga you

linger 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 undiscriminating hotels and a series of

organised homes. 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 lowly 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 civilisation--does business seem so remote, so vague, and

unreal. It is the only place in America in which enjoyment is organised.

If there be 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 collective society

conspires to forget everything that worries. It is a singular fact that

a society that does nothing is decidedly more pictorial, more

interesting to the eye of contemplation, than a society which is hard at

work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more fertile in combinations

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 difficult

play. But here, obviously, the habit of pleasure is formed, and (within

the limits of a severe morality) many of the secrets of pleasure are

known. Do what we will, on certain lines Europe is in advance of us yet.

Newport lags altogether behind Trouville and Brighton in her exhibition

of the unmentionable. All this is markedly absent from the picture,

which is therefore signally destitute of the enhancing tints 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 undercurrent

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

opportunity. 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 motive of a drama which

should depend more on smiles than tears. I can almost imagine, indeed, a

transient observer of the Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a

great American novel, in which the heroine might be infinitely realistic

and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast. I say intentionally the

"transient" observer, because it is probable that here the suspicion

only is friendly to dramatic point; the knowledge is hostile. The

observer would discover, on a nearer view, I rather fear, that his

possible heroines have too perfect a 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 suffer from knowing 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

enjoying them very much. Even this consciousness at times lies dumb and

inert. I wonder at such times whether, to appeal fairly to the general

human sense, the horizon has not too much of that mocking straightness

which is such a misrepresentation of the real character of the sea--as

if, forsooth, it were level. Life seems too short, space too narrow, to

warrant you in giving in an unqualified adhesion to a pay sage 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 the water to make it

precious, the land would be much less lovable. It is, in fact, a land

exquisitely modified by marine influences. Indeed, in spite of all the

evil it has done me, I could almost speak well of the ocean when I

remember the charming tricks it plays with the Newport promontories.

The place consists, as the reader will know, of an ancient and

honourable town, a goodly harbour, 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 cliffs of no great height, 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, and give one some hope of a revival of

the architectural art. Some years ago, when I first knew Newport, the

town proper was considered remarkably quaint. If an antique shabbiness

that amounts almost to squalor is a pertinent element, as I believe it

is, of this celebrated quality, 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 conscientious

American woman. This busy region gradually melts away into the

grass-grown stillness of the Point, in the eyes of many persons the

pleasantest quarter of 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,

so far as it goes, it retains an exquisite tone. It leaves the shops and

the little wharves, and wanders close to the harbour, 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 matter-of-course 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 an unexpected corner. Enough of early architecture

still remains, however, to suggest a multitude of thoughts as to the

severe simplicity of the generation which produced it. The plain gray

nudity of these little warped and shingled boxes seems to make it a

hopeless task on their part to present any positive appearance at all.

But here, as elsewhere, the magical Newport atmosphere wins half the

battle. It aims at no mystery--it simply makes them scintillate in their

bareness. Their homely notches and splinters twinkle till the mere

friendliness of the thing makes a surface. Their steep gray roofs,

barnacled with lichens, remind you of old barges, overturned on the

beach to dry.

One of the more recent monuments of fashion is the long drive which

follows the shore. The Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has

been made to extend 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 axe exposed to a

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 elements of _terra firma_, 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

mossclad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left is nothing but the

shine and surge of the ocean, and over your head that wonderful sky of

Newport, which has such an unexpected resemblance to the sky of Venice.

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, 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, which is sure to be a charming piece of the individual

grotesque. 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 outside the threshold of the west. At its opposite extremity

sinks the sun, with such a splendour, perhaps, as I lately saw--a

splendour of the deepest blue, more luminous and fiery than the usual

redness of evening, and all streaked and barred with blown and drifted

gold. The whole large interval, with its rocks and marshes and ponds,

seems bedimmed with a kind of purple glaze. The near Atlantic fades and

turns cold with that desolate look of the ocean when the day ceases to

care for it. 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

especially 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 now and

here seem unreal and untasteful--the sweet fruit of the lotus grows more

than ever succulent and magical. How sensible they ought to be, the

denizens of these pleasant places, of their peculiar felicity and

distinction! How it should purify their temper and refine their tastes!

How delicate, how wise, how discriminating they should become! What

excellent manners--what enlightened opinions--their situation should

produce! How it should purge them of vulgarity! Happy _villeggianti_ of

Newport!