The historic Ocean House of Newport is a ruin. Flames have laid low the
unsightly structure that was at one time the best-known hotel in America.
Its fifty-odd years of existence, as well as its day, are over. Having
served a purpose, it has departed, together with the generation and
habits of life that produced it, into the limbo where old houses, old
customs, and superannuated ideas survive,—the memory of the few who like
to recall other days and wander from time to time in a reconstructed
past.
There was a certain appropriateness in the manner of its taking off. The
proud old structure had doubtless heard projects of rebuilding discussed
by its owners (who for some years had been threatening to tear it down);
wounded doubtless by unflattering truths, the hotel decided that if its
days were numbered, an exit worthy of a leading rôle was at least
possible. “Pull me down, indeed! That is all very well for ordinary
hostleries, but from an establishment of my pretensions, that has
received the aristocracy of the country, and countless foreign swells,
something more is expected!”
So it turned the matter over and debated within its shaky old brain (Mrs.
Skewton fashion) what would be the most becoming and effective way of
retiring from the social whirl. Balls have been overdone; people are no
longer tempted by receptions; a banquet was out of the question.
Suddenly the wily building hit on an idea. “I’ll give them a _feu
d’artifice_. There hasn’t been a first-class fire here since I burned
myself down fifty-three years ago! That kind of entertainment hasn’t
been run into the ground like everything else in these degenerate days!
I’ll do it in the best and most complete way, and give Newport something
to talk about, whenever my name shall be mentioned in the future!”
Daudet, in his _L’Immortel_, shows us how some people are born lucky.
His “Loisel of the Institute,” although an insignificant and commonplace
man, succeeded all through life in keeping himself before the public, and
getting talked about as a celebrity. He even arranged (to the disgust
and envy of his rivals) to die during a week when no event of importance
was occupying public attention. In consequence, reporters, being short
of “copy,” owing to a dearth of murders and “first nights,” seized on
this demise and made his funeral an event.
The truth is, the Ocean House had lived so long in an atmosphere of
ostentatious worldliness that, like many residents of the summer city, it
had come to take itself and its “position” seriously, and imagine that
the eyes of the country were fixed upon and expected something of it.
The air of Newport has always proved fatal to big hotels. One after
another they have appeared and failed, the Ocean House alone dragging out
a forlorn existence. As the flames worked their will and the careless
crowd enjoyed the spectacle, one could not help feeling a vague regret
for the old place, more for what it represented than for any intrinsic
value of its own. Without greatly stretching a point it might be taken
to represent a social condition, a phase, as it were, in our development.
In a certain obscure way, it was an epoch-marking structure. Its
building closed the era of primitive Newport, its decline corresponded
with the end of the pre-palatial period—an era extending from 1845 to
1885.
During forty years Newport had a unique existence, unknown to the rest of
America, and destined to have a lasting influence on her ways, an
existence now as completely forgotten as the earlier boarding-house
_matinée dansante_ time. {1} The sixties, seventies, and eighties in
Newport were pleasant years that many of us regret in spite of modern
progress. Simple, inexpensive days, when people dined at three (looking
on the newly introduced six o’clock dinners as an English innovation and
modern “frill”), and “high-teaed” together dyspeptically off “sally
lunns” and “preserves,” washed down by coffee and chocolate, which it was
the toilsome duty of a hostess to dispense from a silver-laden tray; days
when “rockaways” drawn by lean, long-tailed horses and driven by
mustached darkies were, if not the rule, far from being an exception.
“Dutch treat” picnics, another archaic amusement, flourished then,
directed by a famous organizer at his farm, each guest being told what
share of the eatables it was his duty to provide, an edict from which
there was no appeal.
Sport was little known then, young men passing their afternoons tooling
solemnly up and down Bellevue Avenue in top-hats and black frock-coats
under the burning August sun.
This was the epoch when the Town and Country Club was young and full of
vigor. We met at each other’s houses or at historic sites to hear papers
read on serious subjects. One particular afternoon is vivid in my
memory. We had all driven out to a point on the shore beyond the Third
Beach, where the Norsemen were supposed to have landed during their
apocryphal visit to this continent. It had been a hot drive, but when we
stopped, a keen wind was blowing in from the sea. During a pause in the
prolix address that followed, a coachman’s voice was heard to mutter, “If
he jaws much longer all the horses will be foundered,” which brought the
learned address to an ignominious and hasty termination.
Newport during the pre-palatial era affected culture, and a whiff of
Boston pervaded the air, much of which was tiresome, yet with an
under-current of charm and refinement. Those who had the privilege of
knowing Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, will remember the pleasant “teas” and
sparkling conversation she offered her guests in the unpretending cottage
where the beauty of the daughter was as brilliant as the mother’s wit.
Two estates on Bellevue Avenue are now without the hostesses who, in
those days, showed the world what great ladies America could produce. It
was the foreign-born husband of one of these women who gave Newport its
first lessons in luxurious living. Until then Americans had travelled
abroad and seen elaborately served meals and properly appointed stables
without the ambition of copying such things at home. Colonial and
revolutionary state had died out, and modern extravagance had not yet
appeared. In the interregnum much was neglected that might have added to
the convenience and grace of life.
In France, under Louis Philippe, and in England, during Victoria’s youth,
taste reached an ebb tide; in neither of those countries, however, did
the general standard fall so low as here. It was owing to the _savoir
faire_ of one man that Newporters and New York first saw at home what
they had admired abroad,—liveried servants in sufficient numbers, dinners
served _à la Russe_, and breeched and booted grooms on English-built
traps, innovations quickly followed by his neighbors, for the most marked
characteristic of the American is his ability to “catch on.”
When, during the war of the secession, our Naval Academy was removed from
Annapolis and installed in the empty Atlantic House (corner of Bellevue
Avenue and Pelham Street), hotel life had already begun to decline; but
the Ocean House, which was considered a vast enterprise at that time,
inherited from the older hotels the custom of giving Saturday evening
“hops,” the cottagers arriving at these informal entertainments toward
nine o’clock and promenading up and down the corridors or dancing in the
parlor, to the admiration of a public collected to enjoy the spectacle.
At eleven the doors of the dining-room opened, and a line of well-drilled
darkies passed ices and lemonade. By half-past eleven (the hour at which
we now arrive at a dance) every one was at home and abed.
One remembers with a shudder the military manœuvres that attended hotel
meals in those days, the marching and countermarching, your dinner
cooling while the head waiter reviewed his men. That idiotic custom has
been abandoned, like many better and worse. Next to the American ability
to catch on comes the facility with which he can drop a fad.
In this peculiarity the history of Newport has been an epitome of the
country, every form of amusement being in turn taken up, run into the
ground, and then abandoned. At one time it was the fashion to drive to
Fort Adams of an afternoon and circle round and round the little green to
the sounds of a military band; then, for no visible reason, people took
to driving on the Third Beach, an inaccessible and lonely point which for
two or three summers was considered the only correct promenade.
I blush to recall it, but at that time most of the turnouts were hired
hacks. Next, Graves Point, on the Ocean Drive, became the popular
meeting-place. Then society took to attending polo of an afternoon, a
sport just introduced from India. This era corresponded with the opening
of the Casino (the old reading-room dating from 1854). For several years
every one crowded during hot August mornings onto the airless lawns and
piazzas of the new establishment. It seems on looking back as if we must
have been more fond of seeing each other in those days than we are now.
To ride up and down a beach and bow filled our souls with joy, and the
“cake walk” was an essential part of every ball, the guests parading in
pairs round and round the room between the dances instead of sitting
quietly “out.” The opening promenade at the New York Charity Ball is a
survival of this inane custom.
The disappearance of the Ocean House “hops” marked the last stage in
hotel life. Since then better-class watering places all over the country
have slowly but surely followed Newport’s lead. The closed caravansaries
of Bar Harbor and elsewhere bear silent testimony to the fact that
refined Americans are at last awakening to the charms of home life during
their holidays, and are discarding, as fast as finances will permit, the
pernicious herding system. In consequence the hotel has ceased to be,
what it undoubtedly was twenty years ago, the focus of our summer life.
Only a few charred rafters remain of the Ocean House. A few talkative
old duffers like myself alone survive the day it represents. Changing
social conditions have gradually placed both on the retired list. A new
and palatial Newport has replaced the simpler city. Let us not waste too
much time regretting the past, or be too sure that it was better than the
present. It is quite possible, if the old times we are writing so fondly
about should return, we might discover that the same thing was true of
them as a ragged urchin asserted the other afternoon of the burning
building:
“Say, Tom, did ye know there was the biggest room in the world in that
hotel?”
“No; what room?”
“Room for improvement, ya!”