NEWPORT
My mother sailed early in the spring of this year--1872--for England to
hold her famous Peace Crusade, and until her return in August, my father
and I were alone together. As usual I resented her absence, believing,
with the egotism of youth, that I had a prior claim on every moment of
both parents’ time, while holding myself perfectly free to give them as
much or as little of my own company as I found convenient. As an
illustration of the working of the law of compensation, those months
brought me a close companionship with my father that only the _solitude
à deux_ can give. I date from this period my increased interest in world
politics, for while my father was the most ardent American imaginable,
his life had inevitably given him the wider outlook of world
citizenship.
I remember something of his talk about the Boundaries and Fisheries
dispute, which twenty years before had loomed so large among the
questions of the day. He impressed it upon me that while our differences
with Great Britain had all the acrimony of a family quarrel, when all
was said and done, despite the behavior of a certain portion of the
English people during the Civil War, despite Carlyle’s Latter Day
Pamphlets and other irritating utterances, Americans should recognize
Great Britain as our nearest of kin in the family of nations, to whom we
are bound by ties of blood, tradition, and a common language. I am
thankful to have escaped the anti-British sentiment so carefully
cultivated by certain interests in this country.
An anecdote touching the Boundary dispute seems worth preserving; it was
told me years after the event by an Englishman.
At the time when the boundary between British Columbia and Washington
Territory was under discussion by the two governments, a commission was
sent out from England to report on the value of the land. One of the
commissioners, a famous sportsman, made the following comment:
“This is a rotten country; the fish won’t rise to a fly!”
When I visited Washington State and saw the beautiful country awarded to
us at that time, I wondered if the dictum of the young angler had
carried much influence in the decision.
Perhaps the sharpest memory I have of this year of 1872 is that of the
great fire, when sixty acres of buildings in the heart of the business
quarter of Boston went up in smoke and flame. I watched the terrible
conflagration from the window of the room in the Institution for the
Blind, where eighteen years before I first saw the light. Hour after
hour passed, as I sat at the open casement watching the flames devour
whole blocks of the city. The crimson sky was reflected in the black
waters of South Boston harbor; the white spire of Park Street Church was
often threatened; over and over again we lost sight of it in the clouds
of sooty smoke, the curtain of leaping flame. Each time that the wind
blew back the smoke and fire, and I caught a glimpse of that white
finger pointing heavenward, fresh hope sprang up; so long as the steeple
stood, we knew that the fire had not crossed the Common, and that
Beacon Hill and the State House were safe. At this time my Aunt and
Uncle Wales had moved into their new house on Brimmer Street, their son
Thomas living at his farm in Wayland. During the night my aunt more than
once called her husband’s attention to the unusual noise in the streets,
the constant ringing of the fire alarm, the toot of engines flying by.
His only answer was:
“Be quiet. Go to sleep!”
The next morning, as Aunt and Uncle Wales sat at breakfast, Cousin Tom
came in, bearing some large ledgers in his arms.
“What brings you to Boston so early?” demanded his father.
“I came in to save the books. Your office and half Boston burned down
last night.”
“I thought there was a good deal of disturbance!” Aunt Jenny placidly
remarked.
The fire occurred on a Saturday night. Sunday morning Miss Elizabeth
Peabody was found trying to make her way across one of the danger zones
roped off and guarded by the police.
“Where did you want to go, Ma’am?” asked a policeman.
“To Sunday school! Please let me pass--my class is waiting.”
“Nary a scholar is waiting for you, Ma’am. There ain’t no church, nor
yet no Sunday school.”
The presidential election of this year was one of the most exciting I
remember. General Grant was running for his second term; he had been
first elected in 1868 with Schuyler Colfax as vice president. In 1872
Colfax withdrew in favor of our friend Henry Wilson. My father was a
Grant man, and our house was, as usual, the center of much activity as
the election drew near. My mother gave a reception for General and Mrs.
Grant, where there was a great gathering of the Republican clan, and my
father was constantly receiving committees and delegations. A section of
the Republicans, dissatisfied with party politics during Grant’s first
term, “split off” and nominated Horace Greeley for president, with Gratz
Brown as his running mate, the Democrats indorsing the nomination.
Greeley was then sixty-one years old. Judging by the portraits, he must
have been rather rustic in appearance, wearing old-fashioned chin
whiskers. The campaign was a bitter one. Greeley was unmercifully
caricatured by Thomas Nast and other cartoonists. My parents, who had
great respect for Greeley, resented the ridicule to which he was
subjected. I remember, among other instruments of torture, an absurd
portrait of him on a paper fan with a long white cotton fluff
representing his beard. This was widely circulated. Greeley’s death, a
few weeks after his defeat at the polls, was said to have been caused by
the suffering he endured in this cruel campaign. As founder and for
thirty years editor of the _New York Tribune_, as a patron of artists
and men of letters, he might have hoped for better treatment at the
hands of the press. The very papers whose ridicule broke his heart were
full of handsome obituary notices after he was gone. It was deeply
impressed on me at this time that to run the gantlet of a presidential
election, a man must have more than common courage.
In Boston it seemed as if every waking hour of my father’s and mother’s
existence was filled with labor for city, state, or nation. At
Portsmouth the pressure was somewhat relaxed. I remember both parents as
steadily at work here during the morning, but there were delicious
afternoons when they were free to play with us. Those were the palmy
days of the Newport catboats, small, steady, centerboard sloops, the
best craft for pleasure sailing I have known. Memories arise of
delightful summer days when a gay party of us drove to town in the old
carryall, which was “put up” in the shed of the Newport Reading Room, of
which my father was one of the founders. At Bannister’s wharf, if we
were lucky, we engaged Cap’n Anthony and his boat, _The Two Sisters_,
for the day. The ecstasy of the motion of that little cockleshell as she
danced over the water is something unforgettable. If the wind were
light, we steered our way out of the harbor towards Beaver Tail for a
taste of the ocean; if there was too much sea on, the course lay within
the landlocked waters of the bay. At high noon we landed at Conanicut
Island just below old Fort Dumpling. Conanicut now goes mostly by the
more prosaic name of Jamestown. Sometimes, when a householder of this
pleasant summer resort drives me about the island, pointing out this or
that view, a miracle happens! Some wind of memory blows Jamestown, with
its hotels, its nice comfortable houses, clean away, and gives me back
the bare rocky Conanicut of my youth that I loved as I can never love
Jamestown. The commodious ferry boat from which I have just stepped
disappears, I am sitting once more at the masthead of _The Two Sisters_,
flying over Narragansett Bay, the salt taste on my lips, the salt wind
in my hair. I am climbing the steep rough path to the old ruined fort, a
lunch basket in one hand, a camp stool in the other. On the farther side
of the Island is a little sheltered silver stretch of beach where one
day, when the party is small and intimate, we make out to rig a shelter
to shield us in our undressing and to slip into the delicious cool
water. The joy of such a stolen sea bath, where there is no curious
crowd to watch, can hardly be known to the ladies and gentlemen who now
disport themselves on summer mornings at Bailey’s Beach.
These joyous outings were often shared by the young people from
Vaucluse, where every summer “Shepherd Tom” (Thomas Hazard) gathered
about him the clans of Hazard and of Minturn. Mr. Hazard’s wife, dead
long before this time, was one of the beautiful Minturn sisters; from
her Shepherd Tom inherited a large family connection, to every branch of
which he showed endless hospitality. Beside the five Hazard children
there were relays of Minturns, Mayers, Halls, Blacklers, Birckheads, and
Hunters, who came and went in dazzling succession. Taken altogether,
they were the handsomest family I have ever seen. Beside their beauty
and charm, they had certain characteristics that set them apart from the
rest of us. They seemed to hold some secret knowledge of and communion
with nature that gave them a power over animals; they understood the
language of horses, dogs, even insects; they had no fear of any living
thing,--knew snakes, bees, spiders, toads, for their friends. They
seemed more like a race of fauns and dryads than mere flesh-and-blood
boys and girls. The four slim, graceful Hazard girls were overshadowed
by their father, a rustic, vigorous man, who left his mark on his
generation, and is remembered to-day by a volume of essays, “Johnny Cake
Papers”, later handsomely reprinted by a nephew of the Peacedale branch
of the clan. The Hazards were Friends; when I first remember him
Shepherd Tom went regularly to Quaker Meeting. He was rough in manner,
careless in dress, and thought too little about his appearance. One
Sunday morning on his return from meeting, he was seen to go hurriedly
to a mirror, where he gazed hard at his reflection. He quickly saw why
the folks at meeting had looked at him so curiously. He had a thick crop
of tiny blond curls. The mirror showed each of these curls tied up with
a bit of scarlet wool. While he slept on the porch before going to
meeting, some of the younger children had played this scurvy trick upon
him. If it were meant as a lesson, perhaps he deserved it, for the
relatives of his beautiful young wife remembered her mortification when
he came into the drawing-room where she was receiving guests from
Newport, fresh from killing a sheep, his white smock showing the
telltale scarlet stains.
Mr. Hazard took some pains to win great influence in the Rhode Island
Legislature. This was a puzzle to his friends till they learned that his
object was the abolition of capital punishment in the State. He did not
rest until the death penalty was done away with, after which he retired
into private life, and, as I think, never again meddled with public
affairs.
Vaucluse, originally laid out by a French landscape architect, was in
those days the finest country seat I had ever seen, although already a
good deal fallen from its high estate and not maintained as it should
have been. The remains of a labyrinth could still be traced by the
windings of its box-bordered paths. The long alley leading to the
summerhouse was bordered by a neglected box hedge higher than a man’s
head. The trees here seemed larger and handsomer than all other oaks,
elms, or maples, and in the month of May two superb specimens of
_Magnolia grandiflora_ were covered with enormous creamy white blossoms,
whose perfume haunts me still. The house was of colonial design, with
very large white columns at the entrance of the main building, flanked
by two wings used in the olden time as servants’ quarters, but now
devoted to seeds and bulbs and all sorts of quaint garden tools. Before
the entrance a graveled path swept round a circle of greensward, in
whose midst stood the old lichen-covered sundial, clasped by a scarlet
honeysuckle. It was here one breathless midsummer afternoon that we gave
the memorable amateur circus. As the crowning event, Sultan, the Mayers’
old Arabian pony, trotted round and round the ring, while Esther Hazard,
in a blue bathing suit and scarlet cap, balanced lightly on his
venerable back!
Mr. Hazard was a confirmed spiritualist. He read “The Banner of Light”,
if, indeed, he did not contribute to that journal, then the chief organ
of the spiritualists. I often went with him to _séances_, which had a
great interest for me, though I was never for a moment shaken in my
belief that the manifestations and materializations I witnessed were
vulgar shams. Fannie Hazard, the eldest daughter, a girl of great
sweetness and a good deal of will power, refused to allow mediums at
Vaucluse; I remember some battles royal on this point. After her death,
however, the mediums came, and a cabinet was arranged in one of the
summerhouses, where the _séances_ took place. Once Frederick Myers of
the London Society for Psychical Research was present with me at a
_séance_. The medium was a dull one, the grossness of her
manifestations, it seemed to me, could not deceive the veriest child.
They deceived Mr. Myer, however, who was deeply impressed with all that
he saw and heard. Later, when I read accounts of the impartial manner in
which the investigations of psychical phenomena were carried on by the
society of which Frederick Myer was the leading spirit, the testimony
left me quite cold.
At the close of the evening sessions, Mr. Hazard used to walk in the
mysterious old garden where, he told me, his dead wife often joined him,
walked with him, leant upon his arm. On one occasion she allowed him to
cut a small piece from the spirit lace drapery in which she was arrayed.
He showed me the fragment the next day; it proved to be the same “wash
blonde” I had bought at Edward Lawton’s shop in Thames Street. The
materialized spirits allowed Mr. Hazard to cut off locks of their hair
for remembrance. The last time I was in the parlor of Vaucluse, there
hung on the wall a glass case with strands of hair of every shade and
degree of fineness: the name of the friend or relative from whose head
it had been cut while the medium was in trance was written beside each.
I remember that in the glass case the hair of Uncle Jonas Minturn was
dark red, though my impression is that in life it was of another shade!
Among the young faces that look at me from the old garden at Vaucluse,
the fairest is that of my “Twin”, Edith Blackler, a tall girl with skin
like a sunburnt peach, eyes like a clear brown brook, teeth like fresh
peeled almonds, and a laugh that made the old feel young, and the young
feel immortal. We were as nearly inseparable as the four miles that lay
between Lawton’s Valley and Vaucluse allowed: together we tramped the
country roads, swam the waters of Narragansett, waded the streams and
sailed the seas that bound our island home. When I was not at Vaucluse,
my Twin was with me at Lawton’s Valley. Here Mama was mistress of the
revels, and here young and old, grave and gay, fashionable and
unfashionable, gladly gathered when she waved her fairy wand. One
afternoon when all Newport, both the “intellectuals” of the Point and
the frivolous of the Avenue, mingled in a friendly crowd in the Valley
for afternoon tea, we had some famous charades. The final scene
represented Blondin crossing Niagara Falls. A plank was laid across the
summit of the waterfall just below the old mill, the “middle fall”, we
called it, for at that time there were three falls in Lawton’s Valley. A
tiny camp chair was placed in the middle of the plank, and here one of
my mother’s familiars (was it William Hunt or Hamilton Wilde?) proceeded
to compound an omelette, while the brook sang, the silver birch rustled,
and the insects trilled their evening hymn. Henry James was of the
company that day; something of its magic always lingered in his
tenacious memory, as it does in my random recollections.
At this time Newport’s summer colony was in the wooden age. Bellevue
Avenue was thickly settled with pleasant, substantial cottages, some of
which still survive. The word cottage was, however, always a misnomer;
these commodious, well-furnished houses should more properly have been
called villas. The first symptom of the impending change was the sudden
transformation of the cottage from a simple, medium-sized country house
to a large ambitious structure like the George Francis Train villa in
the atrocious style of the early seventies, the darkest period of
American architecture. After the wooden age, the brick, stone, and
marble ages followed in quick succession.
The Emperor Caesar Augustus “found Rome a city of brick and left it a
city of marble.” Richard Hunt might well have said, “I found Newport a
town of wood; I left it a town of marble.” At about the time I am
writing of, Hunt built Linden Gate for Mr. Henry Marquand and the John
N. A. Griswold house on Touro Park, now the home of the Art Association.
While maintaining something of the cottage characteristics, both these
are far handsomer and more substantial than the earlier houses, and mark
the summer colony’s second stage of architectural evolution.
I spent part of one season with my mother’s friend, Mrs. Charles H.
Dorr, in Newport, and entered more fully into the social life of the
place than I had done before. Compared to our life in Portsmouth,
Newport seemed formal, dull, cut and dried. Everybody bathed then on the
First Beach, except the few people who lived near “Bailey’s.” The
ladies’ hour was from ten to twelve. At noon a flag was run up on the
bathing pavilion, announcing that the “gentlemen’s hour” had begun, when
women and children were banished from the beach, and the men were free
to take their swim dressed or undressed as they pleased. Most people
dined early, though the seven or half-past seven o’clock dinner parties
were beginning. In the afternoon society took its drive up and down
Bellevue Avenue from five to seven. The horses, harnesses, carriages,
lap dogs, ladies, and toilettes were the handsomest that money could
buy. While I admired the style of it all, the artificiality fretted me,
and after a few days of Bellevue Avenue I was glad to scurry home to
Portsmouth to embrace my parents and go for a tramp with my Twin. The
introduction of polo by James Gordon Bennett was a great boon to the
colony. I can see him now on his swift broncho, tearing across the polo
field after the ball, the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead,
made by the mallet of one of the opposing players.
Among the distinguished people of summer Newport at this time were the
George Bancrofts, old friends of my mother’s. Every summer we were
invited to see Mr. Bancroft’s roses, held to be well-nigh miraculous.
There was a tradition that Newport was not a good place for flowers, and
beyond the formal blue hydrangeas that fashion demanded, few people made
any attempt to grow them. Mr. Bancroft’s roses and artichokes became
famous, people were quick to follow the fashion he set, and now Newport
is rich in beautiful gardens.
In the early seventies my father bought Oak Glen. He had sold our
beloved Lawton’s Valley a few years before, partly on account of the
endless difficulties of transportation.
I think he regretted this lovely place, and partly because my mother
grieved so for it, bought the small estate of five acres a little higher
up on the stream that runs through the valley. He improved the property
and built a large addition to the house, where he spent the last summers
of his life. As long as she lived my mother made Oak Glen her summer
home, and after her death it passed into our hands.