Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan & Co., 1883)/Newport
XVIII.
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 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 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 are 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 moss-clad 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!