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 [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!”
