Reflections and Comments 1865-1895

by Edwin Lawrence Godkin

The worst of it all is, however, that the boarder finds that the cottager has enclosed some of his favorite walks. He can no longer get to them without trespassing or intruding. He can only look wistfully from the dusty high-road at the spots on which he probably once "rocked" with the girl who is now his wife, or chopped logic with professional or clerical friends, whom "the growth of the place" has long ago driven to fresh fields and pastures new. There is something very interesting and touching about these old Mount Deserters of the first period, between 1860 and 1870, who fled even before the enlargement of the hotels, and to whom cottages at Bar Harbor are almost unthinkable. One finds them in undeveloped summer resorts in out-of-the-way places along the American coast, often on the Alps or in Norway, or on the Scotch lakes, still tender, and simple, and unassuming, and cheery, older of course and generally stouter, but with the memories of the mountains, and the rocks, and the islands, of the poor food, "which made no difference, because the air was fine," still as fresh as ever, but without a particle of bitterness. They wander much, but wander as they may they find no summer resorts which can have for them the charm of Frenchman's Bay or Newport Mountain, and no vehicle which touches so many chords in their hearts as the primeval buckboard, in the days when it could only be hired as a great favor.

The cottager, too, sets no bounds to his pretensions as to territory. His policy, apparently the old policy of the conqueror everywhere, is to let the boarder go up the coast and discover the most attractive resorts, and allow him to report on them in the newspapers, write poetry about them, lay the scene of novels and plays in them, and then pursue him and eradicate him from the soil as a burden if not a nuisance. That he makes a resort far more beautiful to the eye than the boarder there is no denying. He covers it with beautiful houses; he converts the scraggy, yellow pastures into smooth, green lawns; he fills the rock crevices with flowers; he introduces better food and neater clothing and the latest dodges in plumbing. But these things are only for the few—in fact, the very few. An area which supports a hundred happy boarders will only bring one cottager to perfection. Moreover, it is impossible, no matter how much the country may flourish, that all Americans who leave the city in summer should by any effort become cottagers. The mass of them must always be boarders and remain boarders, and we would warn the cottagers that it may become dangerous to push them too hard and too far. Much farther east or north on the coast they will not go without turning on their persecutors. They will not put up with the shores of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the season may be. The survival of the fittest is a great law, and has worked wonders in the animal world, but it must be remembered that it has to work in our day in subordination to that greater law of morality which makes weakness itself a strong tower of defence.

The future at all our leading seashore places, in truth, belongs to the Cottager, and it is really useless to resist him. His march along the American coast is nearly as resistless as that of the hordes who issued from the plains of Scythia to overthrow the Roman Empire. He moves on all the "choice sites" without haste, with the calm and remorselessness of the man who knows that the morrow is his. He has two tremendous forces at his back, against which no boarder can stand up. One is the growing passion, or fashion, if any one likes to call it so, of Americans to live in their own houses, both summer and winter. This is rapidly taking possession of all classes, from the New England mechanic, who puts up his shanty or tent on the seashore, to the millionaire who builds his hundred-thousand dollar villa on his thirty-thousand dollar lot. Everybody who can seeks to be at home all the year round, let the home be never so small or humble, and the life in it never so rough. This is a change in the national manners which nobody can regret, but it is a change from which the boarder must suffer, and which must cost him much wandering and many tears. The other is the spread of the love of the seashore among the vast population of the Mississippi Valley, whose wealth is becoming great, for whom long railroad journeys have no terrors, and who are likely now to send their thousands every year to compete with the "money kings" of the East for the best villa sites along the coast. And be it remembered that although our population doubles every twenty-five years, our rocky Atlantic shore, which is what all most love to seek—the sand is tame and dreary in comparison—remains a fixed quantity. It only extends from New York to Eastport, Me., and it only contains a limited number of building lots. These are now being rapidly bought up and built on, or hold on speculation, and in some places, where land only brought ten dollars an acre fifteen years ago, are held at monstrous prices.

To fight against these tendencies is useless. The wise boarder will not so do, nor waste his time in bewailing his fate. It is absurd for him to expect that long stretches of delightful shore will be left wild and uninhabited and unimproved, for him to walk over for three or four weeks every summer. Not even the Henry George régime would oust the cottager, for under it he would simply rent what he owns; a cottager he would still remain. Finally, the boarder must remember that though the cottager, like woman, when he is bad is very bad, when good is delightful. Nothing the American summer has to show can surpass a cottager, and we rejoice to know that the number of good cottagers every year grows larger. At his best though he may be stern in the assertion of his rights of property, there is no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the moral earnestness with the want of which the more austere boarder has been apt to reproach him, grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made and his place in order.

SUMMER REST

The question has occurred to a good many, and has been more than once publicly asked, When do the people who frequent "Summer Schools" of philosophy, theology, and the like, which are now showing themselves at some of the watering-places, get their rest or vacation? At these schools both the lecturers or "paper" readers and the audience are engaged in the same or nearly the same work as during the rest of the year, and therefore in summer get no rest. We have been asked, for instance, whether a clergyman or professor who has a period of leisure allotted to him in summer, in order that he may "recruit," as it is called, is not guilty of some sort of abuse of confidence, if, instead of amusing himself or lying fallow, he goes to a Summer School, and passes several weeks in discussions which, to be profitable either to himself or his hearers, must put some degree of strain on his faculties.

The answer undoubtedly is, that nobody goes to a Summer School who could get refreshment through sheer idleness. One of the greatest mistakes of the Middle Ages, and one which has come down to our own time in education, in theology, and in medicine, was that all men's needs, both spiritual, mental, and physical, are the same; and it long made the world a dreadful place for the exceptional or peculiar. In most things we have given up the theory. It was soonest given up as regards food, because the evidence against it was there plainest and most overwhelming, in the severe suffering inflicted on some people by things "disagreeing with them," as it was called, which others relished and profited by. It has only been surrendered with regard to children and youths, however, after a hard struggle. The idea of a young person being entitled to special treatment of any kind—that is, having in any respect a marked individuality—remains to this day odious to a great many of our theologians and teachers. It is, however, rapidly making its way, and has already obtained a secure footing in some of the colleges. It is the hotels, perhaps, which are now the strongholds of the old doctrine, and in which a person who wants what nobody else wants is considered most odious; partly, of course, because he gives extra trouble, but mainly because he is considered to be given up to a delusion about himself and his constitution. There is probably nothing which excites the anger and contempt of a summer-hotel clerk more than a request for something which is not supplied to everybody or which nobody else asks for. We remember once irritating a White Mountain hotel-keeper extremely by asking to be allowed to ride up Mount Washington alone, instead of in a party of forty. He not only refused our request, but he punished us for making it by selecting for our use the worst pony in his stable, and watching us mounting it with a diabolical sneer.

There is, however, still a good deal of intolerance about people's mode of spending their vacation. Those who take it by simply sitting still or lounging with no particular occupation, are more or less worried by the people who take their rest actively and with much movement and bustle. So also the young man who goes off fishing and hunting, on the other hand, scorns the young man who hangs about the hotels and plays lawn-tennis, or goes to picnics with the girls—a rapidly diminishing class, let us add. A correspondent, who takes a low view of sermons, wrote to us the other day complaining of some mention which recently appeared in our columns of Mount Desert as a good place for "tired clergymen," and wished to know what there was to tire them, seeing that they did nothing but produce two essays a week, which need not be very original. The truth is, however, that everybody's occupation, including that of the young man who does nothing at all, does a great deal to tire him. What probably tires a minister most is not the sermons, but his parishioners; and we suspect that nine-tenths of the ministers, if they made a clean breast of it, would confess that rest to them meant getting away from their parishioners, and not in getting away from the sermons. Sermon-writing in our day, when the area over which a preacher may select his subject is so greatly widened, is probably to a reflective man a great help and relief, as furnishing what nearly every student needs to stimulate study—a means of expression. Sustained solitary thinking is something of which very few men are capable. To keep up what is called active-mindedness nearly everyone needs somebody to talk to. Conversation with a friend is enough for most, but those who have more to say find a sermon or a magazine article just the kind of intellectual stimulus they need. What probably most wears on a clergyman's nerves are his pastoral duties, which do not consist simply in consoling people in great trials, but in listening to their fussy accounts of small ones. Nine-tenths of a minister's patients, like a doctor's, do not know what is the matter with them, and consult a physician largely because they take comfort in talking to anybody about themselves, and doctors and clergymen are the only persons who are bound to listen to them. A professor or teacher is somewhat similarly situated. His business is the most wearing of human occupations—that of putting knowledge into heads only half willing to receive it, and persuading a large number of people to do their duty to whom duty is odious.

To these men, a Summer School of philosophy or theology, or anything else, must be repose of the best sort. It gives light work of the kind they love, free from all nagging, and in good air and fine scenery. At such schools, too, one finds uses for "papers" that no periodical will print, and which no audience would assemble to listen to in a city in the busy part of the year, and to many men an audience of any sort, interested or uninterested, is a great luxury.

The persons who perhaps find it hardest to get rest in summer are brokers. Their activity in their business and the excitement attending it are so great, that quiet to them, more than to most other men, is a hell; so that their vacation is a problem not easy of solution, except to the rich ones, who have yachts and horses without limit. Even to those, every day of a vacation has to be full of movement and change. An hour not filled by some sort of activity, spent on a piazza or under a tree, is to them an hour wasted. A land where it was always afternoon would be to them the most "odious section of country" on earth. The story of one of them, who in Rome lost flesh through pining for "the corner of Wall and William," is well known. Such a man finds nearly all summer resorts vanity and vexation of spirit, because none of them provides excitement. The class known as financiers, such as presidents of banks and insurance companies, is much better off, because it has Saratoga. Its members have generally reached the time of life when men love to sit still, and when the liver is torpid, and they are generally men of means, and wear black broadcloth at all seasons, as being what they have from their youth considered outward and visible signs of "respectability" in the financial sense. What they need is a place where they can have their livers roused without exercise, and this the mineral water does for them; where they can see a good deal going on and many evidences of wealth, without moving from their chairs; and where their financial standing will follow them; and for this there is perhaps no place in the country like Saratoga. Newport has not nearly as much solidity. It is brighter and gayer and more select, but though it contains enormous fortunes, a great fortune does not here do so much for a man. It has to bear the competition of youth and beauty and polo and lawn-tennis. The young man with little besides a polo pony, an imported racquet, and good looks counts for a good deal at Newport; at Saratoga he would be nobody.