Two of our best marine painters in their works offer us a choice of coast-landscape. Kensett paints the bare stiff crags, whitened with salt, standing out of his foregrounds like the clean and hungry teeth of a wild animal, and looking hard enough to have worn out the painter's brush with their implacable enamel. From their treeless waste extends the sea, a bath of deep, pure color. All seems keen, fresh, beautiful and severe: it would take a pair of stout New England lungs to breathe enjoyably in such an air. That is the northern coast. Mr. William Richards gives us the southern—the landscape, in fact, of Atlantic City. In his scenes we have the infinitude of soft silver beach, the rolling tumultuousness of a boundless sea, and twisted cedars mounted like toiling ships on the crests of undulating sand-hills. It is the charm, the dream, the power and the peace of the Desert.
And here let us be indulged with a few words about a section of our great continent which has never been sung in rhyme, and which it is almost a matter of course to treat disparagingly. A cheap and threadbare popular joke assigns the Delaware River as the eastern boundary of the United States of America, and defines the out-landers whose homes lie between that current and the Atlantic Ocean as foreigners, Iberians, and we know not what. Scarcely more of an exile was Victor Hugo, sitting on the shores of Old Jersey, than is the denizen of New Jersey when he brings his half-sailor costume and his beach-learned manners into contrast with the thrift and hardness of the neighboring commonwealth. The native of the alluvium is another being from the native of the great mineral State. But, by the very reason of this difference, there is a strange soft charm that comes over our thoughts of the younger Jersey when we have done laughing at it. That broad, pale peninsula, built of shells and crystal-dust, which droops toward the south like some vast tropical leaf, and spreads its two edges toward the fresh and salt waters, enervated with drought and sunshine—that flat leaf of land has characteristics that are almost Oriental. To make it the sea heaved up her breast, and showed the whitened sides against which her tides were beating. To walk upon it is in a sense to walk upon the bottom of the ocean. Here are strange marls, the relics of infinite animal life, into which has sunk the lizard or the dragon of antiquity—the gigantic Hadrosaurus, who cranes his snaky throat at us in the museum, swelling with the tale of immemorial times when he weltered here in the sunny ooze. The country is a mighty steppe, but not deprived of trees: the ilex clothes it with its set, dark foliage, and the endless woods of pine, sand-planted, strew over that boundless beach a murmur like the sea. The edibles it bears are of the quaintest and most individual kinds: the cranberry is its native condiment, full of individuality, unknown to Europe, beautiful as a carbuncle, wild as a Tartar belle, and rife with a subacid irony that is like the wit of Heine.
Here is the patate douce, with every kind of sweet-fleshed gourd that loves to gad along the sand—the citron in its carved net, and the enormous melon, carnation-colored within and dark-green to blackness outside. The peaches here are golden-pulped, as if trying to be oranges, and are richly bitter, with a dark hint of prussic acid, fascinating the taste like some enchantress of Venice, the pursuit of whom is made piquant by a fancy that she may poison you. The farther you penetrate this huge idle peninsula, the more its idiosyncrasy is borne in on your mind. Infinite horizons, "an everlasting wash of air," the wild pure warmth of Arabia, and heated jungles of dwarf oaks balancing balmy plantations of pine. Then, toward the sea, the wiry grasses that dry into "salt hay" begin to dispute possession with the forests, and finally supplant them: the sand is blown into coast-hills, whose crests send off into every gale a foam of flying dust, and which themselves change shape, under pressure of the same winds, with a slower imitation of the waves. Finally, by the gentlest of transitions, the deserts and the quicksands become the ocean.
The shore melts into the sea by a network of creeks and inlets, edging the territory (as the flying osprey sees it) with an inimitable lacework of azure waters; the pattern is one of looping channels with oval interstices, and the dentellated border of the commonwealth resembles that sort of lace which was made by arranging on glass the food of a silk-spinning worm: the creature ate and wove, having voracity always before him and Fine Art behind him. Much of the solider part of the State is made of the materials which enter into glass-manufacture: a mighty enchanter might fuse the greater portion of it into one gigantic goblet. A slight approximation to this work of magic is already being carried on. The tourist who has crossed the lagoons of Venice to see the fitful lights flash up from the glass-furnaces of Murano, will find more than one locality here where leaping lights, crowning low banks of sand, are preparing the crystal for our infant industries in glass, and will remind him of his hours by the Adriatic. Every year bubbles of greater and greater beauty are being blown in these secluded places, and soon we hope to enrich commerce with all the elegances of latticinio and schmelze, the perfected glass of an American Venice.
But our business is not with the land, but the sea. Here it lies, basking at our feet, the warm amethystine sea of the South. It does not boom and thunder, as in the country of the "cold gray stones." On the contrary, saturating itself with sunny ease, thinning its bulk over the shoal flat beach with a succession of voluptuous curves, it spreads thence in distance with strands and belts of varied color, away and away, until blind with light it faints on a prodigiously far horizon. Its falling noises are as soft as the sighs of Christabel. Its colors are the pale and milky colors of the opal. But ah! what an impression of boundlessness! How the silver ribbon of beach unrolls for miles and miles! And landward, what a parallel sea of marshes, bottoms and dunes! The sense of having all the kingdoms of the world spread out beneath one, together with most of the kingdoms of the mermen, has never so come to one's consciousness before. And again, what an artist is Nature, with these faint washes and tenderest varied hues—varied and tender as the flames from burning gases—while her highest lights (a painter will understand the difficulty of that) are still diaphanous and profound!
One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock's tails, but for saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build a city there that shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of difficulty. One's ideal, after all, is a canvas encampment. A range of solid stone villas like those of Newport, so far as congruity with a watering-place goes, pains the taste like a false note in music. Atlantic City pauses halfway between the stone house and the tent, and erects herself in woodwork. A quantity of bright, rather giddy-looking structures, with much open-work and carved ruffling about the eaves and balconies, are poised lightly on the sand, following the course of the two main avenues which lead parallel with the shore, and the series of short, straight, direct streets which leap across them and run eagerly for the sea. They have a low, brooding look, and evidently belong to a class of sybarites who are not fond of staircases. Among them, the great rambling hotel, sprawling in its ungainly length here and there, looks like one of the ordinary tall New York houses that had concluded to lie over on its side and grow, rather than take the trouble of piling on its stories standing. In this encampment of wooden pavilions is lived the peculiar life of the place.
We are sure it is a sincere, natural, sensible kind of life, as compared with that of other bathing-shores. Although there are brass bands at the hotels, and hops in the evening, and an unequal struggle of macassar oil with salt and stubborn locks, yet the artificiality is kept at a minimum. People really do bathe, really do take walks on the beach for the love of the ocean, really do pick up shells and throw them away again, really do go yachting and crab-catching; and if they try city manners in the evening, they are so tired with their honest day's work that it is apt to end in misery. On the hotel piazzas you see beauties that surprise you with exquisite touches of the warm and languid South. That dark Baltimore girl, her hair a constellation of jessamines, is beating her lover's shoulders with her fan in a state of ferocity that you would give worlds to encounter. That pair of proud Philadelphia sisters, statues sculptured in peach-pulp and wrapped in gauze, look somehow like twin Muses at the gates of a temple. Whole rows of unmatched girls stare at the sea, desolate but implacable, waiting for partners equal to them in social position. In such a dearth a Philadelphia girl will turn to her old music-teacher and flirt solemnly with him for a whole evening, sooner than involve herself with well-looking young chits from Providence or New York, who may be jewelers' clerks when at home. Yet the unspoiled and fruity beauty of these Southern belles is very striking to one who comes fresh from Saratoga and the sort of upholstered goddesses who are served to him there.