Chapter 17

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of American summering than the number of new resorts which are discovered and taken possession of by "the city people" every year, the rapid increase in the means of transportation both to the mountains and the sea, and the steady encroachments of the cottager on the boarder in all the more desirable resorts. The growth of the American watering-place, indeed, now seems to be as much regulated by law as the growth of asparagus or strawberries, and is almost as easy to foretell. The place is usually first discovered by artists in search of sketches, or by a family of small means in search of pure air, and milk fresh from the cow, and liberty--not to say license--in the matter of dress. Its development then begins by some neighboring farmer's agreeing to take them to board--a thing he has never done before, and does now unwillingly, and he is very uncertain what to charge for it. But at a venture he fixes what seems to him an enormous sum--say $5 to $7 a week for each adult. His ideas about food for city people are, however, very vague. The only thing about their tastes of which he feels certain is that what they seek in the country is, above all things, change, and that they accordingly do not desire what they get at home. Accordingly he furnishes them with a complete set of novelties in the matter of food and drink, forgetting, however, that they might have got them at home if they pleased. The tea and coffee and bread differ from what they are used to at home simply in being worse. He is, too, at the seaside, very apt to put them on an exclusively fish diet, in the belief that it is only people who live by the sea who get fish, and that city people, weary of meat, must be longing for fish. The boarders, this first summer, having persuaded him to take them, are of course too modest to remonstrate, or even to hint, and go on to the end eating what is set before them, and pretending to be thankful, and try to keep up their failing strength by being a great deal in the open air, and admiring the scenery. After they leave, he is apt to be astonished by the amount of cash he finds himself possessed of, probably more than he ever handled before at one time, except when he mortgaged his farm, and comes to the conclusion that taking summer boarders is an excellent thing, and worth cultivating.

In the next stage he seeks them, and perhaps is emboldened by the advice of somebody to advertise the place, and try to get hold of some editors or ministers whose names he can use as references, and who will talk it up. He soon secures one or two of each, and they then tell him that his house is frequented by intellectual or "cultured" people; and he becomes more elated and more enterprising, enlarges the dining-room, adds on a wing, relieves his wife of the cooking by hiring a woman in the nearest town, and gives more meat and stronger coffee, and, little by little, grows into a hotel-keeper, with an office and a register. His neighbors, startled by his success, follow his example, it may be only _longo intervallo_, and soon the place becomes a regular "resort," with girls and boys in white flannel, lawn-tennis (which succeeds croquet), a livery-stable, stages, an ice-cream store with a soda-water fountain, a new church, and with strange names taken out of books for the neighboring hills and lanes and brooks.

This stage may last for years--in some places it has been known to last thirty or forty without any change, beyond the opening of new hotels--and it becomes marked by crowds of people, who go back every year in the character of old boarders, get the best rooms, and are on familiar terms of friendship with the proprietor and the older waiter-girls.

But it may be brought to a close, and is now being brought to a close in scores of American watering-places, by the appearance of the cottager, who has become to the boarder what the red squirrel is to the gray, a ruthless invader and exterminator. The first cottager is almost always a boarder, so that there is no means of discovering his approach and resisting his advances. In nine cases out of ten he is a simple guest at the farm-house or the hotel, without any discoverable airs or pretensions, on whom the scenery has made such an impression that he quietly buys a lot with a fine view. The next year he builds a cottage on it, and gradually, and it may be at first imperceptibly, separates himself in feeling and in standards from his fellow-boarders. The year after he is in the cottage, and the mischief is done. The change has come. Caste has been established, with all its attendant evils. The community, once so simple and homogeneous, is now divided into two classes, one of which looks down on the other. More cottages are built, with trim lawns and private lawn-tennis grounds, with "shandy-gaff" and "tennis-cup" concealed on tables in tents. Then the dog-cart with the groom in buckskin and boots, the Irish red setter, the saddle-horse with the banged tail, the phaeton with the two ponies, the young men in knickerbockers carrying imported racquets, the girls with the banged hair, the club, ostensibly for newspaper reading, but really for secret gin-fizzes and soda-cocktails, make their appearance, with numerous other monarchical excrescences. The original farmer, whose pristine board was the beginning of all this, has probably by this time sold enough land to the cottagers to enable him to give up taking boarders and keeping a hotel, and is able to stay in bed like a gentleman most of the winter, and sit on a bench in his shirt-sleeves all summer.

Very soon the boarder, unable to put up with the growing haughtiness of the cottager, and with exclusion from his entertainments, withdraws silently and unobtrusively from the scenes he once enjoyed so much, to seek out another unsophisticated farmer, and begin once more, probably when well on in life, with hope and strength abated, the heavy work of opening up another watering-place and developing its resources. The silent suffering there is in this process, which may be witnessed to-day in hundreds of the most beautiful spots in America, probably none know but those who have gone through it. In fact, the dislodgment along our coast and in our mountains of the boarder by the cottager is to-day the great summer tragedy of American life. Winter has tragedies of its own, which may be worse; but summer has nothing like it, nothing which imposes such a strain on character and so severely tests early training. The worst of it--the pity of it, we might say--is that this is not the expulsion of the inferior by the superior race, which is going on in so many parts of the world, and which Darwin is teaching us to look upon with equanimity. The boarder is often, if not generally, the cottager's superior in culture, in acquirements, and in variety of social experience. He does not board because he likes the food, but simply because it enables him to live in the midst of beautiful scenery. He eats the farmer's poor fare contentedly, because he finds it is sufficient to maintain his sense of natural beauty and the clearness of all his moral perceptions unimpaired, and to brace his nerves for the great battle with evil which he has been carrying on in the city, and to which he means to return after a fortnight or a month or six weeks, as the case may be. We fear, in fact, that very few indeed of our summer cottages contain half so much noble endeavor and power of self-sacrifice as the boarding-houses they are displacing.

The progress made by the cottager in driving the boarder away from some of the most attractive places, both in the hills and on the seaboard, is very steady. Among these Bar Harbor occupies a leading position. It was, for fully fifteen years after its discovery, frequented exclusively by a very high order of boarders, and probably has been the scene of more plain living and high thinking than any other summer spot on the seacoast. It was, in fact, remarkable at one time for an almost unhealthy intellectual stimulation through an exclusively fish diet. But the purity of the air and the grandeur of the scenery brought a yearly increasing tide of visitors from about 1860 onward. These visitors were, until about five years ago, almost exclusively boarders, and the development of the place as a summer resort was prodigious. The little houses of the original half farmers, half fishermen, who welcomed, or rather did not welcome, the first explorers, grew rapidly into little boarding-houses, then into big boarding-houses, then into hotels with registers. Then the hotels grew larger and larger, and the callings of the steamer more frequent, until the place became famous and crowded.

All this while, however, the hold of the boarder on it remained unshaken. He was monarch of all he surveyed. No one on the island, except the landlords, held his head higher. There was one distinction between boarders, but it was not one to wound anybody's self-love: some were "mealers," or persons eating in the hotel where they lodged; and others were "haul-mealers," or persons who were collected and brought to their food in wagons. But this classification produced no heart-burning. The mealer loved and respected the haul-mealer, or wished him in Jericho, and the haul-mealer in like manner the mealer, on general grounds, like other persons with whom he came in contact, without any reference to his place of abode. All were covered by the grand old name of boarder, and that was enough. A happier, easier, freer, and more curiously dressed summer community than Bar Harbor in those early days was not to be found on our coast.

We do not know exactly when the cottager first made his appearance on those rugged shores, but it is certain that his approaches were more insidious than they have ever been anywhere. He did not proclaim himself all at once. The first cottages were very plain structures, which he cunningly spoke of as "shanties," or "log huts," in which he simply lodged, and went to the hotels or neighboring farm-houses for his food in the simple and unpretending character of a haul-mealer. For a good while, therefore, he excited neither suspicion nor alarm, and the hotel-keepers welcomed him heartily, and all went on smoothly. Gradually, however, he threw off all disguise, bought land at high prices, and began unblushingly to erect "marine villas" on it, with everything that the name implies. He has now got possession of all the desirable sites from the Ovens down to the Great Head, and has surrounded himself with all the luxuries, just as at Newport. The consequence is, although the sea and sky and the mountains and the rocks retain all their charm, the boarder is no longer happy. He finds himself relegated to a secondary position. He is abashed when on foot or in his humble buckboard he meets the haughty cottager in his dog-cart or victoria. He has neither dog nor horse, while the cottager has both. He was once proud of staying at Rodick's or Lyman's; now he begins to be ashamed of it. He finds that the cottagers, who are the permanent residents, have a society of their own, in which he is either not welcome or is a mere outsider. He finds that the very name of boarder, which he once wore like a lily, has become a term of inferiority. Worse than all, he finds himself confounded with a still lower class, known at Bar Harbor as "the tourist"--elsewhere called the excursionist--who comes by the hundred on the steamers in linen dusters, and is compelled by force of circumstances to "do" Mount Desert in twenty-four hours, and therefore enters on his task without shame or scruple, roams over the cottager's lawn, stares into his windows, breaks his fences, and sometimes asks him for a free lunch. The boarder, of course, looks down on this man, but when both are on the road or on the piazza of the hotel how are they to be distinguished? They are not, and cannot be.

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.