 | THE LORGNETTE. The lorgnette, or, Studies of the town |  |
THE HABIT OF OUR AMUSEMENTS.
Cela se fait,—cela ne se fait pas;—voilà la decision supreme.
St. Preux a Julie.
The stranger who saw our town only in this
heated month of summer, would have very incorrect,
and unsatisfactory notions of the life and aspect of
the town year. We are pre-eminently a business
and a practical people, (without giving even the Bostonians
the benefit of an aristocratic exclusion;)
and, at the same time, we are the most arrant, and
impetuous seekers of pleasure that are to be found
any ordinary season, and finding few theatres
where action is an art,—few operas where a delicate
appreciation of music makes the charm,—few
public balls where gayety is the impulse, and the
end,—few hotels where daily enjoyment is the pursuit,
and not mere getting of food, and getting of
lodging; and few mansions where the proprietors
study a leisurely enjoyment of life's best comforts,
would decide that we were given over, body and
soul, to trade.
And he would be more than half right: with us
business is the habit,—pleasure is an exception.
The hurry of enterprise, and commercial endeavor,
may be likened to the regular, leafy development
of a plant, in which the abounding succulence goes
only to supply foliage; while our paroxysms of
pleasure-hunting may be aptly compared to that
extraordinary action of the vegetable life, which
shows itself in flowers. Our female plant, to renew
the simile, blossoms twice a year,—once in mid-summer,
and once in mid-winter. Our male plant
has but the single flowering period of mid-summer;
an exception, however, is to be noted, in favor of a
certain class of perennial beaux, who blossom double,
and who, like all double-blossoming trees, make
no fruit.
In the cities of the Old World it is different.
There, pleasure is a part of life. It is incorporate
with the whole animal and mental being. It is an
element of their civilization. It is compacted with
the whole manhood; and it is the daily grace of the
life of woman. We, on the contrary, are in that
stage of civilization, where all hands and nearly all of
energy, are busy upon the crude, mechanical framework
of society; and toward those cultivated pleasures
which will fill up the interstices of a perfected
civilization, we reach by spasms of desire, and
grapple them by piece-meal, and apart.
I do not know, Fritz, if I convey to you by such
language a fair idea of what I wish to express.
Let me give you, therefore, a practical illustration.
Our mid-summer, by habit and conventional usage,
is our pleasure vacation. Being such, it is a business
to enjoy it. To enjoy it, the country must be
sought,—no matter what may be the ties of circumstances,
or of employ,—no matter how rough the
roads over which we are to travel,—no matter how
shabby the hotels we are to visit,—no matter what
may be our tastes, or habitual indulgences,—no
matter what may be the fashionable shackles which
are to hamper us,—the business in hand is pleasure,
and it must all be called pleasure.
The pursuit is entered upon as we enter upon a
of movement; the same bustle of progress, and the
same fears of failure. The hunt after enjoyment is
a venture, into which our anxieties enter as much
as into an investment in grain, or in stocks.
Pleasure is a marketable commodity; it is a business
in hand, upon which valuation is set, by cost.
We bag it as we bag game; and estimate it, like
hunters, by the difficulties of the capture.
I put it to you, Fritz, if the European has not
more method in his madness? Are not his recreations
more intimately blended with his life, and with
his daily habit? Are they not more a part of him,
and less hideously objective? Enjoyment with
him is not at the end of some rough journey, but
lies, on either hand, along his road. It is not
with him a matter of patent manufacture, whose
excellence is to be established by puffing, but it
is a thing of education, and of existence.
The Englishman quits London for his country
place, for Brighton, or for the Moors, not altogether
when the town chooses, but when he chooses himself.
He loves variety, in his way; but he acknowledges
no high road, by which it is always to be approached,
and out of which no enjoyable variety is
to be found. He may love the Cliffs of Scarborough,
or the rural attractions of Leamington, or the
like to admit that either one or the other, is absolutely
essential to the attainment of a summer's
pleasure, or that talk of them is to make up the
only valid catalogue, and measure of his enjoyments.
The Parisian, tiring of the Sunday's talk in the
Passage de l' Opera, or of the Sunday evenings in
the Grand Balcon, may run away to the terrace of
St. Germain, to the baths of Dieppe, or to the waters
of the Pyrenees. And this he does—if done at all—
because he can afford it, and because he finds a
pleasure in every step of his progress; and not because
crowds have gone before him, or because it
will be essential to the chat of the winter, to talk
either of Pau, or of Aix la Chapelle.
There is nothing conventional in his pursuit of
pleasure; it sits on him as easy as his coat; and
when it irks him, he throws it off as sudden as
his dressing-gown. Because the Champs Elysees
are without their equipages, he does not consider
himself debarred the pleasure of a drive; nor does
he repine because he cannot find rooms at the same
watering-place with her Grace the Duchess. Into
the whole web and woof of his life are twisted the
gilded threads, which give the blazon of amusement;
they are not arranged in bands, broad,
Do not understand me, Fritz, to undervalue our
national characteristics of enterprise, and commercial
vigor, or to admire more the easy, and life-long
indulgence, which belongs to a graceful, but a frivolous
nation;—and yet a nation which can well instruct
us in the matter of those amusements which
adorn civilization. It is hardly worth while that
our summer pleasures be piled up in masses, and
be billeted, and appraised, like so much gauze merchandise:
they should be tempered by common
sense, and so worked into the cloth of life, that
they may decorate it and relieve it everywhere.
Nothing is to be feared, and much is to be gained
by a comparison of our recreative resources, with
those of a people, who have served a very long apprenticeship
at the trade. The true art of rational
amusement is in so moderating, and multiplying
its characteristics, as that there may be no danger
from satiety, and no intemperate flush from undue
excitation.
I began, Fritz, with saying something about the
July aspect of our town; it is not like the winter
town. The streets still have their fullness; but
it is not the fullness of the spring-tide, or of the
hybernal flood. Even such of the winter belles as
moderate in dress, and less exacting in their demands.
They glide slily in the shadows of the
houses, as if their vacation had come, and as if
their need of city display had gone by. Some few
who were not noticeable in the fullness of the town,
and who have adroitly out-stayed their more successful
rivals, are grown into objects of attraction,
and are reaping a harvest of favors from those who
possess the habit of bestowal. In the comparative
absence of equipages, too, not a few see the possibility
of arresting attention; and will triumph in
a Brougham, that two months ago would have
given only the most tedious chance of success.
Middle-aged ladies, who, in the plethora of the
winter festivities, might have despaired of smiles,
can now win such adoration as finds no other object.
Negligé dresses are both in rule, and in worship.
Etiquette is forborne; and belles may shop
at their grocer's without fear of observation, or of
remark. The town may be fairly reckoned in deshabille,
and a kind of easy looseness (I mean no
harm) belongs both to its dress, and to its habit.
The formality of receptions is passed away, and
people chat from balcony to balcony, as if they belonged
to a common family.
As you will naturally suppose, there are long
have been exceedingly gay. An old gentleman,
whose wife and daughters are at the Springs, reigns
for once in his own house, and over his own household,
and appears to enjoy exquisitely his freedom.
He may be seen peeping at dusk from between the
half-opened shutters, with an air of pride and independence,
which, though it does not sit upon him
naturally, will yet impose upon many the belief
that he is master of his own mansion. He may
even smoke in the balcony, with an audacious front,
that owes its character only to the distance that
lies between the town and his wife. In the ecstatic
enjoyment of his temporary supremacy, he may
even crack jokes with the maid, without fearing
the punishment of a wife's glance. He will take
advantage of the opportunity to cultivate a neighborly
spirit with the ladies about him, and astonish
them by his courage. Whether his wife may not
be balancing the account, in her own way, at the
Springs, is a question I may broach later in the
season.
Pursy gentlemen, who are heads of families, and
who are allowing their wives and daughters a
week's shopping in the town, may be seen walking
at dusk with their domestic trains, flanked, possibly,
by some negro nurse or body servant. A
public parlors of the town, and the lions of the day
are strangers. Strange faces are in the public
shops, and the churches are sprinkled with strangetrimmed
hats. Amusement has driven away the
absentees, and amusement has brought in the new-comers.
But while this summer rush for amusements
makes the town bare of its old formalities,
it imposes its peculiar restraints upon character
and habit at the watering-places. Nor are these
restraints, for the most part, those either of morals
or of religion; (it being generally understood that
the winter education supplies a sufficient stock
of these useful and respectable matters). The restraints
are of the making of that special tyrant
which we Americans delight to honor—I mean—
public opinion.
Even the arbitrary enactments of the town lose
their force, and rules of propriety languish. What
will be said, and what will be seen,—give a turn to
our summer's choice, the color to a summer's wardrobe,
the moderation to our summer action, and a
zest to the summer amusement.
A little township of jealousies, sects, and reputations
grows up in the heart of each of our summer
resorts; and it forms no small part of the
amusement to keep them warm and active. We
notoriety; and our poor belles, worn out with
the fatigues of a winter, restore their languishing
systems with such air, such dresses, such dances,
such hates, and such acquaintances, as fashion declares
nutritious. If the bitter, nauseating waters
of Sharon have touched pleasantly the fancy, or the
palate of some town leader of the modes, it becomes
part of the summer amusement to cultivate
the sulphurous taste. If riding is in vogue, or
Madame Such-an-one has given the cue, it is capital
amusement to ride. If their graces, who discipline
the hour and the modes, have set their
hearts on Newport, there will be crowds who will
get the first hint of their amusements, by following
in their wake. If Avon is vulgar, with its strong-smelling
waters, and its rough, honest country
folk, it is a part of fashionable amusement, to stay
away.
If the society of a watering-place, by popular
mention, is reckoned good, it is part of our amusement
to be amused with it; but if the society is
doubtful, or mixed, or lacks the quickening leaven
of well-known names, it is the part of our seeker
of amusement to be horribly ennuyé.
In short, my dear Fritz, it will not do to be
amused without discretion. A reliance on one's
reliance; and one may be subjected to the mortifying
reflection of having found amusement in
what the amusement fanciers utterly condemn. A
schedule of the means and appliances might be judiciously,
and most charitably prepared, by which
the ignorant would be informed of all that would
be requisite for a summer's amusement. Into such
schedule might safely enter the details of some
given lady's management; as, for instance,—her
choice of resort,—the style of her morning dress,—
the name of her coiffeur,—a list of her tenpenny
novels,—the intervals in her town correspondence,
—the age of her partners in the polka,—her pronunciation
of plaisir, and of liason,—her terms of
endearment, ordinary and extraordinary, and her
views on social education. With all these made
known, it would be a very dull pupil who did not
learn the art of a summer's amusement.
Am I not right, Fritz? Is there not a base subserviency
to formalities, and to opinionated dictation,
in the very search for recreation? And do
not one half of those so eager in the pursuit of a
summer's pleasure, utterly lose sight of any
healthful, and natural promptings, in the chase of
what some notoriety has decreed?
But I am in too sober a vein for the sultriness of
autumn shall have fanned us, and the amusements
of a season lie under our eye.
| THE LORGNETTE. The lorgnette, or, Studies of the town | |