Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX.

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* * * * *

And so we are at Saratoga. Now, of all places to stay at in the
summer-time, Saratoga is the very last one to choose. It may have
attractions in winter; but, if one wishes to rest and change and root down
and shoot up and branch out, he might as well take lodgings in the
water-wheel of a saw-mill. The uniformity and variety will be much the
same. It is all a noiseless kind of din, narrow and intense. There is
nothing in Saratoga nor of Saratoga to see or to hear or to feel. They
tell you of a lake. You jam into an omnibus and ride four miles. Then you
step into a cockle-shell and circumnavigate a pond, so small that it
almost makes you dizzy to sail around it. This is the lake,--a very nice
thing as far as it goes; but when it has to be constantly on duty as the
natural scenery of the whole surrounding country, it is putting altogether
too fine a point on it. The picturesque people will inform you of an
Indian encampment. You go to see it, thinking of the forest primeval, and
expecting to be transported back to tomahawks, scalps, and forefathers;
but you return without them, and that is all. I never heard of anybody's
going anywhere. In fact, there did not seem to be anywhere to go. Any
suggestion of mine to strike out into the champaign was frowned down in
the severest manner. As far as I could see, nobody ever did anything.
There never was any plan on foot. Nothing was ever stirring. People sat on
the piazza and sewed. They went to the springs, and the springs are
dreadful. They bubble up salts and senna. I never knew anything that
pretended to be water that was half as bad. It has no one redeeming
quality. It is bitter. It is greasy. Every spring is worse than the last,
whichever end you begin at. They told apocryphal stories of people's
drinking sixteen glasses before breakfast; and yet it may have been true;
for, if one could bring himself to the point of drinking one glass of it,
I should suppose it would have taken such a force to enable him to do it
that he might go on drinking indefinitely, from the mere action of the
original impulse. I should think one dose of it would render a person
permanently indifferent to savors, and make him, like Mithridates,
poison-proof. Nevertheless, people go to the springs and drink. Then they
go to the bowling-alleys and bowl. In the evening, if you are hilariously
inclined, you can make the tour of the hotels. In each one you see a large
and brilliantly lighted parlor, along the four sides of which are women
sitting solemn and stately, in rows three deep, with a man dropped in here
and there, about as thick as periods on a page, very young or very old or
in white cravats. A piano or a band or something that can make a noise
makes it at intervals at one end of the room. They all look as if they
were waiting for something, but nothing in particular happens. Sometimes,
after the mountain has labored awhile, some little mouse of a boy and girl
will get up, execute an antic or two and sit down again, when everything
relapses into its original solemnity. At very long intervals somebody
walks across the floor. There is a moderate fluttering of fans and an
occasional whisper. Expectation interspersed with gimcracks seems to be
the programme. The greater part of the dancing that I saw was done by boys
and girls. It was pretty and painful. Nobody dances so well as children;
no grace is equal to their grace: but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at
night, and see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to
be in bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all the
paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of a hollow
square of strangers,--I call it murder in the first degree. What can
mothers be thinking of to abuse their children so? Children are naturally
healthy and simple; why should they be spoiled? They will have to plunge
into the world full soon enough; why should the world be plunged into
them? Physically, mentally, and morally, the innocents are massacred.
Night after night I saw the same children led out to the slaughter, and as
I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin and white, their delicate
nerves lose tone and tension, their brains become feeble and flabby, their
minds flutter out weakly in muslin and ribbons, their vanity kindled by
injudicious admiration, the sweet child--unconsciousness withering away in
the glare of indiscriminate gazing, the innocence and simplicity and
naturalness and child-likeness swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of
artificialness, all the fine, golden butterfly-dust of modesty and
delicacy and retiring girlhood ruthlessly rubbed off forever before
girlhood had even reddened from the dim dawn of infancy. Oh! it is cruel
to sacrifice children so. What can atone for a lost childhood? What can be
given in recompense for the ethereal, spontaneous, sharply defined, new,
delicious sensations of a sheltered, untainted, opening life?

Thoroughly worked into a white heat of indignation, we leave the babes in
the wood to be despatched by their ruffian relatives, and go to another
hotel. A larger parlor, larger rows, but still three deep and solemn. A
tall man, with a face in which melancholy seems to be giving way to
despair, a man most proper for an undertaker, but palpably out of place in
a drawing-room, walks up and down incessantly, but noiselessly, in a
persistent endeavor to bring out a dance. Now he fastens upon a newly
arrived man. Now he plants himself before a bench of misses. You can hear
the low rumble of his exhortation and the tittering replies. After a
persevering course of entreaty and persuasion, a set is drafted, the music
galvanizes, and the dance begins.

I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or their
tongues or their feet find to do. A half-and-half performance of the right
is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the wrong. It is
vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of purpose, imperfect
execution, that works ill in all life. Be monarch of all you survey. If a
woman decides to do her own housework, let her go in royally among her
pots and kettles and set everything a-stewing and baking and broiling and
boiling, as a queen might. If she decides not to do housework, but to
superintend its doing, let her say to her servant, "Go," and he goeth, to
another, "Come," and he cometh, to a third, "Do this," and he doeth it,
and not potter about. So, when girls get themselves up and go to Saratoga
for a regular campaign, I want their bearing to be soldierly. Let them be
gay with abandonment. Let them take hold of it as if they liked it. I do
not affect the word flirtation, but the thing itself is not half so
criminal as one would think from the animadversions visited upon it. Of
course, a deliberate setting yourself to work to make some one fall in
love with you, for the mere purpose of showing your power, is
abominable,--or would be, if anybody ever did it; but I do not suppose it
ever was done, except in fifth-rate novels. What I mean is, that it is
entertaining, harmless, and beneficial for young people to amuse
themselves with each other to the top of their bent, if their bent is a
natural and right one. A few hearts may suffer accidental, transient
injury; but hearts are like limbs, all the stronger for being broken.
Besides, where one man or woman is injured by loving too much, nine
hundred and ninety-nine die the death from not loving enough.

But these Saratoga girls did neither one thing nor another. They dressed
themselves in their best, making a point of it, and failed. They assembled
themselves together of set purpose to be lively, and they were
infectiously dismal. They did not dress well: one looked rustic; another
was dowdyish; a third was over-fine; a fourth was insignificant. Their
bearing was not good, in the main. They danced, and whispered, and
laughed, and looked like milkmaids. They had no style, no figure. Their
shoulders were high, and their chests were flat, and they were one-sided,
and they stooped,--all of which would have been of no account, if they had
only been unconsciously enjoying themselves; but they consciously were
not. It is possible that they thought they were happy, but I knew better.
You are never happy, unless you are master of the situation; and they were
not. They endeavored to appear at ease,--a thing which people who are at
ease never do. They looked as if they had all their lives been meaning to
go to Saratoga, and now they had got there and were determined not to
betray any unwontedness. It was not the timid, eager, delighted,
fascinating, graceful awkwardness of a new young girl; it was not the
careless, hearty, whole-souled enjoyment of an experienced girl; it was
not the natural, indifferent, imperial queening it of an acknowledged
monarch: but something that caught hold of the hem of the garment of them
all. It was they with the sheen damped off. So it was not imposing. I
could pick you up a dozen girls straight along, right out of the pantries
and the butteries, right up from the washing-tubs and the sewing-machines,
who should be abundantly able to "hoe their row" with them anywhere. In
short, I was extremely disappointed. I expected to see the high fashion,
the very birth and breeding, the cream cheese of the country, and it was
skim-milk. If that is birth, one can do quite as well without being born
at all. Occasionally you would see a girl with gentle blood in her veins,
whether it were butcher-blood or banker-blood, but she only made the
prevailing plebsiness more striking. Now I maintain that a woman ought to
be very handsome or very clever, or else she ought to go to work and do
something. Beauty is of itself a divine gift and adequate. "Beauty is its
own excuse for being" anywhere. It ought not to be fenced in or
monopolized, any more than a statue or a mountain. It ought to be free and
common, a benediction to all weary wayfarers. It can never be profaned;
for it veils itself from the unappreciative eye, and shines only upon its
worshippers. So a clever woman, whether she be a painter or a teacher or a
dress-maker,--if she really has an object in life, a career, she is safe.
She is a power. She commands a realm. She owns a world. She is bringing
things to bear. Let her alone. But it is a very dangerous and a very
melancholy thing for common women to be "lying on their oars" long at a
time. Some of these were, I suppose, what Winthrop calls "business-women,
fighting their way out of vulgarity into style." The process is rather
uninteresting, but the result may be glorious. Yet a good many of them
were good, honest, kind, common girls, only demoralized by long lying
around in a waiting posture. It had taken the fire and sparkle out of
them. They were not in a healthy state. They were degraded, contracted,
flaccid. They did not hold themselves high. They knew that in a marketable
point of view there was a frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio
of men was unusually diminished by the absence of those who had gone to
the war, and of those who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that
they had not gone. The few available men had it all their own way; the
women were on the look-out for them, instead of being themselves looked
out for. They talked about "gentlemen," and being "companionable to
_gen_-tlemen," and "who was fascinating to _gen_-tlemen," till the "grand
old name" became a nuisance. There was an under-current of unsated
coquetry. I don't suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but
when our silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching
and returning visits, it passes off harmless. When it is stripped of all
these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts in
with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show.

No, I don't like Saratoga. I don't think it is wholesome. No place can be
healthy that keeps up such an unmitigated dressing.

"Where do you walk?" I asked an artless little lady.

"Oh, almost always on the long piazza. It is so clean there, and we don't
like to soil our dresses."

Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course of
things! It is the result of vile habits. They cease to care for things
which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to what ought
to be only an incident. People dress in their best without break. They go
to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and they go into the
parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is shine, shine, shine, all
the way between, and a different shine each time. You may well suppose
that I was like an owl among birds of Paradise, for what little finery I
had was in my (eminently) travelling-trunk: yet, though it was but a dory,
compared with the Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt, that, if I
could only once get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose.
Like poor Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear
clothes! I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks,
and every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I
could only get at it. By-and-by mine came, and I blossomed. I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up, and
was, as the poet says,--

"Prodigious in change,
And endless in range,"--

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best. The result was,
that in three days I touched bottom. But then we went away, and my
reputation was saved. I don't believe anybody ever did a larger business
on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it. I cherish the hope that
nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way all summer,--I, who
in three days had mustered into service every dress and sash and ribbon
and rag that I had had in three years or expected to have in three more.
But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head down where other people
are holding their heads up.

I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress. It is a duty
as well as a delight. Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that she would
never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or one who seemed
pleased with her dress. And not only young ladies, but old ladies, and old
gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress a concord and not a
discord. But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual falsetto, and stuns you.
One becomes sated with an interminable _piece de resistance_ of full
dress. At the sea-side you bathe; at the mountains you put on stout boots
and coarse frocks and go a-fishing; but Saratoga never "lets up,"--if I
may be pardoned the phrase. Consequently you see much of crinoline and
little of character. You have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau
used to get at bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting
perfectly still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out. You
see more of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty
days of guarded monotone. Now I cannot conceive of any reason why people
should go to Saratoga, except to see people. True, as a general thing,
they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are summering. But
if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in the country during
the nine months of our Northern winter, he may have a mighty hunger and
thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces and hear human voices;
but even then Saratoga is not the place to go to, on account of this very
artificialness. By artificial I do not mean deceitful. I saw nobody but
nice people there, smooth, kind, and polite. By artificial I mean wrought
up. You don't get at the heart of things. Artificialness spreads and spans
all with a crystal barrier,--invisible, but palpable. Nothing was left to
grow and go at its own sweet will. The very springs were paved and
pavilioned. For green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of
brooks, which one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a
pleasure-ground, graded and graced and pathed like a cemetery, wherein
nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume. Everything took pattern
and was elaborate. Nothing was left to the imagination, the taste, the
curiosity. A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and blinded you, and
threatened profanity. Now profanity is wicked and vulgar; but if you
listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that you will not hear them
whispering, "Thunder!"

For the restorative qualities of Saratoga I have nothing to say. I was
well when I went there; nor did my experience ever furnish me with any
disease that I should consider worse than an intermittent attack of her
spring waters. But whatever it may do for the body, I do not believe it is
good for the soul. I do not believe that such places, such scenes, such a
fashion of life ever nourishes a vigorous womanhood or manhood. Taken
homoeopathically, it may be harmless; but if it become a habit, a
necessity, it must vitiate, enervate, destroy. Men can stand it, for the
sea-breezes and the mountain-breezes may have full sweep through their
life; but women cannot, for they just go home and live air-tight.

* * * * *

If the railroad-men at Saratoga tell you you can go straight from there to
the foot of Lake George, don't you believe a word of it. Perhaps you can,
and perhaps you cannot; but you are not any more likely to can for their
saying so. We left Saratoga for Fort-William-Henry Hotel in full faith of
an afternoon ride and a sunset arrival, based on repeated and unhesitating
assurances to that effect. Instead of which, we went a few miles, and were
then dumped into a blackberry-patch, where we were informed that we must
wait seven hours. So much for the afternoon ride through summer fields and
"Sunset on Lake George" from the top of a coach. But I made no unmanly
laments, for we were out of Saratoga, and that was happiness. We were
among cows and barns and homely rail-fences, and that was comfort; so we
strolled contentedly through the pastures, found a river,--I believe it
was the Hudson; at any rate, Halicarnassus said so, though I don't imagine
he knew; but he would take oath it was Acheron rather than own up to
ignorance on any point whatever,--watched the canal-boats and boatmen go
down, marvelled at the arbor-vitae trees growing wild along the
river-banks, green, hale, stately, and symmetrical, against the dismal
mental background of two little consumptive shoots bolstered up in our
front yard at home, and dying daily, notwithstanding persistent and
affectionate nursing with "flannels and rum." And then we went back to the
blackberry-station and inquired whether there was nothing celebrated in
the vicinity to which visitors of received Orthodox creed should dutifully
pay their respects, and were gratified to learn that we were but a few
miles from Jane McCrea and her Indian murderers. Was a carriage
procurable? Well, yes, if the ladies would be willing to go in that. It
wasn't very smart, but it would take 'em safe,--as if "the ladies" would
have raised any objections to going in a wheelbarrow, had it been
necessary, and so we bundled in. The hills were steep, and our horse, the
property of an adventitious bystander, was of the Rosinante breed; but we
were in no hurry, seeing that the only thing awaiting us this side the
sunset was a blackberry-patch without any blackberries, and we walked up
hill and scraped down, till we got into a lane which somebody told us led
to the Fort, from which the village, Fort Edward, takes its name. But,
instead of a fort, the lane ran full tilt against a pair of bars.

"Now we are lost," I said, sententiously.

"A gem of countless price," pursued Halicarnassus, who never quotes poetry
except to inflame me.

"How long will it be profitable to remain here?" asked Grande, when we had
sat immovable and speechless for the space of five minutes.

"There seems to be nowhere else to go. We have got to the end," said
Halicarnassus, roaming as to his eyes over into the wheat-field beyond.

"We might turn," suggested the Anakim, looking bright,

"How can you turn a horse in this knitting-needle of a lane?" I demanded.

"I don't know," replied Halicarnassus, dubiously, "unless I take him up in
my arms, and set him down with his head the other way,"--and immediately
turned him deftly in a corner about half as large as the wagon.

The next lane we came to was the right one, and being narrow, rocky, and
rough, we left our carriage and walked.

A whole volume of the peaceful and prosperous history of our beloved
country could be read in the fact that the once belligerent, life-saving,
death-dealing fort was represented by a hen-coop; yet I was disappointed.
I was hungry for a ruin,--some visible hint of the past. Such is human
nature,--ever prone to be more impressed by a disappointment of its own
momentary gratification than by the most obvious well-being of a nation;
but, glad or sorry, of Fort Edward was not left one stone upon another.
Several single stones lay about promiscuous rather than belligerent.
Flag-staff and palisades lived only in a few straggling bean-poles. For
the heavy booming of cannon rose the "quauk!" of ducks and the cackling of
hens. We went to the spot which tradition points out as the place where
Jane McCrea met her death. River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; women
stood at their washing-tubs, and white-headed children stared at us from
above; nor from the unheeding river or the forgetful woods came shriek or
cry or faintest wail of pain.

When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words on
white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no suffering
woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty dress, long
hair grasped by a half-naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking hands
raised in entreaty. It was interesting as a picture, but it excited no
pity, no horror, because it was only a picture. We never saw women dressed
in that style. We knew that women did not take journeys through woods
without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of ignorant, indifferent
incredulity over the whole. But as we grow up, printed words take on new
life. The latent fire in them lights up and glows. The mystic words throb
with vital heat, and burn down into our souls to an answering fire. As we
stand, on this soft summer day, by the old tree which tradition declares
to have witnessed that fateful scene, we go back into a summer long ago,
but fair and just like this. Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young
girl blooming and beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years. Farther
back still, we see an old man's darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a
light-hearted child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young
veins,--then a tender orphan, sheltered by a brother's care,--then a
gentle maiden, light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with
a priceless burden,--a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice
than brother's blood, stronger even than life. Yonder in the woods lurk
wily and wary foes. Death with unspeakable horrors lies in ambush there;
but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting, after
long, weary absence, is there. What fear can master that overpowering
hope? Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a separated
loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of girlish love.
Taxes, representation, what things are these to come between two hearts?
No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own brave hero and true knight.
Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! Alas! to those
fierce wild men, what is love, or loveliness? Pride, and passion, and the
old accursed hunger for gold flame up in their savage breasts. Wrathful,
loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love
have caressed but with reverent half-touch,--and love, and hope, and life
go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the
reverberations of more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage
of a war more awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a
clear, young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering
woods, cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a
thrill of speechless pain. Along these peaceful banks I see a bowed form
walking, youth in his years, but deeper furrows in his face than age can
plough, stricken down from the heights of his ambition and desire, all the
vigor and fire of manhood crushed and quenched beneath the horror of one
fearful memory. Sweet summer sky, bending above us soft and saintly,
beyond your blue depths is there not Heaven?

* * * * *

"We may as well give Dobbin his oats here," said Halicarnassus.

We had brought a few in a bag for luncheon, thinking it might help him
over the hills. So the wagon was rummaged, the bag brought to light, and I
sent to one of the nearest houses to get something for him to eat out of.
I did not think to ask what particular vessel to inquire for; but after I
had knocked, I decided upon a meat-platter or a pudding-dish, and with the
good woman's permission finally took both, that Halicarnassus might have
his choice.

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