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| Leisure for most of us is a thing to be enjoyed. Leisure at Newport is a thing to be displayed. Toil is tiring, is the experience of most of us. We desire to find a place where we may idle away a few weeks, refresh our brains recruit our energies, and enable ourselves to return with new vigor to our work again. Toil is ignoble, is the Newport idea: let us employ ourselves in showing that we need not engage in it… |
NEWPORT LIFE STRENUOUS –
Society Women in Vacation Having Anything Except Best
It is not difficult to understand why women who have passed the summer at Newport are readily to be distinguished far into the winter by their fagged look. The season is yet young - the more exciting round of balls and cotillions has not indeed begun - but already the faces of the women bear unmistakable lines of weariness which the arts of our army of masseuses cannot quite obliterate.
Young girls not yet out - but who, nevertheless, are ever present and most popular at dinners, dances and doings of all sorts - are already wearing the faces of debutantes at the end of their first season. One or two of them are very lovely, but, it must be owned, are years too old in manners and in looks. It is commonplace to say that life in Newport is so formal that it affords no rest. It is really surprising, however, to reflect how completely the true vacation idea has been inverted. It is not merely that the notion of rest has been lost sight of; it has suffered a curious inversion.
Leisure for most of us is a thing to be enjoyed. Leisure at Newport is a thing to be displayed. Toil is tiring, is the experience of most of us. We desire to find a place where we may idle away a few weeks, refresh our brains recruit our energies, and enable ourselves to return with new vigor to our work again. Toil is ignoble, is the Newport idea: let us employ ourselves in showing that we need not engage in it.
This is the philosophy that explains, as its unconscious working has brought into being, the various phenomena of Newport ostentation of dwelling and dress that is so overwhelming to those unfamiliar with it, and over which visiting foreigners exclaim as over one of the wonders of the universe.
There is no place where so large a portion of the day may be passed in public at the casino, on the avenue and on the beach -though the latter by a classic fiction is supposed to be private. (Its mere semi-publicity has lately interfered sadly with the popularity of Bailey's.) The great houses stand but a little way from the streets and are open at all times to an inspection which would be intolerable to a European.
And yet it is considered well here to keep the proofs of unobserved leisure in constant evidence also. Etiquette, which at such other resorts as are truly vacation places, is neglected to the greatest extent compatible with ordinary respectability, is here carried to the utmost extreme. The exact proprieties of dress, equipage, cards and calls are insisted upon. It is a common bore, which, while confessed on every hand. is notwithstanding strictly observed.
The idle folly of it stands out with great distinctness in a place like this. where it might be expected all possible fromality would be dispensed with in the interest of real comfort and enjoyment. The fact that formality 's nowhere carried further shows the real purpose of life. –New York World, 1902
Leisure for most of us is a thing to be enjoyed. Leisure at Newport is a thing to be displayed. Toil is tiring, is the experience of most of us. We desire to find a place where we may idle away a few weeks, refresh our brains recruit our energies, and enable ourselves to return with new vigor to our work again. Toil is ignoble, is the Newport idea: let us employ ourselves in showing that we need not engage in it.
This is the philosophy that explains, as its unconscious working has brought into being, the various phenomena of Newport ostentation of dwelling and dress that is so overwhelming to those unfamiliar with it, and over which visiting foreigners exclaim as over one of the wonders of the universe.
There is no place where so large a portion of the day may be passed in public at the casino, on the avenue and on the beach -though the latter by a classic fiction is supposed to be private. (Its mere semi-publicity has lately interfered sadly with the popularity of Bailey's.) The great houses stand but a little way from the streets and are open at all times to an inspection which would be intolerable to a European.
And yet it is considered well here to keep the proofs of unobserved leisure in constant evidence also. Etiquette, which at such other resorts as are truly vacation places, is neglected to the greatest extent compatible with ordinary respectability, is here carried to the utmost extreme. The exact proprieties of dress, equipage, cards and calls are insisted upon. It is a common bore, which, while confessed on every hand. is notwithstanding strictly observed.
The idle folly of it stands out with great distinctness in a place like this. where it might be expected all possible fromality would be dispensed with in the interest of real comfort and enjoyment. The fact that formality 's nowhere carried further shows the real purpose of life. –New York World, 1902
🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia
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