Produced by David Widger
LITERATURE AND LIFE—The Confessions of a Summer Colonist
by William Dean Howells
The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down Eastcoast where I have been passing the last three months, and with eachloath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant.A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go alreadybegins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form ofwords which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; someshadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or changeshould destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I shouldnever come back to it. Perhaps others in the distant future may turn toit for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristicphases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions ofour own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange.
In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as thevisible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fireand a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American ofall American things is the least fitted among them to survive from thepresent to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soonbe a "portion and parcel" of our extremely forgetful past.
It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one might say that lastyear it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogetherdifferent. In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when therudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, andvulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvandistinction.
The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is the seven-o'clocksupper. Every one, in hotel or in cottage, dines between one and two,and no less scrupulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists whosup at half-past seven. At this function, which is our chief socialevent, it is 'de rigueur' for the men not to dress, and they come in anysort of sack or jacket or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pompswhich they forego. From this fact may be inferred the informality of themen's day-time attire; and the same note is sounded in the whole range ofthe cottage life, so that once a visitor from the world outside, who hadbeen exasperated beyond endurance by the absence of form among us (ifsuch an effect could be from a cause so negative), burst out with thereproach, "Oh, you make a fetish of your informality!"
"Fetish" is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mindsaying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place. Americanmen are everywhere impatient of form. It burdens and bothers them, andthey like to throw it off whenever they can. We may not be so verydemocratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies thatseparate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at oneanother; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as wedo the expenses. We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty inour colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humblethan of the great. In the nature of things it cannot last, however, andthe only question is how long it will last. I think, myself, until someone imagines giving an eight-o'clock dinner; then all the informalitieswill go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes willrush in.
The cottages themselves a