CHAPTER 46

Enchantments and Enchanters

THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived

too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of

the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights

and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made

gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and

in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other

diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it

filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking

and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the

spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety.

There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither

this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any

outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence;

and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in

which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not

on account of the police.

Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation;

but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out

of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl

and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the

monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land,

is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances

of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well,

perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line

between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.

This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans

until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and

Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could

hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very

brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul

of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the

romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and

Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that

keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the

North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall

upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be

also its last.

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set

two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the

_ancien regime_ and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves

a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above

birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that

whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men,

since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable

for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate

the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the

world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty,

humanity, and progress.

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single

might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the

world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms

of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with

the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham

chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did

measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other

individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part

of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they

flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation

ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome

civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and

commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so

you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive

works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune

romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought

to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the

Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of

phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval

mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than

it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major

or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he,

also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it

was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence

for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on

slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of

Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it

existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for

the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never

should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a

plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild

proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so

did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter

as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be

traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any

other thing or person.

One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence

penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or

Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will

find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism,

sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly

done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This

sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country,

there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence,

the South was able to show as many well-known literary names,

proportioned to population, as the North could.

But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair

competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out

that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings

to it--clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a

consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever

there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under

present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present;

they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of

genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but

upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England,

and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as

witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very

few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead

of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a

dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out.

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm

is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought

by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval

chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far

as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty

nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work

undermined it.