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 theirtrain all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and otherdiverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show,as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the lightof its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said thatin 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 hisgreat 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 mysteryin 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 Ijudge 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 andthe oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to lookat than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabbleof the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the dayand admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holyone is reached.
This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of NewOrleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis andSt. 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 timeas it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic,not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romanticmysteries, 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 itand make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would bealso its last.
Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonapartemay be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolutionbroke 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 whichBonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debtto them for these great and permanent services to liberty,humanity, and progress.
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by hissingle might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back;sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinishforms 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 anyother individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has nowoutlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not soforcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.
There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenthcentury is curiously confused and commingled with the WalterScott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical,common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed upwith the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of anabsurd 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 Majoror a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and itwas he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.
For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and alsoreverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations andcontributions of Sir Walter.
Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existedbefore 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 hadany war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might,perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner ofthe 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'sinfluence than to that of any other thing or person.
One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeplythat influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds.
If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodicalof 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 ofthe country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition;and as a consequence, the South was able to show as manywell-known literary names, proportioned to population,as the North could.
But a change has come, and there is no opportunitynow 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 itand has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence.
There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as everthere was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currencyunder 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 thevery few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style.
Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the Southought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter'stime is out.
A curious exemplification of the power of a single book forgood or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote'
and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world'sadmiration 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.
Enchantments and Enchanters
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