of money and luxury and an easy life, it was comparatively simple. It
cared less for display than the society that is supplanting it. Its rule
was domesticity. I should say that it bad the virtues as well as
the prejudices and the narrowness of intense family feeling, and
its exclusiveness. But when it trusted, it had few reserves, and its
cordiality was equal to its naivete. The Creole civilization differed
totally from that in any Northern city; it looked at life, literature,
wit, manners, from altogether another plane; in order to understand the
society of New Orleans one needs to imagine what French society would
be in a genial climate and in the freedom of a new country. Undeniably,
until recently, the Creoles gave the tone to New Orleans. And it was the
French culture, the French view of life, that was diffused. The young
ladies mainly were educated in convents and French schools. This
education had womanly agreeability and matrimony in view, and the graces
of social life. It differed not much from the education of young ladies
of the period elsewhere, except that it was from the French rather than
the English side, but this made a world of difference. French was a
study and a possession, not a fashionable accomplishment. The Creole had
gayety, sentiment, spice with a certain climatic languor, sweetness of
disposition, and charm of manner, and not seldom winning beauty; she was
passionately fond of dancing and of music, and occasionally an adept in
the latter; and she had candor, and either simplicity or the art of it.
But with her tendency to domesticity and her capacity for friendship,
and notwithstanding her gay temperament, she was less worldly than some
of her sisters who were more gravely educated after the English manner.
There was therefore in the old New Orleans life something nobler than
the spirit of plutocracy. The Creole middle-class population had, and
has yet, captivating naivete, friendliness, cordiality.
But the Creole influence in New Orleans is wider and deeper than this.
It has affected literary sympathies and what may be called literary
morals. In business the Creole is accused of being slow, conservative,
in regard to improvements obstinate and reactionary, preferring to
nurse a prejudice rather than run the risk of removing it by improving
himself, and of having a conceit that his way of looking at life is
better than the Boston way. His literary culture is derived from France,
and not from England or the North. And his ideas a good deal affect the
attitude of New Orleans towards English and contemporary literature.
The American element of the town was for the most part commercial, and
little given to literary tastes. That also is changing, but I fancy it
is still true that the most solid culture is with the Creoles, and it
has not been appreciated because it is French, and because its point
of view for literary criticism is quite different from that prevailing
elsewhere in America. It brings our American and English contemporary
authors, for instance, to comparison, not with each other, but
with French and other Continental writers. And this point of view
considerably affects the New Orleans opinion of Northern literature. In
this view it wants color, passion; it is too self-conscious and prudish,
not to say Puritanically mock-modest. I do not mean to say that the
Creoles as a class are a reading people, but the literary standards
of their scholars and of those among them who do cultivate literature
deeply are different from those at the North. We may call it provincial,
or we may call it cosmopolitan, but we shall not understand New Orleans
until we get its point of view of both life and letters.
In making these observations it will occur to the reader that they are
of necessity superficial, and not entitled to be regarded as criticism
or judgment. But I am impressed with the foreignness of New Orleans
civilization, and whether its point of view is right or wrong, I am very
far from wishing it to change. It contains a valuable element of variety
for the republic. We tend everywhere to sameness and monotony. New
Orleans is entering upon a new era of development, especially in
educational life. The Tonlane University is beginning to make itself
felt as a force both in polite letters and in industrial education. And
I sincerely hope that the literary development of the city and of the
South-west will be in the line of its own traditions, and that it will
not be a copy of New England or of Dutch Manhattan. It can, if it is
faithful to its own sympathies and temperament, make an original and
valuable contribution to our literary life.
There is a great temptation to regard New Orleans through the romance of
its past; and the most interesting occupation of the idler is to stroll
about in the French part of the town, search the shelves of French and
Spanish literature in the second-hand book-shops, try to identify the
historic sites and the houses that are the seats of local romances, and
observe the life in the narrow streets and alleys that, except for the
presence of the colored folk, recall the quaint picturesqueness of
many a French provincial town. One never tires of wandering in the
neighborhood of the old cathedral, facing the smart Jackson Square,
which is flanked by the respectable Pontalba buildings, and supported
on either side by the ancient Spanish courthouse, the most interesting
specimens of Spanish architecture this side of Mexico. When the court is
in session, iron cables are stretched across the street to prevent the
passage of wagons, and justice is administered in silence only broken by
the trill of birds in the Place d’.rmee and in the old flower-garden in
the rear of the cathedral, and by the muffled sound of footsteps in the
flagged passages. The region is saturated with romance, and so full of
present sentiment and picturesqueness that I can fancy no ground more
congenial to the artist and the story-teller. To enter into any details
of it would be to commit one’s self to a task quite foreign to the
purpose of this paper, and I leave it to the writers who have done and
are doing so much to make old New Orleans classic.
Possibly no other city of the United States so abounds in stories
pathetic and tragic, many of which cannot yet be published, growing
out of the mingling of races, the conflicts of French and Spanish, the
presence of adventurers from the Old World and the Spanish Main, and
especially out of the relations between the whites and the fair women
who had in their thin veins drops of African blood. The quadroon and
the octoroon are the staple of hundreds of thrilling tales. Duels were
common incidents of the Creole dancing assemblies, and of the cordon
bleu balls—the deities of which were the quadroon women, “the handsomest
race of women in the world,” says the description, and the most splendid
dancers and the most exquisitely dressed—the affairs of honor being
settled by a midnight thrust in a vacant square behind the cathedral,
or adjourned to a more French daylight encounter at “The Oaks,” or “Les
Trois Capalins.” But this life has all gone. In a stately building in
this quarter, said by tradition to have been the quadroon ball-room, but
I believe it was a white assembly-room connected with the opera, is
now a well-ordered school for colored orphans, presided over by colored
Sisters of Charity.
It is quite evident that the peculiar prestige of the quadroon and
the octoroon is a thing of the past. Indeed, the result of the war
has greatly changed the relations of the two races in New Orleans. The
colored people withdraw more and more to themselves. Isolation from
white influence has good results and bad results, the bad being, as one
can see, in some quarters of the town, a tendency to barbarism, which
can only be counteracted by free public schools, and by a necessity
which shall compel them to habits of thrift and industry. One needs
to be very much an optimist, however, to have patience for these
developments.
I believe there is an instinct in both races against mixture of
blood, and upon this rests the law of Louisiana, which forbids such
intermarriages; the time may come when the colored people will be as
strenuous in insisting upon its execution as the whites, unless there is
a great change in popular feeling, of which there is no sign at present;
it is they who will see that there is no escape from the equivocal
position in which those nearly white in appearance find themselves
except by a rigid separation of races. The danger is of a reversal
at any time to the original type, and that is always present to the
offspring of any one with a drop of African blood in the veins. The
pathos of this situation is infinite, and it cannot be lessened by
saying that the prejudice about color is unreasonable; it exists. Often
the African strain is so attenuated that the possessor of it would pass
to the ordinary observer for Spanish or French; and I suppose that many
so-called Creole peculiarities of speech and manner are traceable to
this strain. An incident in point may not be uninteresting.
I once lodged in the old French quarter in a house kept by two maiden
sisters, only one of whom spoke English at all. They were refined, and
had the air of decayed gentlewomen. The one who spoke English had the
vivacity and agreeability of a Paris landlady, without the latter’s
invariable hardness and sharpness. I thought I had found in her pretty
mode of speech the real Creole dialect of her class. “You are French,” I
said, when I engaged my room.
“No,” she said, “no, m’sieu, I am an American; we are of the United
States,” with the air of informing a stranger that New Orleans was now
annexed.
“Yes,” I replied, “but you are of French descent?”
“Oh, and a little Spanish.”
“Can you tell me, madame,” I asked, one Sunday morning, “the way to
Trinity Church?”
“I cannot tell, m’sieu; it is somewhere the other side; I do not know
the other side.”
“But have you never been the other side of Canal Street?”
“Oh yes, I went once, to make a visit on a friend on New-Year’s.”
I explained that it was far uptown, and a Protestant church.
“M’sieu, is he Cat’olic?”
“Oh no; I am a Protestant.”
“Well, me, I am Cat’olic; but Protestan’ o’ Cat’olic, it is ‘mos’ ze
same.”
This was purely the instinct of politeness, and that my feelings might
not be wounded, for she was a good Catholic, and did not believe at all
that it was “‘mos’ ze same.”
It was Exposition year, and then April, and madame had never been to the
Exposition. I urged her to go, and one day, after great preparation
for a journey to the other side, she made the expedition, and returned
enchanted with all she had seen, especially with the Mexican band. A new
world was opened to her, and she resolved to go again. The morning of
Louisiana Day she rapped at my door and informed me that she was going
to the fair. “And”—she paused at the door-way, her eyes sparkling with
her new project—“you know what I goin’ do?”
“No.”
“I goin’ get one big bouquet, and give to the leader of the orchestre.”
“You know him, the leader?”
“No, not yet.”
I did not know then how poor she was, and how much sacrifice this would
be to her, this gratification of a sentiment.
The next year, in the same month, I asked for her at the lodging.
She was not there. “You did not know,” said the woman then in
possession—“good God! her sister died four days ago, from want of food,
and madame has gone away back of town, nobody knows where. They told
nobody, they were so proud; none of their friends knew, or they would
have helped. They had no lodgers, and could not keep this place, and
took another opposite; but they were unlucky, and the sheriff came.”
I said that I was very sorry that I had not known; she might have been
helped. “No,” she replied, with considerable spirit; “she would have
accepted nothing; she would starve rather. So would I.” The woman
referred me to some well-known Creole families who knew madame, but I
was unable to find her hiding-place. I asked who madame was. “Oh, she
was a very nice woman, very respectable. Her father was Spanish, her
mother was an octoroon.”
One does not need to go into the past of New Orleans for the
picturesque; the streets have their peculiar physiognomy, and
“character” such as the artists delight to depict is the result of the
extraordinary mixture of races and the habit of out-door life. The long
summer, from April to November, with a heat continuous, though rarely so
excessive as it occasionally is in higher latitudes, determines the
mode of life and the structure of the houses, and gives a leisurely and
amiable tone to the aspect of people and streets which exists in few
other American cities. The French quarter is out of repair, and has the
air of being for rent; but in fact there is comparatively little change
in occupancy, Creole families being remarkably adhesive to localities.
The stranger who sees all over the French and the business parts of the
town the immense number of lodging-houses—some of them the most
stately old mansions—let largely by colored landladies, is likely to
underestimate the home life of this city. New Orleans soil is so wet
that the city is without cellars for storage, and its court-yards and
odd corners become catch-alls of broken furniture and other lumber. The
solid window-shutters, useful in the glare of the long summer, give a
blank appearance to the streets. This is relieved, however, by the
queer little Spanish houses, and by the endless variety of galleries
and balconies. In one part of the town the iron-work of the balconies is
cast, and uninteresting in its set patterns; in French-town much of
it is hand-made, exquisite in design, and gives to a street vista a
delicate lace-work appearance. I do not know any foreign town which
has on view so much exquisite wrought-iron work as the old part of
New Orleans. Besides the balconies, there are recessed galleries, old
dormer-windows, fantastic little nooks and corners, tricked out with
flower-pots and vines.
The glimpses of street life are always entertaining, because
unconscious, while full of character. It may be a Creole court-yard, the
walls draped with vines, flowers blooming in bap-hazard disarray, and
a group of pretty girls sewing and chatting, and stabbing the passer-by
with a charmed glance. It may be a cotton team in the street, the mules,
the rollicking driver, the creaking cart. It may be a single figure, or
a group in the market or on the levee—a slender yellow girl sweeping up
the grains of rice, a colored gleaner recalling Ruth; an ancient darky
asleep, with mouth open, in his tipped-up two-wheeled cart, waiting for
a job; the “solid South,” in the shape of an immense “aunty” under a red
umbrella, standing and contemplating the river; the broad-faced women in
gay bandannas behind their cake-stands; a group of levee hands about
a rickety table, taking their noonday meal of pork and greens;
the blind-man, capable of sitting more patiently than an American
Congressman, with a dog trained to hold his basket for the pennies of
the charitable; the black stalwart vender of tin and iron utensils,
who totes in a basket, and piled on his head, and strung on his back,
a weight of over two hundred and fifty pounds; and negro women who walk
erect with baskets of clothes or enormous bundles balanced on their
heads, smiling and “jawing,” unconscious of their burdens. These are
the familiar figures of a street life as varied and picturesque as the
artist can desire.
New Orleans amuses itself in the winter with very good theatres, and
until recently has sustained an excellent French opera. It has all
the year round plenty of cafes chantants, gilded saloons, and
gambling-houses, and more than enough of the resorts upon which the
police are supposed to keep one blind eye. “Back of town,” towards
Lake Pontchartrain, there is much that is picturesque and blooming,
especially in the spring of the year—the charming gardens of the Jockey
Club, the City Park, the old duelling-ground with its superb oaks, and
the Bayou St. John with its idling fishing-boats, and the colored houses
and plantations along the banks—a piece of Holland wanting the Dutch
windmills. On a breezy day one may go far for a prettier sight than the
river-bank and esplanade at Carrollton, where the mighty coffee-colored
flood swirls by, where the vast steamers struggle and cough against the
stream, or swiftly go with it round the bend, leaving their trail of
smoke, and the delicate line of foliage against the sky on the far
opposite shore completes the outline of an exquisite landscape. Suburban
resorts much patronized, and reached by frequent trains, are the old
Spanish Fort and the West End of Lake Pontchartrain. The way lies
through cypress swamp and palmetto thickets, brilliant at certain
seasons with fleur-de-lis. At each of these resorts are restaurants,
dancing-halls, promenade-galleries, all on a large scale; boat-houses,
and semi-tropical gardens very prettily laid out in walks and
labyrinths, and adorned with trees and flowers. Even in the heat of
summer at night the lake is sure to offer a breeze, and with waltz music
and moonlight and ices and tinkling glasses with straws in them and
love’s young dream, even the ennuyé globe-trotter declares that it is
not half bad.
The city, indeed, offers opportunity for charming excursions in
all directions. Parties are constantly made up to visit the river
plantations, to sail up and down the stream, or to take an outing across
the lake, or to the many lovely places along the coast. In the winter,
excursions are made to these places, and in summer the well-to-do take
the sea-air in cottages, at such places as Mandeville across the lake,
or at such resorts on the Mississippi as Pass Christian.
I crossed the lake one spring day to the pretty town of Mandeville, and
then sailed up the Tehefuncta River to Covington. The winding Tchefuncta
is in character like some of the narrow Florida streams, has the same
luxuriant overhanging foliage, and as many shy lounging alligators to
the mile, and is prettier by reason of occasional open glades and large
moss-draped live-oaks and China-trees. From the steamer landing in the
woods we drove three miles through a lovely open pine forest to the
town. Covington is one of the oldest settlements in the State, is the
centre of considerable historic interest, and the origin of several
historic families. The land is elevated a good deal above the
coast-level, and is consequently dry. The town has a few roomy oldtime
houses, a mineral spring, some pleasing scenery along the river that
winds through it, and not much else. But it is in the midst of pine
woods, it is sheltered from all “northers,” it has the soft air, but
not the dampness, of the Gulf, and is exceedingly salubrious in all the
winter months, to say nothing of the summer. It has lately come
into local repute as a health resort, although it lacks sufficient
accommodations for the entertainment of many strangers. I was told by
some New Orleans physicians that they regarded it as almost a specific
for pulmonary diseases, and instances were given of persons in what was
supposed to be advanced stages of lung and bronchial troubles who had
been apparently cured by a few months’ residence there; and invalids
are, I believe, greatly benefited by its healing, soft, and piny
atmosphere.
I have no doubt, from what I hear and my limited observation, that all
this coast about New Orleans would be a favorite winter resort if it had
hotels as good as, for instance, that at Pass Christian. The region
has many attractions for the idler and the invalid. It is, in the first
place, interesting; it has a good deal of variety of scenery and of
historical interest; there is excellent fishing and shooting; and if the
visitor tires of the monotony of the country, he can by a short ride on
cars or a steamer transfer himself for a day or a week to a large and
most hospitable city, to society, the club, the opera, balls, parties,
and every variety of life that his taste craves. The disadvantage of
many Southern places to which our Northern regions force us is that they
are uninteresting, stupid, and monotonous, if not malarious. It seems
a long way from New York to New Orleans, but I do not doubt that the
region around the city would become immediately a great winter resort if
money and enterprise were enlisted to make it so.
New Orleans has never been called a “strait-laced” city; its Sunday
is still of the Continental type; but it seems to me free from the
socialistic agnosticism which flaunts itself more or less in Cincinnati,
St. Louis, and Chicago; the tone of leading Presbyterian churches is
distinctly Calvinistic, one perceives comparatively little of religious
speculation and doubt, and so far as I could see there is harmony
and entire social good feeling between the Catholic and Protestant
communions. Protestant ladies assist at Catholic fairs, and the
compliment is returned by the society ladies of the Catholic faith when
a Protestant good cause is to be furthered by a bazaar or a “pink tea.”
Denominational lines seem to have little to do with social affiliations.
There may be friction in the management of the great public charities,
but on the surface there is toleration and united good-will. The
Catholic faith long had the prestige of wealth, family, and power, and
the education of the daughters of Protestant houses in convent schools
tended to allay prejudice. Notwithstanding the reputation New Orleans
has for gayety and even frivolity—and no one can deny the fast
and furious living of ante-bellum days—it possesses at bottom an
old-fashioned religious simplicity. If any one thinks that “faith” has
died out of modern life, let him visit the mortuary chapel of St. Roch.
In a distant part of the town, beyond the street of the Elysian Fields,
and on Washington avenue, in a district very sparsely built up, is
the Campo Santo of the Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity. In this
foreign-looking cemetery is the pretty little Gothic Chapel of St. Roch,
having a background of common and swampy land. It is a brown stuccoed
edifice, wholly open in front, and was a year or two ago covered with
beautiful ivy. The small interior is paved in white marble, the windows
are stained glass, the side-walls are composed of tiers of vaults, where
are buried the members of certain societies, and the spaces in the wall
and in the altar area are thickly covered with votive offerings, in wax
and in naive painting—contributed by those who have been healed by the
intercession of the saints. Over the altar is the shrine of St. Roch—a
cavalier, staff in hand, with his clog by his side, the faithful animal
which accompanied this eighth-century philanthropist in his visitations
to the plague-stricken people of Munich. Within the altar rail are rows
of lighted candles, tended and renewed by the attendant, placed there
by penitents or by seekers after the favor of the saint. On the wooden
benches, kneeling, are ladies, servants, colored women, in silent
prayer. One approaches the lighted, picturesque shrine through the
formal rows of tombs, and comes there into an atmosphere of peace and
faith. It is believed that miracles are daily wrought here, and one
notices in all the gardeners, keepers, and attendants of the place the
accent and demeanor of simple faith. On the wall hangs this inscription:
“O great St. Roch, deliver us, we beseech thee, from the scourges of
God. Through thy intercessions preserve our bodies from contagious
diseases, and our souls from the contagion of sin. Obtain for us
salubrious air; but, above all, purity of heart. Assist us to make good
use of health, to bear suffering with patience, and after thy example to
live in the practice of penitence and charity, that we may one day enjoy
the happiness which thou hast merited by thy virtues.
“St. Roch, pray for us.
“St. Roch, pray for us.
“St. Roch, pray for us.”