banana,--droop over the dreaming sea: there were sparklings like
effervescence through the archway of stars,--perhaps the molecular
motion of some Astral Thought. Then seemed to fall upon the world a
hush like the hush of sanctuaries,--like that _Silence of Secrets_
told of in the Bhagavad-Gita: the peace of the Immensities. In such
hours fancies come to us like gusts of seawind,--as vast and pure; nay,
sometimes vaster,--measureless like the interspaces between sun and
sun. For it is only in these voiceless moments that the heavens speak
to us,--telling of mysteries beyond the luminous signaling of astral
deep unto astral deep, beyond the furthest burning of constellations;
mysteries that shall still be mysteries when our day-star shall have
yielded up his ghost of flame.--The death of a man; the death of a
sun:--is the awful Universe affected any more by the last than by the
first?
And with this question, the question of the morning returned, enigmatic
as before,--bringing to me the indescribable, creeping, electrical
sensation that we are said to feel especially when some heedless foot
is treading the place of our future grave.
It was late when I sought sleep that night--my last Floridian night.
And I dreamed strange dreams.
First, I dreamed of a plant,--a plant with sombre cordiform
leaves,--that _bent away from the light toward me_, and followed me
persistently when I retreated from it; crawling like a pet reptile to
get in front of me, and then rising up slowly, very slowly; stretching
out to me, as with dumb affection, two helpless arms--two long leafy
stems tipped with blood-colored flowers.
Then it seemed to me that I stood in a place of burial, and that, in
some inexplicable way, I could observe the processes of that dark
alchemy by which flesh is transmuted into leaf and fruit,--by which
blood is transformed into blossom, as in the old Greek myths, and into
the living substance also of those creatures, gem-winged, jewel-eyed,
that feed upon the juices, the honey, and the fruit of graveyard
flora. Then suddenly the mystery of the blonde name again came before
me--this time upon a graven square of marble; and in a little while I
thought I knew the story of the dead; for this impossible and nameless
legend shaped itself in my sleep.
VULTUR AURA
_June_ 2, 188-
... _San Juan de los Pinos_:--'Saint John of the Pines,' That was the
name of the ancient fort. And in those days the names of the bastions
also were names of the Evangelists and the Apostles.
There is a ghostliness in the name! Why Saint John _of the pines_? Was
this low shore beshadowed in the sixteenth century by pines tremendous,
immemorial, more ancient than man,--through whose colossal aisles
the sea-gusts spake with utterance vague and vast as the Wind of the
Spirit? Did the roar of the far-off reef, the mutterings of the mighty
woods, evoke for Spanish piety dim fancies of the Voices of Patmos, of
the Thunders and the Trumpetings?
It was a timber stronghold only,--that forgotten fort, thus placed
beneath the protection of weird Saint John,--a rampart-work of pine.
Then were discovered the virtues of the coquina,--that wonderful
shell-rock which seems marble half formed, half crystallized, under the
pressure of shallow seas; and out of it was Fort San Marco built,--very
solidly, very mathematically, very slowly,--by the labor of more than a
century and the expenditure of thirty millions of good Spanish dollars.
Two hundred and fifty years ago they began to build it; to-day it
stands well-nigh as strong as in the time when Oglethorpe's English
cannon played on it in vain. Now the profane Americano, who putteth no
trust in saints, but in his own strength only, calleth it Fort Marion;
and the lizards dwell in it; and the spider weaves her tapestries
above its chapel-altar; and the dust is deep in the holy-water fonts,
where Catholic swordsmen once dipped their sinewy hands. But over
the great sally-port you may still discern the Arms of Spain,--the
Crown, the Shield, the triple turrets of Castile, the rampant Lions
of Leon, and, encircling these, the sculptured Order of the Fleece of
Gold. Salty winds have chapped the relief;--the fingers of the rain
have worn it down as the smooth face of a coin is worn;--the wings of
Time have brushed away the edges of the tablet,--and besmirched the
Fleece of Gold,--and obliterated, as in irony, the title of the King,
and the beginning of the solemn inscription,--REYNANDO EN ESPANA. The
REY is gone forever!--syllable and potentate! Underneath the pendant
Lamb,--now black,--there are dark stains of drippings,--as of blood
streaming over the stone. Nothing could be more grotesquely realistic
than the sculptured helplessness of that Lamb; yet we may well doubt if
he who chiseled it was moved by any spirit of sardonic symbolism,--any
memory of those Argonauts of the sixteenth century, who found a new
Colchis in the West, and a new Fleece, whereof the shearing yielded in
less than one generation three hundred tons of gold.
Now the moat is haunted by lizards and lovers only; and there
are buzzards upon the sentry towers; and there are bats in the
barbican:--it is just sixty-five years since the last Spanish trooper
tramped out of the sally-port, never to come back. But squamated as the
structure is, the dignity of it imposes awe,--the antiquated vastness
of it compels respect for the vanished grandeur of Spain; the majesty
of its desolation is unspeakable.--I think one feels it most on wild
days, when the mighty drum-roll of the breakers is sounded from the
harbor bar, and the winds of the Atlantic blow their mad clarions in
the barbican, and all the white cavalry of Ocean charge the long coral
coast.
... A Shadow descends the counterscarp of the sea-battery,--passes the
covered way,--crosses the ditch,--mounts the scarp,--vanishes beyond
the bastions. A moment more and it reappears,--still coming from the
sea; it is moving in circles with a swift swimming motion, as of an
opaqueness floating vaguely in the humors of the eye. Now it is only a
passing fleck, a shapeless blot; now it is the phantom of a boat.
Look up, into the brightness,--into the violet blaze!--behold him
hovering in the splendor of heaven, sailing before the sun, that
Kharkas, 'dwelling in decay,'--whom the Parsee reveres. (For't is
written that even the flitting of his shadow over the faces of the dead
driveth out the unclean spirit that entereth into corpses.) 'From the
height of his highest flight he discerneth if there be upon the ground
a morsel of flesh not bigger than a hand; and for his comfort the odor
of musk hath been created underneath his wing,'--How magnificent his
soaring!--yet the vast pinions never beat; they veer only with his
wheeling,--sometimes presenting to the meridian their whole black
banner-breadth,--sometimes offering only the sabre-curves of their
edges. He seems to float by volition alone,--to swim the deeps of
day without effort. Higher and higher he mounts into the abyss of
light; now he seems to hang beside the sun!--now he is only a whirling
speck!--now he is gone!--My field-glass brings him again into view
for a moment--sailing, circling, spiring by turns; but once more he
dwindles into a mote, not bigger than a tiny flake of soot, which
rises up, up, up, and vanishes away at last into luminous eternities
unfathomable. Yet from those invisible heights his eye still scans
the face of the land and the features of men--that wondrous eye far
reaching as a beam of daylight. 'There is a path,' saith Job, 'which
no fowl knoweth, _and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen_--But
that path lies not open to the gaze of the sun; for whatsoever earthly
thing the day-star hath looked upon, that thing the ken of the vulture
also hath discerned. Rightly, therefore, hath the eye of the vulture
been mythologically likened unto the eye of deities and of demons.
Was not the sacred symbol of Isis, the Impenetrably Veiled,--Isis,
mother of Gods, 'Eye of the Sun,' who by the quivering of her feathers
createth light, who by the beating of her wings createth spirit,--a
Golden Vulture, the saving emblem hung about the throat of the dead?
And the vultures of the Vedic prayer to Indra, all-seeing demons; great
sun-vultures of the Sanscrit epic, demi-gods. By vision alone it was
given the bird Gatayus to know the past, the present, and that which
was to come; for, encompassing the world in his flight, all things were
discerned by his gaze.
O ghoul of the empyrean, well doth thy brother, the Shadow-caster of
deserts, know the time of the going and the coming of the caravans;
and he maketh likewise each year the pilgrimage to the tomb of
the Prophet!--Thy cousins sit upon the Towers of Silence; and the
charnel-pits of the dakhmas have no secrets for them! From the eternal
silences of heaven,--from the heights that are echoless and never
reached by human cry,--progenitors of thine have watched the faces of
the continents wrinkle in the revolution of centuries; they have looked
down upon the migrations of races; they have witnessed the growth and
the extinction of nations; they have read the crimson history of a
hundred thousand wars.
Another shadow crosses my feet--and yet another passes; the orbits of
their circlings intercross. Hanging above the dark fort, those black
silhouettes cutting sharply athwart the azure seem grimly appropriate
to this desolation. Doubtless the birds have haunted the coast for
centuries. The Spaniard, who gave many a rich feast of eyes and hearts,
has passed away;--the Vulture remains, and waits. For what?--is it for
some vomit of the spuming sea,--some putrefaction of the buzzing
shambles?--or does he, indeed, still hope, even after the passing of
three hundred years, _for the return of Menendez?_
CREOLE PAPERS
QUAINT NEW ORLEANS AND ITS HABITANTS
I. FRENCH-TOWN
Old New Orleans proper (French-Town, as it is termed by steamboatmen;
Le Carré, as its own inhabitants call it) is principally, though
not wholly, comprised in the great quadrilateral bounded by Canal,
Esplanade, Rampart, and Old Levee streets. Where the horse-cars now
run upon those thoroughfares formerly stood the bastioned walls of
the colonial city, encircled by a deep moat. Double rows of trees now
mark the old rampart lines upon three sides of the quadrilateral, and
birds sing in their branches at just the height where brazen cannon
once showed their black throats, where Swiss or Spanish sentries paced
to and fro against the sky. Within the Carr? the streets are serried,
solid, and picturesque. Memories of aristocratic wealth still endure
in certain vast mansions, broad-balconied and deep-courted, now mostly
converted into hotels or lodging-houses, half the year void of guests;
but the majority of the dwellings are rather curious than splendid.
Nearly all the larger ones are built in the form of an L, the lower
line of the letter representing the street front, the upper line a
shallow but lofty wing reaching far back from the main building at
right angles, and flanked by an enormous green or brown cistern as
by a round tower. A really imposing archway often pierces the street
façade--giving carriageway into the deep court--much like those quaint
archways characteristic of old London taverns. Such a building often
possesses three sets of stairways--invariably two--one for the main
edifice, one for the wing. But these immense winter residences, once
sheltering a population of servants and clients large as that comprised
in the Roman _familia_, are now for the most part in a state of
decay. There is much crumbling of wood-work, looseness of jointing,
ulcerous exposure of the brick skeleton where plaster has rotted away
in patches from piazza pillars and from the ribs of archways. Grass
struggles up between the flagging; microscopic fungi patch the wall
surfaces with sickly green. The semi-tropical forces of nature in the
South are mighty to destroy the work of man. Dismally romantic is
the Greek front upon Toulouse Street, in rear of the old Hôtel Saint
Louis, and once famous as 'The Planters' Bank.' Through cracks in the
high board fence erected about its desolation one may see the weeds
squeezing their way through the joints of its broad stone steps, the
green creepers wriggling round its columns, and bushes actually growing
from the angles of its pediment--a vegetation planted, doubtless, by
birds. This ruin has a veritable classic dignity--a melancholy that
is antique. Sorrowful likewise are the voiceless courts of the once
beautiful French hotel, with their void galleries above and dried-up
fountains below. Millions upon millions have changed hands within that
building; princely revels were held there of old by the feudal lords of
Louisiana; the splendors of the past linger in the tarnished gilding
and dying colors of the lofty apartments, and in the decorations of the
porcelain dome frescoed by Casanova.
Many of the French and Spanish dwellings are as full of architectural
mysteries and surprises as the Castle of Otranto--corridors that
serpentine, stairways that leap from building to building, cabinets
masked in the recesses of dormer-windows, curious covered bridges
worthy of Venice. Looking up or down one of these streets, the eye is
astonished by the long patch-work of colors motley as Joseph's coat,
ultimately fading off into grayish-blues where the vista meets the
horizon. Under the golden glow of the sun these tints take delightful
warmth; there are chrome and gamboge yellows, deep-sea greens, ashen
pinks, brick reds, chocolates, azures, blazing whites, all trimmed with
the intenser green of iron balconies and the antiquated window-shutters
folded back against the wall. The old French Opera-house I have seen
painted in a peculiarly pleasing hue, to which a summer sun would lend
the mellowness of antique marble. It was a ripe-ivorine tint, with
just the faintest conceivable flush of pink; it was a warm and human
color--it was the color of creole flesh!
Speaking of it recalls the curious statement of divers writers to the
effect that the skin of the West Indian creole feels cooler than that
of a European or American from the Northern States. The same is true of
the Louisiana creole; the vigorous European or Northerner who touches a
creole hand during the burning hours of a July or August day has reason
to be surprised at its coolness--such a coolness as tropical fruits
retain even under the perpendicular fires of an equatorial sun.
II THE CREOLES
When an educated resident of New Orleans speaks of the creoles he
must be understood as referring to the descendants of the early Latin
colonists, the posterity of those French and Spanish settlers who
founded or ruled Louisiana. The diminutive _criollo_, derived from the
Spanish _criar_, 'to beget,' primarily signified the colonial-born
child of European blood, as distinguished from the offspring of the
Conquistadores by slave women, whether Indian or African. Nothing
could be more etymologically antithetical, therefore, than the phrase
'colored creoles,' although it has obtained considerable currency as
a convenient term to distinguish those colored people who can claim a
partly Latin origin, from the plainer 'American' colored folk who have
neither French nor Spanish blood in their veins, and to whom the creole
dialect is supremely unintelligible. Among the colored population of
lighter tint, moreover, the characteristics of the Latin blood show
themselves so strongly that the popular use of the term distinguishing
them from ordinary types of mulatto, quadroon, quinteroon, or octoroon
appears justifiable.
What old Bryan Edwards, in his excellent but obsolete 'History of the
British West Indies;' wrote concerning the creoles of the Antilles,
largely applies to the creoles of Louisiana likewise, especially in
relation to their physical characteristics. In whatever part of the
civilized Temperate Zone pronounced, the very word 'creole' conveys
to the hearer fancies tropical as the poetry of Baudelaire; to the
imagination of well-informed readers the creole invariably appears
as a person of European blood corporeally and morally modified by
the influences of a torrid climate. Whether we hear of the English
creoles of the West Indian, East Indian, or West African colonies,
the French creoles of Algeria, Martinique, or Senegal, or the Dutch
creoles of Malabar, the name invariably provokes fancies of burning
suns, of monstrous vegetation, of nights lighted by the Southern Cross.
In New Orleans we are only at the Gate of the Tropics; sometimes our
orange-trees shiver in frosty winds, our rare palms droop in January
colds. But the climate is torrid enough nevertheless to have produced
marked physical changes in the native white population of Louisiana
during the lapse of generations. It has modified the osteogeny of the
true creoles almost as remarkably as in Martinique or Trinidad; it
has greatly deepened the eye-sockets to shelter the sight from the
furnace glow of summer heat; it has made limbs suppler, extremities
more delicate; and to these changes wrought in the body's framework is
wholly attributable that languid and singular grace which distinguishes
the _Louisianaise_ among her fairer American sisters. Creole eyes--the
eyes that tantalized Gottschalk into the musical utterances of _Ojos
Criollos_--are large, luminous, liquidly black, deeply fringed, and
their darkness is strangely augmented by the uncommon depth of the
orbit. The pilose system--to use anatomical phraseology---is richly
developed; the women have magnificent hair, and creole beards and
mustaches are usually very handsome. Formerly the Louisiana creoles
excelled in exercises demanding grace and quickness of eye; they were
fine dancers and famous swordsmen--indeed, the art of fencing is
not yet lost among them. The beauty of the women is peculiar; they
possess a _sveltesse_--a slender elegance that is very fascinating;
but to Northerners they seem fragile of physique, more delicate than
they really are. A rosy face, a bright, fresh complexion, is rarely
seen among them; they have an ivorine tint, a convalescent pallor,
that contrasts oddly with the fire of their dark pupils and the
lustrous blackness of their hair. When the tint is darker,--a Spanish
swarthiness,--the effect is less strange. Creole blondes are few.
The creole temperament is one of great nervous sensibility; phlegmatic
characters are anomalies; a disposition to violent extremes of anger
or affection is often masked by an exterior appearance of listless
indifference. The climate itself (nine months of summer heat, three
of snowless chill, long periods of heavy calm, broken by storms of
extraordinary and splendid violence--a climate enervating, fitful,
luxuriant) has reflected its characteristics in the native population.
The mind develops precociously, blossoms richly. There are few educated
creoles who cannot speak two or three languages well; many speak more;
and the writer has known one who was almost a Mezzofanti. Love of the
mother-country is not dead among the creoles, and their attachment
to ancient French customs has but little abated. Their home life has
scarcely changed during a century, although they are becoming less
socially exclusive. Nevertheless, the Northern stranger invited to
visit the home of a creole family may even now consider himself the
subject of a rare compliment. Such a visit, however, will scarcely be
made within the limits of the old colonial city, for the creoles are
no longer there. They have moved away to newer districts north and
south--away from the decaying streets and the crumbling cemeteries--out
to quiet suburbs where the air is sweet with breath of jasmine
flowers and orange-blossoms, out to dreamy Bayou Saint Jean, where
clusters of white-pillared cottages slumber in green. They have mostly
abandoned the Carré to the European Latins--French emigrants from the
Mediterranean coasts, Italians, Sicilians, Spaniards, Greeks; to the
population of the French Market, the venders of fruits and meats; to
the keepers of what Sala called 'absurd little shops'; and especially
to the French-speaking element of color, which still clings to the
ruined Past with something of the strange affection that erst subsisted
between master and slave.
How long will even that ruined Past endure? The somnolent quiet of the
old streets is being already broken by the energetic bustle of American
commerce; the Northern Thor is already threatening the picturesque
town with iconoclastic hammer. Colossal capital advances menacingly
from the southern side, showing the sheet-lightning of its gold. One
huge firm has already devoured a whole square, and extended itself
into four streets at once, cruciform-wise, like a Greek basilica. Even
the old Napoleon First furniture sets, the massive four-pillared beds,
the ponderous cabinets curiously carved, the luxuriant fauteuils, the
triple-footed tables,--all these solid household gods which stood upon
eagle feet of gilded brass,--are being bought up by shrewd speculators
and sent North, to fetch prices which no one here would dream of
paying. Perhaps the antique life will make its last rally about the
old Place d'Armes (_Plaza de Armas,_) in the vicinity of the quaint
cathedral, under the shadow of those towers whose bells for a hundred
years have rung diurnally for the repose of the soul of _Don_ _André
Almonaster Roxas_, _Knight of the Royal and Distinguished Spanish
Order of Charles III., Regidor and Alferez-Real of His Most Catholic
Majesty_. So long as the iron tongues of those bells can speak, so
long as the iron heart of the great tower-clock shall beat, something
of the old life and the old faith must live in the creole quarter.
Long after most of the quaint architecture shall have disappeared I
fancy those two massive Spanish edifices, the old Cabildo and Casa
Curial, will still remain standing upon either side of the cathedral,
like grim soldiery guarding a commissary of the Holy Inquisition. The
Spaniard builded well: after the lapse of nearly a hundred years, those
rugged edifices testify grandly to the solid Roman character of their
creators. The plaster may peel from the stout pillars of their arcades;
but dilapidation only adds nobility to their quaintness; they are
dignified by the scars of their battle with Time; they are imposing
without loftiness; they are superb without artifice--deep-shouldered,
thick-set, broad-backed, firm upon their feet, like veteran troops,
like the splendid Spanish infantry of three hundred years ago.
CREOLE WOMEN IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES
I
Although it is generally well known that the condition of woman in most
Latin countries is one of comparative seclusion,--totally different
from that existence of large freedom she enjoys in English or American
communities, some romantic misconception prevails regarding her life
in the Latin tropics. Fiction, painting, and poetry have combined to
create a false ideal of that life,--to make the word 'creole' suggest
many happy, dreamy, luminous things. Not altogether are the artists
and romance-writers at fault, nevertheless: their purpose has been
only to reflect something of nature's magic in the zones of eternal
summer; and no art and no words could transcend the splendor that was
their inspiration. He who has once seen tropic nature under a tropic
sun has received a revelation: there will come to him, if he has a
heart, with a new strange meaning,--also eternal and true,--the words
of John,--voiced perpetually from the purple peaks, and the undying
woods, and sapphire glory of sea and sky:--'_This is the message which
we announce unto you, that God is_ LIGHT!'