CHAPTER LVI
THE CITY OF THE CREOLE
When a poet, a painter, or a sculptor wishes to personify a city, why does he invariably give it the feminine gender? Why is this so, even though the city be named for a man, or for a masculine saint? And why is it so in the case of commonplace cities, commercial cities, and ugly, sordid cities? It is not difficult to understand why a beautiful, sparkling city, like Washington or Paris, suggests a handsome woman, richly gowned and bedecked with jewels, but it is hard to understand why some other cities, far less pleasing, seem somehow to be stamped with the qualities of woman-nature rather than man-nature. Is it perhaps because the nature of all cities is so complicated? Is it because they are volatile, changeful, baffling? Or is it only that they are the mothers of great families of men?
When I arrive in a strange city I feel as though I were making the acquaintance of a woman of whom I have often heard. I am curious about her. I am alert. I gaze at her eagerly, wondering if she is as I have imagined her. I try to read her expression while listening to her voice. I consider her raiment, noticing whether it is fine, whether it is good only in spots, and whether it is well put together. I inspect the important buildings, boulevards, parks, and monuments with which she is jeweled, and judge by them not only of her prosperity, but of her sense of beauty. Before long I have a distinct impression of her. Sometimes, as with a woman, this first impression has to be revised; sometimes not. Sometimes, on acquaintance, a single feature, or trait, becomes so important in my eyes that all else seems inconsequential. A noble spirit may cover physical defects; beauty may seem to compensate for weaknesses of character. The spell of a beautiful city which is bad resembles the spell of such a city's prototype among women.
Some young growing cities are like young growing women of whom we think: "She is as yet unformed, but she will fill out and become more charming as she grows older." Or again we think: "She is somewhat dowdy and run down at the heels but she is ambitious, and is replenishing her wardrobe as she can afford it." One expects such failings in young cities, and readily forgives them where there is wholesome promise for the future. But where old cities become slovenly, the affair is different, for then it means physical decay, and physical decay should never come to a city--for a city is not only feminine, but should be immortal. The symbol for every city should be a goddess, forever in her prime.
Among southern cities Richmond is the _grande dame_; she is gray and distinguished, and wears handsome old brocades and brooches. Richmond is aquiline and crisp and has much "manner." But though Charleston is actually the older, the wonderful beauty of the place, the softness of the ancient architectural lines, the sweet scents wafting from walled gardens, the warmth of color everywhere, gives the place that very quality of immortal youth and loveliness which is so rare in cities, and is so much to be desired. Charleston I might allegorize in the person of a young woman I met there. I was in the drawing-room of a fine old house; a beautifully proportioned room, paneled to the ceiling, hung with family portraits and other old paintings, and furnished with mahogany masterpieces a century and a half old. The girl lived in this house. She was not exactly pretty, nor was her figure beautiful in the usual sense; yet it was beautiful, all the same, with a sort of long-limbed, supple, aristocratic aliveness. Most of all there was about her a great fineness--the kind of fineness which seems to be the expression of generations of fineness. She was the granddaughter of a general in the Civil War, the great-granddaughter of an ambassador, the great-great-granddaughter of a Revolutionary hero, and though one could not but be thankful that she failed of striking resemblance to the portraits of these admirable ancestors, nevertheless it seemed to me that, had I not known definitely of their place in her family history, I might almost have sensed them hovering behind her: a background, nebulous and shadowy, out of which she had emerged.
Memphis, upon the other hand, will always be to me a lively modern débutante. I vision her as dancing--dancing to Handy's ragtime music--all shoulders, neck, and arms, and tulle, and twenty-dollar satin slippers. Atlanta, too, is young, vivid, affluent, altogether modern; while as for Birmingham, she is pretty, but a little strident, a little overdressed; touched a little with the amiability, and the other qualities, of the _nouveau riche_.
The beauty of New Orleans is of a different kind. She is a full-blown, black-eyed, dreamy, drawly creature, opulent of figure, white of skin, and red of lip. Like San Francisco she has Latin blood which makes her love and preserve the carnival spirit; but she is more voluptuous than San Francisco, for not only is she touched with the languor and the fire of her climate, but she is without the virile blood of the forty-niner, or the invigorating contact of the fresh Pacific wind. In my imaginary picture I see her yawning at eleven in the morning, when her negro maid brings black coffee to her bedside--such wonderful black coffee!--whereas, at that hour, I conceive San Francisco as having long been up and about her affairs. Even in the afternoon I fancy my New Orleans beauty as a little bit relaxed. But at dinner she becomes alive, and after dinner more alive, and by midnight she is like a flame.
I must admit, however, that of late years New Orleans has developed a perfect case of dual personality, and that, as often happens where there is dual personality, one side of her nature seems altogether incompatible with the other. The very new New Orleans has no resemblance to the picture I have drawn; moreover, my picture is not her favorite likeness of herself. She prefers more recent ones--pictures showing the lines of determination which, within the last ten years have stamped themselves upon her features, as she has fought and overcome the defects of character which logically accompanied her peculiar, temperamental type of charm. I, upon the other hand, am like some lover who values most an older picture of the woman he adores. I admire her for building character, but it is by her languorous beauty that I am infatuated, and the portrait which most effectively displays that beauty is the one for which I care.
Her very failings were so much a part of her that they made us the more sympathetic; she was too lovely to be greatly blamed for anything; gazing into her eyes, we hardly noticed that there was dust under the piano and in the corners; dining at her sumptuous table, we gave but little thought to the fact that the cellar was damp, the house none too healthy, and that there were mosquitoes and rats about the place; nor did it seem to matter, in face of her allurements, that she was shiftless, extravagant, improvident in the management of her affairs. If these things were brought to our attention, we excused them on the grounds of Latin blood and enervating climate.
But if we excused her, she did not excuse herself. Without being shaken awake by an earthquake, or forced to action by a devastating fire or flood, she set to work, calmly and of her own volition, to reform her character.
First she cleaned house, providing good surface drainage, an excellent filtered water supply from the river in place of her old mosquito-breeding cisterns, and modern sewers in place of cesspools. She killed rats by the hundreds of thousands, rat-proofed her buildings, and thus, at one stroke, eliminated all fear of bubonic plague. She began to take interest in the public schools, and soon trebled their advantages. She concerned herself with the revision of repressive tax laws. She secured one of the best street railway systems in the country. But, perhaps most striking of all, she set to work to build scientifically toward the realization of a gigantic dream. This dream embodies the resumption by New Orleans of her old place as second seaport city. To this end she is doing more than any other city to revive the commerce of the Mississippi River, and is at the same time making a strong bid for trade by way of the Panama Canal, as well as other sea traffic. She has restored her forty miles of water front to the people, has built municipal docks and warehouses at a cost of millions, and has so perfectly coördinated her river-rail-sea traffic-handling agencies that rates have been greatly reduced. Upon these, and related enterprises, upward of a hundred millions are being spent, and the vast plan is working out with such promise that one almost begins to fear lest New Orleans become too much enamored of her new-found materialism--lest the easy-going, pleasure-loving, fascinating Creole belle be transformed into the much-less-rare and much-less-desirable business type of woman: a woman whose letters, instead of being written in a fine French hand and scented with the faint fragrance of vertivert, are typewritten upon commercial paper; whose lips, instead of causing one to think of kisses, are laden with the deadly cant of commerce; whose skin, instead of seeming to be made of milk and rose leaves, is dappled with industrial soot.
Lord Chesterfield in one of his letters to his son, intimated that beautiful women desire to be flattered upon their intelligence, while intelligent women who are not altogether ugly like to be told that they are beautiful. So with New Orleans. Speak of her individuality, her picturesqueness, her gift of laughter, and she will listen with polite ennui; but admire her commercial progress and she will hang upon your words. Gaiety and charm are so much a part of her that she not only takes them as a matter of course, but seems to doubt, sometimes, that they are virtues. She is like some unusual and fascinating woman who, instead of rejoicing because she is not like all other women, begins to wonder if she ought not to be like them. Perhaps she is wrong to be gay? Perhaps her carnival proves her frivolous? Perhaps she ought not to continue to hold a carnival each year?
Far to the north of New Orleans the city of St. Paul was afflicted, some years since, by a similar agitation. It will be remembered that St. Paul used to build an ice palace each year. People used to go to see it as they go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Then came some believer in the standardization of cities, advancing the idea that ice palaces advertised St. Paul as a cold place. As a result they ceased to be built. St. Paul threw away something which drew attention to her and which gave her character. Moreover, I am told this mania went so far that when folders were issued for the purpose of advertising the region, they were designed to suggest the warmth and brilliance of the tropics. Had St. Paul a bad climate, instead of a peculiarly fine one, we might feel sympathetic tolerance for these performances, but a city which enjoys cool summers and dry, bracing winters has no apologies to make upon the score of climate, and only need apologize if she tries to make us think that bananas and cocoanuts grow on sugar-maple trees. However, in the last year or two, St. Paul has perceived the folly of her course, and has resumed her annual carnival.
In the case of New Orleans I cannot believe there is real danger that the carnival will be given up. Instead, I believe that the business enthusiasts will be appeased--as they were a year or two ago, for the first time in carnival history--by the inclusion of an industrial pageant glorifying the city's commercial renaissance. Also the New Orleans newspapers soothe the spirit of the Association of Commerce, at carnival time, by publishing items presumably furnished by that capable organization, showing that business is going on as usual, that bank clearings have not diminished during the festivities, and that, despite the air of happiness that pervades the town, New Orleans is not really beginning to have such a good time as a stranger might suppose from superficial signs. With such concessions made to solemn visaged commerce, is the carnival continued.
* * * * *
There are at least six cities on this continent which every one should see. Every one should see New York because it is the largest city in the world, and because it combines the magnificence, the wonder, the beauty, the sordidness, and the shame of a great metropolis; every one should see San Francisco because it is so vivid, so alive, so golden; every one should see Washington, the clean, white splendor of which is like the embodiment of a national dream; every one should see the old gray granite city of Quebec, piled on its hill above the river like some fortified town in France; every one should see the sweet and aristocratic city of Charleston, which suggests a museum of tradition and early American elegance; and of course every one should see New Orleans.
As to whether it is best to see the city in everyday attire, or masked for the revels, that is a matter of taste, and perhaps of age as well. To any one who loves cities, New Orleans is always good to see, while to the lover of spectacles and fêtes the carnival is also worth seeing--once. The two are, however, hardly to be seen to advantage simultaneously. To visit New Orleans in carnival time is like visiting some fine old historic mansion when it is all in a flurry over a fancy-dress ball. The furniture is moved, master, mistress and servants are excited, the cook is overworked and is perhaps complaining a little, and the brilliant costumes of the masquerade divert the eye of the visitor so that he hardly knows what sort of house he is in. Attend the ball if you like, but do not fail to revisit the house when normal conditions have been restored; see the festivities of Mardi Gras if you will, but do not fail to browse about old New Orleans and sit down at her famous tables when her chefs have time to do their best.
##