Chapter 46

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