New Life ​ Young Again in Another World Illustrations
"Slap-up Scott!"
[Backside MT'southward want to re- or un-write Malory lay his longstanding quarrel with Walter Scott's historical romances. There'southward only ane reference to Scott's novels in Connecticut Yankee -- when Hank disparagingly notes the difference between the eloquent language Sir Walter puts into the mouths of characters like Ivanhoe and Rebecca and the muddied words Hank hears around the Round Table. But by making Hank's own favorite expletive "Bully Scott," MT makes sure his readers are continually reminded of Scott's idealizations of the Heart Ages throughout his own "realistic" try to testify the same past equally information technology actually was. To MT, Scott'due south fiction epitomized the falsehoods that the Realist writer had to correct. In the post-obit two chapters from Life on the Mississippi (1882), he indicates how much influence he believes "a single book" could exert on a culture, blaming Scott's Ivanhoe for not simply "re-enslaving" the minds that had been ready gratuitous by the French Revolution and Napoleon, only also for causing the Civil War. In these passages, MT diagnoses the symptoms of what he calls "the Sir Walter illness" -- the influence that Scott's romances had, and are even so having, on the listen of the S -- and suggests how much his volume nigh 6th century England is in fact "nearly" 19th century America.
[The illustrations below are from the beginning edition of Life on the Mississippi. To run into a photograph of the Capital Building MT refers to, CLICK HERE.]
Castles and Culture
Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a helpmate--no, much more than so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dumbo rich foliage and huge snowfall-brawl blossoms. The aroma of the flower is very sweetness, but y'all want altitude on it, because it is and then powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate i in his slumber. We were certainly in the Due south at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with carbohydrate-mill and negro quarters amassed together in the eye distance--were in view. And in that location was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air.
And at this point, also, begins the airplane pilot's paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.
Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for it is not believable that this footling sham castle would ever accept been congenital if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations agone, with his mediaeval romances. The South has not all the same recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque "chivalry" doings and romantic juvenilities all the same survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and applied nineteenth-century odour of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. Information technology is pathetic enough, that a white-washed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever accept been congenital in this otherwise honorable place; merely information technology is much more than pathetic to come across this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our mean solar day, when it would have been so like shooting fish in a barrel to permit dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration-money to the building of something genuine.
Baton Rouge has no patent on fake castles, nonetheless, and no monopoly of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the "Female person Establish" of Columbia, Tennessee. The post-obit remark is from the same advertizing--
'The Plant building has long been famed equally a model of striking and beautiful architecture. Visitors are overjoyed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.'
Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; equally romantic as keeping hotel in a castle.
Past itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough; only as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Centre-Historic period romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the globe has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful affair and a mistake.
Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky "Female College." Female person college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing information technology in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--considering shorter, and means the same affair: that is, if either phrase means anything at all--
"The president is southern past birth, past rearing, by pedagogy, and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south. Believing the southern to exist the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, ¹ the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and solicit southern patronage."
What, warder, ho! the man that can accident so complacent a blast as that, probably blows information technology from a castle.
¹ Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:
ThouNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This forenoon a few minutes after ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to impale him. This was at the off-white grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that information technology was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry and so told O'Connor he should non alive. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not. The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some holding from Mabry to O'Connor. Afterward in the afternoon Mabry sent give-and-take to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This forenoon Major O'Connor was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which he was president. General Mabry and another admirer walked downwards Gay Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the banking concern, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired. Mabry vicious dead, being shot in the left side. Equally he fell O'Connor fired once again, the shot taking outcome in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun. Virtually this fourth dimension Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing downwardly the street, unseen past O'Connor until within forty feet, when the beau fired a pistol, the shot taking effect in O'Connor'due south right breast, passing through the body near the eye. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired, the load taking result in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry barbarous pierced with xx buckshot, and nearly instantly O'Connor brutal expressionless without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise, but fell dorsum dead. The whole tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the 3 spoke subsequently he was shot. General Mabry had well-nigh xxx buckshot in his body. A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their wearable pierced past buckshot. The affair acquired great excitement, and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted simply a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Volition Mabry was killed by Don Lusby terminal Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was President of the Mechanics' National Banking company here, and was the wealthiest human being in the Country.--Associated Press Telegram.
Ane day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville, Tenn., Female College, "a placidity and gentlemanly homo," was told that his blood brother-in-law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to impale him. Burton, it seems, had already killed 1 man and driven his pocketknife into some other. The Professor armed himself with a double-barrelled shot gun, started out in search of the brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. The "Memphis Avalanche" reports that the Professor'south course met with pretty full general approval in the customs; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself.
About the aforementioned time, two immature men in North Carolina quarrelled about a girl, and "hostile messages" were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile them, just had their labour for their pains. On the 24th the young men met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy lodge in his paw, the other an axe. The man with the guild fought desperately for his life, only it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead human.
Virtually the same time, ii "highly continued" young Virginians, clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while "skylarking," came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads'due south eyes; Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, merely a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and it was too tardily at night to procure them. One of them suggested that butcher-knives would reply the purpose, and the other accepted the proposition; the issue was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. If Dick has been arrested, the news has non reached united states. He "expressed deep regret," and we are told by a Staunton correspondent of the Philadelphia Press that "every effort has been made to hush the thing up."--Extracts from the Public Journals.
Enchantments and Enchanters
The largest annual issue in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample: the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Coiffure of Comus there, xx-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'southward use; and in their train all fashion of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently downward the street in the lite of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that is these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to toll, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his slap-up following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to vest to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the law.
Mardi-Gras is of class a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; merely I guess that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of information technology now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His mediaeval concern, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-country, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the revelling rabble of the priest'south twenty-four hours, and serves quite besides, peradventure, to emphasize the solar day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly flavor and the holy ane is reached.
This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. Merely at present it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. Information technology is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly final but a very brief time; as cursory a time equally it would last in London. For the soul of information technology is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take abroad the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and large-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would dice, downwards 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 Dial, and the printing universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would also exist its last.
Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution bankrupt the chains of the ancien régime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above nativity, and as well so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never by gods again, but just figureheads, and accountable for their acts like mutual clay. Such benefactions equally these recoup the temporary impairment which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the earth in debt to them for these corking and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and past his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham guads, and sham chivalries of a dotterel and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more than real and lasting harm, possibly, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the globe has at present outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Non so forcefully as half a generation ago, mayhap, but even so forcefully. At that place, the 18-carat and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Historic period sham civilisation; and then you have practical, mutual-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed upward with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be cached. But for the Sir Walter affliction, the graphic symbol of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing information technology--would be wholly modern, in identify of mod and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation farther advanced than it is. Information technology was Sir Walter that fabricated every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, likewise, that fabricated these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste downward there, and too reverence for rank and degree, and pride and pleasance in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon information technology these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.
Sir Walter had and so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in smashing measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead human being to say that we never should have had whatsoever state of war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the erstwhile resembles the latter every bit an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The alter of grapheme can be traced rather more than easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person.
One may discover, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly information technology holds. If i take upwardly a Northern or Southern literary periodical of 40 or l years ago, he volition discover it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, besides--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the style in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a upshot, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could.
Merely a modify has come, and at that place is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and Due south. For the Northward has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer all the same clings to it--clings to information technology and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the Due south, now, as always there was, of course; but its work tin can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they employ obsolete forms, and a expressionless language. Simply when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they comport it swiftly all nigh America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Federal republic of germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern mode. Instead of 3 or four widely-known literary names, the Southward ought to have a dozen or 2--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out.
A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for adept or damage is shown in the furnishings wrought by "Don Quixote" and those wrought past "Ivanhoe." The beginning swept the globe's adoration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of being; and the other restored it. Every bit far equally our S is concerned, the good work done past Cervantes is pretty virtually a dead letter of the alphabet, and so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.
Source: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cyinlife.html