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!'
Light!—no one dwelling in the cities of the North may ever imagine the possibilities of light and of color in the equatorial world. And he who has once known them must continue forever enchanted,—must feel, after departure from them, like an exile from Paradise. The poetry of the tropics is born of such regret. Romance and song are essentially imaginative; and that which surpasses and satiates imagination does not directly stimulate their production: it is only as an exile that the creole becomes a poet, when he remembers the charm of his country without the pains of its daily life. There is no more touching incident, perhaps, in literary history, than the fate of Léonard, the poet of Guadeloupe. His youth had been mostly spent abroad in struggles to obtain the means of returning to his native island. Succeeding after intense strain, he returned to find himself only a victim of the revolution of 1789,—threatened with death if he persisted in remaining. His friends hurried him on board a vessel; but, although he had been already wounded and pursued by an assassin, he could not nerve himself to go. Again and again he left the ship, and only with the greatest difficulty could he be persuaded at last to remain on board. But nostalgia had brought him to the condition of a dying man before his arrival in France. At Nantes he tried to reëmbark, hoping at least to die in his beloved island; but he expired before the ship could sail.
Tropical nature is indeed an enchantress; but she does more than bewitch, she transforms body and soul. She satisfies the senses, and numbs the aspirations; she lulls the higher faculties to sleep while gratifying, as nowhere else, the physical wants of life. It has been often said that human happiness has a certain fixed measure in all conditions of existence: the quality may vary, the capacity for each individual remains the same. Such a belief would seem to have its confirmation in the conditions of tropical society. The pleasures of intellectual life become almost impossible in a climate where the least mental effort provokes drowsiness, and the middle of each day is devoted to sleep; nor can the dazzling spectacle of tropical vegetation under tropical skies wholly compensate the enervating effect of an atmosphere hot and heavy as the air of a Turkish bath. Social existence, so circumstanced, becomes of necessity both indolent and provincial; and the enchantment of the tropics should prove irresistible only to strangers able and willing to dream life away, and to abandon all gifts of civilization so hardly earned by Northern struggle. And one must know this, to guess how far from enviable is the life of white women even in the English tropics, where there is at least an effort to maintain the social customs of the mother country. But in the old Latin colonies of the Pacific and the West Indies, woman's life has always been narrowed by formal customs which no American or English girl could well resign herself to endure.
II
Time seems to have moved very slowly in the old French colonies. In the streets of Martinique or Réunion or Marie-Galante or Guadeloupe, one almost seems to live in the seventeenth century,—so little have architecture or customs been modified in two or three hundred years. The great changes effected by the abolition of slavery are not immediately discernible to a stranger; the free blacks and people of color, forming the mass of the population, still cling to the simple and bright attire of other days, and seem to hold almost the same relation to white colonial life as hired servants that they formerly held as slaves. Emancipation, republicanism, and education have not yet abolished the old manners, nor greatly modified the creole speech. Could Josephine arise from the dust of her rest to revisit her Martinique birthplace, she would find so little changed at Trois-Islets, that except for the saucier manner of the younger negroes, she could scarcely surmise the new republican conditions. And the modern life of the creole woman, though less luxurious than in the previous century of colonial prosperity, varies otherwise little from that of her great-greatgrandmother.