But though the old order of creole life remains almost unchanged, that life has shrunk into much smaller channels, and has undergone many modifications. The wealth and indolent luxury of the eighteenth century have become memories. The influence of the race upon home politics has totally ceased. The race itself is rapidly disappearing from the islands. Except among the few survivors of the old régime you may now seek in vain for that proud, fine type of valiant and vigorous manhood, once the honor of colonial France. With the abolition of slavery and the introduction of universal suffrage, the new social conditions became almost unbearable for the formerly dominant class,—with its intense conservatism. Naturally the men of strong individuality suffered most in the hopeless war of race prejudice and race politics provoked by a too speedy conferring of political rights upon a population of slaves; and the more energetic whites found themselves forced to emigrate elsewhere. Those powerful characters who had given the old creole life all its dignity and stability vanished from the scene; and the remnant of the whites softened down into that condition of dull, inert, flaccid existence which is their portion to-day. The social conditions of the time of the monarchy have been, indeed, almost reversed: the dark population, multiplying with wonderful rapidity ever since emancipation, is crowding the white population out of the islands; and the former slave race is now politically the dominant one. It seems more than possible that the white creole race will have disappeared from all the French West Indies within a few more generations,—certainly from Martinique.
How much the creole white woman has suffered in this race contest may only be understood by those long familiar with colonial life. With the decline of caste dignity and caste prosperity her existence necessarily becomes more and more narrowed, and her future vaguer in its promises of happiness. Something of her present life may be divined from its invisibility; still more from the fact that it is dominated by a religious influence which strictly, regulates and limits her diversions, her reading, and the boundaries of her knowledge. She has lost that graceful haughtiness once the particular characteristic of her race; she has also, perhaps, lost something of that aristocratic gift of fine tact which formerly distinguished her as a daughter of statesmen; she is becoming something of a bourgeoise. Her chances in life are also growing cruelly small. Probably the white female population now considerably exceeds the male; yet weddings are infrequent, and their number yearly grows less. Among the modern creoles, the size of a girl's dowry has most to do with influencing a match; marriages are rather dependent upon business considerations and social connections in relation to business prospects, than upon mutual affection. It was not so in the old days: marriage was then regarded as a social duty; and even the laxity of tropical morals in slave times rarely prevented any man from fulfilling that social duty, and abandoning all reckless living after a certain age. The change in colonial ideas in this respect has been attributed to moral degeneracy,—to class conservatism in creole relations with the foreign element,—to various other causes. It is simply the result of poverty! The old conditions were wholly artificial, wholly based upon the institution of slavery, supported by a strong monarchical government; and the true character of that structure is now being revealed by the fact that the white race cannot hold its own in the colonies.
Only those who remember monarchical times can decide how far the creole girl has been changed by the new conditions; the foreigner, of course, has few opportunities for observing her. Does she still possess that exotic charm which in other years lifted her to the throne of empire, and inspired that exquisite white dream in marble which still stands in the Savannah of Fort-de-France—between the Rivière Madame and the Rivière Monsieur? Does she still keep that fine witchery which frightened the foolish Métropole long ago into the utterance of the law that no French official in the colonies should marry a creole? I do not know. But it is sadly true that she is bearing more than her share of the penalty for the errors made by her fathers in the past—those errors of slavery, that have not even yet been expiated. And it is also true that many a fair proud girl—perhaps more than one with princely blood in her veins—seeks escape at last from the dull formality of an aimless and hopeless existence, by returning forever to the convent of her child-days; knowing nothing of the higher joys or deeper pains of life, and so the more innocently eager to transmute into religious ecstasy and penance that strength of love and that divine desire of self-sacrifice for some one's sake which are attributes of woman's soul.
[ARABESQUES]
ARABIAN WOMEN
Although sensitiveness to beauty—the æsthetic sense—is not in itself a capacity by which the comparative civilization of races may be fully estimated, it is at least an indication of the possession of powers which under favoring circumstances would enable the people possessing it to occupy a high rank in the hierarchy of nations. When found among semi-savage peoples, it gives us the right to believe that such peoples have been or might yet be the founders of civilizations; and in these days, when the study of Oriental history and ethnology is making such rapid progress, especial interest attaches to the evidences of the æsthetic sense in the earliest literature of the nations of the East. In this regard, no Oriental literature possesses so natural a charm as that of the Arabs,—particularly, perhaps, from the fact that in it is preserved every link in the history of the wonderful evolution of the æsthetic sense,—from the primitive desert-chant to the elaborate literature of the Golden Prime of Islam,—from the first camel-skin tents to the glories of Saracenic architecture in Spain and India,—from the simplicity of nomad life between sand and sun, to the luxurious era of El Rashid and El Mamoun, of which the memory still lingers in the world like a breath of perfume, like a golden afterglow, like the throbbing in the brain after some wondrous music has died away. This literature is vast and variform; it were useless to attempt in any limited space to speak, even of the titles of its main branches,—or even to touch ever so lightly upon those branches which deal especially with the sense of the beautiful. But the memory of the student, culling here and there a blossom of the poetical flora whose odor is most grateful to his special literary sense, can at least present the reader with a bouquet of fancies curious enough to interest if not beautiful enough, perhaps, to charm. If there be any particular subject the poetical treatment of which is the best evidence of the æsthetic sense, it is the beauty of woman,—and we confine our gleanings to this particular domain.
From time immemorial, before the coming of Mahomet, the desert Arabs were wont not only to honor poets highly, but to hold periodical assemblies at which poetical contests took place, the contestants being stimulated by the promise of a prize or the signal honor of having their compositions hung up in the precincts of the temples as almost-inspired masterpieces. Six out of the many victors at these ante-islamic poetical exhibitions obtained such fame that their names are still familiar to all the desert-tribes, and their poems have been preserved for us almost unchanged,—marvelous specimens of simple, beautiful, but savage genius. Naturally the field of the desert-poet had but little variation; his subjects were few and simple—the fine qualities of thoroughbred horses or camels, the triumph of battle, the lament of defeat, the joy of the chase, the beauty of a mistress. This very limitation of subject, together with the monotonous sameness of nomad life in all ages and as far as the sands extend, by increasing the difficulty of the art, renders its charming expression more wonderful to modern minds. To describe the beauty of woman, the modern poet can summon to his aid the whole art of civilization, the varied knowledge of three thousand years, the charm of all things that charm—jewels, music, flowers, birds, ivories of China and the Indies, colors of the Pacific, Greek and Etruscan arts, the melody and passion of a hundred wonderful languages. The Arab, knowing no language but his own, seeing ever about him the yellow waste, above him the unvarying blue,—ignorant of all arts save those of war and the chase,—was able to create masterpieces of language which the most learned men of our own day cannot speak of without admiration,—poems virile, supple, ardent as the desert itself and as sun-colored. Translations of these are now printed in most European languages.
Symbolism, so infinitely rich in the nineteenth century, was necessarily meagre in the deserts of Arabia before the advent of Mahomet, and the Arab lover knew of but few things to which he might compare the beauty of her he loved: comely animals and simple objects familiar to dwellers in tents constituted the bulk of his poetical stock of similes. In the neighborhood of the cities he might see other objects suited to the evocation of graceful fancies, as when he compared the loosened tresses of an Arab girl falling over her face, to 1 the graceful drooping of the flexible vine over its trellis-work,' But he generally confined his symbolism to desert-subjects,—the palm, the ostrich, the gazelle, the wild cattle of the stony hills, the antelopes,—the weapons of his people; for in all countries the eyebrow of the fair has ever been Love's bow, her gaze its arrows, her glance their barbed points that may not be readily withdrawn from the heart.