Soon after his visit to the President, we find our errant Frenchman steaming down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. At Cincinnati, when about to embark on a steamer pompously advertised as "The splendid and fast-running John Hancock," he is somewhat startled by a conversation between two Americans, from which he gathers that the said "Hancock" is a worthless boat, whose boilers have been condemned by the inspector, and which the insurance companies refuse to take, but out of whose rotten hull and rickety engines the considerate proprietors propose to squeeze a little more passage-money at risk of the passengers' lives. So M. Marmier takes his place by the "Western World," also announced as "splendid and fast-running," but which, he flatters himself, is more sea, or at least river worthy, and devotes a few pages to the perils of the West, the recklessness of steamboat captains in America, and the unpaternal nature of a Government which imposes no check on the employment of damaged steamers. Explosions, conflagrations, inundations, snags, sawyers, and races—he makes out a terrible list of dangers, and estimates at thirty or forty per annum the number of steamers lost in the Western waters.
"The average existence of a boat is here about four years. In four years it must have brought in its cost, with interest. If it lasts longer, it is by unhoped-for good luck. But the American does not trouble his head about difficulties or perils. He must travel, and he travels at all risks. You have doubtless read the account of that terrible explosion of the "Louisiana," which, about a month ago, discharged the fragments of her boilers and some hundreds of corpses upon the quay of New Orleans. Next day, not a steamer had a passenger the less. Go ahead is the American motto. Is there a new territory to explore at three hundred leagues distance, a sale of goods to be effected north or south—go ahead! The weather may be bad, the roads covered with snow, the journey long and difficult, no matter—go ahead. The steamer by which they are to go is of bad repute, is ill organised and worse commanded; there is danger of its sinking at the very first casualty; never mind—go ahead. Fatigue and danger are nothing—movement before everything. I ought to admire such intrepidity; but, with my old-fashioned European notions, I regret to think that the seductions of fortune can inspire as great courage as the chivalrous sentiments of glory, religion, and love."
M. Marmier is manifestly of too romantic a turn to travel in the States with gratification to himself, or to write about them in a manner likely to satisfy their inhabitants. He humbly confesses his deficiencies, and implores indulgence. A poor tourist, he says, incapable of correctly adding up a column of figures, and ignorant of the very first principles of mechanical science, he prefers the fresh morning breeze to the roar of a locomotive, and would never dream of putting a railway in competition with a hawthorn-hedged footpath. And although, before starting on his Transatlantic expedition, he assiduously studied the works on America of Michel Chevalier, De Tocqueville, and Miss Martineau, even they had not sufficiently guarded him against disappointments. At the bottom of his heart there still lingered fanciful dreams of vast forests, Indian traditions, and deep silent savannahs. He had dreamed of New York as "rising like an enchanted isle between the waves of ocean and the azure current of the Hudson, in the poetical prestige of a world decked in all the charms of youth." We feel that our imperfect translation but feebly renders the elevation of M. Marmier's style and sentiments; but it may suffice to give the reader an idea of that gentleman's bitter disappointment on finding the city of his dreams a vast focus of speculation, cupidity, and roguery; where "the stranger is every moment exposed to find himself gently duped or audaciously robbed;" where the proportion of knaves and adventurers to the mass of the population exceeds that in any other city of the world; and where the religion, even of the most honest, is the blind and unbounded worship of the Golden Calf. The most ungallant of Frenchmen, he spares not even the ladies, but imagines that the gay swarm which daily flutters in Broadway, between the hours of twelve and two, laden to excess with silks and velvets, shawls and laces, collars and jewellery, do not repair thither solely for their amusement, nor yet for the more important business of shopping; but that they are intended as sauntering advertisements of the wealth of their houses, "and to announce, perhaps, by an increased display of plumes and diamonds, each new victory achieved in the campaigns of speculation." In America, according to M. Marmier, and particularly in New York, everything is reducible into dollars and cents, and is duly reduced accordingly.
"To understand the ardour with which they toil in this reproduction, (of dollars,) we must bear in mind that, in their virtuous democracy, there is no other real sign of distinction, neither birth nor titles of nobility, nor artistic and literary talent. Here everything must be reckoned by figures, or weighed in the goldsmith's balance. A captain of a vessel has distinguished himself by a voyage of discovery, and you take pleasure in quoting the interesting places he has seen, and the observations he has made. You are interrupted by an inquiry of how much he was paid. A painter has been successful at the Exhibition, and has received the most encouraging eulogiums, accompanied with a gold medal. They overlook the eulogiums, but desire to know the weight of the medal. Tell an American that Murray gave Lord Byron sixteen hundred guineas for a canto of Childe Harold, he opens his eyes, and exclaims, with poetic enthusiasm, that he should like to have written Childe Harold. But if you add, that Béranger lives in a cottage at Passy, and that his whole fortune consists of a slender annuity, he ridicules Béranger's glory, and reckons he would have done better to take to trade. With such ideas, you will understand that here literature takes no very high flight. Cooper, Washington Irving, and the learned historian Prescott, have certainly acquired much more fame in Europe than in the United States. For there the merit of their works is alone thought of; but here it is gravely remarked that, with all their writings, they have not made their fortunes.
Nevertheless, standing in a New York library, and reckoning up the immense number of newspapers published in America, one might suppose that a more literary country did not exist on the globe's surface. But those publishers do but reprint, in a compact form, and at the lowest possible price, the feuilletons of France, and the elegant octavos of England. Alexander Dumas gives employment to more printing-presses, papermakers, and stitchers here than in France. As to the two thousand four hundred newspapers of which the United States boast, as of a sign of the diffusion of enlightenment, it is impossible, until one has held them in one's hand, and read them with one's own eyes, to form an idea of such a mass of personal diatribes, coarse chronicles, puerile anecdotes—of such a confused medley of political and commercial notices, mingled with shopkeepers' puffs in prose and verse, and smothered in an ocean of advertisements. Nothing that you see in France can give you an idea of these advertisements. They are a daily inventory of all imaginable merchandise, heaped up, pêle-mêle, as in an immense arena—a register of all the inventions possible, and of every conceivable trade.... With the exception of the New Orleans Bee, and of the Courier of the United States, (both published in the French language,) I do not know an American paper—not even the best of all, that of a distinguished poet, Mr Bryant—which can be compared, for the order of its contents, and its general getting-up, to the most unpretending of our provincial newspapers. As every considerable city publishes at least a dozen papers, and every little town two or three, the consequence is, that none attain sufficient circulation to afford fair remuneration to a body of able writers. Some are sustained by the funds of partymen, whose organs they are; and the majority exist only by the proceeds of their advertisements."
Arrived at New Orleans, M. Marmier makes his moan over the fair and broad territories once possessed by France in the Western Hemisphere, and predicts the loss of nearly all that she still retains in those latitudes, the Islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique, as a natural consequence of that decree of the Provisional Government which liberated, at one blow, the whole of the blacks, thereby ruining the white proprietors. The slaves had cost three or four thousand francs a-piece; four hundred francs was the indemnity granted to their owners. The negroes, thus suddenly emancipated, at once took to idleness, and would work only when they pleased, and as they pleased, and on their own terms. The sugar-fields were deserted, and the Creoles, abandoning their plantations, worthless for want of hands to cultivate them, were emigrating in numbers to the United States. M. Marmier met a great many of these unfortunate men, ruined and exiled by the mad precipitation of one of the most worthless and despicable Governments that ever swayed, even for a brief space, the destinies of a great country and its colonies.
"Some day," he says, "the negroes will no longer be satisfied to receive wages. With the ideas of equality preached to them by their apostles, they will grow indignant at their condition of hired labourers. They will desire to possess lands. The sooner to have them, they will seize them by force. All the emigrants from Guadaloupe and Martinique with whom I conversed respecting the present condition of the two islands, foresaw a bloody and terrible catastrophe. Failing energetic repression, those islands, like that of St Domingo, will be lost to us. But we shall have the satisfaction, perhaps, of witnessing the foundation of a new kingdom of blacks, and of manufacturing at Paris the crown and sceptre of another Faustin I."
Such gloomy accounts of their condition and prospects were not calculated to encourage M. Marmier in any design he may have entertained of a visit to the French West-Indian colonies. He preferred Cuba—previously, however, abiding some days in New Orleans, where, as in Canada, he fondly traced the lingering habits and traditions of his native land. The gay, urbane, and sociable Creoles contrasted most favourably with the dry, taciturn, tobacco-chewing men of business of the Northern States. M. Marmier was no less surprised than pleased at the striking difference, having expected to find the people of New Orleans already "vitrified by the American furnace."
"For of all the things," he says, "which astonish the stranger in the United States, the most astonishing, perhaps, is the power of absorption of the American character. Suppose a skilful chemist throwing five or six different ingredients into his crucible, mingling and crushing them with a view to the extraction of one homogeneous essence, and you have the image of the moral and intellectual chemistry which continually acts upon this country. What we call the American people is but an agglomeration of emigrants from various regions and races. The first came from England; others have come from Germany, Ireland, France, the mountains of Switzerland, the shores of the Baltic—in short, from all the countries of Europe. At first this agglomeration was effected slowly, by small detachments. Now it annually consists of whole armies of artisans and tillers of the soil, and of thousands upon thousands of families. All these foreigners naturally take with them to the United States their particular predilections, their national habits, doubtless also their prejudices. At first the character of the American displeases them, and they are disagreeably surprised by his habits. They resolve to keep aloof from him, to live apart with their own countrymen, to preserve, upon that distant continent, the manners of their native land, and in their mother tongue they energetically protest that they never will become Americans. Vain is the project! useless the protestation! The American atmosphere envelopes them, and by its constant action weakens their recollections, dissolves their prejudices, decomposes their primitive elements. Little by little, by insensible modifications, they change their views and mode of living, adopt the usages and language of the Americans, and end by being absorbed in the American nation, as are the streamlets from the valleys in the great rivers that bear them onward to the ocean. How many are the honest Germans, who, after cursing the rudeness of American manners, and bitterly regretting their good kindly Germany, have come at last to stick their hat, Yankee fashion, on the back of their head, to stiffen themselves, like the Yankee, in a coat buttoned up to the chin, to disdain all the rules of European courtesy, and to use no other language but the consecrated dialect of business."
Fearing a like transformation in the French population of New Orleans, M. Marmier, delighted to find himself mistaken, thanks Heaven for his escape from the frigid zone of Yankee-land, and for once more finding himself, for the first time since he left Canada, amongst people with hearts as well as heads, whose commercial pursuits do not preclude social enjoyments and friendly attentions to a stranger. He notes a vast difference between the aspect of New Orleans and that of the other cities of the Union. In the Louisianian capital there is more of holidaymaking, and less of unremitting money-seeking; there are to be found gay dinners, agreeable pastimes, music in the streets and coffee-houses, manners more courtly and dress more elegant, an opera and a vaudeville. This, at least, is the case in the French portion of the city; and the inhabitants of the American quarter have benefited, our traveller assures us, by the contact and intercourse of their lively and amiable neighbours. Even in New Orleans, however, he finds things to blame, or at least to deplore. The principal of these is the fatal practice of duelling, which has brought desolation into so many Creole families. A. N., victime de l'honneur à 24 ans, is the brief but significant inscription upon a plain tombstone, before which he pauses during his ramble amidst the flower garlands and green shrubberies of the carefully kept cemetery. Duels in Louisiana are much less frequent since the passing of a law which deprives the duellist of his civil rights for a space of five years, and which closes to him the profession of the bar, and the avenues to certain public employments. No law, however, can tame the fierce passions of the men of the Southern States, or prevent those extempore duels, fought out on the instant of quarrel, with revolver and Arkansas toothpick—a Gargantuan toothpick, M. Marmier shudderingly explains, having a two-edged blade, a foot long and two or three inches wide.
Before quitting the Union, whose inhabitants and institutions have certainly met with little favour at his hands, M. Marmier apologises for any undue severity into which he may possibly have been betrayed.