418 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
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 made of a nation
of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the
setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the
divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were
gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again,
but only figure-heads, and answerable for their acts like common clay,
Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm whicih
Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to
them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, an3
progress.
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his
angle 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 gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-
vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting
harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most ol
the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no
means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully
stilL Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still
forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilisation of the
nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the
Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilisation; and so you have practical,
common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed np
*wi£h the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejnne romanticism of an
abenrd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But
for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or
Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—