The great thing about the carnival, it seems to me, is that it bears the
relation to the life of the city, that a well-developed hobby does to
the life of an individual. It keeps the city young. It keeps it from
becoming pompous, from taking itself too seriously, from getting into a
rut. It stimulates not alone the young, but the grave and reverend
seigniors also, to give themselves up for a little while each year to
play, and moreover to use their imaginations in annually devising new
pageants and costumes. From this point of view such a carnival would be
a good thing for any city.
But that is where the Latin spirit of New Orleans comes in, with its
pleasing combination of gaiety and restraint. You could not hold such a
carnival in every city. You could not do it in New York. For more
important even than the pageants and the balls, is the carnival frame of
mind. To hold a carnival such as New Orleans holds, a city must know how
to be lively and playful without becoming drunk, without breaking
barroom mirrors, upsetting tables, annoying women, thrusting "ticklers"
into people's faces, jostling, fighting, committing the thousand rough
vulgar excesses in which New York indulges every New Year's Eve, and in
which it would indulge to an even more disgusting extent under the
additional license of the mask.
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