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Castilian Days

by John Hay · English · Gutenberg #7470 · 402,618 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Castilian Days

Author: John Hay


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7470]
                Most recently updated: August 24, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7470

Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CASTILIAN DAYS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred






CASTILIAN DAYS

By John Hay


Published November 1903




PUBLISHERS' NOTE


In this Holiday Edition of _Castilian Days_ it has been thought
advisable to omit a few chapters that appeared in the original edition.
These chapters were less descriptive than the rest of the book, and not
so rich in the picturesque material which the art of the illustrator
demands. Otherwise, the text is reprinted without change. The
illustrations are the fruit of a special visit which Mr. Pennell has
recently made to Castile for this purpose.

BOSTON, AUTUMN, 1903




LIST OF CONTENTS


MADRID AL FRESCO

SPANISH LIVING AND DYING

INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE

TAUROMACHY

RED-LETTER DAYS

AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS

A CASTLE IN THE AIR

THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS

THE ESCORIAL

A MIRACLE PLAY

THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES




MADRID AL FRESCO


Madrid is a capital with malice aforethought. Usually the seat of
government is established in some important town from the force of
circumstances. Some cities have an attraction too powerful for the court
to resist. There is no capital of England possible but London. Paris is
the heart of France. Rome is the predestined capital of Italy in spite
of the wandering flirtations its varying governments in different
centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can
imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,--the gemuthlich
Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and
consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial
court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward
into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent
barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen of
the cold-blooded handiwork of the capital builders. We shall think
nothing less of the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of its founder if we
admit he was human, and his wishing the seat of government nearer to
Mount Vernon than Mount Washington sufficiently proves this. But Madrid
more plainly than any other capital shows the traces of having been set
down and properly brought up by the strong hand of a paternal
government; and like children with whom the same regimen has been
followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawlessness
and insipidity.

Its greatness was thrust upon it by Philip II. Some premonitory symptoms
of the dangerous honor that awaited it had been seen in preceding
reigns. Ferdinand and Isabella occasionally set up their pilgrim
tabernacle on the declivity that overhangs the Manzanares. Charles V.
found the thin, fine air comforting to his gouty articulations. But
Philip II. made it his court. It seems hard to conceive how a king who
had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious harbor and unequalled
communications; Seville, with its delicious climate and natural beauty;
and Salamanca and Toledo, with their wealth of tradition, splendor of
architecture, and renown of learning, should have chosen this barren
mountain for his home, and the seat of his empire. But when we know this
monkish king we wonder no longer. He chose Madrid simply because it was
cheerless and bare and of ophthalmic ugliness. The royal kill-joy
delighted in having the dreariest capital on earth. After a while there
seemed to him too much life and humanity about Madrid, and he built the
Escorial, the grandest ideal of majesty and ennui that the world has
ever seen. This vast mass of granite has somehow acted as an anchor that
has held the capital fast moored at Madrid through all succeeding years.

It was a dreary and somewhat shabby court for many reigns. The great
kings who started the Austrian dynasty were too busy in their world
conquest to pay much attention to beautifying Madrid, and their weak
successors, sunk in ignoble pleasures, had not energy enough to indulge
the royal folly of building. When the Bourbons came down from France
there was a little flurry of construction under Philip V., but he never
finished his palace in the Plaza del Oriente, and was soon absorbed in
constructing his castle in cloud-land on the heights of La Granja. The
only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to
him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement.
Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was
educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and
superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a
city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active
and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades
which give to Madrid almost its only outward attraction. The Picture
Gallery, which is the shrine of all pilgrims of taste, was built by him
for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stranger cares to
see, Madrid is not an older city than Boston.

There is consequently no glory of tradition here. There are no
cathedrals. There are no ruins. There is none of that mysterious and
haunting memory that peoples the air with spectres in quiet towns like
Ravenna and Nuremberg. And there is little of that vast movement of
humanity that possesses and bewilders you in San Francisco and New York.
Madrid is larger than Chicago; but Chicago is a great city and Madrid a
great village. The pulsations of life in the two places resemble each
other no more than the beating of Dexter's heart on the home-stretch is
like the rising and falling of an oozy tide in a marshy inlet.

There is nothing indigenous in Madrid. There is no marked local color.
It is a city of Castile, but not a Castilian city, like Toledo, which
girds its graceful waist with the golden Tagus, or like Segovia,
fastened to its rock in hopeless shipwreck.

But it is not for this reason destitute of an interest of its own. By
reason of its exceptional history and character it is the best point in
Spain to study Spanish life. It has no distinctive traits itself, but it
is a patchwork of all Spain. Every province of the Peninsula sends a
contingent to its population. The Gallicians hew its wood and draw its
water; the Asturian women nurse its babies at their deep bosoms, and
fill the promenades with their brilliant costumes; the Valentians carpet
its halls and quench its thirst with orgeat of chufas; in every street
you shall see the red bonnet and sandalled feet of the Catalan; in every
cafe, the shaven face and rat-tail chignon of the Majo of Andalusia. If
it have no character of its own, it is a mirror where all the faces of
the Peninsula may sometimes be seen. It is like the mockingbird of the
West, that has no song of its own, and yet makes the woods ring with
every note it has ever heard.

Though Madrid gives a picture in little of all Spain, it is not all
Spanish. It has a large foreign population. Not only its immediate
neighbors, the French, are here in great numbers,--conquering so far
their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the
midst of traditional hatred,--but there are also many Germans and
English in business here, and a few stray Yankees have pitched their
tents, to reinforce the teeth of the Dons, and to sell them ploughs and
sewing-machines. Its railroads have waked it up to a new life, and the
Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which
would have been hardly credible a few years ago. Its streets swarm with
newsboys and strangers,--the agencies that are to bring its people into
the movement of the age.

It has a superb opera-house, which might as well be in Naples, for all
the national character it has; the court theatre, where not a word of
Cas-tilian is ever heard, nor a strain of Spanish music. Even
cosmopolite Paris has her grand opera sung in French, and easy-going
Vienna insists that Don Juan shall make love in German. The champagny
strains of Offenbach are heard in every town of Spain oftener than the
ballads of the country. In Madrid there are more _pilluelos_ who whistle
_Bu qui s'avance_ than the Hymn of Riego. The Cancan has taken its place
on the boards of every stage in the city, apparently to stay; and the
exquisite jota and cachucha are giving way to the bestialities of the
casino cadet. It is useless perhaps to fight against that hideous orgie
of vulgar Menads which in these late years has swept over all nations,
and stung the loose world into a tarantula dance from the Golden Horn to
the Golden Gate. It must have its day and go out; and when it has
passed, perhaps we may see that it was not so utterly causeless and
irrational as it seemed; but that, as a young American poet has
impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of
the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart,
the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political
repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends, which
Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty."

This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most
of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical
concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres
play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are
in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more
frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine
old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and
Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk
almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of
the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for
which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon
which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.

This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls
what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is
like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard
and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the
suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest
eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and
the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature
receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a
friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant
reception,--"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace alone!" His heart was
heavy for the steamed cherry-stones of Harvey and the stewed terrapin of
Augustin.

The speech of the gay world has almost ceased to be national. Every one
speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is sometimes
to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign language in
official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of
ideas. It is impossible for any one to use another tongue with the ease
and grace with which he could use his own. You know how tiresome the
most charming foreigners are when they speak English. A fetter-dance is
always more curious than graceful. Yet one who has nothing to say can
say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but
phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen
people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a
certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of no other way of
accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid and stupid people
clever when they speak French. This facile language thus becomes the
missionary of mental equality,--the principles of '89 applied to
conversation. All men are equal before the phrase-book.

But this is hypercritical and ungrateful. We do not go to balls to hear
sermons nor discuss the origin of matter. If the young grandees of Spain
are rather weaker in the parapet than is allowed in the nineteenth
century, if the old boys are more frivolous than is becoming to age, and
both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even
their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle
are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The
foreigner never forgets those piquant, _mutines_ faces of Andalusia and
those dreamy eyes of Malaga,--the black masses of Moorish hair and the
blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic
demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, but they were
knowing enough to trouble the soundest sleep. Their voices could
interpret the sublimest ideas of Mendelssohn. They knew sufficiently of
lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their
little feet were well enough educated to bear them over the polished
floor of a ball-room as lightly as swallows' wings. The flirting of
their intelligent fans, the flashing of those quick smiles where eyes,
teeth, and lips all did their dazzling duty, and the satin twinkling of
those neat boots in the waltz, are harder to forget than things better
worth remembering.

Since the beginning of the Revolutionary regime there have been serious
schisms and heart-burnings in the gay world. The people of the old
situation assumed that the people of the new were rebels and traitors,
and stopped breaking bread with them. But in spite of this the palace
and the ministry of war were gay enough,--for Madrid is a city of
office-holders, and the White House is always easy to fill, even if two
thirds of the Senate is uncongenial. The principal fortress of the post
was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name
is Duchess of Penaranda, but who is better known as the mother of the
Empress of the French. Her salon was the weekly rendezvous of the
irreconcilable adherents of the House of Bourbon, and the aristocratic
beauty that gathered there was too powerful a seduction even for the
young and hopeful partisans of the powers that be. There was nothing
exclusive about this elegant hospitality. Beauty and good manners have
always been a passport there. I have seen a proconsul of Prim talking
with a Carlist leader, and a fiery young democrat dancing with a
countess of Castile.

But there is another phase of society in Madrid which is altogether
pleasing,--far from the domain of politics or public affairs, where
there is no pretension or luxury or conspiracy,--the old-fashioned
Tertulias of Spain. There is nowhere a kindlier and more unaffected
sociableness. The leading families of each little circle have one
evening a week on which they remain at home. Nearly all their friends
come in on that evening. There is conversation and music and dancing.
The young girls gather together in little groups,--not confined under
the jealous guard of their mothers or chaperons,--and chatter of the
momentous events of the week--their dresses, their beaux, and their
books. Around these compact formations of loveliness skirmish light
bodies of the male enemy, but rarely effect a lodgment. A word or a
smile is momently thrown out to meet the advance; but the long,
desperate battle of flirtation, which so often takes place in America in
discreet corners and outlying boudoirs, is never seen in this
well-organized society. The mothers in Israel are ranged for the evening
around the walls in comfortable chairs, which they never leave; and the
colonels and generals and chiefs of administration, who form the bulk of
all Madrid gatherings, are gravely smoking in the library or playing
interminable games of tresillon, seasoned with temperate denunciations
of the follies of the time.

Nothing can be more engaging than the tone of perfect ease and cordial
courtesy which pervades these family festivals. It is here that the
Spanish character is seen in its most attractive light. Nearly everybody
knows French, but it is never spoken. The exquisite Castilian, softened
by its graceful diminutives into a rival of the Italian in tender
melody, is the only medium of conversation; it is rare that a stranger'
is seen, but if he is, he must learn Spanish or be a wet blanket
forever.

You will often meet, in persons of wealth and distinction, an easy
degenerate accent in Spanish, strangely at variance with their elegance
and culture. These are Creoles of the Antilles, and they form one of the
most valued and popular elements of society in the capital. There is a
gallantry and dash about the men, and an intelligence and independence
about the women, that distinguish them from their cousins of the
Peninsula. The American element has recently grown very prominent in the
political and social world. Admiral Topete is a Mexican. His wife is one
of the distinguished Cuban family of Arrieta. General Prim married a
Mexican heiress. The magnificent Duchess de la Torre, wife of the Regent
Serrano, is a Cuban born and bred.

In one particular Madrid is unique among capitals,--it has no suburbs.
It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on
the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other
side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow
ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes
into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon.
There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos
out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break
with such enchanting freshness and variety the steady course of life in
other capitals cannot here exist. No Parisian loves _la bonne ville_ so
much that he does not call those the happiest of days on which he
deserts her for a row at Asnieres, a donkey-ride at Enghien, or a
bird-like dinner in the vast chestnuts of Sceaux. "There is only one
Kaiserstadt," sings the loyal Kerl of Vienna, but he shakes the dust of
the Graben from his feet on holiday mornings, and makes his merry
pilgrimage to the lordly Schoen-brunn or the heartsome Dornbach, or the
wooded eyry of the Kahlenberg. What would white-bait be if not eaten at
Greenwich? What would life be in the great cities without the knowledge
that just outside, an hour away from the toil and dust and struggle of
this money-getting world, there are green fields, and whispering
forests, and verdurous nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks
where the white pebbles shine through the mottled stream,--where you
find great pied pan-sies under your hands, and catch the black beady
eyes of orioles watching you from the thickets, and through the lush
leafage over you see patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail
so lazily you cannot be sure if the blue or the white is moving?
Existence without these luxuries would be very much like life in Madrid.

Yet it is not so dismal as it might seem. The Grande Duchesse of
Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne, announces
just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut
aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you have when
you never imagined anything better! The bulk of the good people of
Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for their
sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the dusty
villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they give
fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They
shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations,
and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so
anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never
wished to travel,--some people who had been to France preferred Paris to
Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their
wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard
accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves
him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. _Vamonos al Prado!_
or, as Browning says,--

  "Let's to the Prado and make the most of time."

The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than any
I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon them by
those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III. and Aranda. They knew
how important to the moral and physical health of the people a place of
recreation was. They reduced the hideous waste land on the east side of
the city to a breathing-space for future generations, turning the meadow
into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro. The people growled
terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything this prematurely
liberal government did for them. The wise king once wittily said: "My
people are like bad children that kick the shins of their nurse whenever
their faces are washed."

But they soon became reconciled to their Prado,--a name, by the way,
which runs through several idioms,--in Paris they had a Pre-aux-clercs,
the Clerks' Meadow, and the great park of Vienna is called the Prater.
It was originally the favorite scene of duels, and the cherished
trysting-place of lovers. But in modern times it is too popular for any
such selfish use.

The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in
the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official
courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech
the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the
social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in
society never walk in this long promenade, which is open to all the
world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the
aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the
diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing
of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from
snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred
paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its
plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of
government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness
of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the
Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena.

After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the
summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the
Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic.
The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening
party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San
Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a
carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying
the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is
music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way beginning so
early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning
you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to
call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine
and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very
good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter
fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard _baton._

In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before
them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when the
sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they
utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and
are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of
lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside
them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late
in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade,
the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his _placens
uxor_ dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another
slumbering in her lap.

This Madrid climate is a gallant one, and kindlier to the women than the
men. The ladies are built on the old-fashioned generous plan. Like a
Southern table in the old times, the only fault is too abundant plenty.
They move along with a superb dignity of carriage that Banting would
like to banish from the world, their round white shoulders shining in
the starlight, their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and
always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men of
Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin,
eager, sinewy in appearance,--though it is the spareness of the Turk,
not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds.
This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the
treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men
of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will
not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of
the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after
all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants
of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman
says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet
only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined
principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits
indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of
their luxury is a cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have
seen the fountains all surrounded by luxurious vagabonds asleep or in
revery, dozens of them stretched along the rim of the basins, in the
spray of the splashing water, where the least start would plunge them
in. But the dreams of these Latin beggars are too peaceful to trouble
their slumber. They lie motionless, amid the roar of wheels and the
tramp of a thousand feet, their bed the sculptured marble, their
covering the deep, amethystine vault, warm and cherishing with its
breath of summer winds, bright with its trooping stars. The Providence
of the worthless watches and guards them!

The chief commerce of the streets of Madrid seems to be fire and water,
bane and antidote. It would be impossible for so many match-venders to
live anywhere else, in a city ten times the size of Madrid. On every
block you will find a wandering merchant dolefully announcing paper and
phosphorus,--the one to construct cigarettes and the other to light
them. The matches are little waxen tapers very neatly made and enclosed
in pasteboard boxes, which are sold for a cent and contain about a
hundred _fosforos._ These boxes are ornamented with portraits of the
popular favorites of the day, and afford a very fair test of the
progress and decline of parties. The queen has disappeared from them
except in caricature, and the chivalrous face of Castelar and the heavy
Bourbon mouth of Don Carlos are oftener seen than any others. A Madrid
smoker of average industry will use a box a day. They smoke more
cigarettes than cigars, and in the ardor of conversation allow their
fire to go out every minute. A young Austrian, who was watching a
_senorito_ light his wisp of paper for the fifth time, and mentally
comparing it with the volcano volume and _kern-deutsch_ integrity of
purpose of the meerschaums of his native land, said to me: "What can you
expect of a people who trifle in that way with the only work of their
lives?"

It is this habit of constant smoking that makes the Madrilenos the
thirstiest people in the world; so that, alternating with the cry of
"Fire, lord-lings! Matches, chevaliers!" you hear continually the drone
so tempting to parched throats, "Water! who wants water? freezing water!
colder than snow!" This is the daily song of the Gallician who marches
along in his irrigating mission, with his brown blouse, his short
breeches, and pointed hat, like that Aladdin wears in the cheap
editions; a little varied by the Valentian in his party-colored mantle
and his tow trousers, showing the bronzed leg from the knee to the
blue-bordered sandals. Numerous as they are, they all seem to have
enough to do. They carry their scriptural-looking water-jars on their
backs, and a smart tray of tin and burnished brass, with meringues and
glasses, in front. The glasses are of enormous but not extravagant
proportions. These dropsical Iberians will drink water as if it were no
stronger than beer. In the winter-time, while the cheerful invitation
rings out to the same effect,--that the beverage is cold as the
snow,--the merchant prudently carries a little pot of hot water over a
spirit-lamp to take the chill off for shivery customers.

Madrid is one of those cities where strangers fear the climate less than
residents. Nothing is too bad for the Castilian to say of his native
air. Before you have been a day in the city some kind soul will warn you
against everything you have been in the habit of doing as leading to
sudden and severe death in this subtle air. You will hear in a dozen
different tones the favorite proverb, which may be translated,--

  The air of Madrid is as sharp as a knife,--
  It will spare a candle and blow out your life:--

and another where the truth, as in many Spanish proverbs, is sacrificed
to the rhyme, saying that the climate is _tres meses invierno y nueve
infierno,--_three months winter and nine months Tophet. At the first
coming of the winter frosts the genuine son of Madrid gets out his capa,
the national full round cloak, and never leaves it off till late in the
hot spring days. They have a way of throwing one corner over the left
shoulder, so that a bright strip of gay lining falls outward and
pleasantly relieves the sombre monotony of the streets. In this way the
face is completely covered by the heavy woollen folds, only the eyes
being visible under the sombrero. The true Spaniard breathes no
out-of-doors air all winter except through his cloak, and they stare at
strangers who go about with uncovered faces enjoying the brisk air as if
they were lunatics. But what makes the custom absurdly incongruous is
that the women have no such terror of fresh air. While the hidalgo goes
smothered in his wrappings his wife and daughter wear nothing on their
necks and faces but their pretty complexions, and the gallant breeze,
grateful for this generous confidence, repays them in roses. I have
sometimes fancied that in this land of traditions this difference might
have arisen in those days of adventure when the cavaliers had good
reasons for keeping their faces concealed, while the senoras, we are
bound to believe, have never done anything for which their own beauty
was not the best excuse.

Nearly all there is of interest in Madrid consists in the faces and the
life of its people. There is but one portion of the city which appeals
to the tourist's ordinary set of emotions. This is the old Moors'
quarter,--the intricate jumble of streets and places on the western edge
of the town, overlooking the bankrupt river. Here is St. Andrew's, the
parish church where Isabella the Catholic and her pious husband used to
offer their stiff and dutiful prayers. Behind it a market-place of the
most primitive kind runs precipitately down to the Street of. Segovia,
at such an angle that you wonder the turnips and carrots can ever be
brought to keep their places on the rocky slope. If you will wander
through the dark alleys and hilly streets of this quarter when twilight
is softening the tall tenement-houses to a softer purpose, and the
doorways are all full of gossiping groups, and here and there in the
little courts you can hear the tinkling of a guitar and the drone of
ballads, and see the idlers lounging by the fountains, and everywhere
against the purple sky the crosses of old convents, while the evening
air is musical with slow chimes from the full-arched belfries, it will
not be hard to imagine you are in the Spain you have read and dreamed
of. And, climbing out of this labyrinth of slums, you pass under the
gloomy gates that lead to the Plaza Mayor. This once magnificent square
is now as squalid and forsaken as the Place Royale of Paris, though it
dates from a period comparatively recent. The mind so instinctively
revolts at the contemplation of those orgies of priestly brutality which
have made the very name of this place redolent with a fragrance of
scorched Christians, that we naturally assign it an immemorial
antiquity. But a glance at the booby face of Philip III. on his
round-bellied charger in the centre of the square will remind us that
this place was built at the same time the Mayflower's passengers were
laying the massive foundations of the great Republic. The Autos-da-Fe,
the plays of Lope de Vega, and the bull-fights went on for many years
with impartial frequency under the approving eyes of royalty, which
occupied a convenient balcony in the Panaderia, that overdressed
building with the two extinguisher towers. Down to a period
disgracefully near us, those balconies were occupied by the dull-eyed,
pendulous-lipped tyrants who have sat on the throne of St. Ferdinand,
while there in the spacious court below the varied sports went
on,--to-day a comedy of Master Lope, to-morrow the gentle and joyous
slaying of bulls, and the next day, with greater pomp and ceremony, with
banners hung from the windows, and my lord the king surrounded by his
women and his courtiers in their bravest gear, and the august presence
of the chief priests and their idol in the form of wine and wafers,--the
judgment and fiery sentence of the thinking men of Spain.

Let us remember as we leave this accursed spot that the old palace of
the Inquisition is now the Ministry of Justice, where a liberal
statesman has just drawn up the bill of civil marriage; and that in the
convent of the Trinitarians a Spanish Rationalist, the Minister of
Fomento, is laboring to secularize education in the Peninsula. There is
much coiling and hissing, but the fangs of the ser-pent are much less
prompt and effective than of old.

The wide Calle Mayor brings you in a moment out of these mouldy shadows
and into the broad light of nowadays which shines in the Puerta del Sol.
Here, under the walls of the Ministry of the Interior, the quick,
restless heart of Madrid beats with the new life it has lately earned.
The flags of the pavement have been often stained with blood, but of
blood shed in combat, in the assertion of individual freedom. Although
the government holds that fortress-palace with a grasp of iron, it can
exercise no control over the free speech that asserts itself on the very
sidewalk of the Principal. At every step you see news-stands filled with
the sharp critical journalism of Spain,--often ignorant and unjust, but
generally courteous in expression and independent in thought. Every day
at noon the northern mails bring hither the word of all Europe to the
awaking Spanish mind, and within that massive building the converging
lines of the telegraph are whispering every hour their persuasive
lessons of the world's essential unity.

The movement of life and growth is bearing the population gradually away
from that dark mediaeval Madrid of the Catholic kings through the Puerta
del Sol to the airy heights beyond, and the new, fresh quarter built by
the philosopher Bourbon Charles III. is becoming the most important part
of the city. I think we may be permitted to hope that the long reign of
savage faith and repression is broken at last, and that this abused and
suffering people is about to enter into its rightful inheritance of
modern freedom and progress.




SPANISH LIVING AND DYING


Nowhere is the sentiment of home stronger than in Spain. Strangers,
whose ideas of the Spanish character have been gained from romance and
comedy, are apt to note with some surprise the strength and prevalence
of the domestic affections. But a moment's reflection shows us that
nothing is more natural. It is the result of all their history. The old
Celtic population had scarcely any religion but that of the family. The
Goths brought in the pure Teutonic regard for woman and marriage. The
Moors were distinguished by the patriarchal structure of their society.
The Spaniards have thus learned the lesson of home in the school of
history and tradition. The intense feeling of individuality, which so
strongly marks the Spanish character, and which in the political world
is so fatal an element of strife and obstruction, favors this peculiar
domesticity. The Castilian is submissive to his king and his priest,
haughty and inflexible with his equals. But his own house is a refuge
from the contests of out of doors. The reflex of absolute authority is
here observed, it is true. The Spanish father is absolute king and lord
by his own hearthstone, but his sway is so mild and so readily
acquiesced in that it is hardly felt. The evils of tyranny are rarely
seen but by him who resists it, and the Spanish family seldom calls for
the harsh exercise of parental authority.

This is the rule. I do not mean to say there are no exceptions. The
pride and jealousy inherent in the race make family quarrels, when they
do arise, the bitterest and the fiercest in the world. In every grade of
life these vindictive feuds among kindred are seen from time to time.
Twice at least the steps of the throne have been splashed with royal
blood shed by a princely hand. Duels between noble cousins and stabbing
affrays between peasant brothers alike attest the unbending sense of
personal dignity that still infects this people.

A light word between husbands and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and
the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the
wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet
on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they
have lived for years and have not spoken. One word would heal all
discord, and that word will never be spoken by either. They cannot be
divorced,--the Church is inexorable. They will not incur the scandal of
a public separation. So they pass lives of lonely isolation in adjoining
apartments, both thinking rather better of each other and of themselves
for this devilish persistence.

An infraction of parental discipline is never forgiven. I knew a general
whose daughter fell in love with his adjutant, a clever and amiable
young officer. He had positively no objection to the suitor, but was
surprised that there should be any love-making in his house without his
previous suggestion. He refused his consent, and the young people were
married without it. The father and son-in-law went off on a campaign,
fought, and were wounded in the same battle. The general was asked to
recommend his son-in-law for promotion. "I have no son-in-law!" "I mean
your daughter's husband." "I have no daughter." "I refer to Lieutenant
Don Fulano de Tal. He is a good officer. He distinguished himself
greatly in the recent affair." "Ah! otra cosa!" said the grim
father-in-law. His hate could not overcome his sense of justice. The
youth got his promotion, but his general will not recognize him at the
club. It is in the middle and lower classes that the most perfect
pictures of the true Spanish family are to be found. The aristocracy is
more or less infected with the contagion of Continental manners and
morals. You will find there the usual proportion of wives who despise
their husbands, and men who neglect their wives, and children who do not
honor their parents. The smartness of American "pickles" has even made
its appearance among the little countesses of Madrid. A lady was eating
an ice one day, hungrily watched by the wide eyes of the infant heiress
of the house. As the latter saw the last hope vanishing before the
destroying spoon, she cried out, "Thou eatest all and givest me
none,--maldita sea tu alma!" (accursed be thy soul). This dreadful
imprecation was greeted with roars of laughter from admiring friends,
and the profane little innocent was smothered in kisses and cream.

Passing at noon by any of the squares or shady places of Madrid, you
will see dozens of laboring-people at their meals. They sit on the
ground, around the steaming and savory _cocido_ that forms the peasant
Spaniard's unvaried dinner. The foundation is of _garbanzos,_ the large
chick-pea of the country, brought originally to Europe by the
Carthaginians,--the Roman _cicer,_ which gave its name to the greatest
of the Latin orators. All other available vegetables are thrown in; on
days of high gala a piece of meat is added, and some forehanded
housewives attain the climax of luxury by flavoring the compound with a
link of sausage. The mother brings the dinner and her tawny brood of
nestlings. A shady spot is selected for the feast. The father dips his
wooden spoon first into the vapory bowl, and mother and babes follow
with grave decorum. Idle loungers passing these patriarchal groups, on
their way to a vapid French breakfast at a restaurant, catch the
fragrance of the _olla_ and the chatter of the family, and envy the
dinner of herbs with love.

There is no people so frugal. We often wonder how a Washington clerk can
live on twelve hundred dollars, but this would be luxury in expensive
Madrid. It is one of the dearest capitals in Europe. Foreigners are
never weary decrying its high prices for poor fare; but Castilians live
in good houses, dress well, receive their intimate friends, and hold
their own with the best in the promenade, upon incomes that would seem
penury to any country parson in America. There are few of the nobility
who retain the great fortunes of former days. You can almost tell on
your fingers the tale of the grandees in Madrid who can live without
counting the cost. The army and navy are crowded with general officers
whose political services have obliged their promotion. The state is too
much impoverished to pay liberal salaries, and yet the rank of these
officers requires the maintenance of a certain social position. Few of
them are men of fortune. The result is that necessity has taught them to
live well upon little, I knew widows who went everywhere in society,
whose daughters were always charmingly dressed, who lived in a decent
quarter of the town, and who had no resources whatever but a husband's
pension.

The best proof of the capacity of Spaniards to spread a little gold over
as much space as a goldbeater could is the enormous competition for
public employment. Half the young men in Spain are candidates for
places under government ranging from $250 to $1000. Places of $1500 to
$2000 are considered objects of legitimate ambition even to deputies and
leading politicians. Expressed in reals these sums have a large and
satisfying sound. Fifty dollars seems little enough for a month's work,
but a thousand reals has the look of a most respectable salary. In
Portugal, however, you can have all the delightful sensations of
prodigality at a contemptible cost. You can pay, without serious damage
to your purse, five thousand reis for your breakfast.

It is the smallness of incomes and the necessity of looking sharply to
the means of life that makes the young people of Madrid so prudent in
their love affairs. I know of no place where ugly heir-esses are such
belles, and where young men with handsome incomes are so universally
esteemed by all who know them. The stars on the sleeves of young
officers are more regarded than their dancing, and the red belt of a
field officer is as winning in the eyes of beauty as a cestus of Venus.
A. subaltern offered his hand and heart to a black-eyed girl of Castile.
She said kindly but firmly that the night was too cloudy. "What," said
the stupefied lover, "the sky is full of stars." "I see but one," said
the prudent beauty, her fine eyes resting pensively upon his cuff, where
one lone luminary indicated his rank.

This spirit is really one of forethought, and not avarice. People who
have enough for two almost always marry from inclination, and frequently
take partners for life without a penny.

If men were never henpecked except by learned wives, Spain would be the
place of all others for timid men to marry in. The girls are bright,
vivacious, and naturally very clever, but they have scarcely any
education whatever. They never know the difference between _b_ and _v._
They throw themselves in orthography entirely upon your benevolence.
They know a little music and a little French, but they have never
crossed, even in a school-day excursion, the border line of the ologies.
They do not even read novels. They are regarded as injurious, and
cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma
never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default.
Fernan Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this
illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief
charm,--that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know
anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal. There is-an old proverb
which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman that
talks Latin never come to any good.

There is a contented acquiescence in this moral servitude among the fair
Spaniards which would madden our agitatresses. (See what will become of
the language when male words are crowded out of the dictionary!)

It must be the innocence which springs from ignorance that induces an
occasional coarseness of expression which surprises you in the
conversation of those lovely young girls. They will speak with perfect
freedom of the _etat-civil_ of a young unmarried mother. A maiden of
fifteen said to me: "I must go to a party this evening _decolletee,_ and
I hate it. Benigno is getting old enough to marry, and he wants to see
all the girls in low neck before he makes up his mind." They all swear
like troopers, without a thought of profanity. Their mildest expression
of surprise is Jesus Maria! They change their oaths with the season. At
the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the favorite oath is Maria
Purissima. This is a time of especial interest to young girls. It is a
period of compulsory confession,--conscience-cleaning, as they call it.
They are all very pious in their way. They attend to their religious
duties with the same interest which they displayed a few years before in
dressing and undressing their dolls, and will display a few years later
in putting the lessons they learned with their dolls to a more practical
use.

The visible concrete symbols and observances of religion have great
influence with them. They are fond of making vows in tight places and
faithfully observing them afterwards. In an hour's walk in the streets
of Madrid you will see a dozen ladies with a leather strap buckled about
their slender waists and hanging nearly to the ground. Others wear a
knotted cord and tassels. These are worn as the fulfilment of vows, or
penances.

I am afraid they give rise to much worldly conjecture on the part of
idle youth as to what amiable sins these pretty penitents can have been
guilty of. It is not prudent to ask an explanation of the peculiar
mercy, or remorse, which this purgatorial strap commemorates. You will
probably not enlarge your stock of knowledge further than to learn that
the lady in question considers you a great nuisance.

The graceful lady who, in ascending the throne of France, has not ceased
to be a thorough Spaniard, still preserves these pretty weaknesses of
her youth. She vowed a chapel to her patron saint if her firstborn was a
man-child, and paid it. She has hung a vestal lamp in the Church of
Notre Dame des Victoires, in pursuance of a vow she keeps rigidly
secret. She is a firm believer in relics also, and keeps a choice
assortment on hand in the Tuileries for sudden emergencies. When old
Baciocchi lay near his death, worn out by a horrible nervous disorder
which would not let him sleep, the empress told the doctors, with great
mystery, that she would cure him. After a few preliminary masses, she
came into his room and hung on his bedpost a little gold-embroidered
sachet containing (if the evidence of holy men is to be believed) a few
threads of the swaddling-clothes of John the Baptist. Her simple
childlike faith wrung the last grim smile from the tortured lips of the
dying courtier.

The very names of the Spanish women are a constant reminder of their
worship. They are all named out of the calendar of saints and virgin
martyrs. A large majority are christened Mary; but as this sacred name
by much use has lost all distinctive meaning, some attribute, some
especial invocation of the Virgin, is always coupled with it. The names
of Dolores, Mercedes, Milagros, recall Our Lady of the Sorrows, of the
Gifts, of the Miracles. I knew a hoydenish little gypsy who bore the
tearful name of Lagrimas. The most appropriate name I heard for these
large-eyed, soft-voiced beauties was Peligros, Our Lady of Dangers. Who
could resist the comforting assurance of "Consuelo"? "Blessed," says my
Lord Lytton, "is woman who consoles." What an image of maiden purity
goes with the name of Nieves, the Virgin of the Snows! From a single
cotillon of Castilian girls you can construct the whole history of Our
Lady; Conception, Annunciation, Sorrows, Solitude, Assumption. As young
ladies are never called by their family names, but always by their
baptismal appellations, you cannot pass an evening in a Spanish
_tertulia_ without being reminded of every stage in the life of the
Immaculate Mother, from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond.

The common use of sacred words is universal in Catholic countries, but
nowhere so striking as in Spain. There is a little solemnity in the
French adieu. But the Spaniard says adios instead of "good-morning." No
letter closes without the prayer, "God guard your Grace many years!"
They say a judge announces to a murderer his sentence of death with the
sacramental wish of length of days. There is something a little shocking
to a Yankee mind in the label of Lachryma Christi; but in La Mancha they
call fritters the Grace of God.

The piety of the Spanish women does not prevent them from seeing some
things clearly enough with their bright eyes. One of the most bigoted
women in Spain recently said: "I hesitate to let my child go to
confession. The priests ask young girls such infamous questions, that my
cheeks burn when I think of them, after all these years." I stood one
Christmas Eve in the cold midnight wind, waiting for the church doors to
open for the night mass, the famous _misa del gallo._ On the steps
beside me sat a decent old woman with her two daughters. At last she
rose and said, "Girls, it is no use waiting any longer. The priests
won't leave their housekeepers this cold night to save anybody's soul."
In these two cases, taken from the two extremes of the Catholic society,
there was no disrespect for the Church or for religion. Both these women
believed with a blind faith. But they could not help seeing how unclean
were the hands that dispensed the bread of life.

The respect shown to the priesthood as a body is marvellous, in view of
the profligate lives of many. The general progress of the age has forced
most of the dissolute priests into hypocrisy. But their cynical
immorality is still the bane of many families. And it needs but a glance
at the vile manual of confession, called the Golden Key, the author of
which is the too well known Padre Claret, confessor to the queen, to see
the systematic moral poisoning the minds of Spanish women must undergo
who pay due attention to what is called their religious duties. If a
confessor obeys the injunctions of this high ecclesiastical authority,
his fair penitents will have nothing to learn from a diligent perusal of
Faublas or Casanova. It would, however, be unjust to the priesthood to
consider them all as corrupt as royal chaplains. It requires a
combination of convent and palace life to produce these finished
specimens of mitred infamy.

It is to be regretted that the Spanish women are kept in such systematic
ignorance. They have a quicker and more active intelligence than the
men. With a fair degree of education, much might be hoped from them in
the intellectual development of the country. In society, you will at
once be struck with the superiority of the women to their husbands and
brothers in cleverness and appreciation. Among small tradesmen, the wife
always comes to the rescue of her slow spouse when she sees him befogged
in a bargain. In the fields, you ask a peasant some question about your
journey. He will hesitate, and stammer, and end with, "_Quien sabe?"_
but his wife will answer with glib completeness all you want to know. I
can imagine no cause for this, unless it be that the men cloud their
brains all day with the fumes of tobacco, and the women do not.

The personality of the woman is not so entirely merged in that of the
husband as among us. She retains her own baptismal and family name
through life. If Miss Matilda Smith marries Mr. Jonathan Jones, all
vestige of the former gentle being vanishes at once from the earth, and
Mrs. Jonathan Jones alone remains. But in Spain she would become Mrs.
Matilda Smith de Jones, and her eldest-born would be called Don Juan
Jones y Smith. You ask the name of a married lady in society, and you
hear as often her own name as that of her husband.

Even among titled people, the family name seems more highly valued than
the titular designation. Everybody knows Narvaez, but how few have heard
of the Duke of Valencia! The Regent Serrano has a name known and honored
over the world, but most people must think twice before they remember
the Duke de la Torre. Juan Prim is better known than the Marques de los
Castillejos ever will be. It is perhaps due to the prodigality with
which titles have been scattered in late years that the older titles are
more regarded than the new, although of inferior grade. Thus Prim calls
himself almost invariably the Conde de Reus, though his grandeeship came
with his investiture as marquis.

There is something quite noticeable about this easy way of treating
one's name. We are accustomed to think a man can have but one name, and
can sign it but in one way. Lord Derby can no more call himself Mr.
Stanley than President Grant can sign a bill as U. Simpson. Yet both
these signatures would be perfectly valid according to Spanish analogy.
The Marquis of Santa Marta signs himself Guzman; the Marquis of Albaida
uses no signature but Orense; both of these gentlemen being Republican
deputies. I have seen General Prim's name signed officially, Conde de
Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, Prim, J. Prim, Juan Prim, and Jean
Prim, changing the style as often as the humor strikes him.

Their forms of courtesy are, however, invariable. You can never visit a
Spaniard without his informing you that you are in your own house. If,
walking with him, you pass his residence, he asks you to enter your
house and unfatigue yourself a moment. If you happen upon any Spaniard,
of whatever class, at the hour of repast, he always offers you his
dinner; if you decline, it must be with polite wishes for his digestion.
With the Spaniards, no news is good news; it is therefore civil to ask a
Spaniard if his lady-wife goes on without novelty, and to express your
profound gratification on being assured that she does. Their forms of
hospitality are evidently Moorish, derived from the genuine open hand
and open tent of the children of the desert; now nothing is left of them
but grave and decorous words. In the old times, one who would have
refused such offers would have been held a churl; now one who would
accept them would be regarded as a boor.

There is still something primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor
of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are
chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal
Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly
and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and
sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian,
and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of
intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his
dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no
conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our
manservants and our maidservants. The Spanish servant seems to regard it
as part of his duty to keep your spirits gently excited while you dine
by the gossip of the day. He joins also in your discussions, whether
they touch lightly on the politics of the hour or plunge profoundly into
the depths of philosophic research. He laughs at your wit, and swings
his napkin with convulsions of mirth at your good stories. He tells you
the history of his life while you are breaking your egg, and lays the
story of his loves before you with your coffee. Yet he is not intrusive.
He will chatter on without waiting for a reply, and when you are tired
of him you can shut him off with a word. There are few Spanish servants
so uninteresting but that you can find in them from time to time some
sparks of that ineffable light which shines forever in Sancho and
Figaro.

The traditions of subordination, which are the result of long centuries
of tyranny, have prevented the development of that feeling of
independence among the lower orders, which in a freer race finds its
expression in ill manners and discourtesy to superiors. I knew a
gentleman in the West whose circumstances had forced him to become a
waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a deadly grudge at the
profession that kept him from starving, and asserted his unconquered
nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands
he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would
growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" You see nothing of this defiant spirit
in Spanish servants. They are heartily glad to find employment, and ask
no higher good-fortune than to serve acceptably. As to drawing
comparisons between themselves and their masters, they never seem to
think they belong to the same race. I saw a pretty grisette once stop to
look at a show-window where there was a lay-figure completely covered
with all manner of trusses. She gazed at it long and earnestly,
evidently thinking it was some new fashion just introduced into the gay
world. At last she tripped away with all the grace of her unfettered
limbs, saying, "If the fine ladies have to wear all those machines, I am
glad I am not made like them."

Whether it be from their more regular and active lives, or from their
being unable to pay for medical attendance, the poorer classes suffer
less from sickness than their betters. An ordinary Spaniard is sick but
once in his life, and that once is enough,--'twill serve. The traditions
of the old satires which represented the doctor and death as always
hunting in couples still survive in Spain. It is taken as so entirely a
matter of course that a patient must die that the law of the land
imposed a heavy fine upon physicians who did not bring a priest on their
second visit. His labor of exhortation and confession was rarely wasted.
There were few sufferers who recovered from the shock of that solemn
ceremony in their chambers. Medical science still labors in Spain under
the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety.
The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed
the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage
of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always
looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators. Why these
probes, these lancets, these multifarious drugs, when the object in view
could be so much more easily obtained by the judicious application of
masses and prayers?

So it has come about that the doctor is a Pariah, and miracles flourish
in the Peninsula. At every considerable shrine you will see the walls
covered with waxen models of feet, legs, hands, and arms secured by the
miraculous interposition of the _genius loci,_ and scores of little
crutches attesting the marvellous hour when they became useless. Each
shrine, like a mineral spring, has its own especial virtue. A Santiago
medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is
sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of
mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of
congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Ona acted as a vermifuge on royal
infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this
world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They
turn out their score or so of miracles every feast-day, it is true, but
are no longer capable of the _tours de force_ of earlier days. Cardinal
de Retz saw with his eyes a man whose wooden legs were turned to
capering flesh and blood by the image of the Pillar of Saragossa. But
this was in the good old times before newspapers and telegraphs had come
to dispel the twilight of belief.

Now, it is excessively probable that neither doctor nor priest can do
much if the patient is hit in earnest. He soon succumbs, and is laid out
in his best clothes in an improvised chapel and duly sped on his way.
The custom of burying the dead in the gown and cowl of monks has greatly
passed into disuse. The mortal relics are treated with growing contempt,
as the superstitions of the people gradually lose their concrete
character. The soul is the important matter which the Church now looks
to. So the cold clay is carted off to the cemetery with small ceremony.
Even the coffins of the rich are jammed away into receptacles too small
for them, and hastily plastered out of sight. The poor are carried off
on trestles and huddled into their nameless graves, without following or
blessing. Children are buried with some regard to the old Oriental
customs. The coffin is of some gay and cheerful color, pink or blue, and
is carried open to the grave by four of the dead child's young
companions, a fifth walking behind with the ribboned coffin-lid. I have
often seen these touching little parties moving through the bustling
streets, the peaceful small face asleep under the open sky, decked with
the fading roses and withering lilies. In all well-to-do families the
house of death is deserted immediately after the funeral. The stricken
ones retire to some other habitation, and there pass eight days in
strict and inviolable seclusion. On the ninth day the great masses for
the repose of the soul of the departed are said in the parish church,
and all the friends of the family are expected to be present. These
masses are the most important and expensive incident of the funeral.
They cost from two hundred to one thousand dollars, according to the
strength and fervor of the orisons employed. They are repeated several
years on the anniversary of the decease, and afford a most sure and
nourishing revenue to the Church. They are founded upon those feelings
inseparable from every human heart, vanity and affection. Our dead
friends must be as well prayed for as those of others, and who knows but
that they may be in deadly need of prayers! To shorten their fiery
penance by one hour, who would not fast for a week? On these
anniversaries a black-bordered advertisement appears in the newspapers,
headed by the sign of the cross and the Requiescat in Pace, announcing
that on this day twelve months Don Fulano de Tal passed from earth
garnished with the holy sacraments, that all the masses this day
celebrated in such and such churches will be applied to the benefit of
his spirit's repose, and that all Christian friends are hereby requested
to commend his soul this day unto God. These efforts, if they do the
dead no good, at least do the living no harm.

A luxury of grief, in those who can afford it, consists in shutting up
the house where a death has taken place and never suffering it to be
opened again. I once saw a beautiful house and wide garden thus
abandoned in one of the most fashionable streets of Madrid. I inquired
about it, and found it was formerly the residence of the Duke of------.
His wife had died there many years before, and since that day not a door
nor a window had been opened. The garden gates were red and rough with
rust. Grass grew tall and rank in the gravelled walks. A thick lush
undergrowth had overrun the flower-beds and the lawns. The blinds were
rotting over the darkened windows. Luxuriant vines clambered over all
the mossy doors. The stucco was peeling from the walls in unwholesome
blotches. Wild birds sang all day in the safe solitude. There was
something impressive in this spot of mould and silence, lying there so
green and implacable in the very heart of a great and noisy city. The
duke lived in Paris, leading the rattling life of a man of the world. He
never would sell or let that Madrid house. Perhaps in his heart also,
that battered thoroughfare worn by the pattering boots of Ma-bine and
the Bois, and the Quartier Breda, there was a green spot sacred to
memory and silence, where no footfall should ever light, where no living
voice should ever be heard, shut out from the world and its cares and
its pleasures, where through the gloom of dead days he could catch a
glimpse of a white hand, a flash of a dark eye, the rustle of a trailing
robe, and feel sweeping over him the old magic of love's young dream,
softening his fancy to tender regret and his eyes to a happy mist--

  "Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
  Before the useful trouble of the rain."




INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE


Intelligent Spaniards with whom I have conversed on political matters
have often exclaimed, "Ah, you Americans are happy! you have no
traditions." The phrase was at first a puzzling one. We Americans are
apt to think we have traditions,--a rather clearly marked line of
precedents. And it is hard to see how a people should be happier without
them. It is not anywhere considered a misfortune to have had a
grandfather, I believe, and some very good folks take an innocent pride
in that very natural fact. It was not easy to conceive why the
possession of a glorious history of many centuries should be regarded as
a drawback. But a closer observation of Spanish life and thought reveals
the curious and hurtful effect of tradition upon every phase of
existence.

In the commonest events of every day you will find the flavor of past
ages lingering in petty annoyances. The insecurity of the middle ages
has left as a legacy to our times a complicated system of obstacles to a
man getting into his own house at night. I lived in a pleasant house on
the Prado, with a minute garden in front, and an iron gate and railing.
This gate was shut and locked by the night watchman of the quarter at
midnight,--so conscientiously that he usually had everything snug by
half past eleven. As the same man had charge of a dozen or more houses,
it was scarcely reasonable to expect him to be always at your own gate
when you arrived. But by a singular fatality I think no man ever found
him in sight at any hour. He is always opening some other gate or
shutting some other door, or settling the affairs of the nation with a
friend in the next block, or carrying on a chronic courtship at the
lattice of some olive-cheeked soubrette around the corner. Be that as it
may, no one ever found him on hand; and there is nothing to do but to
sit down on the curbstone and lift up your voice and shriek for him
until he comes. At two o'clock of a morning in January the exercise is
not improving to the larynx or the temper. There is a tradition in the
very name of this worthy. He is called the Sereno, because a century or
so ago he used to call the hour and the state of the weather, and as the
sky is almost always cloudless here, he got the name of the Sereno, as
the quail is called Bob White, from much iteration. The Sereno opens
your gate and the door of your house. When you come to your own floor
you must ring, and your servant takes a careful survey of you through a
latticed peep-hole before he will let you in. You may positively forbid
this every day in the year, but the force of habit is too strong in the
Spanish mind to suffer amendment.

This absurd custom comes evidently down from a time of great lawlessness
and license, when no houses were secure without these precautions, when
people rarely stirred from their doors after nightfall, and when a door
was never opened to a stranger. Now, when no such dangers exist, the
annoying and senseless habit still remains, because no one dreams of
changing anything which their fathers thought proper. Three hundred
thousand people in Madrid submit year after year to this nightly cross,
and I have never heard a voice raised in protest, nor even in defence of
the custom.

There is often a bitterness of opposition to evident improvement which
is hard to explain. In the last century, when the eminent naturalist
Bowles went down to the Almaden silver-mines, by appointment of the
government, to see what was the cause of their exhaustion, he found that
they had been worked entirely in perpendicular shafts instead of
following the direction of the veins. He perfected a plan for working
them in this simple and reasonable way, and no earthly power could make
the Spanish miners obey his orders. There was no precedent for this new
process, and they would not touch it. They preferred starvation rather
than offend the memory of their fathers by a change. At last they had to
be dismissed and a full force imported from Germany, under whose hands
the mines became instantly enormously productive.

I once asked a very intelligent English contractor why he used no
wheelbarrows in his work. He had some hundreds of stalwart navvies
employed carrying dirt in small wicker baskets to an embankment. He said
the men would not use them. Some said it broke their backs. Others
discovered a capital way of amusing themselves by putting the barrow on
their heads and whirling the wheel as rapidly as possible with their
hands. This was a game which never grew stale. The contractor gave up in
despair, and went back to the baskets. But it is in the official regions
that tradition is most powerful. In the budget of 1870 there was a
curious chapter called "Charges of Justice." This consisted of a
collection of articles appropriating large sums of money for the payment
of feudal taxes to the great aristocracy of the kingdom as a
compensation for long extinct seigniories. The Duke of Rivas got
thirteen hundred dollars for carrying the mail to Victoria. The Duke of
San Carlos draws ten thousand dollars for carrying the royal
correspondence to the Indies. Of course this service ceased to belong to
these families some centuries ago, but the salary is still paid. The
Duke of Almodovar is well paid for supplying the _baton_ of office to
the Alguazil of Cordova. The Duke of Osuna--one of the greatest grandees
of the kingdom, a gentleman who has the right to wear seventeen hats in
the presence of the Queen--receives fifty thousand dollars a year for
imaginary feudal services. The Count of Altamira, who, as his name
indicates, is a gentleman of high views, receives as a salve for the
suppression of his fief thirty thousand dollars a year. In consideration
of this sum he surrenders, while it is punctually paid, the privilege of
hanging his neighbors.

When the budget was discussed, a Republican member gently criticised
this chapter; but his amendment for an investigation of these charges
was indignantly rejected. He was accused of a shocking want of
Espanolismo. He was thought to have no feeling in his heart for the
glories of Spain. The respectability of the Chamber could find but one
word injurious enough to express their contempt for so shameless a
proposition; they said it was little better than socialism. The
"charges" were all voted. Spain, tottering on the perilous verge of
bankruptcy, her schoolmasters not paid for months, her sinking fund
plundered, her credit gone out of sight, borrowing every cent she spends
at thirty per cent., is proud of the privilege of paying into the hands
of her richest and most useless class this gratuity of twelve million
reals simply because they are descended from the robber chiefs of the
darker ages. There is a curious little comedy played by the family of
Medina Celi at every new coronation of a king of Spain. The duke claims
to be the rightful heir to the throne. He is descended from Prince
Ferdinand, who, dying before his father, Don Alonso X., left his babies
exposed to the cruel kindness of their uncle Sancho, who, to save them
the troubles of the throne, assumed it himself and transmitted it to his
children,--all this some half dozen centuries ago. At every coronation
the duke formally protests; an athletic and sinister-looking court
headsman comes down to his palace in the Carrera San Geronimo, and by
threats of immediate decapitation induces the duke to sign a paper
abdicating his rights to the throne of all the Spains. The duke eats the
Bourbon leek with inward profanity, and feels that he has done a most
clever and proper thing. This performance is apparently his only object
and mission in life. This one sacrifice to tradition is what he is born
for.

The most important part of a Spaniard's signature is the _rubrica_ or
flourish with which it closes. The monarch's hand is set to public acts
exclusively by this _parafe._ This evidently dates from the time when
none but priests could write. In Madrid the mule-teams are driven tandem
through the wide streets, because this was necessary in the ages when
the streets were narrow.

There is even a show of argument sometimes to justify an adherence to
things as they are. About a century ago there was an effort made by
people who had lived abroad, and so become conscious of the possession
of noses, to have the streets of Madrid cleaned. The proposition was at
first received with apathetic contempt, but when the innovators
persevered they met the earnest and successful opposition of all
classes. The Cas-tilian _savans_ gravely reported that the air of
Madrid, which blew down from the snowy Guadarra-mas, was so thin and
piercing that it absolutely needed the gentle corrective of the
ordure-heaps to make it fit for human lungs.

There is no nation in Europe in which so little washing is done. I do
not think it is because the Spaniards do not want to be neat. They are,
on the whole, the best-dressed people on the Continent. The hate of
ablutions descends from those centuries of warfare with the Moors. The
heathens washed themselves daily; therefore a Christian should not. The
monks, who were too lazy to bathe, taught their followers to be filthy
by precept and example. Water was never to be applied externally except
in baptism. It was a treacherous element, and dallying with it had
gotten Bathsheba and Susanna into no end of trouble. So when the cleanly
infidels were driven out of Granada, the pious and hydrophobic Cardinal
Ximenez persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to destroy the abomination of
baths they left behind. Until very recently the Spanish mind has been
unable to separate a certain idea of immorality from bathing. When
Madame Daunoy, one of the sprightliest of observers, visited the court
of Philip IV., she found it was considered shocking among the ladies of
the best society to wash the face and hands. Once or twice a week they
would glaze their pretty visages with the white of an egg. Of late years
this prejudice has given way somewhat; but it has lasted longer than any
monument in Spain.

These, however, are but trivial manifestations of that power of
tradition which holds the Spanish intellect imprisoned as in a vice of
iron. The whole life of the nation is fatally influenced by this blind
reverence for things that have been. It may be said that by force of
tradition Christian morality has been driven from individual life by
religion, and honesty has been supplanted as a rule of public conduct by
honor,--a wretched substitute in either case, and irreconcilably at war
with the spirit of the age.

The growth of this double fanaticism is easily explained; it is the
result of centuries of religious wars. From the hour when Pelayo, the
first of the Asturian kings, successfully met and repulsed the hitherto
victorious Moors in his rocky fortress of Covadonga, to the day when
Boabdil the Unlucky saw for the last time through streaming tears the
vermilion towers of Alhambra crowned with the banner of the cross, there
was not a year of peace in Spain. No other nation has had such an
experience. Seven centuries of constant warfare, with three thousand
battles; this is the startling epitome of Spanish history from the
Mahometan conquest to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In this vast
war there was laid the foundation of the national character of to-day.

Even before the conquering Moslem crossed from Africa, Spain was the
most deeply religious country in Europe; and by this I mean the country
in which the Church was most powerful in its relations with the State.
When the Council of Toledo, in 633, received the king of Castile, he
fell on his face at the feet of the bishops before venturing to address
them. When the hosts of Islam had overspread the Peninsula, and the last
remnant of Christianity had taken refuge in the inaccessible hills of
the northwest, the richest possession they carried into these inviolate
fastnesses was a chest of relics,--knuckle-bones of apostles and
splinters of true crosses, in which they trusted more than in mortal
arms. The Church had thus a favorable material to work upon in the years
of struggle that followed. The circumstances all lent themselves to the
scheme of spiritual domination. The fight was for the cross against the
crescent; the symbol of the quarrel was visible and tangible. The
Spaniards were poor and ignorant and credulous. The priests were enough
superior to lead and guide them, and not so far above them as to be out
of the reach of their sympathies and their love. They marched with them.
They shared their toils and dangers. They stimulated their hate of the
enemy. They taught them that their cruel anger was the holy wrath of
God. They held the keys of eternal weal or woe, and rewarded
subservience to the priestly power with promises of everlasting
felicity; while the least symptom of rebellion in thought or action was
punished with swift death and the doom of endless flames. There was
nothing in the Church which the fighting Spaniard could recognize as a
reproach to himself. It was as bitter, as brave, as fierce, and
revengeful as he. His credulity regarded it as divine, and worthy of
blind adoration, and his heart went out to it with the sympathy of
perfect love.

In these centuries of war there was no commerce, no manufactures, no
settled industry of importance among the Spaniards. There was
consequently no wealth, none of that comfort and ease which is the
natural element of doubt and discussion. Science did not exist. The
little learning of the time was exclusively in the hands of the
priesthood. If from time to time an intelligent spirit struggled against
the chain of unquestioning bigotry that bound him, he was rigorously
silenced by prompt and bloody punishment. There seemed to be no need of
discussion, no need of inculcation of doctrine. The serious work of the
time was the war with the infidel. The clergy managed everything. The
question, "What shall I do to be saved?" never entered into those simple
and ignorant minds. The Church would take care of those who did her
bidding.

Thus it was that in the hammering of those struggling ages the nation
became welded together in one compact mass of unquestioning, unreasoning
faith, which the Church could manage at its own good pleasure.

It was also in these times that Spanish honor took its rise. This
sentiment is so nearly connected with that of personal loyalty that they
may be regarded as phases of the same monarchical spirit. The rule of
honor as distinguished from honesty and virtue is the most prominent
characteristic of monarchy, and for that reason the political theorists
from the time of Montesquieu have pronounced in favor of the monarchy as
a more practicable form of government than the republic, as requiring a
less perfect and delicate machinery, men of honor being far more common
than men of virtue. As in Spain, owing to special conditions, monarchy
attained the most perfect growth and development which the world has
seen, the sentiment of honor, as a rule of personal and political
action, has there reached its most exaggerated form. I use this word, of
course, in its restricted meaning of an intense sense of personal
dignity, and readiness to sacrifice for this all considerations of
interest and morality.

This phase of the Spanish character is probably derived in its germ from
the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has
been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence
and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect
and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain have
unfortunately never gone through this civilizing process. Their endless
wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic
virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too
wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war,
to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the
proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance
within the Spanish lines. There was no opportunity for the growth of the
true burgher spirit.

There was no law to speak of in all these years except the twin
despotism of the Church and the king. If there had been dissidence
between them it might have been better for the people. But up to late
years there has never been a quarrel between the clergy and the crown.
Their interests were so identified that the dual tyranny was stronger
than even a single one could have been. The crown always lending to the
Church when necessary the arm of flesh, and the Church giving to the
despotism of the sceptre the sanction of spiritual authority, an
absolute power was established over body and soul.

The spirit of individual independence inseparable from Gothic blood
being thus forced out of its natural channels of freedom of thought and
municipal liberty, it remained in the cavaliers of the army of Spain in
the same barbarous form which it had held in the Northern forests,--a
physical self-esteem and a readiness to fight on the slightest
provocation. This did not interfere with the designs of the Church and
was rather a useful engine against its enemies. The absolute power of
the crown kept the spirit of feudal arrogance in check while the
pressure of a common danger existed. The close cohesion which was so
necessary in camp and Church prevented the tendency to disintegration,
while the right of life and death was freely exercised by the great
lords on their distant estates without interference. The predominating
power of the crown was too great and too absolute to result in the
establishment of any fixed principle of obedience to law. The union of
crozier and sceptre had been, if anything, too successful. The king was
so far above the nobility that there was no virtue in obeying him. His
commission was divine, and he was no more confined by human laws than
the stars and the comets. The obedience they owed and paid him was not
respect to law. It partook of the character of religious worship, and
left untouched and untamed in their savage hearts the instinct of
resistance to all earthly claims of authority.

Such was the condition of the public spirit of Spain at the beginning of
that wonderful series of reigns from Ferdinand and Isabella to their
great-grandson Philip II., which in less than a century raised Spain to
the summit of greatness and built up a realm on which the sun never set.
All the events of these prodigious reigns contributed to increase and
intensify the national traits to which we have referred. The discovery
of America flooded Europe with gold, and making the better class of
Spaniards the richest people in the world naturally heightened their
pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V.
and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families
whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious
self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and the spoil of
rebels.

The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier
class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the
use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and
affirming them.

So terrible was this absolute command of the spiritual and physical
forces of the kingdom possessed by the monarchs of that day, that when
the Reformation flashed out, a beacon in the northern sky of political
and religious freedom to the world, its light could not penetrate into
Spain. There was a momentary struggle there, it is true. But so
apathetic was the popular mind that the effort to bring it into sympathy
with the vast movement of the age was hopeless from the beginning. The
axe and the fagot made rapid work of the heresy. After only ten years of
burnings and beheadings Philip II. could boast that not a heretic lived
in his borders.

Crazed by his success and his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and
drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through
him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe;
and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In
this he failed, the stars in their courses fighting against him, the God
that his worship slandered taking sides against him. But history records
what rivers of blood he shed in the long and desperate fight, and how
lovingly and adoringly his people sustained him. He killed, in cold
blood, some forty thousand harmless people for their faith, besides the
vastly greater number whose lives he took in battle.

Yet this horrible monster, who is blackened with every crime at which
humanity shudders, who had no grace of manhood, no touch of humanity, no
gleam of sympathy which could redeem the gloomy picture of his ravening
life, was beloved and worshipped as few men have been since the world
has stood. The common people mourned him at his death with genuine
unpaid sobs and tears. They will weep even yet at the story of his
edifying death,--this monkish vampire breathing his last with his eyes
fixed on the cross of the mild Nazarene, and tormented with impish
doubts as to whether he had drunk blood enough to fit him for the
company of the just!

His successors rapidly fooled away the stupendous empire that had filled
the sixteenth century with its glory. Spain sank from the position of
ruler of the world and queen of the seas to the place of a second-rate
power, by reason of the weakening power of superstition and bad
government, and because the people and the chieftains had never learned
the lesson of law.

The clergy lost no tittle of their power. They went on, gayly roasting
their heretics and devouring the substance of the people, more
prosperous than ever in those days of national decadence. Philip III.
gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an
alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the
succeeding reign the Church had become such a gnawing cancer upon the
state that the servile Cortes had the pluck to protest against its
inroads. There were in 1626 nine thousand monasteries for men, besides
nunneries. There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan
friars. In the diocese of Seville alone there were fourteen thousand
chaplains. There was a panic in the land. Every one was rushing to get
into holy orders. The Church had all the bread. Men must be monks or
starve. _Zelus domus tuae come-dit me,_ writes the British ambassador,
detailing these facts.

We must remember that this was the age when the vast modern movement of
inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the
foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the
horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of
thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her
literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to
amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's
hood; and Lope de Vega was a familiar of the Inquisition. The sad story
of the mind of Spain in this momentous period may be written in one
word,--everybody believed and nobody inquired.

The country sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks
and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a
million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation
with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that
"affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf
of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land
nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and the royal authority.

This is the curious fact. The Church and the Crown had brought them to
this misery, yet better than their lives the Spaniards loved the Church
and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in
those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church
bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic
power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something
superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the
aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat
of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily
bring a courtier to his knees; but how can we account for the equal
reverence that was paid to the ninny Philip III., the debauched trifler
Philip IV., and the drivelling idiot Charles II.?

Yet all of these were invested with the same attributes of the divine.
Their hands, like those of Midas, had the gift of making anything they
touched too precious for mortal use. A horse they had mounted could
never be ridden again. A woman they had loved must enter a nunnery when
they were tired of her.

When Buckingham came down to Spain with Charles of England, the
Conde-Duque of Olivares was shocked and scandalized at the relation of
confidential friendship that existed between the prince and the duke.
The world never saw a prouder man than Olivares. His picture by
Velazquez hangs side by side with that of his royal master in Madrid.
You see at a glance that the count-duke is the better man physically,
mentally, morally. But he never dreamed it. He thought in his inmost
heart that the best thing about him was the favor of the worthless
fribble whom he governed.

Through all the vicissitudes of Spanish history the force of these
married superstitions--reverence for the Church as distinguished from
the fear of God, and reverence for the king as distinguished from
respect for law--have been the ruling characteristics of the Spanish
mind. Among the fatal effects of this has been the extinction of
rational piety and rational patriotism. If a man was not a good Catholic
he was pretty sure to be an atheist. If he did not honor the king he was
an outlaw. The wretched story of Spanish dissensions beyond seas, and
the loss of the vast American empire, is distinctly traceable to the
exaggerated sentiment of personal honor, unrestrained by the absolute
authority of the crown. It seems impossible for the Spaniard of history
and tradition to obey anything out of his sight. The American provinces
have been lost one by one through petty quarrels and colonial rivalries.
At the first word of dispute their notion of honor obliges them to fly
to arms, and when blood has been shed reconciliation is impossible. So
weak is the principle of territorial loyalty, that whenever the
Peninsula government finds it necessary to overrule some violence of its
own soldiers, these find no difficulty in marching over to the
insurrection, or raising a fresh rebellion of their own. So little
progress has there been in Spain from the middle ages to to-day in true
political science, that we see such butchers as Caballero and Valmaseda
repeating to-day the crimes and follies of Cortes and Pamfilo Narvaez,
of Pizarro and Almagro, and the revolt of the bloodthirsty volunteers of
the Havana is only a question of time.

It is true that in later years there has been the beginning of a better
system of thought and discussion in Spain. But the old tradition still
holds its own gallantly in Church and state. Nowhere in the world are
the forms of religion so rigidly observed, and the precepts of Christian
morality less regarded. The most facile beauties in Madrid are severe as
Minervas on Holy Thursday. I have seen a dozen fast men at the door of a
gambling-house fall on their knees in the dust as the Host passed by in
the street. Yet the fair were no less frail and the senoritos were no
less profligate for this unfeigned reverence for the outside of the cup
and platter.

In the domain of politics there is still the lamentable disproportion
between honor and honesty. A high functionary cares nothing if the whole
Salon del Prado talks of his pilferings, but he will risk his life in an
instant if you call him no gentleman. The word "honor" is still used in
all legislative assemblies, even in England and America. But the idea
has gone by the board in all democracies, and the word means no more
than the chamberlain's sword or the speaker's mace. The only criterion
which the statesman of the nineteenth century applies to public acts is
that of expediency and legality. The first question is, "Is it lawful?"
the second, "Does it pay?" Both of these are questions of fact, and as
such susceptible of discussion and proof. The question of honor and
religion carries us at once into the realm of sentiment where no
demonstration is possible. But this is where every question is planted
from the beginning in Spanish politics. Every public matter presents
itself under this form: "Is it consistent with Spanish honor?" and "Will
it be to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church?" Now,
nothing is consistent with Spanish honor which does not recognize the
Spain of to-day as identical with the Spain of the sixteenth century,
and the bankrupt government of Madrid as equal in authority to the
world-wide autocracy of Charles V. And nothing is thought to be to the
advantage of the Church which does not tend to the concubinage of the
spiritual and temporal power, and to the muzzling of speech and the
drugging of the mind to sleep.

Let any proposition be made which touches this traditional
susceptibility of race, no matter how sensible or profitable it may be,
and you hear in the Cortes and the press, and, louder than all, among
the idle cavaliers of the _cafes,_ the wildest denunciations of the
treason that would consent to look at things as they are. The men who
have ventured to support the common-sense view are speedily stormed into
silence or timid self-defence. The sword of Guzman is brandished in the
Chambers, the name of Pelayo is invoked, the memory of the Cid is
awakened, and the proposition goes out in a blaze of patriotic
pyrotechnics, to the intense satisfaction of the unthinking and the
grief of the judicious. The senoritos go back to the serious business of
their lives--coffee and cigarettes--with a genuine glow of pride in a
country which is capable of the noble self-sacrifice of cutting off its
nose to spite somebody else's face.

But I repeat, the most favorable sign of the times is that this tyranny
of tradition is losing its power. A great deal was done by the single
act of driving out the queen. This was a blow at superstition which gave
to the whole body politic a most salutary shock. Never before in Spain
had a revolution been directed at the throne. Before it was always an
obnoxious ministry that was to be driven out. The monarch remained; and
the exiled outlaw of to-day might be premier to-morrow. But the fall of
Novaliches at the Bridge of Alcolea decided the fate not only of the
ministry but of the dynasty; and while General Concha was waiting for
the train to leave Madrid, Isabel of Bourbon and Divine Right were
passing the Pyrenees.

Although the moral power of the Church is still so great, the
incorporation of freedom of worship in the constitution of 1869 has been
followed by a really remarkable development of freedom of thought. The
proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with
contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to
me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere
abstract proposition,--it can never have any practical value except for
foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a
Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the
deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners
in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, that if any Spaniards should profess
any other religion than the Catholic, they are entitled to the same
liberty as foreigners. The Inquisition has been dead half a century,
but you can see how its ghost still haunts the official mind of Spain.
It is touching to see how the broken links of the chain of superstition
still hang about even those who imagine they are defying it. As in their
Christian burials, following unwittingly the example of the hated Moors,
they bear the corpse with uncovered face to the grave, and follow it
with the funeral torch of the Romans, so the formula of the Church
clings even to the mummery of the atheists. Not long ago in Madrid a man
and woman who belonged to some fantastic order which rejected religion
and law had a child born to them in the course of things, and determined
that it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should
not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they
could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of
water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail
life went out in its first wheezing week.

But in spite of all this a spirit of religious inquiry is growing up in
Spain, and the Church sees it and cannot prevent it. It watches the
liberal newspapers and the Protestant prayer-meetings much as the old
giant in Bunyan's dream glared at the passing pilgrims, mumbling and
muttering toothless curses. It looks as if the dead sleep of uniformity
of thought were to be broken at last, and Spain were to enter the
healthful and vivifying atmosphere of controversy.

Symptoms of a similar change may be seen in the world of politics. The
Republican party is only a year or two old, but what a vigorous and
noisy infant it is! With all its faults and errors, it seems to have the
promise of a sturdy and wholesome future. It refuses to be bound by the
memories of the past, but keeps its eyes fixed on the brighter
possibilities to come. Its journals, undeterred by the sword of Guzman
or the honor of all the Caballeros,--the men on horseback,--are
advocating such sensible measures as justice to the Antilles, and the
sale of outlying property, which costs more than it produces. Emilio
Castelar, casting behind him all the restraints of tradition, announces
as his idea of liberty "the right of all citizens to obey nothing but
the law." There is no sounder doctrine than this preached in Manchester
or Boston. If the Spanish people can be brought to see that God is
greater than the Church, and that the law is above the king, the day of
final deliverance is at hand.




TAUROMACHY


The bull-fight is the national festival of Spain. The rigid Britons have
had their fling at it for many years. The effeminate _badaud_ of Paris
has declaimed against its barbarity. Even the aristocracy of Spain has
begun to suspect it of vulgarity and to withdraw from the arena the
light of its noble countenance. But the Spanish people still hold it to
their hearts and refuse to be weaned from it.

"As Panem et Circenses was the cry Among the Roman populace of old, So
Pan y Toros is the cry in Spain."

It is a tradition which has passed into their national existence. They
received it from nowhere. They have transmitted it nowhither except to
their own colonies. In late years an effort has been made to transplant
it, but with small success. There were a few bull-fights four years ago
at Havre. There was a sensation of curiosity which soon died away. This
year in London the experiment was tried, but was hooted out of
existence, to the great displeasure of the Spanish journals, who said
the ferocious Islanders would doubtless greatly prefer baiting to death
a half dozen Irish serfs from the estate of Lord Fritters,--a gentle
diversion in which we are led to believe the British peers pass their
leisure hours.

It is this monopoly of the bull-fight which so endears it to the Spanish
heart. It is to them conclusive proof of the vast superiority of both
the human and taurine species in Spain. The eminent torero, Pepe Illo,
said: "The love of bulls is inherent in man, especially in the Spaniard,
among which glorious people there have been bull-fights ever since bulls
were, because," adds Pepe, with that modesty which forms so charming a
trait of the Iberian character, "the Spanish men are as much more brave
than all other men, as the Spanish bull is more savage and valiant than
all other bulls."

The sport permeates the national life. I have seen it woven into the
tapestry of palaces, and rudely stamped on the handkerchief of the
peasant. It is the favorite game of children in the street. Loyal Spain
was thrilled with joy recently on reading in its Paris correspondence
that when the exiled Prince of Asturias went for a half-holiday to visit
his imperial comrade at the Tuileries, the urchins had a game of "toro"
on the terrace, admirably conducted by the little Bourbon and followed
up with great spirit by the little Montijo-Bonaparte.

The bull-fight has not always enjoyed the royal favor. Isabel the
Catholic would fain have abolished bathing and bull-fighting together.
The Spaniards, who willingly gave up their ablutions, stood stoutly by
their bulls, and the energetic queen was baffled. Again when the
Bourbons came in with Philip V., the courtiers turned up their thin
noses at the coarse diversion, and induced the king to abolish it. It
would not stay abolished, however, and Philip's successor built the
present coliseum in expiation. The spectacle has, nevertheless, lost
much of its early splendor by the hammering of time. Formerly the gayest
and bravest gentlemen of the court, mounted on the best horses in the
kingdom, went into the arena and defied the bull in the names of their
lady-loves. Now the bull is baited and slain by hired artists, and the
horses they mount are the sorriest hacks that ever went to the knacker.

One of the most brilliant shows of the kind that was ever put upon the
scene was the Festival of Bulls given by Philip IV. in honor of Charles
I.,

  "When the Stuart came from far,
  Led by his love's sweet pain,
  To Mary, the guiding star
  That shone in the heaven of Spain."

And the memory of that dazzling occasion was renewed by Ferdinand VII.
in the year of his death, when he called upon his subjects to swear
allegiance to his baby Isabel. This festival took place in the Plaza
Mayor. The king and court occupied the same balconies which Charles and
his royal friend and model had filled two centuries before. The
champions were poor nobles, of good blood but scanty substance, who
fought for glory and pensions, and had quadrilles of well-trained
bull-fighters at their stirrups to prevent the farce from becoming
tragedy. The royal life of Isabel of Bourbon was inaugurated by the
spilled blood of one hundred bulls save one. The gory prophecy of that
day has been well sustained. Not one year has passed since then free
from blood shed in her cause.

But these extraordinary attractions are not necessary to make a festival
of bulls the most seductive of all pleasures to a Spaniard. On any
pleasant Sunday afternoon, from Easter to All Souls, you have only to go
into the street to see that there is some great excitement fusing the
populace into one living mass of sympathy. All faces are turned one way,
all minds are filled with one purpose. From the Puerta del Sol down the
wide Alcala a vast crowd winds, solid as a glacier and bright as a
kaleidoscope. From the grandee in his blazoned carriage to the manola in
her calico gown, there is no class unrepresented. Many a red hand grasps
the magic ticket which is to open the realm of enchantment to-day, and
which represents short commons for a week before. The pawnbrokers' shops
have been very animated for the few preceding days. There is nothing too
precious to be parted with for the sake of the bulls. Many of these
smart girls have made the ultimate sacrifice for that coveted scrap of
paper. They would leave one their mother's cross with the children of
Israel rather than not go. It is no cheap entertainment. The worst
places in the broiling sun cost twenty cents, four reals; and the boxes
are sold usually at fifteen dollars. These prices are necessary to cover
the heavy expenses of bulls, horses, and gladiators.

The way to the bull-ring is one of indescribable animation. The cabmen
drive furiously this day their broken-kneed nags, who will soon be found
on the horns of the bulls, for this is the natural death of the Madrid
cab-horse; the omnibus teams dash gayly along with their shrill chime of
bells; there are the rude jests of clowns and the high voices of excited
girls; the water-venders droning their tempting cry, "Cool as the snow!"
the sellers of fans and the merchants of gingerbread picking up their
harvests in the hot and hungry crowd.

The Plaza de Toros stands just outside the monumental gate of the
Alcala. It is a low, squat, prison-like circus of stone, stuccoed and
whitewashed, with no pretence of ornament or architectural effect. There
is no nonsense whatever about it. It is built for the killing of bulls
and for no other purpose. Around it, on a day of battle, you will find
encamped great armies of the lower class of Madrilenos, who, being at
financial ebb-tide, cannot pay to go in. But they come all the same, to
be in the enchanted neighborhood, to hear the shouts and roars of the
favored ones within, and to seize any possible occasion for getting in.
Who knows? A caballero may come out and give them his check. An English
lady may become disgusted and go home, taking away numerous lords whose
places will be vacant. The sky may fall, and they may catch four reals'
worth of larks. It is worth taking the chances.

One does not soon forget the first sight of the full coliseum. In the
centre is the sanded arena, surrounded by a high barrier. Around this
rises the graded succession of stone benches for the people; then
numbered seats for the connoisseurs; and above a row of boxes extending
around the circle. The building holds, when full, some fourteen thousand
persons; and there is rarely any vacant space. For myself I can say that
what I vainly strove to imagine in the coliseum at Rome, and in the more
solemn solitude of the amphitheatres of Capua and Pompeii, came up
before me with the vividness of life on entering the bull-ring of
Madrid. This, and none other, was the classic arena. This was the crowd
that sat expectant, under the blue sky, in the hot glare of the South,
while the doomed captives of Dacia or the sectaries of Judea commended
their souls to the gods of the Danube, or the Crucified of Galilee. Half
the sand lay in the blinding sun. Half the seats were illuminated by the
fierce light. The other half was in shadow, and the dark crescent crept
slowly all the afternoon across the arena as the sun declined in the
west.

It is hard to conceive a more brilliant scene. The women put on their
gayest finery for this occasion. In the warm light, every bit of color
flashes out, every combination falls naturally into its place. I am
afraid the luxuriance of hues in the dress of the fair Iberians would be
considered shocking in Broadway, but in the vast frame and broad light
of the Plaza the effect was very brilliant. Thousands of party-colored
paper fans are sold at the ring. The favorite colors are the national
red and yellow, and the fluttering of these broad, bright disks of color
is dazzlingly attractive. There is a gayety of conversation, a quick
fire of repartee, shouts of recognition and salutation, which altogether
make up a bewildering confusion.

The weary young water-men scream their snow-cold refreshment. The
orange-men walk with their gold-freighted baskets along the barrier, and
throw their oranges with the most marvellous skill and certainty to
people in distant boxes or benches. They never miss their mark. They
will throw over the heads of a thousand people a dozen oranges into the
outstretched hands of customers, so swiftly that it seems like one line
of gold from the dealer to the buyer.

At length the blast of a trumpet announces the clearing of the ring. The
idlers who have been lounging in the arena are swept out by the
alguaciles, and the hum of conversation gives way to an expectant
silence. When the last loafer has reluctantly retired, the great gate is
thrown open, and the procession of the toreros enters. They advance in a
glittering line: first the marshals of the day, then the picadors on
horseback, then the matadors on foot surrounded each by his quadrille of
chulos. They walk towards the box which holds the city fathers, under
whose patronage the show is given, and formally salute the authority.
This is all very classic, also, recalling the _Ave Caesar, morituri,_
etc., of the gladiators. It lacks, however, the solemnity of the Roman
salute, from those splendid fellows who would never all leave the arena
alive. A bullfighter is sometimes killed, it is true, but the percentage
of deadly danger is scarcely enough to make a spectator's heart beat as
the bedizened procession comes flashing by in the sun.

The municipal authority throws the bowing alguacil a key, which he
catches in his hat, or is hissed if he misses it. With this he unlocks
the door through which the bull is to enter, and then scampers off with
undignified haste through the opposite entrance. There is a bugle
flourish, the door flies open, and the bull rushes out, blind with the
staring light, furious with rage, trembling in every limb. This is the
most intense moment of the day. The glorious brute is the target of
twelve thousand pairs of eyes. There is a silence as of death, while
every one waits to see his first movement. He is doomed from the
beginning; the curtain has risen on a three-act tragedy, which will
surely end with his death, but the incidents which are to fill the
interval are all unknown. The minds and eyes of all that vast assembly
know nothing for the time but the movements of that brute. He stands for
an instant recovering his senses. He has been shot suddenly out of the
darkness into that dazzling light. He sees around him a sight such as he
never confronted before,--a wall of living faces lit up by thousands of
staring eyes. He does not dwell long upon this, however; in his pride
and anger he sees a nearer enemy. The horsemen have taken position near
the gate, where they sit motionless as burlesque statues, their long
ashen spears, iron-tipped, in rest, their wretched nags standing
blindfolded, with trembling knees, and necks like dromedaries, not
dreaming of their near fate. The bull rushes, with a snort, at the
nearest one. The picador holds firmly, planting his spear-point in the
shoulder of the brute. Sometimes the bull flinches at this sharp and
sudden punishment, and the picador, by a sudden turn to the left, gets
away unhurt. Then there is applause for the torero and hisses for the
bull. Some indignant amateurs go so far as to call him cow, and to
inform him that he is the son of his mother. But oftener he rushes in,
not caring for the spear, and with one toss of his sharp horns tumbles
horse and rider in one heap against the barrier and upon the sand. The
capeadores, the cloak-bearers, come fluttering around and divert the
bull from his prostrate victims. The picador is lifted to his feet,--his
iron armor not permitting him to rise without help,--and the horse is
rapidly scanned to see if his wounds are immediately mortal. If not, the
picador mounts again, and provokes the bull to another rush. A horse
will usually endure two or three attacks before dying. Sometimes a
single blow from in front pierces the heart, and the blood spouts forth
in a cataract. In this case the picador hastily dismounts, and the
bridle and saddle are stripped in an instant from the dying brute. If a
bull is energetic and rapid in execution, he will clear the arena in a
few moments. He rushes at one horse after another, tears them open with
his terrible "spears" ("horns" is a word never used in the ring), and
sends them madly galloping over the arena, trampling out their gushing
bowels as they fly. The assistants watch their opportunity, from time to
time, to take the wounded horses out of the ring, plug up their gaping
rents with tow, and sew them roughly up for another sally. It is
incredible to see what these poor creatures will endure,--carrying their
riders at a lumbering gallop over the ring, when their thin sides seem
empty of entrails.

Sometimes the bull comes upon the dead body of a horse he has killed.
The smell of blood and the unmoving helplessness of the victim excite
him to the highest pitch. He gores and tramples the carcass, and tosses
it in the air with evident enjoyment, until diverted by some living
tormentor. You will occasionally see a picador nervous and anxious about
his personal safety. They are ignorant and superstitious, and subject to
presentiments; they often go into the ring with the impression that
their last hour has come. If one takes counsel of his fears and avoids
the shock of combat, the hard-hearted crowd immediately discover it and
rain maledictions on his head. I saw a picador once enter the ring as
pale as death. He kept carefully out of the way of the bull for a few
minutes. The sharp-eyed Spaniards noticed it, and commenced shouting,
"Craven! He wants to live forever!" They threw orange-skins at him, and
at last, their rage vanquishing their economy, they pelted him with
oranges. His pallor gave way to a flush of shame and anger. He attacked
the bull so awkwardly that the animal, killing his horse, threw him also
with great violence. His hat flew off, his bald head struck the hard
soil. He lay there as one dead, and was borne away lifeless. This
mollified the indignant people, and they desisted from their abuse.

A cowardly bull is much more dangerous than a courageous one, who lowers
his head, shuts his eyes, and goes blindly at everything he sees. The
last refuge of a bull in trouble is to leap the barrier, where he
produces a lively moment among the water-carriers and orange-boys and
stage-carpenters. I once saw a bull, who had done very little execution
in the arena, leap the barrier suddenly and toss an unfortunate
carpenter from the gangway sheer into the ring. He picked himself up,
laughed, saluted his friends, ran a little distance and fell, and was
carried out dying. Fatal accidents are rarely mentioned in the
newspapers, and it is considered not quite good form to talk about them.

When the bull has killed enough horses, the first act of the play
terminates. But this is an exceedingly delicate matter for the
authorities to decide. The audience will not endure any economy in this
respect. If the bull is enterprising and "voluntary," he must have as
many horses as he can dispose of. One day in Madrid the bulls operated
with such activity that the supply of horses was exhausted before the
close of the show, and the contractors rushed out in a panic and bought
a half dozen screws from the nearest cab-stand. If the president orders
out the horses before their time, he will hear remarks by no means
complimentary from the austere groundlings.

The second act is the play of the banderilleros, the flag-men. They are
beautifully dressed and superbly built fellows, principally from
Andalusia, got up precisely like Figaro in the opera. Theirs is the most
delicate and graceful operation of the bull-fight. They take a pair of
barbed darts, with little banners fluttering at their ends, and provoke
the bull to rush at them. At the instant he reaches them, when it seems
nothing can save them, they step aside and plant the banderillas in the
neck of the bull. If the bull has been cowardly and sluggish, and the
spectators have called for "fire," darts are used filled with detonating
powder at the base, which explode in the flesh of the bull. He dances
and skips like a kid or a colt in his agony, which is very diverting to
the Spanish mind. A prettier conceit is that of confining small birds in
paper cages, which come apart when the banderilla is planted, and set
the little fluttering captives free.

Decking the bull with these torturing ornaments is the last stage in the
apprenticeship of the chulo, before he rises to the dignity of matador,
or killer. The matadors themselves on special occasions think it no
derogation from their dignity to act as banderilleros. But they usually
accompany the act with some exaggeration of difficulty that reaps for
them a harvest of applause. Frascuelo sits in a chair and plants the
irritating bannerets. Lagartijo lays his handkerchief on the ground and
stands upon it while he coifs the bull. A performance which never fails
to bring down the house is for the torero to await the rush of the bull,
and when the bellowing monster comes at him with winking eyes and
lowered head, to put his slippered foot between the horns, and vault
lightly over his back.

These chulos exhibit the most wonderful skill and address in evading the
assault of the bull. They can almost always trick him by waving their
cloaks a little out of the line of their flight. Sometimes, however, the
bull runs straight at the man, disregarding the flag, and if the
distance is great to the barrier the danger is imminent; for swift as
these men are, the bulls are swifter. Once I saw the bull strike the
torero at the instant he vaulted over the barrier. He fell sprawling
some distance the other side, safe, but terribly bruised and stunned. As
soon as he could collect himself he sprang into the arena again, looking
very seedy; and the crowd roared, "Saved by miracle." I could but think
of Basilio, who, when the many cried, "A miracle," answered, "Industria!
Industria!" But these bullfighters are all very pious, and glad to curry
favor with the saints by attributing every success to their
intervention. The famous matador, Paco Montes, fervently believed in an
amulet he carried, and in the invocation of Our Lord of the True Cross.
He called upon this special name in every tight place, and while other
people talked of his luck he stoutly affirmed it was his faith that
saved him; often he said he saw the veritable picture of the Passion
coming down between him and the bull, in answer to his prayers. At every
bull-ring there is a little chapel in the refreshment-room where these
devout ruffians can toss off a prayer or two in the intervals of work. A
priest is always at hand with a consecrated wafer, to visa the torero's
passport who has to start suddenly for Paradise. It is not exactly
regular, but the ring has built many churches and endowed many chapels,
and must not be too rigidly regarded. In many places the chief boxes are
reserved for the clergy, and prayers are hurried through an hour earlier
on the day of combat.

The final act is the death of the bull. It must come at last. His
exploits in the early part of his career afford to the amateur some
indication of the manner in which he will meet his end. If he is a
generous, courageous brute, with more heart than brains, he will die
gallantly and be easily killed. But if he has shown reflection,
forethought, and that saving quality of the oppressed, suspicion, the
matador has a serious work before him. The bull is always regarded from
this objective standpoint. The more power of reason the brute has, the
worse opinion the Spaniard has of him. A stupid creature who rushes
blindly on the sword of the matador is an animal after his own heart.
But if there be one into whose brute brain some glimmer of the awful
truth has come,--and this sometimes happens,--if he feels the solemn
question at issue between him and his enemy, if he eyes the man and not
the flag, if he refuses to be fooled by the waving lure, but keeps all
his strength and all his faculties for his own defence, the soul of the
Spaniard rises up in hate and loathing. He calls on the matador to kill
him any way. If he will not rush at the flag, the crowd shouts for the
demi-lune; and the noble brute is houghed from behind, and your soul
grows sick with shame of human nature, at the hellish glee with which
they watch him hobbling on his severed legs.

This seldom happens. The final act is usually an admirable study of
coolness and skill against brute force. When the banderillas are all
planted, and the bugles sound for the third time, the matador, the
espada, the sword, steps forward with a modest consciousness of
distinguished merit, and makes a brief speech to the corregidor,
offering in honor of the good city of Madrid to kill the bull. He turns
on his heel, throws his hat by a dexterous back-handed movement over the
barrier, and advances, sword and cape in hand, to where his noble enemy
awaits him. The bull appears to recognize a more serious foe than any he
has encountered. He stops short and eyes the newcomer curiously. It is
always an impressive picture: the tortured, maddened animal, whose thin
flanks are palpitating with his hot breath, his coat one shining mass of
blood from the darts and the spear-thrusts, his massive neck still
decked as in mockery with the fluttering flags, his fine head and muzzle
seeming sharpened by the hour's terrible experience, his formidable
horns crimsoned with onset; in front of this fiery bulk of force and
courage, the slight, sinewy frame of the killer, whose only reliance is
on his coolness and his intellect. I never saw a matador come carelessly
to his work. He is usually pale and alert. He studies the bull for a
moment with all his eyes. He waves the blood-red engano, or lure, before
his face. If the bull rushes at it with his eyes shut, the work is easy.
He has only to select his own stroke and make it. But if the bull is
jealous and sly, it requires the most careful management to kill him.
The disposition of the bull is developed by a few rapid passes of the
red flag. This must not be continued too long: the tension of the nerves
of the auditory will not bear trifling. I remember one day the crowd was
aroused to fury by a bugler from the adjoining barracks playing retreat
at the moment of decision. All at once the matador seizes the favorable
instant. He poises his sword as the bull rushes upon him. The point
enters just between the left shoulder and the spine; the long blade
glides in up to the hilt. The bull reels and staggers and dies.
Sometimes the matador severs the vertebrae. The effect is like magic. He
lays the point of his sword between the bull's horns, as lightly as a
lady who touches her cavalier with her fan, and he falls dead as a
stone.

If the blow is a clean, well-delivered one, the enthusiasm of the people
is unbounded. Their approval comes up in a thunderous shout of "Well
done! Valiente! Viva!" A brown shower of cigars rains on the sand. The
victor gathers them up: they fill his hands, his pockets, his hat. He
gives them to his friends, and the aromatic shower continues. Hundreds
of hats are flung into the ring. He picks them up and shies them back to
their shouting owners. Sometimes a dollar is mingled with the flying
compliments; but the enthusiasm of the Spaniard rarely carries him so
far as that. For ten minutes after a good estocada, the matador is the
most popular man in Spain.

But the trumpets sound again, the door of the Toril flies open, another
bull comes rushing out, and the present interest quenches the past. The
play begins again, with its sameness of purpose and its infinite variety
of incident.

It is not quite accurate to say, as is often said, that the bull-fighter
runs no risk. El Tato, the first sword of Spain, lost his leg in 1869,
and his life was saved by the coolness and courage of Lagartijo, who
succeeded him in the championship, and who was terribly wounded in the
foot the next summer. Arjona killed a bull in the same year, which
tossed and ruptured him after receiving his death-blow. Pepe Illo died
in harness, on the sand. Every year picadors, chulos, and such small
deer are killed, without gossip. I must copy the inscription on the
sword which Tato presented to Lagartijo, as a specimen of tauromachian
literature:--

"If, as philosophers say, gratitude is the tribute of noble souls,
accept, dear Lagartijo, this present; preserve it as a sacred relic, for
it symbolizes the memory of my glories, and is at the same time the mute
witness of my misfortune. With it I killed my last bull named
_Peregrino,_ bred by D. Vicente Martinez, fourth of the fight of the 7th
June, 1869, in which act I received the wound which has caused the
amputation of my right leg. The will of man can do nothing against the
designs of Providence. Nothing but resignation is left to thy
affectionate friend, Antonio Sanchez [Tato]."

It is in consideration of the mingled skill and danger of the trade,
that such enormous fees are paid the principal performers. The leading
swordsmen receive about three hundred dollars for each performance, and
they are eagerly disputed by the direction of all the arenas of Spain.
In spite of these large wages, they are rarely rich. They are as
wasteful and improvident as gamblers. Tato, when he lost his leg, lost
his means of subsistence, and his comrades organized one or two benefits
to keep him from want. Cuchares died in the Havana, and left no
provision for his family.

There is a curious naivete in the play-bill of a bull-fight, the only
conscientious public document I have seen in Spain. You know how we of
Northern blood exaggerate the attractions of all sorts of shows,
trusting to the magnanimity of the audience. "He warn't nothing like so
little as that," confesses Mr. Magsman, "but where's your dwarf what
is?" There are few who have the moral courage to demand their money back
because they counted but thirty-nine thieves when the bills promised
forty. But the management of the Madrid bull-ring knows its public too
well to promise more than it is sure of performing. It announces six
bulls, and positively no more. It says there will be no use of
bloodhounds. It promises two picadors, with three others in reserve, and
warns the public that if all five become inutilized in the combat, no
more will be issued. With so fair a preliminary statement, what crowd,
however inflammable, could mob the management?

Some industrious and ascetic statistician has visited Spain and
interested himself in the bullring. Here are some of the results of his
researches. In 1864 the number of places in all the taurine
establishments of Spain was 509,283, of which 246,813 belonged to the
cities, and 262,470 to the country.

In the year 1864, there were 427 bull-fights, of which 294 took place in
the cities, and 13 3 in the country towns. The receipts of ninety-eight
bullrings in 1864 reached the enormous sum of two hundred and seventeen
and a half millions of reals (nearly $11,000,000). The 427 bull-fights
which took place in Spain during the year 1864 caused the death of 2989
of these fine animals, and about 7473 horses,--something more than half
the number of the cavalry of Spain. These wasted victims could have
ploughed three hundred thousand hectares of land, which would have
produced a million and a half hectolitres of grain, worth eighty
millions of reals; all this without counting the cost of the slaughtered
cattle, worth say seven or eight millions, at a moderate calculation.

Thus far the Arithmetic Man; to whom responds the tauromachian
aficionado: That the bulk of this income goes to purposes of charity;
that were there no bull-fights, bulls of good race would cease to be
bred; that nobody ever saw a horse in a bull-ring that could plough a
furrow of a hundred yards without giving up the ghost; that the nerve,
dexterity, and knowledge of brute nature gained in the arena is a good
thing to have in the country; that, in short, it is our way of amusing
ourselves, and if you don't like it you can go home and cultivate
prize-fighters, or kill two-year-old colts on the racecourse, or murder
jockeys in hurdle-races, or break your own necks in steeple-chases, or
in search of wilder excitement thicken your blood with beer or burn your
souls out with whiskey.

And this is all we get by our well-meant effort to convince Spaniards of
the brutality of bullfights. Must Chicago be virtuous before I can
object to Madrid ale, and say that its cakes are unduly gingered?

Yet even those who most stoutly defend the bull-fight feel that its
glory has departed and that it has entered into the era of full
decadence. I was talking one evening with a Castilian gentleman, one of
those who cling with most persistence to the national traditions, and he
confessed that the noble art was wounded to death. "I do not refer, as
many do, to the change from the old times, when gentlemen fought on
their own horses in the ring. That was nonsense, and could not survive
the time of Cervantes. Life is too short to learn bull-fighting. A
grandee of Spain, if he knows anything else, would make a sorry torero.
The good times of the art are more modern. I saw the short day of the
glory of the ring when I was a boy. There was a race of gladiators then,
such as the world will never see again,--mighty fighters before the
king. Pepe Illo and Costillares, Romero and Paco Montes,--the world does
not contain the stuff to make their counterparts. They were serious,
earnest men. They would have let their right arms wither before they
would have courted the applause of the mob by killing a bull outside of
the severe traditions. Compare them with the men of to-day, with your
Rafael Molina, who allows himself to be gored, playing with a heifer;
with your frivolous boys like Frascuelo. I have seen the ring convulsed
with laughter as that buffoon strutted across the arena, flirting his
muleta as a manola does her skirts, the bewildered bull not knowing what
to make of it. It was enough to make Illo turn in his bloody grave.

"Why, my young friend, I remember when bulls were a dignified and
serious matter; when we kept account of their progress from their
pasture to the capital. We had accounts of their condition by couriers
and carrier-pigeons. On the day when they appeared it was a high
festival in the court. All the sombreros in Spain were there, the ladies
in national dress with white mantillas. The young queen always in her
palco (may God guard her). The fighters of that day were high priests of
art; there was something of veneration in the regard that was paid them.
Duchesses threw them bouquets with billets-doux. Gossip and newspapers
have destroyed the romance of common life.

"The only pleasure I take in the Plaza de Toros now is at night. The
custodians know me and let me moon about in the dark. When all that is
ignoble and mean has faded away with the daylight, it seems to me the
ghosts of the old time come back upon the sands. I can fancy the patter
of light hoofs, the glancing of spectral horns. I can imagine the agile
tread of Romero, the deadly thrust of Montes, the whisper of
long-vanished applause, and the clapping of ghostly hands. I am growing
too old for such skylarking, and I sometimes come away with a cold in my
head. But you will never see a bull-fight you can enjoy as I do these
visionary festivals, where memory is the corregidor, and where the only
spectators are the stars and I."




RED-LETTER DAYS


No people embrace more readily than the Spaniards the opportunity of
spending a day without work. Their frequent holidays are a relic of the
days when the Church stood between the people and their taskmasters, and
fastened more firmly its hold upon the hearts of the ignorant and
overworked masses, by becoming at once the fountain of salvation in the
next world, and of rest in this. The government rather encouraged this
growth of play-days, as the Italian Bourbons used to foster mendicancy,
by way of keeping the people as unthrifty as possible. Lazzaroni are so
much more easily managed than burghers!

It is only the holy days that are successfully celebrated in Spain. The
state has tried of late years to consecrate to idle parade a few
revolutionary dates, but they have no vigorous national life. They grow
feebler and more colorless year by year, because they have no depth of
earth.

The most considerable of these national festivals is the 2d of May,
which commemorates the slaughter of patriots in the streets of Madrid by
Murat. This is a political holiday which appeals more strongly to the
national character of the Spaniards than any other. The mingled pride of
race and ignorant hate of everything foreign which constitutes that
singular passion called Spanish patriotism, or Espanolismo, is fully
called into play by the recollections of the terrible scenes of their
war of independence, which drove out a foreign king, and brought back
into Spain a native despot infinitely meaner and more injurious. It is
an impressive study in national character and thought, this
self-satisfaction of even liberal Spaniards at the reflection that, by a
vast and supreme effort of the nation, after countless sacrifices and
with the aid of coalesced Europe, they exchanged Joseph Bonaparte for
Ferdinand VII. and the Inquisition. But the victims of the Dos de Mayo
fell fighting. Daoiz, Velarde, and Ruiz were bayoneted at their guns,
scorning surrender. The alcalde of Mostoles, a petty village of Castile,
called on Spain to rise against the tyrant. And Spain obeyed the summons
of this cross-roads justice. The contempt of probabilities, the
Quixotism of these successive demonstrations, endear them to the Spanish
heart.

Every 2d of May the city of Madrid gives up the day to funeral honors to
the dead of 1808. The city government, attended by its Maceros, in their
gorgeous robes of gold and scarlet, with silver maces and long white
plumes; the public institutions of all grades, with invalids and
veterans and charity children; a large detachment of the army and
navy,--form a vast procession at the Town Hall, and, headed by the
Supreme Government, march to slow music through the Puerta del Sol and
the spacious Alcala street to the granite obelisk in the Prado which
marks the resting-place of the patriot dead. I saw the regent of the
kingdom, surrounded by his cabinet, sauntering all a summer's afternoon
under a blazing sun over the dusty mile that separates the monument from
the Ayuntamiento. The Spaniards are hopelessly inefficient in these
matters. The people always fill the line of march, and a rivulet of
procession meanders feebly through a wilderness of mob. It is fortunate
that the crowd is more entertaining than the show.

The Church has a very indifferent part in this ceremonial. It does
nothing more than celebrate a mass in the shade of the dark cypresses in
the Place of Loyalty, and then leaves the field clear to the secular
power. But this is the only purely civic ceremony I ever saw in Spain.
The Church is lord of the holidays for the rest of the year.

In the middle of May comes the feast of the ploughboy patron of
Madrid,--San Isidro. He was a true Madrileno in tastes, and spent his
time lying in the summer shade or basking in the winter sunshine, seeing
visions, while angels came down from heaven and did his farm chores for
him. The angels are less amiable nowadays, but every true child of
Madrid reveres the example and envies the success of the San Isidro
method of doing business. In the process of years this lazy lout has
become a great saint, and his bones have done more extensive and
remarkable miracle-work than any equal amount of phosphate in existence.
In desperate cases of sufficient rank the doctors throw up the sponge
and send for Isidro's urn, and the drugging having ceased, the noble
patient frequently recovers, and much honor and profit comes thereby to
the shrine of the saint. There is something of the toady in Isidro's
composition. You never hear of his curing any one of less than princely
rank. I read in an old chronicle of Madrid, that once when Queen Isabel
the Catholic was hunting in the hills that overlook the Manzanares, near
what is now the oldest and quaintest quarter of the capital, she killed
a bear of great size and ferocity; and doubtless thinking it might not
be considered lady-like to have done it unassisted, she gave San Isidro
the credit of the lucky blow and built him a nice new chapel for it near
the Church of San Andres. If there are any doubters, let them go and see
the chapel, as I did. When the allied armies of the Christian kings of
Spain were seeking for a passage through the hills to the Plains of
Tolosa, a shepherd appeared and led them straight to victory and endless
fame. After the battle, which broke the Moorish power forever in Central
Spain, instead of looking for the shepherd and paying him handsomely for
his timely scout-service, they found it more pious and economical to say
it was San Isidro in person who had kindly made himself flesh for this
occasion. By the great altar in the Cathedral of Toledo stand side by
side the statues of Alonso VIII., the Christian commander, and San Isidro
brazenly swelling in the shepherd garb of that unknown guide who led
Alonso and his chivalry through the tangled defiles of the Sierra
Morena.

His fete is the Derby Day of Madrid. The whole town goes out to his
Hermitage on the further banks of the Manzanares, and spends a day or
two of the soft spring weather in noisy frolic. The little church stands
on a bare brown hill, and all about it is an improvised village
consisting half of restaurants and the other half of toyshops. The
principal traffic is in a pretty sort of glass whistle which forms the
stem of an artificial rose, worn in the button-hole in the intervals of
tooting, and little earthen pig-bells, whose ringing scares away the
lightning. There is but one duty of the day to flavor all its pleasures.
The faithful must go into the oratory, pay a penny, and kiss a
glass-covered relic of the saint which the attendant ecclesiastic holds
in his hand. The bells are rung violently until the church is full; then
the doors are shut and the kissing begins. They are very expeditious
about it. The worshippers drop on their knees by platoons before the
railing. The long-robed relic-keeper puts the precious trinket rapidly
to their lips; an acolyte follows with a saucer for the cash. The glass
grows humid with many breaths. The priest wipes it with a dirty napkin
from time to time. The multitude advances, kisses, pays, and retires,
till all have their blessing; then the doors are opened and they all
pass out,--the bells ringing furiously for another detachment. The
pleasures of the day are like those of all fairs and public merrymaking.
Working-people come to be idle, and idle people come to have something
to do. There is much eating and little drinking. The milk-stalls are
busier than the wine-shops. The people are gay and jolly, but very
decent and clean and orderly. To the east of the Hermitage, over and
beyond the green cool valley, the city rises on its rocky hills, its
spires shining in the cloudless blue. Below on the emerald meadows there
are the tents and wagons of those who have come from a distance to the
Romeria. The sound of guitars and the drone of peasant songs come up the
hill, and groups of men are leaping in the wild barbaric dances of
Iberia. The scene is of another day and time. The Celt is here, lord of
the land. You can see these same faces at Donnybrook Fair. These
large-mouthed, short-nosed, rosy-cheeked peasant-girls are called
Dolores and Catalina, but they might be called Bridget and Kathleen.
These strapping fellows, with long simian upper lips, with brown
leggings and patched, mud-colored overcoats, who are leaping and
swinging their cudgels in that Pyrrhic round are as good Tipperary boys
as ever mobbed an agent or pounded, twenty to one, a landlord to death.
The same unquestioning, fervent faith, the same superficial good-nature,
the same facility to be amused, and at bottom the same cowardly and
cruel blood-thirst. What is this mysterious law of race which is
stronger than time, or varying climates, or changing institutions? Which
is cause, and which is effect, race or religion?

The great Church holiday of the year is Corpus Christi. On this day the
Host is carried in solemn procession through the principal streets,
attended by the high officers of state, several battalions of each arm
of the service in fresh bright uniforms, and a vast array of
ecclesiastics in the most gorgeous stoles and chasubles their vestiary
contains. The windows along the line of march are gayly decked with
flags and tapestry. Work is absolutely suspended, and the entire
population dons its holiday garb. The Puerta del Sol--at this season
blazing with relentless light--is crowded with patient Madrilenos in
their best clothes, the brown-cheeked maidens with flowing silks as in a
ball-room, and with no protection against the ardent sky but the
fluttering fan they hold in their ungloved hands. As everything is
behind time in this easy-going land, there are two or three hours of
broiling gossip on the glowing pavement before the Sacred Presence is
announced by the ringing of silver bells. As the superb structure of
filigree gold goes by, a movement of reverent worship vibrates through
the crowd. Forgetful of silks and broadcloth and gossip, they fall on
their knees in one party-colored mass, and, bowing their heads and
beating their breasts, they mutter their mechanical prayers. There are
thinking men who say these shows are necessary; that the Latin mind must
see with bodily eyes the thing it worships, or the worship will fade
away from its heart. If there were no cathedrals and masses, they say,
there would be no religion; if there were no king, there would be no
law. But we should not accept too hurriedly this ethnological theory of
necessity, which would reject all principles of progress and positive
good, and condemn half the human race to perpetual childhood. There was
a time when we Anglo-Saxons built cathedrals and worshipped the king.
Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of
parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the
religious spirit that presided over those master works of English
Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the
English love and fear of princes. But the steady growth of centuries has
left nothing but the outworn shell of the old religion and the old
loyalty. The churches and the castles still exist. The name of the king
still is extant in the constitution. They remain as objects of taste and
tradition, hallowed by a thousand memories of earlier days, but, thanks
be to God who has given us the victory, the English race is now
incapable of making a new cathedral or a new king.

Let us not in our safe egotism deny to others the possibility of a like
improvement.

This summery month of June is rich in saints. The great apostles, John,
Peter, and Paul, have their anniversaries on its closing days, and the
shortest nights of the year are given up to the riotous eating of
fritters in their honor. I am afraid that the progress of luxury and
love of ease has wrought a change in the observance of these festivals.
The feast of midsummer night is called the Verbena of St. John, which
indicates that it was formerly a morning solemnity, as the vervain could
not be hunted by the youths and maidens of Spain with any success or
decorum at midnight. But of late years it may be that this useful and
fragrant herb has disappeared from the tawny hills of Castile. It is
sure that midsummer has grown too warm for any field work. So that the
Madrilenos may be pardoned for spending the day napping, and swarming
into the breezy Prado in the light of moon and stars and gas. The Prado
is ordinarily the promenade of the better classes, but every Spanish
family has its John, Paul, and Peter, and the crowded barrios of Toledo
and the Penue-las pour out their ragged hordes to the popular festival.
The scene has a strange gypsy wildness. From the round point of Atocha
to where Cybele, throned among spouting waters, drives southward her
spanking team of marble lions, the park is filled with the merry
roysterers. At short intervals are the busy groups of fritter merchants;
over the crackling fire a great caldron of boiling oil; beside it a
mighty bowl of dough. The bunolero, with the swift precision of
machinery, dips his hand into the bowl and makes a delicate ring of the
tough dough, which he throws into the bubbling caldron. It remains but a
few seconds, and his grimy acolyte picks it out with a long wire and
throws it on the tray for sale. They are eaten warm, the droning cry
continually sounding, "Bunuelos! Calientitos!" There must be millions of
these oily dainties consumed on every night of the Verbena. For the more
genteel revellers, the Don Juans, Pedros, and Pablos of the better sort,
there are improvised restaurants built of pine planks after sunset and
gone before sunrise. But the greater number are bought and eaten by the
loitering crowd from the tray of the fritterman. It is like a vast
gitano-camp. The hurrying crowd which is going nowhere, the blazing
fires, the cries of the venders, the songs of the majos under the great
trees of the Paseo, the purposeless hurly-burly, and above, the steam of
the boiling oil and the dust raised by the myriad feet, form together a
striking and vivid picture. The city is more than usually quiet. The
stir of life is localized in the Prado. The only busy men in town are
those who stand by the seething oil-pots and manufacture the brittle
forage of the browsing herds. It is a jealous business, and requires the
undivided attention of its professors. The _ne sutor ultra crepidam_ of
Spanish proverb is "Bunolero haz tus bunuelos,"--Fritterman, mind thy
fritters. With the long days and cooler airs of the autumn begin the
different fairs. These are relics of the times of tyranny and exclusive
privilege, when for a few days each year, by the intervention of the
Church, or as a reward for civic service, full liberty of barter and
sale was allowed to all citizens. This custom, more or less modified,
may be found in most cities of Europe. The boulevards of Paris swarm
with little booths at Christmas-time, which begin and end their lawless
commercial life within the week. In Vienna, in Leipsic, and other
cities, the same waste-weir of irregular trade is periodically opened.
These fairs begin in Madrid with the autumnal equinox, and continue for
some weeks in October. They disappear from the Alcala to break out with
renewed virulence in the avenue of Atocha, and girdle the city at last
with a belt of booths. While they last they give great animation and
spirit to the street life of the town. You can scarcely make your way
among the heaps of gaudy shawls and handkerchiefs, cheap laces and
illegitimate jewels, that cumber the pavement. When the Jews were driven
out of Spain, they left behind the true genius of bargaining.

A nut-brown maid is attracted by a brilliant red and yellow scarf. She
asks the sleepy merchant nodding before his wares, "What is this rag
worth?"

He answers with profound indifference, "Ten reals."

"Hombre! Are you dreaming or crazy?" She drops the coveted neck-gear,
and moves on, apparently horror-stricken.

The chapman calls her back peremptorily. "Don't be rash! The scarf is
worth twenty reals, but for the sake of Santisima Maria I offered it to
you for half price. Very well! You are not suited. What will you give?"

"Caramba! Am I buyer and seller as well? The thing is worth three reals;
more is a robbery."

"Jesus! Maria! Jose! and all the family! Go thou with God! We cannot
trade. Sooner than sell for less than eight reals I will raise the cover
of my brains! Go thou! It is eight of the morning, and still thou
dreamest."

She lays down the scarf reluctantly, saying, "Five?"

But the outraged mercer snorts scornfully, "Eight is my last word! Go
to!"

She moves away, thinking how well that scarf would look in the Apollo
Gardens, and casts over her shoulder a Parthian glance and bid, "Six!"

"Take it! It is madness, but I cannot waste my time in bargaining."

Both congratulate themselves on the operation. He would have taken five,
and she would have given seven. How trade would suffer if we had windows
in our breasts!

The first days of November are consecrated to all the saints, and to the
souls of all the blessed dead. They are observed in Spain with great
solemnity; but as the cemeteries are generally of the dreariest
character, bare, bleak, and most forbidding under the ashy sky of the
late autumn, the days are deprived of that exquisite sentiment that
pervades them in countries where the graves of the dead are beautiful.
There is nothing more touching than these offerings of memory you see
every year in Mont Parnasse and Pere-la-Chaise. Apart from all beliefs,
there is a mysterious influence for good exerted upon the living by the
memory of the beloved dead. On all hearts not utterly corrupt, the
thoughts that come by the graves of the departed fall like dew from
heaven, and quicken into life purer and higher resolves.

In Spain, where there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the
churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God
their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and
perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests
upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the consolation
that comes with the free air and the sunshine, and the infinite blue
vault, where Nature conspires with revelation to comfort and cherish and
console.

Christmas apparently comes in Spain on no other mission than that
referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The
Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that
precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as
completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans.
Swarms of turkeys are driven in from the surrounding country, and taken
about the streets by their rustic herdsmen, making the roads gay with
their scarlet wattles, and waking rural memories by their vociferous
gobbling. The great market-place of the season is the Plaza Mayor. The
ever-fruitful provinces of the South are laid under contribution, and
the result is a wasteful show of tropical luxuriance that seems most
incongruous under the wintry sky. There are mountains of oranges and
dates, brown hillocks of nuts of every kind, store of every product of
this versatile soil. The air is filled with nutty and fruity fragrance.
Under the ancient arcades are the stalls of the butchers, rich with the
mutton of Castile, the hams of Estremadura, and the hero-nourishing
bull-beef of Andalusian pastures.

At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the
tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the
Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat--the
unemancipated slaves of necessity--go out this night to cheat their
misery with noisy frolic. The owner of a tambourine is the equal of a
peer; the proprietor of a guitar is the captain of his hundred. They
troop through the dim city with discordant revel and song. They have
little idea of music. Every one sings and sings ill. Every one dances,
without grace or measure. Their music is a modulated howl of the East.
Their dancing is the savage leaping of barbarians. There is no lack of
couplets, religious, political, or amatory. I heard one ragged woman
with a brown baby at her breast go shrieking through the Street of the
Magdalen,--

  "This is the eve of Christmas,
  No sleep from now till morn,
  The Virgin is in travail,
  At twelve will the child be born!"

Behind her stumped a crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with
frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of the great:--

  "This is the eve of Christmas,
  But what is that to me?
  We are ruled by thieves and robbers,
  As it was and will always be."

Next comes a shouting band of the youth of Spain, strapping boys with
bushy locks, crisp and black almost to blueness, and gay young girls
with flexible forms and dark Arab eyes that shine with a phosphorescent
light in the shadows. They troop on with clacking castinets. The
challenge of the mozos rings out on the frosty air,--

  "This is the eve of Christmas,
  Let us drink and love our fill!"

And the saucy antiphon of girlish voices responds,--

  "A man may be bearded and gray,
  But a woman can fool him still!"

The Christmas and New-Year's holidays continue for a fortnight, ending
with the Epiphany. On the eve of the Day of the Kings a curious farce is
performed by bands of the lowest orders of the people, which
demonstrates the apparently endless naivete of their class. In every
coterie of water-carriers, or mozos de cordel, there will be one found
innocent enough to believe that the Magi are coming to Madrid that
night, and that a proper respect to their rank requires that they must
be met at the city gate. To perceive the coming of their feet, beautiful
upon the mountains, a ladder is necessary, and the poor victim of the
comedy is loaded with this indispensable "property." He is dragged by
his gay companions, who never tire of the exquisite wit of their jest,
from one gate to another, until suspicion supplants faith in the mind of
the neophyte, and the farce is over.

In the burgher society of Castile this night is devoted to a very
different ceremony. Each little social circle comes together in a house
agreed upon. They take mottoes of gilded paper and write on each the
name of some one of the company. The names of the ladies are thrown into
one urn, and those of the cavaliers into another, and they are drawn out
by pairs. These couples are thus condemned by fortune to intimacy during
the year. The gentleman is always to be at the orders of the dame and to
serve her faithfully in every knightly fashion. He has all the duties
and none of the privileges of a lover, unless it be the joy of those
"who stand and wait." The relation is very like that which so astonished
M. de Gramont in his visit to Piedmont, where the cavalier of service
never left his mistress in public and never approached her in private.

The true Carnival survives in its naive purity only in Spain. It has
faded in Rome into a romping day of clown's play. In Paris it is little
more than a busier season for dreary and professional vice. Elsewhere
all over the world the Carnival gayeties are confined to the salon. But
in Madrid the whole city, from grandee to cordwainer, goes with
childlike earnestness into the enjoyment of the hour. The Corso begins
in the Prado on the last Sunday before Lent, and lasts four days. From
noon to night the great drive is filled with a double line of carriages
two miles long, and between them are the landaus of the favored hundreds
who have the privilege of driving up and down free from the law of the
road. This right is acquired by the payment of ten dollars a day to city
charities, and produces some fifteen thousand dollars every Carnival. In
these carriages all the society of Madrid may be seen; and on foot,
darting in and out among the hoofs of the horses, are the young men of
Castile in every conceivable variety of absurd and fantastic disguise.
There are of course pirates and Indians and Turks, monks, prophets, and
kings, but the favorite costumes seem to be the Devil and the
Englishman. Sometimes the Yankee is attempted, with indifferent success.
He wears a ribbon-wreathed Italian bandit's hat, an embroidered jacket,
slashed buckskin trousers, and a wide crimson belt,--a dress you would
at once recognize as universal in Boston.

Most of the maskers know by name at least the occupants of the
carriages. There is always room for a mask in a coach. They leap in,
swarming over the back or the sides, and in their shrill monotonous
scream they make the most startling revelations of the inmost secrets of
your soul. There is always something impressive in the talk of an
unknown voice, but especially is this so in Madrid, where every one
scorns his own business, and devotes himself rigorously to his
neighbor's. These shrieking young monks and devilkins often surprise a
half-formed thought in the heart of a fair Castilian and drag it out
into day and derision. No one has the right to be offended. Duchesses
are called Tu! Isabel! by chin-dimpled school-boys, and the proudest
beauties in Spain accept bonbons from plebeian hands. It is true, most
of the maskers are of the better class. Some of the costumes are very
rich and expensive, of satin and velvet heavy with gold. I have seen a
distinguished diplomatist in the guise of a gigantic canary-bird,
hopping briskly about in the mud with bedraggled tail-feathers,
shrieking well-bred sarcasms with his yellow beak.

The charm of the Madrid Carnival is this, that it is respected and
believed in. The best and fairest pass the day in the Corso, and gallant
young gentlemen think it worth while to dress elaborately for a few
hours of harmless and spirituelle intrigue. A society that enjoys a
holiday so thoroughly has something in it better than the blase cynicism
of more civilized capitals. These young fellows talk like the lovers of
the old romances. I have never heard prettier periods of devotion than
from some gentle savage, stretched out on the front seat of a landau
under the peering eyes of his lady, safe in his disguise, if not
self-betrayed, pouring out his young soul in passionate praise and
prayer; around them the laughter and the cries, the cracking of whips,
the roll of wheels, the presence of countless thousands, and yet these
two young hearts alone under the pale winter sky. The rest of the
Continent has outgrown the true Carnival. It is pleasant to see this gay
relic of simpler times, when youth was young. No one here is too "swell"
for it. You may find a duke in the disguise of a chimney-sweep, or a
butcher-boy in the dress of a Crusader. There are none so great that
their dignity would suffer by a day's reckless foolery, and there are
none so poor that they cannot take the price of a dinner to buy a mask
and cheat their misery by mingling for a time with their betters in the
wild license of the Carnival.

The winter's gayety dies hard. Ash Wednesday is a day of loud merriment
and is devoted to a popular ceremony called the Burial of the Sardine. A
vast throng of workingmen carry with great pomp a link of sausage to the
bank of the Manzanares and inter it there with great solemnity. On the
following Saturday, after three days of death, the Carnival has a
resurrection, and the maddest, wildest ball of the year takes place at
the opera. Then the sackcloth and ashes of Lent come down in good
earnest and the town mourns over its scarlet sins. It used to be very
fashionable for the genteel Christians to repair during this season of
mortification to the Church of San Gines, and scourge themselves lustily
in its subterranean chambers. A still more striking demonstration was
for gentlemen in love to lash themselves on the sidewalks where passed
the ladies of their thoughts. If the blood from the scourges sprinkled
them as they sailed by, it was thought an attention no female heart
could withstand. But these wholesome customs have decayed of late
unbelieving years.

The Lenten piety increases with the lengthening days. It reaches its
climax on Holy Thursday. On this day all Spain goes to church: it is one
of the obligatory days. The more you go, the better for you; so the good
people spend the whole day from dawn to dusk roaming from one church to
another, and investing an Ave and a Pater-Noster in each. This fills
every street of the city with the pious crowd. No carriages are
permitted. A silence like that of Venice falls on the rattling capital.
With three hundred thousand people in the street, the town seems still.
In 1870, a free-thinking cabman dared to drive up the Calle Alcala. He
was dragged from his box and beaten half to death by the chastened
mourners, who yelled as they kicked and cuffed him, "Que bruto! He will
wake our Jesus."

On Good Friday the gloom deepens. No colors are worn that day by the
orthodox. The senoras appear on the street in funeral garb. I saw a
group of fast youths come out of the jockey club, black from hat to
boots, with jet studs and sleeve-buttons. The gayest and prettiest
ladies sit within the church doors and beg in the holy name of charity,
and earn large sums for the poor. There are hourly services in the
churches, passionate sermons from all the pulpits. The streets are free
from the painted haunters of the pavement. The whole people taste the
luxury of a sentimental sorrow.

Yet in these heavy days it is not the Redeemer whose sufferings and
death most nearly touch the hearts of the faithful. It is Santisima
Maria who is worshipped most. It is the Dolorous Mother who moves them
to tears of tenderness. The presiding deity of these final days of
meditation is Our Lady of Solitude.

But at last the days of mourning are accomplished. The expiation for sin
is finished. The grave is vanquished, death is swallowed up in victory.
Man can turn from the grief that is natural to the joy that is eternal.
From every steeple the bells fling out their happy clangor in glad
tidings of great joy. The streets are flooded once more with eager
multitudes, gay as in wedding garments. Christ has arisen! The heathen
myth of the awakening of nature blends the old tradition with the new
gospel. The vernal breezes sweep the skies clean and blue. Birds are
pairing in the budding trees. The streams leap down from the melting
snow of the hills. The brown turf takes a tint of verdure. Through the
vast frame of things runs a quick shudder of teeming power. In the heart
of man love and will mingle into hope. Hail to the new life and the
ever-new religion! Hail to the resurrection morning!




AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS


As a general thing it is well to distrust a Spaniard's superlatives. He
will tell you that his people are the most amiable in the world, but you
will do well to carry your revolver into the interior. He will say there
are no wines worth drinking but the Spanish, but you will scarcely
forswear Clicquot and Yquem on the mere faith of his assertion. A
distinguished general once gravely assured me that there was no
literature in the world at all to be compared with the productions of
the Castilian mind. All others, he said, were but pale imitations of
Spanish master-work.

Now, though you may be shocked at learning such unfavorable facts of
'Shakespeare and Goethe and Hugo, you will hardly condemn them to an
Auto da fe, on the testimony even of a grandee of Spain.

But when a Spaniard assures you that the picture-gallery of Madrid is
the finest in the world, you may believe him without reserve. He
probably does not know what he is talking about. He may never have
crossed the Pyrenees. He has no dream of the glories of Dresden, or
Florence, or the Louvre. It is even possible that he has not seen the
matchless collection he is boasting of. He crowns it with a sweeping
superlative simply because it is Spanish. But the statement is
nevertheless true.

The reason of this is found in that gigantic and overshadowing fact
which seems to be an explanation of everything in Spain,--the power and
the tyranny of the House of Austria. The period of the vast increase of
Spanish dominion coincided with that of the meridian glory of Italian
art. The conquest of Granada was finished as the divine child Raphael
began to meddle with his father's brushes and pallets, and before his
short life ended Charles, Burgess of Ghent, was emperor and king.

The dominions he governed and transmitted to his son embraced Spain, the
Netherlands, Franche-Comte, the Milanese, Naples, and Sicily; that is to
say, those regions where art in that age and the next attained its
supreme development. He was also lord of the New World, whose
inexhaustible mines poured into the lap of Europe a constant stream of
gold. Hence came the riches and the leisure necessary to art.

Charles V., as well as his great contemporary and rival, Francis I., was
a munificent protector of art. He brought from Italy and Antwerp some of
the most perfect products of their immortal masters. He was the friend
and patron of Titian, and when, weary of the world and its vanities, he
retired to the lonely monastery of Yuste to spend in devout
contemplation the evening of his days, the most precious solace of his
solitude was that noble canvas of the great Venetian, where Charles and
Philip are borne, in penitential guise and garb, on luminous clouds into
the visible glory of the Most High.

These two great kings made a good use of their unbounded opportunities.
Spain became illuminated with the glowing canvases of the incomparable
Italians. The opening up of the New World beyond seas, the meteoric
career of European and African conquest in which the emperor had won so
much land and glory, had given an awakening shock to the intelligent
youth of Spain, and sent them forth in every avenue of enterprise. This
jealously patriotic race, which had remained locked up by the mountains
and the seas for centuries, started suddenly out, seeking adventures
over the earth. The mind of Spain seemed suddenly to have brightened and
developed like that of her great king, who, in his first tourney at
Valladolid, wrote with proud sluggishness _Nondum_--not yet--on his
maiden shield, and a few years later in his young maturity adopted the
legend of arrogant hope and promise,--_Plus Ultra._ There were seen two
emigrations of the young men of Spain, eastward and westward. The latter
went for gold and material conquest into the American wilds; and the
former, led by the sacred love of art, to that land of beauty and
wonder, then, now, and always the spiritual shrine of all
peoples,--Italy.

A brilliant young army went out from Spain on this new crusade of the
beautiful. From the plains of Castile and the hills of Navarre went,
among others, Berruguete, Becerra, and the marvellous deaf-mute
Navarrete. The luxurious city of Valentia sent Juan de Juanes and
Ribalta. Luis de Vargas went out from Seville, and from Cordova the
scholar, artist, and thinker, Paul of Cespedes. The schools of Rome and
Venice and Florence were thronged with eager pilgrims, speaking an alien
Latin and filled with a childlike wonder and appreciation.

In that stirring age the emigration was not all in one direction. Many
distinguished foreigners came down to Spain, to profit by the new love
of art in the Peninsula. It was Philip of Burgundy who carved, with
Berruguete, those miracles of skill and patience we admire to-day in the
choir of Toledo. Peter of Champagne painted at Seville the grand
altar-piece that so comforted the eyes and the soul of Murillo. The wild
Greek bedouin, George Theotocopouli, built the Mozarabic chapel and
filled the walls of convents with his weird ghost-faces. Moor, or Moro,
came from the Low Countries, and the Carducci brothers from Italy, to
seek their fortunes in Madrid. Torrigiani, after breaking Michael
Angelo's nose in Florence, fled to Granada, and died in a prison of the
Inquisition for smashing the face of a Virgin which a grandee of Spain
wanted to steal from him.

These immigrations, and the refluent tide of Spanish students from
Italy, founded the various schools of Valentia, Toledo, Seville, and
Madrid. Madrid soon absorbed the school of Toledo, and the attraction of
Seville was too powerful for Valentia. The Andalusian school counts
among its early illustrations Vargas, Roelas, the Castillos, Herrera,
Pacheco, and Moya, and among its later glories Velazquez, Alonzo Cano,
Zurbaran, and Murillo, last and greatest of the mighty line. The school
of Madrid begins with Berruguete and Na-varrete, the Italians Caxes,
Rizi, and others, who are followed by Sanchez Coello, Pantoja,
Collantes. Then comes the great invader Velazquez, followed by his
retainers Pareja and Carreno, and absorbs the whole life of the school.
Claudio Coello makes a good fight against the rapid decadence. Luca
Giordano comes rattling in from Naples with his whitewash-brush,
painting a mile a minute, and classic art is ended in Spain with the
brief and conscientious work of Raphael Mengs.

There is therefore little distinction of schools in Spain. Murillo, the
glory of Seville, studied in Madrid, and the mighty Andalusian,
Velazquez, performed his enormous life's work in the capital of Castile.

It now needs but one word to show how the Museum of Madrid became so
rich in masterpieces. During the long and brilliant reigns of Charles V.
and Philip II., when art had arrived at its apogee in Italy, and was
just beginning its splendid career in Spain, these powerful monarchs had
the lion's share of all the best work that was done in the world. There
was no artist so great but he was honored by the commands of these lords
of the two worlds. They thus formed in their various palaces,
pleasure-houses, and cloisters a priceless collection of pictures
produced in the dawn of the Spanish and the triumphant hey-day of
Italian genius. Their frivolous successors lost provinces and kingdoms,
honor and prestige, but they never lost their royal prerogative nor
their taste for the arts. They consoled themselves for the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune by the delights of sensual life, and
imagined they preserved some distant likeness to their great forerunners
by encouraging and protecting Velazquez and Lope de Vega and other
intellectual giants of that decaying age. So while, as the result of a
vicious system of kingly and spiritual thraldom, the intellect of Spain
was forced away from its legitimate channels of thought and action,
under the shadow of the royal prerogative, which survived the genuine
power of the older kings, art flourished and bloomed, unsuspected and
unpersecuted by the coward jealousy of courtier and monk.

The palace and the convent divided the product of those marvellous days.
Amid all the poverty of the failing state, it was still the king and
clergy who were best able to appropriate the works of genius. This may
have contributed to the decay of art. The immortal canvases passed into
oblivion in the salons of palaces and the cells of monasteries. Had they
been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have
kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclusiveness is
inevitably followed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish
artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe obscurity of
palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the
interests of this Museum. The pictures were held by the clenched dead
hand of the Church and the throne. They could not be sold or
distributed. They made the dark places luminous, patiently biding their
time.

It was long enough coming, and it was a despicable hand that brought
them into the light. Ferdinand VII. thought his palace would look
fresher if the walls were covered with French paper, and so packed all
the pictures off to the empty building on the Prado, which his
grandfather had built for a museum. As soon as the glorious collection
was exposed to the gaze of the world, its incontestable merit was at
once recognized. Especially were the works of Velazquez, hitherto almost
an unknown name in Europe, admired and appreciated. Ferdinand, finding
he had done a clever thing unawares, began to put on airs and poser for
a patron of art. The gallery was still further immensely enriched on the
exclaustration of the monasteries, by the hidden treasures of the
Escorial, and other spoils of mortmain. And now, as a collection of
masterpieces, it has no equal in the world.

A few figures will prove this. It contains more than two thousand
pictures already catalogued,--all of them worth a place on the walls.
Among these there are ten by Raphael, forty-three by Titian, thirty-four
by Tintoret, twenty-five by Paul Veronese. Rubens has the enormous
contingent of sixty-four. Of Teniers, whose works are sold for fabulous
sums for the square inch, this extraordinary museum possesses no less
than sixty finished pictures,--the Louvre considers itself rich with
fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the
three greatest names could alone fill a gallery. There are sixty-five
Velazquez, forty-six Murillos, and fifty-eight Riberas. Compare these
figures with those of any other gallery in existence, and you will at
once recognize the hopeless superiority of this collection. It is not
only the greatest collection in the world, but the greatest that can
ever be made until this is broken up.

But with all this mass of wealth it is not a complete, nor, properly
speaking, a representative museum. You cannot trace upon its walls the
slow, groping progress of art towards perfection. It contains few of
what the book-lovers call _incunabula._ Spanish art sprang out
full-armed from the mature brain of Rome. Juan de Juanes came back from
Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing
tree. Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared little for the
crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came
before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing
Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the
early Flemings,--the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full
splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the
representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and
Tintorets you find but two Domenichinos and two Correggios. Even in
Spanish art the gallery is far from complete. There is almost nothing
of such genuine painters as Zurbaran and Herrera.

But recognizing all this, there is, in this glorious temple, enough to
fill the least enthusiastic lover of art with delight and adoration for
weeks and months together. If one knew he was to be blind in a year,
like the young musician in Auerbach's exquisite romance, I know of no
place in the world where he could garner up so precious a store of
memories for the days of darkness, memories that would haunt the soul
with so divine a light of consolation, as in that graceful Palace of the
Prado.

It would be a hopeless task to attempt to review with any detail the
gems of this collection. My memory is filled with the countless canvases
that adorn the ten great halls. If I refer to my notebook I am equally
discouraged by the number I have marked for special notice. The
masterpieces are simply innumerable. I will say a word of each room, and
so give up the unequal contest.

As you enter the Museum from the north, you are in a wide
sturdy-columned vestibule, hung with splashy pictures of Luca Giordano.
To your right is the room devoted to the Spanish school; to the left,
the Italian. In front is the grand gallery where the greatest works of
both schools are collected. In the Spanish saloon there is an
indefinable air of severity and gloom. It is less perfectly lighted than
some others, and there is something forbidding in the general tone of
the room. There are prim portraits of queens and princes, monks in
contemplation, and holy people in antres vast and deserts idle. Most
visitors come in from a sense of duty, look hurriedly about, and go out
with a conscience at ease; in fact, there is a dim suggestion of the
fagot and the rack about many of the Spanish masters. At one end of this
gallery the Prometheus of Ribera agonizes chained to his rock. His
gigantic limbs are flung about in the fury of immortal pain. A vulture,
almost lost in the blackness of the shadows, is tugging at his vitals.
His brow is convulsed with the pride and anguish of a demigod. It is a
picture of horrible power. Opposite hangs one of the few Zurbarans of
the gallery,--also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows
which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to
look darker than blackness. Before him in a luminous nimbus that burns
its way through the dark, is the image of the crucified Saviour, head
downwards. So remarkable is the vigor of the drawing and the power of
light in this picture that you can imagine you see the resplendent
crucifix suddenly thrust into the shadow by the strong hands of
invisible spirits, and swayed for a moment only before the dazzled eyes
of the ecstatic solitary.

But after you have made friends with this room it will put off its
forbidding aspect, and you will find it hath a stern look but a gentle
heart. It has two lovely little landscapes by Murillo, showing how
universal was that wholesome genius. Also one of the largest landscapes
of Velazquez, which, when you stand near it, seems a confused mass of
brown daubs, but stepping back a few yards becomes a most perfect view
of the entrance to a royal park. The wide gate swings on its pivot
before your eyes. A court cortege moves in,--the long, dark alley
stretches off for miles directly in front, without any trick of lines or
curves; the artist has painted the shaded air. To the left a patch of
still water reflects the dark wood, and above there is a distant and
tranquil sky. Had Velazquez not done such vastly greater things, his few
landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a
large number of royal portraits,--one especially worth attention, of
Philip III. The scene is by the shore,--a cool foreground of sandy
beach,--a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low
promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king
mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken
rush of a cascade. The keeping is wonderful; a fresh sea breeze blows
out of the canvas. A brilliant bit of color is thrown into the red,
gold-fringed scarf of the horseman, fluttering backward over his
shoulder. Yet the face of the king is, as it should be, the principal
point of the picture,--the small-eyed, heavy-mouthed, red-lipped, fair,
self-satisfied face of these Austrian despots. It is a handsomer face
than most of Velazquez, as it was probably painted from memory and
lenient tradition. For Philip III. was gathered to his fathers in the
Escorial before Velazquez came up from Andalusia to seek his fortune at
the court. The first work he did in Madrid was to paint the portrait of
the king, which so pleased his majesty that he had it repeated _ad
nauseam._ You see him served up in every form in this gallery,--on foot,
on horseback, in full armor, in a shooting-jacket, at picnics, and
actually on his knees at his prayers! We wonder if Velazquez ever grew
tired of that vacant face with its contented smirk, or if in that loyal
age the smile of royalty was not always the sunshine of the court?

There is a most instructive study of faces in the portraits of the
Austrian line. First comes Charles V., the First of Spain, painted by
Titian at Augsburg, on horseback, in the armor he wore at Muhl-berg, his
long lance in rest, his visor up over the eager, powerful face,--the eye
and beak of an eagle, the jaw of a bull-dog, the face of a born ruler, a
man of prey. And yet in the converging lines about the eyes, in the
premature gray hair, in the nervous, irritable lips, you can see the
promise of early decay, of an age that will be the spoil of superstition
and bigotry. It is the face of a man who could make himself emperor and
hermit. In his son, Philip II., the soldier dies out and the bigot is
intensified. In the fine portrait by Pantoja, of Philip in his age,
there is scarcely any trace of the fresh, fair youth that Titian painted
as Adonis. It is the face of a living corpse; of a ghastly pallor,
heightened by the dull black of his mourning suit, where all passion and
feeling have died out of the livid lips and the icy eyes. Beside him
hangs the portrait of his rickety, feebly passionate son, the
unfortunate Don Carlos. The forehead of the young prince is narrow and
ill-formed; the Austrian chin is exaggerated one degree more; he looks a
picture of fitful impulse. His brother, Philip III., we have just seen,
fair and inane,--a monster of cruelty, who burned Jews and banished
Moors, not from malice, but purely from vacuity of spirit; his head
broadens like a pine-apple from the blond crest to the plump jowls.
Every one knows the head of Philip IV.,--he was fortunate in being the
friend of Velazquez,--the high, narrow brow, the long, weak face, the
yellow, curled mustache, the thick, red lips, and the ever lengthening
Hapsburg chin. But the line of Austria ends with the utmost limit of
caricature in the face of Charles the Bewitched! Carreno has given us an
admirable portrait of this unfortunate,--the forehead caved in like the
hat of a drunkard, the red-lidded eyes staring vacantly, a long, thin
nose absurd as a Carnival disguise, an enormous mouth which he could not
shut, the under-jaw projected so prodigiously,--a face incapable of any
emotion but fear. And yet in gazing at this idiotic mask you are
reminded of another face you have somewhere seen, and are startled to
remember it is the resolute face of the warrior and statesman, the king
of men, the Kaiser Karl. Yes, this pitiable being was the descendant of
the great emperor, and for that sufficient reason, although he was an
impotent and shivering idiot, although he could not sleep without a
friar in his bed to keep the devils away, for thirty-five years this
scarecrow ruled over Spain, and dying made a will whose accomplishment
bathed the Peninsula in blood. It must be confessed this institution of
monarchy is a luxury that must be paid for.

We did not intend to talk of politics in this room, but that line of
royal effigies was too tempting. Before we go, let us look at a
beautiful Magdalen in penitence, by an unknown artist of the school of
Murillo. She stands near the entrance of her cave, in a listening
attitude. The bright out-of-door light falls on her bare shoulder and
gives the faintest touch of gold to her dishevelled brown hair. She
casts her eyes upward, the large melting eyes of Andalusia; a chastened
sorrow, through which a trembling hope is shining, softens the somewhat
worldly beauty of her exquisite and sensitive face. Through the mouth of
the cave we catch a glimpse of sunny mountain solitude, and in the rosy
air that always travels with Spanish angels a band of celestial
serenaders is playing. It is a charming composition, without any depth
of sentiment or especial mastery of treatment, but evidently painted by
a clever artist in his youth, and this Magdalen is the portrait of the
lady of his dreams. None of Murillo's pupils but Tobar could have
painted it, and the manner is precisely the same as that of his Divina
Pastora.

Across the hall is the gallery consecrated to Italian artists. There are
not many pictures of the first rank here. They have been reserved for
the great central gallery, where we are going. But while here, we must
notice especially two glorious works of Tintoret,--the same subject
differently treated,--the Death of Holofernes. Both are placed higher
than they should be, considering their incontestable merit. A full light
is needed to do justice to that magnificence of color which is the pride
of Venice. There are two remarkable pictures of Giordano,--one in the
Roman style, which would not be unworthy of the great Sanzio himself, a
Holy Family, drawn and colored with that scrupulous correctness which
seems so impossible in the ordinary products of this Protean genius; and
just opposite, an apotheosis of Rubens, surrounded by his usual
"properties" of fat angels and genii, which could be readily sold
anywhere as a specimen of the estimate which the unabashed Fleming
placed upon himself. It is marvellous that any man should so master the
habit and the thought of two artists so widely apart as Raphael and
Rubens, as to produce just such pictures as they would have painted upon
the same themes. The halls and dark corridors of the Museum are filled
with Giordano's canvases. In less than ten years' residence in Spain he
covered the walls of dozens of churches and palaces with his fatally
facile work. There are more than three hundred pictures recorded as
executed by him in that time. They are far from being without merit.
There is a singular slap-dash vigor about his drawing. His coloring,
except when he is imitating some earlier master, is usually thin and
poor. It is difficult to repress an emotion of regret in looking at his
laborious yet useless life. With great talents, with indefatigable
industry, he deluged Europe with paintings that no one cares for, and
passed into history simply as Luca Fa Presto,--Luke Work-Fast.

It is not by mere activity that great things are done in art. In the
great gallery we now enter we see the deathless work of the men who
wrought in faith. This is the grandest room in Christendom. It is about
three hundred and fifty feet long and thirty-five broad and high. It is
beautifully lighted from above. Its great length is broken here and
there by vases and statues, so placed between doors as nowhere to
embarrass the view. The northern half of the gallery is Spanish, and the
southern half Italian. Halfway down, a door to the left opens into an
oval chamber, devoted to an eclectic set of masterpieces of every school
and age. The gallery ends in a circular room of French and German
pictures, on either side of which there are two great halls of Dutch and
Flemish. On the ground floor there are some hundreds more Flemish and a
hall of sculpture.

The first pictures you see to your left are by the early masters of
Spain,--Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now
extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long,
fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,--and Juan de
Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy
the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy
of color, and whose genuine merit has survived all vicissitudes of
changing taste. He has here a superb Last Supper and a spirited series
of pictures illustrating the martyrdom of Stephen. There is perhaps a
little too much elaboration of detail, even for the Romans. Stephen's
robes are unnecessarily new, and the ground where he is stoned is
profusely covered with convenient round missiles the size of Vienna
rolls, so exactly suited to the purpose that it looks as if Providence
sided with the persecutors. But what a wonderful variety and truth in
the faces and the attitudes of the groups! What mastery of drawing, and
what honest integrity of color after all these ages! It is reported of
Juanes that he always confessed and prayed before venturing to take up
his pencils to touch the features of the saints and Saviours that shine
on his canvas. His conscientious fervor has its reward.

Across the room are the Murillos. Hung together are two pictures, not of
large dimensions, but of exquisite perfection, which will serve as fair
illustrations of the work of his youth and his age; the frio and the
vaporoso manner. In the former manner is this charming picture of
Rebecca at the Well; a graceful composition, correct and somewhat severe
drawing, the greatest sharpness and clearness of outline. In the
Martyrdom of St. Andrew the drawing and the composition are no less
absolutely perfect, but there hangs over the whole picture a luminous
haze of strangeness and mystery. A light that never was on sea or land
bathes the distant hills and battlements, touches the spears of the
legionaries, and shines in full glory on the ecstatic face of the aged
saint. It does not seem a part of the scene. You see the picture through
it. A step further on there is a Holy Family, which seems to me the
ultimate effort of the early manner. A Jewish carpenter holds his
fair-haired child between his knees. The urchin holds up a bird to
attract the attention of a little white dog on the floor. The mother, a
dark-haired peasant woman, looks on the scene with quiet amusement. The
picture is absolutely perfect in detail. It seems to be the _consigne_
among critics to say it lacks "style." They say it is a family scene in
Judaea, _voila tout._ Of course, and it is that very truth and nature
that makes this picture so fascinating. The Word was made flesh, and not
a phosphorescent apparition; and Murillo knew what he was about when he
painted this view of the interior of St. Joseph's shop. What absurd
presumption to accuse this great thinker of a deficiency of ideality, in
face of these two glorious Marys of the Conception that fill the room
with light and majesty! They hang side by side, so alike and yet so
distinct in character. One is a woman in knowledge and a goddess of
purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous
revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future.
It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The
face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The
Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at
her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions
of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the
Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no
man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power
that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the
passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of
Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and
color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion
and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for
the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect
Feminine,--

"Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and
Thee!"

There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable,
but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a
charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were
caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the
Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the
warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that
streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted
boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling
background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology
repeated by a miracle and mystery of art.

Even when you have exhausted the Murillos of the Museum you have not
reached his highest achievements in color and design. You will find
these in the Academy of San Fernando,--the Dream of the Roman Gentleman,
and the Founding of the Church of St. Mary the Greater; and the powerful
composition of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, in her hospital work. In the
first, a noble Roman and his wife have suddenly fallen asleep in their
chairs in an elegant apartment. Their slumber is painted with curious
felicity,--you lower your voice for fear of waking them. On the left of
the picture is their dream: the Virgin comes in a halo of golden clouds
and designates the spot where her church is to be built. In the next
picture the happy couple kneel before the pope and expose their high
commission, and outside a brilliant procession moves to the ceremony of
the laying of the corner-stone. The St. Elizabeth is a triumph of genius
over a most terribly repulsive subject. The wounds and sores of the
beggars are painted with unshrinking fidelity, but every vulgar detail
is redeemed by the beauty and majesty of the whole. I think in these
pictures of Murillo the last word of Spanish art was reached. There was
no further progress possible in life, even for him. "Other heights in
other lives, God willing."

Returning to the Museum and to Velazquez, we find ourselves in front of
his greatest historical work, the Surrender of Breda. This is probably
the most utterly unaffected historical painting in existence. There is
positively no stage business about it. On the right is the Spanish
staff, on the left the deputation of the vanquished Flemings. In the
centre the great Spinola accepts the keys of the city from the governor;
his attitude and face are full of dignity softened by generous and
affable grace. He lays his hand upon the shoulder of the Flemish
general, and you can see he is paying him some chivalrous compliment on
the gallant fight he has lost. If your eyes wander through the open
space between the two escorts, you see a wonderful widespread landscape
in the Netherlands, which would form a fine picture if the figures all
were gone. Opposite this great work is another which artists consider
greater,--Las Meninas. When Luca Giordano came from Italy he inquired
for this picture, and said on seeing it, "This is the theology of
painting." If our theology were what it should be, and cannot be,
absolute and unquestionable truth, Luca the Quick-worker would have been
right. Velazquez was painting the portrait of a stupid little infanta
when the idea came to him of perpetuating the scene just as it was. We
know how we have wished to be sure of the exact accessories of past
events. The modern rage for theatrical local color is an illustration of
this desire. The great artist, who must have honored his art, determined
to give to future ages an exact picture of one instant of his glorious
life. It is not too much to say he has done this. He stands before his
easel, his pencils in his hand. The little princess is stiffly posing in
the centre. Her little maids are grouped about her. Two hideous dwarfs
on the right are teasing a noble dog who is too drowsy and magnanimous
to growl. In the background at the end of a long gallery a gentleman is
opening a door to the garden. The presence of royalty is indicated by
the reflection of the faces of the king and queen in a small mirror,
where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this
marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely
the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It
does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is
a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could
walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the
portrait. There is space and light in this picture, as in any room.
Every object is detached, as in the common miracle of the stereoscope.
If art consist in making a fleeting moment immortal, if the True is a
higher ideal than the Beautiful, then it will be hard to find a greater
painting than this. It is utterly without beauty; its tone is a cold
olive green-gray; there is not one redeeming grace or charm about it
except the noble figure of Velazquez himself,--yet in its austere
fidelity to truth it stands incomparable in the world. It gained
Velazquez his greatest triumph. You see on his breast a sprawling red
cross, painted evidently by an unskilful hand. This was the gracious
answer made by Philip IV. when the artist asked him if anything was
wanting to the picture. This decoration, daubed by the royal hand, was
the accolade of the knighthood of Santiago,--an honor beyond the dreams
of an artist of that day. It may be considered the highest compliment
ever paid to a painter, except the one paid by Courbet to himself, when
he refused to be decorated by the Man of December.

Among Velazquez's most admirable studies of life is his picture of the
Borrachos. A group of rustic roysterers are admitting a neophyte into
the drunken _confrerie._ He kneels to receive a crown of ivy from the
hands of the king of the revel. A group of older tipplers are filling
their cups, or eyeing their brimming glasses, with tipsy, mock-serious
glances. There has never been a chapter written which so clearly shows
the drunkard's nature as this vulgar anacreontic. A thousand men have
painted drunken frolics, but never one with such distinct spiritual
insight as this. To me the finest product of Jordaens' genius is his
Bohnen Koenig in the Belvedere, but there you see only the incidents of
the mad revel; every one is shouting or singing or weeping with maudlin
glee or tears. But in this scene of the Borrachos there is nothing
scenic or forced. These topers have come together to drink, for the love
of the wine,--the fun is secondary. This wonderful reserve of Velazquez
is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a
young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than
bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the
plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary;
one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to
give them _Katzenjammer_ or remorse. The others are of the commoner type
of haunters of wine-shops,--with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled
matted hair,--but every man of them inexorably true, and a predestined
sot.

We must break away from Velazquez, passing by his marvellous portraits

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