Part 4
Although the Spaniard has an enormous capacity for enjoyment, his popular pastimes are not numerous. Bull-fighting, as I shall explain, is meat and drink to him, and it is something more, because it is his horse-racing, cricket, football, and the prize-ring rolled into one. It is his National sport. Horse-racing is creeping into popularity; but although all Madrid attends the meetings at the Hippodrome, and ladies don their most gorgeous gowns to do honour to the sport, it is doubtful if it will imperil the strong position which the bulls hold in the affections of the people. After bull-fighting, the only other universal amusement is the guitar and the dance. The upper classes affect polo and tennis; in the Basque provinces Pelota rouses enthusiasm, and cock-fighting is still practised amongst the lower classes in most of the Spanish towns; but these must be classed in “side-shows” in the gallery of their general recreations.
A widespread and entirely erroneous impression prevails in this country that the Spanish national dances are indecent. People who entertain this notion may dispense with it as soon as possible. Londoners are frequently given the opportunity of witnessing Spanish dancing at the Alhambra by Otero, or Guerrero, or that even more splendid exponent of the art, Consuelo Tortajada. I was present one evening at London’s Alhambra, when the last-named was dancing the “Malagueña”--a variety to which the description “poetry of motion” may be applied with full justice--and a spectator remarked to me: “Very fine, very fine indeed, but you should see it danced in Madrid. You wouldn’t recognise it for the same thing.” And his look was more meaningful than his words. Although he was not aware of it, he had informed me that he had never been to Madrid, or at least had never witnessed the Andalucian dance on the stage of a theatre there; and I suspect that if I had displayed a craving for further information, I should have been assured that Spanish women generally are ladies of flexible ethics, who indulge in cigarettes. I believe that by paying for the edifying spectacle, certain gipsy dances of the Hindoo “nautch” variety can be witnessed in the gipsy quarter of Seville; but the Spaniard leaves these exhibitions to the English and American tourists, who call it “studying the life of the country,” or “gaining experience.” Those shows have no more connection with the national dances than has burglary with the marriage service. In the streets outside the cafes, and in the theatres, the dances of Spain are as irreproachable as a _pas de seul_ by Miss Topsy Sinden.
In the Spanish theatre, with the exception of the leading playhouses in the larger cities, the two, and even more shows a night system is an ancient and universal practice. The pieces are short, and the charges for admission are not based on the idea of so much a seat, but so much a piece. Each item costs the spectator fivepence, and the audience is constantly being changed and renewed during the evening. Variety is the spice of the entertainment; and in the provincial towns, where the theatres are always well patronised, a constant change of bill is maintained. Madrid alone supports no less than nineteen theatres; and Madrid, let it be remembered, is a city with under half-a-million inhabitants. At the same rate, London would have over two hundred.
If one could extend the list of amusements without fear of being thought irreverent, I should be inclined to include the saints’ festivals in this category. Although these religious observances are conducted with sincere devotional decorum, they provide, as they do in all Roman Catholic countries, the excuse for, as well as the main feature of, a general holiday. I have seen many festival crowds in Spain, and the good humour, the innocent happiness and universal sobriety that characterise them, is to an Englishman acquainted with English holiday-makers, as novel as it is delightful. The festival of San Isidro del Campo, the tutelary saint of Madrid, is the principal festival of the Madrilenian year, and is religiously celebrated by all the lower classes and the peasants
who come from the neighbouring villages. It takes place on May 15th, and provides the most genuine bit of local colour that is to be witnessed outside Toledo. The great concourse sets out early; and crossing the Manzanares, follows a road which is lined with men and women offering their “agua fresca” (cold water) from large jugs. Water, it may be noted, is the staple beverage of all Spanish fairs and festivals. On the other side of the river--in May, the Manzanares belies the description--the miscellaneous vehicles (some drawn by as many as six mules) discharge their crowded freights, and soon the country is like an ant-hill, except that ants are usually in mourning, and do not wear such bright colours as the peasant women and the soldiers who form so large a portion of the crowd. There are innumerable booths for eating and drinking, and other common features of folk festivals. More unique are the family groups scattered everywhere, eating their slices of cold meat, salad, red pepper and oranges. Many have their wine in the same old pig-skins of which one reads in _Don Quixote_. At every hundred yards there is some sort of primitive music, to the rhythm of which the young men and young women dance with an expression of delighted absorption. Indeed the whole crowd wear a look of indifference to the past and future, and a determination to make the most of the passing moment. Away up the hill are long rows of booths with pottery, toys for children and cakes, and further up still is the saint’s chapel, into which all the people crowd in turn to kiss a silver image held by the priest, to receive a printed picture of the saint, and to drop a copper. But that wonderful crowd, whether at dance, or meat, or its devotion, contained the greatest number of happy faces I have ever seen together in my life.
El Escorial.
Another of the Spanish royal residences, of which no other European country can boast so many, is, to give the edifice its correct title: “El Real sitio de San Lorenzo el Real del Escorial,” which is situated some twenty-five miles from Madrid. The ancient glory of _El Escorial_, its revenues, its monks and its magnificence, are vanished, but the activity and importance of the district have been revived by virtue of the wonderful copper mines which lie almost under the shadow of the mighty walls of the historical building. The immediate vicinity of the Escorial is extremely beautiful. Close at hand rises a mountain range, highly picturesque in form and outline, and of a colouring singularly rich and varied, while many of the upland slopes are clothed with thickets and bushy patches of copse-wood, their varied tints thrown into bright relief by the dark grey rocks cropping out here and there along the face of the mountain. Immediately below lies the park with its dark foliage of ibex, while to the east lies a tiny lake, which glistens under the early sunbeams.
The Escorial, which has been pronounced to be the “eighth wonder of the world,” owed its existence to Philip II. and the celebrated architects, Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, and is at once a palace, a monastery and the pantheon of the monarchs of Spain. Formerly, it was known as the Royal Monastery of St. Lawrence, and it was raised in commemoration of the battle of St. Quentin, when the Spanish army routed the French on the festival day of the martyr, St. Lawrence. Philip II., or the architect, or both, are commonly believed to have designedly planned the outline of the building in the shape of a gridiron, out of respect for the butchered saint, whose martyrdom on one of those utensils is a matter of history. Probably, however, chance rather than design is responsible for the exact plan; though there can be no doubt, looking down at the Escorial from the top of the neighbouring mountains, that the simile is justifiable. A desire to protect majesty from the keen winds and to obtain for majesty’s apartments the bulk of the sunshine in the neighbourhood, perhaps helped to make the Escorial what it is, architecturally speaking.
Before the French invasion, the church teemed with treasures of art--sacred vessels of gold and silver--a multitude of shrines--reliquaires--and a tabernacle of such exquisite workmanship, that it was wont to be spoken of as worthy to be one of the ornaments of the celestial altar. All these were destroyed by La Houssage’s troopers when they occupied the Escorial in 1808, by way of giving vent to their national feeling respecting the battle of St. Quentin, two-and-a-half centuries before. The Escorial sustained a still greater loss in 1837, during the Carlist war, when about a hundred of the choicest paintings were removed, for safety’s sake, to the Museo at Madrid.
The exploration of the Escorial is a formidable undertaking, comprising as it does the inspection of a palace, a convent, two
colleges, three chapter-houses and three libraries, with their concomitant complement of halls, dormitories, refectories and infirmaries. There are no fewer than eighty-six staircases; and someone, gifted with a turn for statistics, has calculated that to visit every individual room and to traverse each staircase and corridor, would occupy four entire days, and carry the adventurer over a distance of about a hundred and twenty English miles. The square of the building covers 500,000 feet; there are eighty-eight fountains, fifteen cloisters, sixteen courtyards, and 3,000 feet of painted fresco.
Twenty-one years were occupied in its construction, but a century did not suffice to collect the wonderful literary treasures which it now contains. One of the most famous MSS. in the Escorial library is the “Libro de Oro,” the letters of which are composed of eight kilogrammes (18 lbs.) of gold leaf. These letters, which are of course very thin, are attached to parchment. Forty-two richly-decorated altars are to be seen in the interior of the palace church, but more wonderful in their way than the altars are the service books for the use of the choir. It is said that each leaf of each book was made from an entire calf-skin, 17,000 skins being used in the process.
Beneath the church is the burial place of the kings of Spain; the one spot, one would imagine, where etiquette would not rule; but where, in reality, it is most rigorously observed; for right royal dust must not mingle with the dust of princes, and a separate pantheon was for this cause built for those sons of kings who had not actually worn the purple. Apart from its treasures and its curiosities, there is one quarter of the Escorial which is of particular interest to English-speaking peoples. In three small rooms, as bare as the cell of the anchorite, dwelt the husband of Queen Mary of England, that monkish and forbidding sovereign at whose command the myriad ships of the Invincible Armada were hurled against England. His ambition was to make England the appanage of Spain; all he obtained were a few English elms which still flourish in the palace gardens.
Yet another Royal Palace, occupying an extensive valley, surrounded by hills, is situated at Aranjuez, in the extreme south of the province of Madrid, on the left bank of the full-flowing river Tajo. In the town of Aranjuez there are splendid farms, palaces and hotels, wide thoroughfares, good churches, theatre, hospital, barracks, very beautiful promenades, and all the other adjuncts of a model town. All these, however, are surpassed by the beauty of the gardens and parks which, with the Royal Palace, are the property of the Crown. The illustration shows the side of the Royal dwelling which opens on to what are called the Island gardens, on account of their being surrounded by the waters of the river Tajo. The first thing that strikes one is the monumental fountain which deals with the allegory of the Pillars of Hercules, and was designed by the Italian sculptor, Alexander Algardi. The building, which was commenced in 1561 by Philip II. and continued by all the Bourbon kings, is elegantly proportioned, and is surrounded by delicious gardens, luxurious avenues of trees, picturesque woods, and large lakes.
Barcelona.
Don Quixote was a true lover of Barcelona, which he addressed as “the home of courtesy, refuge for strangers, country of the valiant.” Its history is replete with records of its valour; its everyday life is illumined with a grave courtesy; the stranger within its gates is welcomed with a cordiality in which suspicion has no part. The Catalan is afraid of nobody on this earth; he has no use, as the Americans put it, for suspicion. He is a distinct race in costume, habits, and language; combining the grace and charm of the Spanish manner, with the mental vitality of the French, and the commercial enterprise and integrity of the English. Physically he is strong, sinewy, and active; and his dogged perseverance, his enormous powers of endurance, and his patience under privation and fatigue make him as fine a soldier as the world has seen. The Catalans take what our grandmothers used to call a proper pride in themselves. The hauteur of the proud Castilians is not theirs; they regard the poetic language and indolent gaiety of the Andalucians without envy; they know themselves to be the most serious, industrious, and progressive people in the Peninsula; they are Spaniards, but Spaniards, be it understood, of Catalonia.
This feeling is not of course peculiar to the Catalans. Spanish character, and the special localism that forms one of its most distinctive features, has changed but little since Richard Ford, writing more than half-a-century ago, said: “The inhabitants of the different provinces think, indeed, that Madrid
is the greatest and richest court in the world, but their hearts are in their native localities. ‘Mi paisano,’ my fellow-countryman, or rather my fellow-countyman, fellow-parishioner, does not mean Spaniard, but Andalucian, Catalonian as the case may be. When a Spaniard is asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ the reply is, ‘_Soy hijo de Murcia--hijo de Granada_’--‘I am a son of Murcia--a son of Granada,’ &c.” This is strictly analogous to the “children of Israel,” the “Bene” of the Spanish Moors, and to this day the Arabs of Cairo call themselves _children_ of that town; and just as the Milesian Irishman is a “boy from Tipperary,” &c., and ready to fight with anyone who is so also, against all who are not of that ilk: similar, too, is the clanship of the highlander: indeed, everywhere, not perhaps to the same extent as in Spain, the being of the same province or town creates a powerful freemasonry: the parties cling together like old school-fellows. It is a _home_, and really binding feeling. To the spot of their birth, all their recollections, comparisons, and eulogies are turned: nothing, to them, comes up to their particular province; that is their real country. “_La Patria_,” means Spain at large, is a subject of declamation, fine words, _palabras_--palaver, in which all, like Orientals, delight to indulge, and to which their grandiloquent idioms lends itself readily: but their patriotism is still largely parochial, and self is the centre of Spanish gravity.
And so it happens that if the Catalan has scant liking for the romantic, pleasure-loving, guitar-thrumming Andalucian, the Andalucian, on the other hand, regards the Catalan as a hard, pedantic and unpoetic mechanic. As a matter of fact, he is straightforward without being hard, grave without pedantry, hospitable without ostentation; and, like all Spaniards, he is a poet. Poetry, as a national characteristic, is an accident of climate. Here is Barcelona, the Manchester of Spain, a hive of manufacturing industry, rejoicing in one of the most lovely sites in Europe, possessed of a climate equal to that of Naples, and with its beauty untarnished by the hand of time, or the artificer. Such an atmosphere, such skies, such stars make a people poets against their wills. I do not imply a charge against the Spaniards that they write poetry--that is an entirely different thing. They may--they do, happily, for the most part--die with all their poetry in them; but they are none the less poets; and indeed they are, as Oscar Wilde argued, the better poets on that account. For the Spanish temperament rises superior to the temptations of environment. If it were my good fortune to live perpetually beneath that star-spangled sky, I believe I could not resist the impulse to write verse. If for no other reason than for this alone I doff my beaver to the unversifying Catalan.
There is, however, another characteristic which accounts for their prosperity, and excuses the tone of superiority they adopt towards the people of the neighbouring provinces--they are not afraid of work. Since the thirteenth century, when the Catalans led the way to the whole world in maritime conquest and jurisprudence, they have never thought trade to be a degradation, but rather have ennobled it by their honesty and enterprise. The Spanish race generally has lacked the trading spirit. An intelligent American writer, who has studied the causes which have brought Spain down from her ancient eminence in the affairs of Europe, finds them in a position different from that which is generally supposed. “Pride, a weak monarch, a dissolute court, religious intolerance--all these,” says our transpontine critic, “are admirable starting points from which to prove a nation’s decline. But Spain has been by no means unique in the possession of these requisites. A close examination of intrigue, and counter-intrigue, and plot at the capital reveals a condition different from that of some other countries only in being a little later in occurrence. In
fact, all these are mere effects; the cause is the absence of that which has developed the great nations of the earth, the cause on which civilisation rests, the great primitive developing agency--the trading spirit. For seven centuries she was a battlefield. During that time, while she was keeping the Mohammedan wolf from the door of Europe, there was no chance for the development of the trading spirit. What growth came in a measure to some of the coast cities was the result of local commercial relations finding an extension and expansion between nation and nation. The spirit of getting by the good right arm grew, and produced its tradition; while the precarious cultivation of land for food, an occupation ever more and more removed from the leaders, became the work of an ignorant and unrespected class.
“With the absence of trade goes the absence of knowledge of the outside world; and though a certain general knowledge was brought back by the Europe-conquering soldiers of Charles and Philip, it was a knowledge of how easily gain could be made in the old way, rather than a stimulus to the merchant.
“Without the logical traditions of buying and selling, raised up through generations, Spain could hardly avoid the errors of government which the want of such traditions bring. She could scarcely hope not to become the victim of each and every scheme for a financial millennium, as a nation, which we are all accustomed to smile at when played in the more self-evident form of personal charlatanry. And, most of all, the dignity of work has been lost. The Spanish labourer pitied himself--and was pitied.
“Up to the beginning of the Cuban war, however, a better condition had been developing. Education, and a knowledge of the outside world, were bringing home to this nation that to be the proudest man in the world it is well to have a basis for that pride in tangible rather than traditional things; and of so excellent a nature have I found the Spaniard when one knows him, that I cannot help believing in his ultimate development.
“But few, I know, cross the threshold of the Spanish house to find how good a man at heart the owner is. He is proud, it is true, and does not much favour the stranger; but it is the pride of a reserved nature, not of a weak one.”
There is indeed much truth to be found in this view of the situation. Spain has never been a great _commercial_ nation; she
is, in fact, only now entering for the first time the commercial arena. No nation in Europe commenced her career on a trade basis. Conquest in the early ages was the only acknowledged industry; and the empires of Carthage, Phœnicia, Rome, Spain, and Great Britain all rose to greatness by the right of might. England was a young nation when Spain commenced to decline after centuries of conquest and supremacy, and England was ripe to receive the impression of the value of commerce as a maker and sustainer of kingdoms. Germany did not become a great power until the supremacy of trade was universally acknowledged; America was cradled in a counting house, and brought up in the atmosphere of profit and loss.
Barcelona, of all the cities of Spain, has never been blind to the advantages of commerce; and to-day, the city, in its bustling activity, its red-hot life, its ceaseless movement and sense of prosperity resembles all the great commercial cities of the world--London, New York, Melbourne, Liverpool, and Chicago. But in one respect it more nearly approaches London in the resemblance, by reason of an ill-favoured side of approach. I have often met at Tilbury or Liverpool--but Tilbury especially--friends who have been on their first visit to our Metropolis, and I have begged them, as a personal favour, not to form any opinion of the city from the railway-carriage windows. The squalor and dreariness of the eastern approach to London is only mildly reproduced by the southern environs of Barcelona. Indeed, when one makes one’s first acquaintance with it, it is difficult to believe that it is the boastedly first city of Spain. Yet the boast is not unjustified in so far, at least, as the concerns of every-day life, polity and progress are concerned. When once the visitor is within the circle of her brighter ways, he will look in vain for any of the smudginess whose kingdom and on-coming have been heralded by smudge; he will speedily recognise the fact that here is rolling by him a greater volume of trade than in all the other great centres of Spanish commercial life put together. Everywhere in Barcelona there is apparent the lively, virile animation, bred of a prosperous and forceful existence; and it is this which constitutes one of the great charms of the place. In no town-ways of Spain, not even in those of Seville, is the visitor so well rewarded as in Barcelona.