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.