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.