superstition have already given way in many places. A Protestant can not
only live in Spain, but, what was once a more important matter, he can
die and be buried there. This is one of the conquests of the revolution.
So delicate has been the susceptibility of the Spanish mind in regard to
the pollution of its soil by heretic corpses that even Charles I. of
England, when he came a-wooing to Spain, could hardly gain permission to
bury his page by night in the garden of the embassy; and in later days
the Prussian Minister was compelled to smuggle his dead child out of the
kingdom among his luggage to give it Christian burial. Even since the
days of September the clergy has fought manfully against giving
sepulture to Protestants; but Rivero, alcalde of Madrid and president of
the Cortes, was not inclined to waste time in dialectics, and sent a
police force to protect the heretic funerals and to arrest any priest
who disturbed them. There is freedom of speech and printing. The
humorous journals are full of blasphemous caricatures that would be
impossible out of a Catholic country, for superstition and blasphemy
always run in couples. It was the Duke de Guise, commanding the pope's
army at Civitella, who cried in his rage at a rain which favored Alva,
"God has turned Spaniard;" like Quashee, who burns his fetish when the
weather is foul. The liberal Spanish papers overflowed with wit at the
proclamation of infallibility. They announced that his holiness was now
going into the lottery business with brilliant prospects of success;
that he could now tell what Father Manterola had done with the thirty
thousand dollars' worth of bulls he sold last year and punctually
neglects to account for, and other levities of the sort, which seemed
greatly relished, and which would have burned the facetious author two
centuries before, and fined and imprisoned him before the fight at
Alcolea. The minister having charge of the public instruction has
promised to present a law for the prohibition of dogmatic doctrine in
the national schools. The law of civil registry and civil marriage,
after a desperate struggle in the Cortes, has gone into operation with
general assent. There is a large party which actively favors the entire
separation of the spiritual from the temporal power, making religion
voluntary, and free, and breaking its long concubinage with the crown.
The old superstition, it is true, still hangs like a malarial fog over
Spain. But it is invaded by flashes and rays of progress. It cannot
resist much longer the sunshine of this tolerant age.
Far up the mountain-side, in the shade of a cluster of chestnuts, is a
rude block of stone, called the "King's Chair," where Philip used to sit
in silent revery, watching as from an eyry the progress of the enormous
work below. If you go there, you will see the same scene upon which his
basilisk glance reposed,--in a changed world, the same unchanging
scene,--the stricken waste, the shaggy horror of the mountains, the
fixed plain wrinkled like a frozen sea, and in the centre of the perfect
picture the vast chill bulk of that granite pile, rising cold,
colorless, and stupendous, as if carved from an iceberg by the hand of
Northern gnomes. It is the palace of vanished royalty, the temple of a
religion which is dead. There are kings and priests still, and will be
for many coming years. But never again can a power exist which shall
rear to the glory of the sceptre and the cowl a monument like this. It
is a page of history deserving to be well pondered, for it never will be
repeated. The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama
has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders
of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no
more Escoriais. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth
more than the glory of princes. The better religion of the future has
no need of these massive dungeon-temples of superstition and fear. Yet
there is a store of precious teachings in this mass of stone. It is one
of the results of that mysterious law to which the genius of history has
subjected the caprices of kings, to the end that we might not be left
without a witness of the past for our warning and example,--the law
which induces a judged and sentenced dynasty to build for posterity some
monument of its power, which hastens and commemorates its ruin. By
virtue of this law we read on the plains of Egypt the pride and the fall
of the Pharaohs. Before the fagade of Versailles we see at a glance the
grandeur of the Capetian kings and the necessity of the Revolution. And
the most vivid picture of that fierce and gloomy religion of the
sixteenth century, compounded of a base alloy of worship for an absolute
king and a vengeful God, is to be found in this colossal hermitage in
the flinty heart of the mountains of Castile.
A MIRACLE PLAY
In the windy month of March a sudden gloom falls upon Madrid,--the
reaction after the _folie gaiete_ of the Carnival. The theatres are at
their gayest in February until Prince Carnival and his jolly train
assault the town, and convert the temples of the drama into ball-rooms.
They have not yet arrived at the wonderful expedition and despatch
observed in Paris, where a half hour is enough to convert the grand
opera into the masked ball. The invention of this process of flooring
the orchestra flush with the stage and making a vast dancing-hall out of
both is due to an ingenious courtier of the regency, bearing the great
name of De Bouillon, who got much credit and a pension by it. In Madrid
they take the afternoon leisurely to the transformation, and the
evening's performance is of course sacrificed. So the sock and buskin,
not being adapted to the cancan, yielded with February, and the theatres
were closed finally on Ash Wednesday.
Going by the pleasant little theatre of Lope de Rueda, in the Calle
Barquillo, I saw the office-doors open, the posters up, and an
unmistakable air of animation among the loungers who mark with a seal so
peculiar the entrance of places of amusement. Struck by this apparent
levity in the midst of the general mortification, I went over to look at
the bills and found the subject announced serious enough for the most
Lenten entertainment,--Los Siete Dolores de Maria,--The Seven Sorrows of
Mary,--the old mediaeval Miracle of the Life of the Saviour.
This was bringing suddenly home to me the fact that I was really in a
Catholic country. I had never thought of going to Ammergau, and so, when
reading of these shows, I had entertained no more hope of seeing one
than of assisting at an auto-da-fe or a witch-burning. I went to the
box-office to buy seats. But they were all sold. The forestallers had
swept the board. I was never able to determine whether I most pitied or
despised these pests of the theatre. Whenever a popular play is
presented, a dozen ragged and garlic-odorous vagabonds go early in the
day and buy as many of the best places as they can pay for. They hang
about the door of the theatre all day, and generally manage to dispose
of their purchases at an advance. But it happens very often that they
are disappointed; that the play does not draw, or that the evening
threatens rain, and the Spaniard is devoted to his hat. He would keep
out of a revolution if it rained. So that, at the pleasant hour when the
orchestra are giving the last tweak to the key of their fiddles, you may
see these woebegone wretches rushing distractedly from the Piamonte to
the Alcala, offering their tickets at a price which falls rapidly from
double to even, and tumbles headlong to half-price at the first note of
the opening overture. When I see the forestaller luxuriously basking at
the office-door in the warm sunshine, and scornfully refusing to treat
for less than twice the treasurer's figures, I feel a divided
indignation against the nuisance and the management that permits it. But
when in the evening I meet him haggard and feverish, hawking his unsold
places in desperate panic on the sidewalk, I cannot but remember that
probably a half dozen dirty and tawny descendants of Pelayo will eat no
beans to-morrow for those unfortunate tickets, and my wrath melts, and I
buy his crumpled papers, moist with the sweat of anxiety, and add a
slight propina, which I fear will be spent in aguardiente to calm his
shattered nerves.
This day the sky looked threatening, and my shabby hidalgo listened to
reason, and sold me my places at their price and a _petit verre._
As we entered in the evening the play had just begun. The scene was the
interior of the Temple at Jerusalem, rather well done,--two ranges of
superimposed porphyry columns with a good effect of oblique perspective,
which is very common in the Spanish theatres. St. Simeon, in a dress
suspiciously resembling that of the modern bishop, was talking with a
fiery young Hebrew who turns out to be Demas, the Penitent Thief, and
who is destined to play a very noticeable part in the evening's
entertainment. He has received some slight from the government
authorities and does not propose to submit to it. The aged and
cooler-blooded Simeon advises him to do nothing rash. Here at the very
outset is a most characteristic Spanish touch. You are expected to be
interested in Demas, and the only crime which could appeal to the
sympathies of a Castilian crowd would be one committed at the promptings
of injured dignity.
There is a soft, gentle strain of music played pianissimo by the
orchestra, and, surrounded by a chorus of mothers and maidens, the
Virgin Mother enters with the Divine Child in her arms. The Madonna is a
strapping young girl named Gutierrez, a very clever actress; and the
Child has been bought in the neighboring toy-shop, a most palpable and
cynical wax-doll. The doll is handed to Simeon, and the solemn ceremony
of the Presentation is performed to fine and thoughtful music. St.
Joseph has come in sheepishly by the flies with his inseparable staff
crowned with a garland of lilies, which remain miraculously fresh during
thirty years or so, and kneels at the altar, on the side opposite to
Miss Gutierrez.
As the music ceases, Simeon starts as from a trance and predicts in a
few rapid couplets the sufferings and the crucifixion of the child. Mary
falls overwhelmed into the arms of her attendants, and Simeon exclaims,
"Most blessed and most unfortunate among women! thy heart is to be
pierced with Seven Sorrows, and this is the first." Demas rushes in and
announces the massacre of the innocents, concluding with the appropriate
reflection, "Perish the kings! always the murderers of the people." This
sentiment is so much to the taste of the gamins of the paraiso that they
vociferously demand an encore; but the Roman soldiers come in and
commence the pleasing task of prodding the dolls in the arms of the
chorus.
The next act is the Flight into Egypt. The curtain rises on a rocky
ravine with a tinsel torrent in the background and a group of robbers on
the stage. Gestas, the impenitent thief, stands sulky and glum in a
corner, fingering his dagger as you might be sure he would, and
informing himself in a growling soliloquy that his heart is consumed
with envy and hate because he is not captain. The captain, one Issachar,
comes in, a superbly handsome young fellow, named Mario, to my thinking
the first comedian in Spain, dressed in a flashy suit of leopard hides,
and announces the arrival of a stranger. Enters Demas, who says he hates
the world and would fain drink its foul blood. He is made politely
welcome. No! he will be captain or nothing. Issachar laughs scornfully
and says _he_ is in the way of that modest aspiration. But Demas
speedily puts him out of the way with an Albacete knife, and becomes
captain, to the profound disgust of the impenitent Gestas, who exclaims,
just as the profane villains do nowadays on every well-conducted stage,
"Damnation! foiled again!"
The robbers pick up their idolized leader and pitch him into the tinsel
torrent. This is also extremely satisfactory to the wide-awake young
Arabs of the cock-loft. The bandits disperse, and Demas indulges in some
fifty lines of rhymed reflections, which are interrupted by the approach
of the Holy Family, hotly pursued by the soldiery of Herod. They stop
under a sycamore tree, which instantly, by very clever machinery, bends
down its spreading branches and miraculously hides them from the
bloodthirsty legionaries. These pass on, and Demas leads the saintly
trio by a secret pass over the torrent,--the Mother and Child mounted
upon an ass and St. Joseph trudging on behind with his lily-decked
staff, looking all as if they were on a short leave of absence from
Correggio's picture-frame.
Demas comes back, calls up his merrymen, and has a battle-royal with the
enraged legionaries, which puts the critics of the gallery into a frenzy
of delight and assures the success of the spectacle. The curtain falls
in a gust of applause, is stormed up again, Demas comes forward and
makes a neat speech, announcing the author. Que salga! roar the
gods,--"Trot him out!" A shabby young cripple hobbles to the front,
leaning upon a crutch, his sallow face flushed with a hectic glow of
pride and pleasure. He also makes a glib speech,--I have never seen a
Spaniard who could not,--disclaiming all credit for himself, but lauding
the sublimity of the acting and the perfection of the scene-painting,
and saying that the memory of this unmerited applause will be forever
engraved upon his humble heart.
Act third, the Lost Child, or Christ in the Temple. The scene is before
the Temple on a festival day, plenty of chorus-girls, music, and
flowers. Demas and the impenitent Gestas and Barabbas, who, I was
pleased to see, was after all a very good sort of fellow, with no more
malice than you or I, were down in the city on a sort of lark, their
leopard skins left in the mountains and their daggers hid under the
natty costume of the Judaean dandy of the period. Demas and Gestas have
a quarrel, in which Gestas is rather roughly handled, and goes off
growling like every villain, _qui se respecte,--_"I will have
r-revenge." Barabbas proposes to go around to the cider-cellars, but
Demas confides to him that he is enslaved by a dream of a child, who
said to him, "Follow me--to Paradise;" that he had come down to
Jerusalem to seek and find the mysterious infant of his vision. The
jovial Barabbas seems imperfectly impressed by these transcendental
fancies, and at this moment Mary comes in dressed like a Madonna of
Guido Reni, and soon after St. Joseph and his staff. They ask each other
where is the Child,--a scene of alarm and bustle, which ends by the door
of the Temple flying open and discovering, shrined in ineffable light,
Jesus teaching the doctors.
In the fourth act, Demas meets a beautiful woman by the city gate, in
the loose, graceful dress of the Hetairai, and the most wonderful
luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to
her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a
golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name,
La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the
scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre
that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that
formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed
upon a typical face and figure for the Saviour of men; it has been
repeated on myriads of canvases and reproduced in thousands of statues,
till there is scarcely a man living that does not have the same image of
the Redeemer in his mind. Well, that image walked quietly upon the
stage, so perfect in make-up that you longed for some error to break the
terrible vraisemblance. I was really relieved when the august appearance
spoke, and I recognized the voice of a young actor named Morales, a
clever light comedian of the Bressant type.
The Magdalene is soon converted by the preaching of the Nazarene
Prophet, and the scene closes by the triumphant entry into Jerusalem
amid the waving of palm-branches, the strewing of flowers, and "sonorous
metal blowing martial sounds." The pathetic and sublime lament,
"Jerusalem! Jerusalem! thou that killest the prophets!" was delivered
with great 'feeling and power.
The next act brings us before the judgment-seat of Pontius Pilate. This
act is almost solely horrible. The Magdalene in her garb of penitence
comes in to beg the release of Jesus of Nazareth. Pontius, who is
represented as a gallant old gentleman, says he can refuse nothing to a
lady. The prisoner is dragged in by two ferocious ruffians, who beat and
buffet him with absurd and exaggerated violence. There is nothing more
hideous than the awful concreteness of this show,--the naked
helplessness of the prisoner, his horrible, cringing, overdone humility,
the coarse kicking and cuffing of the deputy sheriffs. The Prophet is
stripped and scourged at the pillar until he drops from exhaustion. He
is dragged anew before Pilate and examined, but his only word is, "Thou
hast said." The scene lasts nearly an hour. The theatre was full of
sobbing women and children. At every fresh brutality I could hear the
weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk
of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. They
looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One
hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel
guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box,
with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly
shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, and fell
back fainting in the arms of her friends.
The Nazarene Prophet was condemned at last. Gestas gives evidence
against him, and also delivers Demas to the law, but is himself
denounced, and shares their sentence. The crowd howled with exultation,
and Pilate washed his hands in impotent rage and remorse. The curtain
came down leaving the uncultivated portion of the audience in the frame
of mind in which their ancestors a few centuries earlier would have gone
from the theatre determined to serve God and relieve their feelings by
killing the first Jew they could find. The diversion was all the better,
because safer, if they happened to the good luck of meeting a Hebrew
woman or child.
The Calle de Amargura--the Street of Bitterness--was the next scene.
First came a long procession of official Romans,--lictors and swordsmen,
and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demas appears, dragged
along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls
under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and
dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the
ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a
tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow from the Madonna, and a
most curious scene of the Wandering Jew. This worthy, who in defiance of
tradition is called Samuel, is sitting in his doorway watching the show,
when the suffering Christ begs permission to rest a moment on his
threshold. He says churlishly, Anda!--"Begone!" "I will go, but thou
shalt go forever until I come." The Jew's feet begin to twitch
convulsively, as if pulled from under him. He struggles for a moment,
and at last is carried off by his legs, which are moved like those of
the walking dolls with the Greek names. This odd tradition, so utterly
in contradiction with the picture the Scriptures give us of the meek
dignity with which the Redeemer forgave all personal injuries, has taken
a singular hold upon the imaginations of all peoples. Under varying
names,---Ahasuerus, Salathiel, le Juif Errant, der ewige Jude,--his
story is the delight and edification of many lands; and I have met some
worthy people who stoutly insisted that they had read it in the Bible.
The sinister procession moves on. The audience, which had been somewhat
cheered by the prompt and picturesque punishment inflicted upon the
inhospitable Samuel, was still further exhilarated by the spectacle of
the impenitent traitor Gestas, staggering under an enormous cross, his
eyes and teeth glaring with abject fear, with an athletic Roman haling
him up to Calvary with a new hempen halter.
A long intermission followed, devoted to putting babies to sleep,--for
there were hundreds of them, wide-eyed and strong-lunged,--to smoking
the hasty cigarette, to discussing the next combination of Prim or the
last scandal in the gay world. The carpenters were busy behind the
scenes building the mountain. When the curtain rose, it was worth
waiting for. It was an admirable scene. A genuine Spanish mountain,
great humpy undulations of rock and sand, gigantic cacti for all
vegetation, a lurid sky behind, but not over-colored. A group of Roman
soldiers in the foreground, in the rear the hill, and the executioners
busily employed in nailing the three victims to their crosses. Demas was
fastened first; then Gestas, who, when undressed for execution, was a
superb model of a youthful Hercules. But the third cross still lay on
the ground; the hammering and disputing and coming and going were
horribly lifelike and real.
At last the victim is securely nailed to the wood, and the cross is
slowly and clumsily lifted and falls with a shock into its socket. The
soldiers _huzza.,_ the fiend in the tin barrel and another in a tin hat
come down to the footlights and throw dice for the raiment. "Caramba!
curse my luck!" says our friend in the tin case, and the other walks off
with the vestment.
The Passion begins, and lasts an interminable time. The grouping is
admirable, every shifting of the crowd in the foreground produces a new
and finished picture, with always the same background of the three high
crosses and their agonizing burdens against that lurid sky. The
impenitent Gestas curses and dies; the penitent Demas believes and
receives eternal rest. The Holy Women come in and group themselves in
picturesque despair at the foot of the cross. The awful drama goes on
with no detail omitted,--the thirst the sponge dipped in vinegar, the
cry of desolation, the spear-thrust, the giving up of the ghost. The
stage-lights are lowered. A thick darkness--of crape--comes down over
the sky. Horror falls on the impious multitude, and the scene is
deserted save by the faithful.
The closing act opens with a fine effect of moon and stars. "Que linda
luna!" sighed a young woman beside me, drying her tears, comforted by
the beauty of the scene. The central cross is bathed in the full
splendor that is denied the others. Joseph of Abarimathea (as he is here
called) comes in with ladders and winding-sheets, and the dead Christ is
taken from the cross. The Descent is managed with singular skill and
genuine artistic feeling. The principal actor, who has been suspended
for an hour in a most painful and constrained posture, has a corpse-like
rigidity and numbness. There is one moment when you can almost imagine
yourself in Antwerp, looking at that sublimest work of Rubens. The
Entombment ends, and the last tableau is of the Mater Dolorosa in the
Solitude. I have rarely seen an effect so simple, and yet so
striking,--the darkened stage, the softened moonlight, the now Holy Rood
spectral and tall against the starry sky, and the Dolorous Mother, alone
in her sublime sorrow, as she will be worshipped and revered for coming
aeons.
A curious observation is made by all foreigners, of the absence of the
apostles from the drama. They appear from time to time, but merely as
supernumeraries. One would think that the character of Judas was
especially fitted for dramatic use. I spoke of this to a friend, and he
said that formerly the false apostle was introduced in the play, but
that the sight of him so fired the Spanish heart that not only his life,
but the success of the piece was endangered. This reminds one of Mr. A.
Ward's account of a high-handed outrage at "Utiky," where a young
gentleman of good family stove in the wax head of "Jewdas Iscarrit,"
characterizing him at the same time as a "pew-serlanimous cuss."
"To see these Mysteries in their glory," continued my friend, "you
should go into the small towns in the provinces, uncontaminated with
railroads or unbelief. There they last several days The stage is the
town, the Temple scene takes place in the church, the Judgment at the
city hall, and the procession of the Via Crucis moves through all the
principal streets. The leading roles are no joke,--carrying fifty kilos
of wood over the mud and cobble-stones for half a day. The Judas or
Gestas must be paid double for the kicks and cuffs he gets from
tender-hearted spectators,--the curses he accepts willingly as a tribute
to his dramatic ability. His proudest boast in the evening is Querian
matarme,--'They wanted to kill me!' I once saw the hero of the drama
stop before a wine-shop, sweating like rain, and positively swear by the
life of the Devil, he would not carry his gallows a step farther unless
he had a drink. They brought him a bottle of Valdepenas, and he drained
it before resuming his way to Golgotha. Some of us laughed
thoughtlessly, and narrowly escaped the knives of the orthodox ruffians
who followed the procession."