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OUR EUROPEAN NEIGHBOURS
_French Life_
_German Life_
_Russian Life_
_Dutch Life_
_Swiss Life_
_Spanish Life_
_Italian Life_
_Danish Life_
_Austro-Hungarian Life_
_Turkish Life_
_Belgian Life_
_Swedish Life_
OUR EUROPEAN
NEIGHBOURS
EDITED BY
WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON
SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND
COUNTRY
[Illustration: "IN CHURCH." SHOWING THE MANTILLA AND VELO]
SPANISH LIFE
IN TOWN AND
COUNTRY
BY L. HIGGIN
WITH CHAPTERS ON
PORTUGUESE LIFE IN TOWN AND
COUNTRY, BY EUGÈNE E. STREET
* * * * *
ILLUSTRATED
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1904
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, May, 1902
Reprinted, February, 1903
May, 1904; September, 1904
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
NOTE BY THE EDITOR
It has been thought well to include Portugal in this volume, so as to
embrace the entire Iberian Peninsula. Though geographically contiguous,
and so closely associated in the popular mind, the Spanish and
Portuguese nations offer in fact the most striking divergences alike in
character and institutions, and separate treatment was essential in
justice to each country. The preferential attention given to Spain is
only in keeping with the more prominent part she has played, and may yet
play, in the history of civilisation.
* * * * *
I am indebted for the chapters on Portugal to Mr. Eugène E. Street,
whose long and intimate acquaintance with the land and its people
renders him peculiarly fitted to draw their picture.
L. HIGGIN.
CONTENTS
_SPANISH LIFE_
PAGE
CHAPTER I
LAND AND PEOPLE 1
CHAPTER II
TYPES AND TRAITS 24
CHAPTER III
NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS 38
CHAPTER IV
SPANISH SOCIETY 55
CHAPTER V
MODERN MADRID 77
CHAPTER VI
THE COURT 97
CHAPTER VII
POPULAR AMUSEMENTS 111
CHAPTER VIII
THE PRESS AND ITS LEADERS 129
CHAPTER IX
POLITICAL GOVERNMENT 142
CHAPTER X
COMMERCE AND AGRICULTURE 156
CHAPTER XI
THE ARMY AND NAVY 183
CHAPTER XII
RELIGIOUS LIFE 198
CHAPTER XIII
EDUCATION AND THE PRIESTHOOD 213
CHAPTER XIV
PHILANTHROPY--POSITION OF WOMEN--MARRIAGE CUSTOMS 226
CHAPTER XV
MUSIC, ART, AND THE DRAMA 236
CHAPTER XVI
MODERN LITERATURE 246
CHAPTER XVII
THE FUTURE OF SPAIN 260
_PORTUGUESE LIFE_
CHAPTER XVIII
LAND AND PEOPLE 277
CHAPTER XIX
PORTUGUESE INSTITUTIONS 298
INDEX 315
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"IN CHURCH." SHOWING THE MANTILLA AND VELO _Frontispiece_
PEASANTS 2
A CORNER IN OLD MADRID 8
SEVILLE CIGARRERA 20
PEASANTS 20
VALENCIANOS 26
THE WATER TRIBUNAL IN VALENCIA. SHOWING VALENCIAN COSTUMES 34
PAST WORK 50
KNIFE-GRINDER 50
OUTSIDE THE PLAZA DE TOROS, MADRID 78
BUEYES RESTING 94
IN THE WOODS AT LA GRANJA 104
PLAZA DE TOROS. PICADOR CAUGHT BY THE BULL 120
PLAZA DE TOROS. THE PROCESSION 124
DRAGGING OUT THE DEAD BULL 126
THE ESCURIAL 140
A WEDDING PARTY IN ESTREMADURA 170
A COUNTRY CABIN IN GALICIA 292
SPANISH LIFE IN TOWN AND COUNTRY
CHAPTER I
LAND AND PEOPLE
Only in comparatively late years has the Iberian Continent been added to
the happy hunting-grounds of the ordinary British and American tourist,
and somewhat of a check arose after the outbreak of the war with
America. To the other wonderful legends which gather round this romantic
country, and are spread abroad, unabashed and uncontradicted, was added
one more, to the effect that so strong a feeling existed on the part of
the populace against Americans, that it was unsafe for English-speaking
visitors to travel there. Nothing is farther from the truth; there is no
hatred of American or English, and, if there had been, they little know
the innate courtesy of the Spanish people, who fear insult that is not
due to the overbearing manners of the tourist himself.
To-day, however, everyone is going to Spain, and as the number of
travellers increases, so, perhaps, does the real ignorance of the
country and of her people become more apparent, for, after a few days,
or at most weeks, spent there, those who seem to imagine that they have
discovered Spain, as Columbus discovered America, deliver their judgment
upon her with all the audacity of ignorance, or, at best, with very
imperfect information and capacity for forming an opinion.
For many years, the foreign element in Spain was so small that all who
made their home in the country were known and easily counted, while
those who travelled were, for the most part, cultivated people--artists,
or lovers of art, or persons interested in some way in the commercial or
industrial progress of the nation. Even in those days, however, too many
tourists spent their time amongst the dead cities, remnants of Spain's
great past, and came back to add their quota to the sentimental notions
current about the romantic land sung by Byron. Wrapped in a glamour for
which their own enthusiasm was mainly responsible, they beheld all
things coloured with the rich glow of a resplendent sunset; their
descriptions of people and places raised expectations too often cruelly
dispelled by facts, as presented to those of less exuberant
imaginations.
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
On the other hand, the mere British traveller, knowing nothing of art,
almost nothing of history, and very little of anything beyond his own
provincial parish, finds all that is not the commonplace of his own
country, barbarous and utterly beneath contempt. His own manners, not
generally of the best, set all that is proud and dignified in the lowest
Spaniard in revolt; he imagines that he meets with discourtesy where, in
fact, he has gone out to seek it, and his own ignorance is chiefly to
blame for his failure to understand a people wholly unlike his own class
associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to
draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that
of the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not
exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that
visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay
in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another
question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain, or
from a more prolonged sojourn there, all the pleasure that may be
derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its
people intimately, love it dearly, a remembrance of its past history and
of its strange agglomeration of nationalities is absolutely necessary;
nor can any true idea be formed of the country from a mere acquaintance
with any one of its widely differing provinces. Galicia is, even to-day,
more nearly allied to Portugal than to Spain, and it was only in 1668
that the independence of the former was acknowledged, and it became a
separate kingdom.
With all rights now equalised, the inhabitants of the remaining
provinces of Spain differ as widely from one another as they do from the
sister kingdom, while the folklore of Asturias and of the Basque
Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the
Biscayan by the same standard as the Andaluz, is as sensible as it would
be to compare the Irish squatter with Cornish fisher-folk, or the
peasants of Wilts and Surrey with the Celtic races of the West Highlands
of Scotland, or even with the people of Lancashire or Yorkshire.
Nor is it possible to speak of Spain as a whole, and of what she is
likely to make of the present impulse towards national growth and
industrial prosperity, without remembering that her population counts,
among its rapidly increasing numbers, the far-seeing and business-like,
if somewhat selfish, Catalan, with a language of his own; the dreamy,
pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive language
is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other part of
Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting Aragonese, who
have always made their mark in the history of their country, and were
looked upon as a foreign element in the days when their kingdom and that
of Leon were united, under one crown, with Castile. It was only after
Alfonso XII. had stamped out the last Carlist war that the ancient
_fueros_, or special rights, of the Basque Provinces became a thing of
the past, and their people liable to conscription, on a par with all the
other parts of Spain.
Every student of history knows that the era of Spain's greatness was
that of _Los Reyes Católicos_, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of
Aragon, when the wonderful discovery and opening up of a new world made
her people dizzy with excitement, and seemed to promise steadily
increasing power and influence. Everyone knows that these dreams were
never realised; that, so far from remaining the greatest nation of the
Western World, Spain has gradually sunk back into a condition that
leaves her to-day outside of international politics; and that, with the
loss of her last colonies overseas, she appears to the superficial
observer to be a dead or dying nation, no longer of any account among
the peoples of Europe.
But this is no fact; it is rather the baseless fancy of incompetent
observers, to some extent acquiesced in, or at least not contradicted,
by the proud Castilian, who cares not at all about the opinions of other
nationalities, and who never takes the trouble to enlighten ignorance of
the kind. True, there was an exhibition of something like popular
indignation when the people fancied they discovered a reference to Spain
in the utterances of two leading English statesmen, during the war with
America, and the feeling of soreness against England still to some
extent exists; in fact, strange as it may appear, there is far less
anger against America, which deprived Spain of her colonies, than
against England, which looked on complacently, and with obvious sympathy
for the aggressor. But all this is past, or passing. The Spaniards are a
generous people, and no one forgets or forgives more easily or more
entirely. Those who knew Madrid in the days of Isabel II., would not have
imagined it possible that the Queen, who had been banished with so much
general rejoicing, could, under any circumstances, have received in the
capital a warm greeting; in fact, it was for long thought inexpedient to
allow her to risk a popular demonstration of quite another character.
But when she came to visit her son, after the restoration of Alfonso
XII., her sins, which were many, were forgiven her. It was, perhaps,
remembered that in her youth she had been more sinned against than
sinning; that she was _muy Española_, kind-hearted and gracious in
manner, pitiful and courteous to all. Hence, so long as she did not
remain, and did not in any way interfere in the government, the people
were ready to receive her with acclamation, and were probably really
glad to see her again without her _camarilla_, and with no power to
injure the new order of things.
No nation in the world is more innately democratic than Spain--none,
perhaps, so attached to monarchy; but one lesson has been learned,
probably alike by King and people--that absolutism is dead and buried
beyond recall. The ruler of Spain, to-day and in the future, must
represent the wishes of the people; and if at any time the two should
once more come into sharp collision, it is not the united people of this
once-divided country that would give way. For the rest, so long as the
monarch reigns constitutionally, and respects the rights and the desires
of his people, there is absolutely nothing to fear from pretender or
republican. At a recent political meeting in Madrid, for the first time,
were seen democrats, republicans, and monarchists united; amidst a
goodly quantity of somewhat "tall" talk, two notable remarks were
received with acclamation by all parties: one was that Italy had found
freedom, and had made herself into a united nationality, under a
constitutional monarch; and the other, that between the Government of
England and a republic there was no difference except in name--that in
all Europe there was no country so democratic or so absolutely free as
England under her King, nor one in which the people so entirely governed
themselves.
Among the many mistaken ideas which obtain currency in England with
regard to Spain, perhaps none is more common or more baseless than the
fiction about Don Carlos and his chances of success. A certain small
class of journalists from time to time write ridiculous articles in
English papers and magazines about what they are pleased to call the
"legitimatist" cause, and announce its coming triumph in the Peninsula.
No Spaniard takes the trouble to notice these remarkable productions of
the fertile journalistic brain of a foreigner. There are still, of
course, people calling themselves Carlists--notably the Duke of Madrid
and Don Jaime, but the cult, such as there is of it in Spain, is of the
"Platonic" order only,--to use the Spanish description of it, "a little
talk but no fight,"--and it may be classed with the vagaries of the
amiable people in England who amuse themselves by wearing a white rose,
and also call themselves "legitimatists," praying for the restoration of
the Stuarts.
The truth about the Carlist pretension is so little known in England
that it may be well to state it. Spain has never been a land of the
Salic Law; the story of her reigning queens--chief of all, Isabel la
Católica, shows this. It was not until the time of Philip V., the first
of the Bourbons, that this absolute monarch limited the succession to
heirs male by "pragmatic sanction"; that is to say, by his own
unsupported order. The Act in itself was irregular; it was never put
before the Cortes, and the Council of Castile protested against it at
the time.
[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD MADRID]
This Act, such as it was, was revoked by Charles IV.; but the revocation
was never published, the birth of sons making it immaterial. When,
however, his son Ferdinand VII. was near his end, leaving only two
daughters, he published his father's revocation of the Act of Philip V.,
and appointed his wife, Cristina, Regent during the minority of Isabel
II., then only three years of age.
At no time, then, in its history, has the Salic Law been in use in
Spain: the irregular act of a despotic King was repudiated both by his
grandson and his great-grandson. Nothing, therefore, can be more
ridiculous than the pretension of legitimacy on the part of a pretender
whose party simply attempts to make an illegal innovation, in defiance
of the legitimate kings and of the Council of Castile, a fundamental law
of the monarchy. Carlism, the party of the Church against the nation,
came into existence when, during the first years of Cristina's Regency,
Mendizábal, the patriotic merchant of Cadiz and London, then First
Minister of the Crown, carried out the dismemberment of the religious
orders, and the diversion of their enormous wealth to the use of the
nation. Don Carlos, the brother of Ferdinand VII., thereupon declared
himself the Defender of the Faith and the champion of the extreme
clerical party. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ_, and two Carlist wars!
The position of the Church, or rather what was called the "Apostolic
party," is intelligible enough, and it is easy also to understand why
Carlism has been preached as a crusade to English Roman Catholics, who
have been induced in both Carlist wars to provide the main part of the
funds which made them possible; but to call Don Carlos "the legitimate
King" is an absurd misnomer.
For the rest, as regards Spain herself and the wishes of her people, it
is perhaps enough to remark that if, after the expulsion of the Bourbons
in 1868, at the time of the Revolution known as "La Gloriosa," when Prim
had refused to think of a republic and declared himself once and always
in favour of a monarchy, and the Crown of proud Spain went a-begging
among the Courts of Europe,--if, at that time of her national need, Don
Carlos was unable to come forward in his celebrated character of
"legitimate Sovereign of the Spanish people," or to raise even two or
three voices in his favour, what chance is he likely to have with a
settled constitutional Government and the really legitimate Monarch on
the throne? The strongest chance he ever had of success was when the
Basque Provinces were at one time disposed, it is said almost to a man,
to take his side; but, in fact, the men of the mountain were fighting
much more for the retention of their own _fueros_--for their immunity
from conscription, among others--than for any love of Don Carlos
himself. They would have liked a king and a little kingdom all of their
own, and, above all, to have held their beloved rights against all the
rest of Spain.
All that, however, is over now. In all Spain no province has profited as
have those of the North by the settled advance of the country. Bilbao,
once a small trading town, twice devastated during the terrible civil
wars, has forged ahead in a manner perhaps only equalled by Liverpool in
the days of its first growth, and is now more important and more
populous than Barcelona itself; with its charming outlet of Portugalete,
it is the most flourishing of Spanish ports, and is able to compare with
any in Europe for its commerce and its rapid growth. Viscaya and
Asturias want no more civil war, and the Apostolic party may look in
vain for any more Carlist risings. More to be feared now are labour
troubles, or the contamination of foreign anarchist doctrines; but in
this case, the Church and the nation would be on the same side--that of
order and progress.
In attempting to understand the extremely complex character of the
Spaniard as we know him,--that is to say, the Castilian, or rather the
Madrileño,--one has to take into account not only the divers races which
go to make up the nationality as it is to-day, but something of the past
history of this strangely interesting people. To go back to the days
when Spain was a Roman province in a high state of civilisation: some of
the greatest Romans known to fame were Spaniards--Quintilian, Martial,
Lucan, and the two Senecas. Trajan was the first Spaniard named Emperor,
and the only one whose ashes were allowed to rest within the city walls;
but the Spanish freedman of Augustus, Gaius Julius Hyginus, had been
made the chief keeper of the Palatine Library, and Ballus, another
Spaniard, had reached the consulship, and had been accorded the honour
of a public triumph. Hadrian, again, was a Spaniard, and Marcus Aurelius
a son of Córdoba. No wonder that Spain is proud to remember that, of the
"eighty perfect golden years" which Gibbon declares to have been the
happiest epoch in mankind's history, no less than sixty were passed
beneath the sceptre of her Cæsars.
The conquered had become conquerors; the intermarriage of Roman soldiers
and settlers with Spanish women modified the original race; the Iberians
invaded the politics and the literature of their conquerors. St.
Augustine mourned the _odiosa cantio_ of Spanish children learning
Latin, but the language of Rome itself was altered by its Iberian
emperors and literati; the races, in fact, amalgamated, and the Spaniard
of to-day, to those who know him well, bears a strange resemblance to
the Roman citizens with whom the letters of the Younger Pliny so
charmingly make us familiar. The dismemberment of the Roman Empire left
Spain exposed to the inroads of the Northern barbarians, and led
indirectly to the subsequent Moorish inrush; for the Jews, harassed by a
severe penal code, hailed the Arabs as a kindred race; and with their
slaves made common cause with the conquering hordes.
The Goths seem to have been little more than armed settlers in the
country. Marriage between them and the Iberians was forbidden by their
laws, and the traces of their occupation are singularly few: not a
single inscription or book of Gothic origin remains, and it seems
doubtful if any trace of the language can be found in Castilian or any
of its dialects. It is strange, if this be true, that there should be so
strong a belief in the influence of Gothic blood in the race.
In all these wars and rumours of war the men of the hardy North remained
practically unconquered. The last to submit to the Roman, the first to
throw off the yoke of the Moor, the Basques and Asturians appear to be
the representatives of the old inhabitants of Spain, who never settled
down under the sway of the invader or acquiesced in foreign rule. Cicero
mentions a Spanish tongue which was unintelligible to the Romans; was
this Basque, which is equally so now to the rest of Spain, and which, if
you believe the modern Castilian, the devil himself has never been able
to master?
The history of Spain is one to make the heart ache. Some evil influence,
some malign destiny, seems ever to have brought disaster where her
people looked for progress or happiness. Her golden age was just in the
short epoch when Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon reigned and
ruled over the united kingdoms: both were patriotic, both clever, and
absolutely at one in their policy. It is almost impossible to us who can
look back on the long records, almost always sad and disastrous, not to
doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon," Cristobal
Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption which she
was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the successors of
her _muy Españoles y muy Católicos_ kings, a curse instead of a
blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in
political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes which
this opening up of a new world brought about. The sudden increase of
wealth without labour, of reward for mere adventure, slew in its infancy
any impulse there might have been to carry on the splendid manufactures
and enlightened agriculture of the Moors; trade became a disgrace, and
the fallacious idea that bringing gold and silver into a country could
make it rich and prosperous ate like a canker into the industrial heart
of the people, and with absolute certainty threw them backward in the
race of civilisation.
Charles V. was the first evil genius of Spain; thinking far more of his
German and Italian possessions than of the country of his mother, poor
mad Juana, he exhausted the resources of Spain in his endless wars
outside the country, and inaugurated her actual decline at a moment
when, to the unthinking, she was at the height of her glory. The
influence of the powerful nobility of the country had been completely
broken by Isabella and Ferdinand, and the device of adopting the
Burgundian fashion of keeping at the Court an immense crowd of nobles in
so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national vanity, while
it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been
useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II.
and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more and more effete
and more and more mad. The very doubtful "glory" of the reign of the
Catholic Kings in having driven out the Moors after eight centuries of
conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no advantage to the country; but
twenty thousand Christian captives were freed, and every reader of
history must, for the moment, sympathise with the people who effected
this freeing of their country from a foreign yoke.
Looking at the marvellous tracery of the church of San Juan de los Reyes
at Toledo, picked out by the actual chains broken off the miserable
Christian captives, and hanging there unrusted in the fine air and
sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart beats
in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic Kings. But
Toledo, alas! is dead; the centre of light and learning is mouldering in
the very slough of ignorance, and Christianity compares badly enough
with the rule of Arab and Jew.
Nevertheless, it must be said that, had matters been left as Isabella
and Ferdinand left them, Spain might have benefited by the example of
her conquerors, as other countries have done, and as she herself did
during the Roman occupation. Philip II. was too wise to expel the
richest and most industrious of his subjects so long as they paid his
taxes and, at least, professed to be Christians. It was not until the
reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the
most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera,
the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless
people were ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a
prolific garden,--even to-day it is called the _huerta_,--their silk
manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry
and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw
wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly
unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera,
the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the King their
expulsion.
The nobles and landowners protested in vain. September 22, 1609, is one
of the blackest--perhaps, in fact, the blackest--of all days in the
disastrous annals of Spain. The Marqués de Caracena, Viceroy of
Valencia, issued the terrible edict of expulsion. Six of the oldest and
"most Christian" Moriscos in each community of a hundred souls were to
remain to teach their modes of cultivation and their industries, and
only three days were allowed for the carrying out of this most wicked
and suicidal law. In the following six months one hundred and fifty
thousand Moors were hounded out of the land which their ancestors had
possessed and enriched for centuries. Murcia, Andalucia, Aragon,
Cataluña, Castile, La Mancha, and Estremadura were next taken in hand.
In these latter provinces the cruel blunder was all the worse, since the
Moors had intermarried with the Iberian inhabitants, and had really
embraced the Christian religion, so called.
Half a million souls, according to Father Bleda, in his _Defensio
Fidei_, were thrust out, with every aggravation of cruelty and robbery.
No nation can commit crimes like this without suffering more than its
victims. Spain has never to this day recovered from the blow to her own
prosperity, to her commerce, her manufactures, and her civilisation
dealt by the narrow-minded and ignorant King, led by a despicable
favourite, and the fanatical bigot, Ribera. With the Moors went almost
all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country became arid
wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every second year where
the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and Estremadura from a
smiling garden became a waste where wandering flocks of sheep and pigs
now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all. Science and learning were
also driven out with the Arab and Jew; Córdoba, like Toledo, vanished,
as the centre of intellectual life. In place of enlightened agriculture,
irrigation of the dry land, and the planting of trees, the peasant was
taught to take for his example San Isidro, the patron saint of the
labourer, who spent his days in prayer, and left his fields to plough
and sow themselves; the forests were cut down for fuel, until the
shadeless wastes became less and less productive, and the whole land on
the elevated plains, which the Moors had irrigated and planted, became
little better than a desert.
It was not only in the mother country that frightful acts of bigotry and
lust for wealth were enacted. In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid
civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order
which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from
fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been
surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples
where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God
"of whom nothing could be known save by His works," as their tenet ran,
and substituted the religion which they represented as having been
taught by Jesus of Nazareth; a religion which looked for its chief power
to the horrible Inquisition and its orgies called _Autos da fé!_
As regards the mysterious race of the Incas, who in comparison with the
native Indians were almost white, and who possessed a high cultivation,
it is curious to note that during the late troubles in China records
came to light in the Palace of Pekin showing that Chinese missionaries
landed on the coast subsequently known as Peru, in ages long antecedent
to the discovery of the country by the Spaniards, and established
temples and schools there. No one who reads the minute accounts of the
Incas from Garcilaso de la Vega--himself of the royal race on his
mother's side, his father having been one of the Spanish
adventurers--can avoid the conclusion that the religion of the Incas,
thus utterly destroyed by the Spaniards, was much more nearly that of
Christ than the debased worship introduced in its place. The whole story
of these "Children of the Sun," told by one of themselves afterwards in
Córdoba, where he is always careful to keep on the right side of the
Inquisition by pretending to be a "Christian after the manner of his
father," is fascinatingly interesting as well as instructive.
It is almost impossible to speak of the Spanish Inquisition and its
baneful influence on the people without seeming to be carried away by
prejudice or even bigotry, but it is equally impossible for the ordinary
student of history to read, even in the pages of the "orthodox," the
terrible repression of its iron hand on all that was advancing in the
nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they
dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one
dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native
land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain's decadence from the
moment she had handed herself over, bound hand and foot, to the Church.
Wondering, rather, at her enormous inherent vitality, which at last,
after so many centuries of spasmodic effort, has shaken off the incubus
and regained liberty, or for the first time established it in the realms
of religion, science, and general instruction.
It matters little or nothing whether the Inquisition, with its secret
spies, its closed doors, its mockery of justice, and its terrible
background of smouldering _Quemadero_, was the instrument of the Church
or of the King for the moment. Whether a religious or a political
tyranny, it was at all times opposed to the very essence of freedom, and
it was deliberately used, and would be again to-day if it were possible
to restore it, to keep the people in a gross state of ignorance and
superstition. That it was admirable as an organisation only shows it in
a more baneful light, since it was used to crush out all progress. Its
effect is well expressed in the old proverb: "Between the King and the
Inquisition we must not open our lips."
"I would rather think I had ascended from an ape," said Huxley, in his
celebrated answer to the Bishop of Oxford, "than that I had descended
from a man who used great gifts to darken reason." It has been the
object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power,
and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they
are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals, ready to amuse
themselves when their country was at its hour of greatest agony, debased
by the sight of wholesale and cruel murders carried out by the priests
of their religion in the name of Christ.
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
[Illustration: SEVILLE CIGARRERA]
Even to-day the Spaniard of the lower classes can scarcely understand
that he can have any part or parcel in the government of his country.
Long ages of misrule have made him hate all governments alike: he
imagines that all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience
are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that
it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his
head, and he votes, if he votes at all, as he is ordered to vote. He has
been taught for ages past to believe whatever he has been told. His
reason has been "offered as a sacrifice to God," if indeed he is aware
that he possesses any.
The danger of the thorough awakening may be that which broke out so
wildly during Castelar's short and disastrous attempt at a republic:
that when once he breaks away from the binding power of his old
religion, he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall
back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition
are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain
adapt itself to the new state of things, or will it see its people drift
away from its pale altogether, as other nations have done? This is the
true clerical question which looms darkly before the Spain of to-day.
To return, however. The Austrian kings of Spain had brought her only
ruin. With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was
only exchanging one form of misrule for another. The kings existed for
their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them
and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was ruled
by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the
disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen,
sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the
nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man
against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad
career. Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she
underwent the "Terror of 1824," the disastrous and unworthy regency of
Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before
she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming
as one, drove out the Queen, with her _camarilla_ of priests and
bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom.
For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history,
it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty.
There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly
wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made
extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the
country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his
reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened
Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected:
savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides;
vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and
skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as
if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his
time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their
wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the
dust. Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the
long story of misrule and misery; Mendizábal and Espartero scarcely did
more than lighten the black canopy of cloud overhanging the country for
a time; but at last came freedom, halting somewhat, as must needs be,
but no longer to be repressed or driven back by the baneful influence
known as _palaciö_, intrigues arising in the immediate circle of the
Court.