SEVILLE.
DON MIGUEL DE MANARA, a Spanish rake, one of many like the Don Juan who
stands as type of his race, having spent his life in the way rakes love
to live, undertook to be religious in his later years. He had sowed his
wild oats, and never got much of a crop, and now that death was likely
to call for him soon, he thought to get ready for his coming by making
over to some pious uses what he had not spent upon his lusts. According
to the theory of that church which takes care of all Spanish souls, he
made a sure thing of it by founding a hospital, to which was given the
name of “LA CARIDAD.” A brotherhood, whose special vocation was to
minister to persons sentenced to death, and to bury their bodies, took
charge of it. It is famous far beyond Seville and Spain. Its patients
are tended by young men of good families in the city, who minister by
turns to the sick and dying brought to this CHARITY. Perhaps some of the
young gentlemen nurses, like the founder, have an eye to a compromise of
their own infirmities, by giving attention to these miserably sick poor.
But the fame of the hospital is so great because it has within its walls
some of the noblest paintings in the world!
The building stands in an obscure part of the town, and we had a long
search to find it, Antanazio, our guide, being quite unused to take his
travellers to hospitals and out-of-the-way churches, as theatres and
bull-fights and fandangoes among the gypsies are much more attractive.
But we found it; an old woman janitor let us in, and led us to the
chapel where the art-treasures are to be seen.
This church is the guardian of the masterpieces of MURILLO. His manner
is as distinctly marked as Raphael’s or Titian’s, and the power of none
of the Italian masters, unless we except Leonardo da Vinci, is greater
than his. It was difficult to believe this in Italy, where Murillos are
comparatively rare, but here, where alone his greatest and best works
are to be found, it is easy to believe that he is among the first.
Several of his pictures in this church are of St. John, and in one of
them an angel assists the saint in carrying a sick man, and in another
the same saint washes the feet of a pauper. The Miracle of the Loaves
and Fishes is a wonderfully faithful presentation of that sublime scene.
But the great picture, the one we specially came to see, is “Moses
striking the Rock in the Desert.” Its eloquence tells and pleads its own
story: a famished multitude pressing to the gushing stream and gathering
the precious waters in their hands; mothers drinking, while their
children, with parched lips, are pleading for the life-saving draught;
even the beasts declare their joy at the sight of water, and gratitude
lights up the faces of the thronging Israelites. But the central,
majestic figure in the group, on which the painter’s high art is
lavished with a wealth of skill, is Moses, with folded hands and
upturned eyes, acknowledging the goodness and the power which this
miracle, almost as wondrous to him as to his people, has so suddenly
revealed. Near him is his brother Aaron, scarcely less than Moses in the
scene, for he, priest-like, is still in the act of prayer. And in the
people every form and feature of human life and feeling are portrayed,
each after its own kind, with the hand of a master.
There are several pictures here by others, as well as other Murillos,
that I have not space to mention. Marshal Soult carried off five of the
great pictures by Murillo, and two of them, “Abraham entertaining the
Angels,” and the “Prodigal Son,” were bought by the Duke of Sutherland.
Wellington recovered, at Waterloo, some of Soult’s spoils of the
galleries of Spain. The French are great thieves when they get among
pictures or statuary. They once had the Venus de Medicis boxed and ready
for Paris. War is pretty much the same game all the world over, and
always.
The picture-gallery of Seville was saved from French spoliation by the
forethought of a Spanish amateur, who sent all the paintings to
Gibraltar before the French reached Seville. We found, to our
disappointment, that the museum was closed for repairs, and a special
order from the governor was necessary. Instead of sending the order, he
promised to send us a guide to conduct us through the gallery the next
day. An hour after the time he came, and the only service he came to
perform was to lead us to the door of the museum, which was close to our
lodgings, and then to receive his fees for this needless service. That
was very Spanish. The porter then admitted us and received his fees.
Another led us across the court into the hall where the pictures were
standing along the walls, unhung, and he received his fees. When the
convents in Spain were suppressed, the best pictures among them were
gathered into this museum. Murillo painted some of his finest works for
the Capuchin convent, which stood near the Cordova gate. One of the
sweetest and most perfect of paintings is that of the two saints of
Seville, the maidens Justa and Rufina, who held up the giralda, or tower
of the cathedral, when it was likely to be blown down in a tempest. In
the days of Pagan Spain a procession was passing through the streets
bearing an image of VENUS, to which the people made homage. Two young
women, lately converted to the Christian religion, by name Justa and
Rufina, refused to worship the idol, and the multitude in their madness
made martyrs of them on the spot. When the Christians became masters of
the city, the maidens became its tutelar saints, and are painted as
holding the giralda in their hands, in honor of their kind interposition
in a storm.
Here is Murillo’s first and last page of the gospel,—the Annunciation is
the first page, with the beauty and joyful hope of the motherhood of him
who is the desire of all nations; the last page is the Mother of Jesus
weeping over the death of him who was to have redeemed Israel. The St.
Thomas giving alms, by Murillo, has been praised by the best critics as
not excelled by any of his works. Wilkie placed it among the finest.
It is a question often asked, and never answered, Why can we not have
these pictures, or such as these, in the Western World? Few of the many
who would enjoy and appreciate them ever can come to Spain or Italy, and
must they live and die without the sight of all these glorious works of
art? It would be an easy matter to have copies made of the most
celebrated and magnificent pictures, and transported to New York, into a
national gallery. Copies may be made so as to challenge comparison with
the original, and to give a fair idea of the distinctive manner of each
of the artists. It does not require the same genius to make a perfect
copy that it does to conceive and give birth to the original. And there
are no living artists, and have been none in the last three hundred
years, to paint character, soul, thought, feeling, as those men did whom
we call the Old Masters. We have as great painters now as they. But not
in their line of things. England and France and America have had, and
now have, artists whose works could not have been produced by Da Vinci,
Giotto, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Carlo Dolce, or Murillo. But
there is no one alive now to paint the Last Supper, the Judgment, the
Transfiguration, the Charles V. on horseback, or the Smitten Rock,
comparable with those majestic transcripts of sentiment which stand up
in the world of art among man’s works, as Niagara and Mont Blanc are
sublime among the works of God.
After writing the account of the bull-fight in a former chapter, it
occurred to me that you might ask whether I went to see the _sport_
myself, or relied altogether on the descriptions of the ladies and
others. That is a fair question, and I am therefore obliged to say that
I did not; that I have never seen a bull-fight. Three reasons prevented
me from going. First, they are usually to be seen only on Sunday, and I
never go to places of amusement on that day, at home or abroad.
Secondly, I have no taste for sights of blood, and would rather go the
other way than into the bull-ring at any time. And thirdly and lastly,
in the way of reasons for not going, there was not a bull-fight while I
was there! It was and is yet the winter season, when the weather is cool
compared with spring and summer, and the bulls do not fight well except
when the weather is hot. The “season,” which is even more distinctly
marked than that of opera in Paris or New York, begins the first Sunday
after Lent, and a performance takes place every Sunday afterwards, if
the weather permits, till the height of summer suspends it for a few
weeks when the heat is excessive. It is resumed from the latter part of
August until the first of October. Then the fall and winter are made
dull by its absence, and the Spaniards long for the return of hot
weather and the beasts.
There is a great deal of exaggeration in the descriptions given by those
who enjoy the sport. The horses selected for the sacrifice are miserable
jades, that are fit for nothing else but to be killed, and the bulls are
rarely so fierce as to be dangerous, unless goaded or provoked into
phrensy by the tricks of the combatants. The men who go into the fight
are all hired butchers or fighters, who are paid regular salaries, like
actors in a theatre, and they make a business of it. And so universal is
the rage of the people to see this, the national sport and pastime, that
the ring must furnish seats for ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand people,
and the price of admission for such a multitude readily supplies the
means to meet the great expenses of the entertainment.
One of the most curious facts developed by the bull-fight is the
fondness that women have for such scenes. It is no fiction that ladies,
whose refinement cannot be called in question, are in raptures when the
fight is the most savage and bloody. It always was so. In the
amphitheatres of Italy, when martyr Christians were compelled to fight
with wild beasts, the fairest and proudest of women were among the
spectators, who looked on with delight when their fellow-creatures were
torn limb from limb. I have often heard it said, here and elsewhere,
that women are more fond of these bloody spectacles than men are. We
know they are more sympathetic with suffering, and in the hospital and
chamber of sickness and anguish, they minister with a long-suffering
patience and fortitude from which the sterner stuff that men are
supposed to be made of revolts at once, or soon shrinks worn out, “used
up,” as we say.
What is the effect of these scenes of blood and butchery on the national
character? In the streets the boys play bull-fight: one holds up a red
handkerchief and shakes it in the face of another boy, who makes a lunge
at him with his head, and then pursues him, and another sets off after
_him_, and so the bull-ring is enacted in the highway. As all the large
towns have bull-rings, and the poorest classes of people manage to get
money enough to see the show, and the country boy can give his girl no
greater treat than to take her to a bull-fight, the thing is in the
widest sense national, and its influence reaches down to the lowest
ranks, while it is the pet of the nobility and gentry. And its effect
must be degrading, brutifying, and demoralizing. If there were any thing
in the Spanish character to work upon, for good or evil, the influence
of such a decided national pastime would be more distinctly pronounced.
But the senseless _pride_ of the Spaniard,—pride with nothing to be
proud of; pride with idleness, ignorance, and poverty; pride of the
meanest and most contemptible sort,—is the warp and woof of Spanish
character, and there is hardly any thing more in them than there would
be in a nation of peacocks.
When you have excepted the vice of intoxication, and a great exception
it is, you have said all that can be said in favor of the moral habits
of the Spanish people. They do not steal from one another, that I know
of, any more than other people do. But they certainly commit murders
more frequently than other nations do, unless the slayer is maddened by
drink. In estimating the comparative morality of peoples, this matter of
intemperance holds the balance. It is the prolific parent of the greater
part of the crimes of a people where it is the prevailing vice, yet very
few moralists are disposed to reckon it the crime of crimes. In Spain
the women are said to be almost universally corrupt. As a matter of
course, the men must be just as bad. I have been assured here in
Granada, by those who ought to know, having long resided here and become
thoroughly acquainted with the state of things, that there is no social
morality among men and women in Spain: that from the highest to the
lowest they have all gone out of the way, and that they are known—the
women are—as divided into four classes, with different degrees of
refinement in vice, but all four classes lost to virtue and without
conscience of sin. It is quite probable that such a statement is to be
taken with many grains of allowance. But making all deductions that
one’s good nature demands, there still remains a sediment of truth that
one shudders to admit. In this plane of inquiry we are met with the
truth that Austria, Italy, France, and Spain are the Roman Catholic
countries where the vice of licentiousness corrupts the moral of social
life. The Protestant countries of Europe are in colder climes, and
intemperance is the vice that among the poorer people breeds misery more
ruinous to their health and prosperity.
At the railway station, when we were leaving Seville for the Alhambra by
the way of Malaga, a group of natives in the costume of Andalusia
presented a picturesque and not unpleasing appearance. In the _cities_
of Europe it is rare to see any thing national and peculiar in the dress
of the people. Fashion is an empire that extends over every nation, and
reigns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid with resistless sway. The
seat of government is in Paris, and her edicts are obeyed in free
America as well as in France. But when you get into the rural districts,
the people cling to an ancient _régime_; a fashion, indeed, who sat on
the throne long years ago, and has never been put aside by any
revolutions of modern invention. These rural Andalusians, in breeches
and sandals, with red belt or sash, and loose jacket, and conical hat
and wide rim turned up all around, are dressed as their
great-grandfathers were, and as their own great-grandchildren will be,
and others, for generations to come. They had been to the city _on an
excursion_, and were now going home again, none the better, but a deal
the worse for the change of life they had suffered in town.
It was a good opportunity to learn something of the life of these
people, who form, after all, the great mass of any nation, and the part
of the people with whom every true heart is in sympathy. The rich and
the gay, the fashionable people who throng in cities, can live as they
please. The poor, who live from hand to mouth, and cannot choose for
themselves, but must live as they can, these are the people in every
country whose condition we want to inquire into; and when we have
learned of their state, we know what their country is. It is the average
of human comfort that we want to get at.
And it is a real help towards one’s satisfaction with the condition of a
people to know that it does not take a vast amount of the good things of
this life to make one happy, if he has never had any thing more or
better than the little he has been contented with. These Andalusians
work on the farms of large proprietors, and get six to ten cents a day
and their food, when they are working by the season. This sounds small.
The wages of laboring men who find themselves, and who work by the day,
will average forty or fifty cents a day. To know what such pay is worth
we must know how they live, and what it costs to buy the food they have.
Their food is chiefly soup of bacon oil and vegetables, with bread and
fruit. They take a kettle of this thick soup, more like a pudding than a
soup, to the fields with them; and day after day, year in and year out,
eat substantially the same thing. And this food costs the peasants a
very little more than nothing. The ground is easily worked, the climate
is so favorable to growth and land so abundant, that what can be raised
for food is almost as accessible to the poor as if vegetables were
spontaneous and free to everybody. So it is that these _poor_ people are
quite as well off, as to the mere physical comforts of life, as those
who get one, two, and five dollars a day in other lands, and have to pay
so much for food and lodgings as to be sorely puzzled to do what a cat
often tries to do,—make both ends meet.
These Spanish peasants appear to be lively, intelligent, and wide-awake.
They give a reason for doing any thing, when they are asked; and that is
more than the Irish or English peasantry can do at home, or in the land
of the soaring eagle. Except in Russia, there is not a people on the
continent of Europe that appear more stolid and unthoughtful, more like
mere cattle or machines, than the farm peasantry of merry England. This
may be in appearance only; but the truth is that you can get more out of
an ignorant laborer on the continent of Europe, whose language you do
not more than half understand, than out of an English farm hand who is
supposed to speak English.
Beer has something to do with this matter of stupidity. These southern
climates in Europe and this soil are favorable to the culture of
wine-grapes, and wine is the solace and stimulus of the commonest
people. You may buy as good a bottle of wine for thirty cents in Spain
as you would have to pay three or four dollars for in New York. And if
you will not give thirty cents for it, you can have as much as you want
for little or nothing. Until the railroads were built and transportation
made easy and cheap, it was common, when the new vintage came in, to
empty the casks that held what was left over of former years. And a
church was pointed out to me that was built with mortar made with wine
instead of water, there being a scarcity of water in the vicinity but
plenty of wine that was to be thrown away. Sherry wine, which is the
_sack_ of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, is the leading wine of Spain, and
is made now and here just as wine was made in the times of Hesiod and
Isaiah; for in such climes as this the people keep on doing things as
their ancestors or others did in the same place thousands of years ago.
They drink wine as freely as the English drink beer, and as Americans
drink rum and water. But they do not get drunk as our people do, and
they are not so stupid as the beer drinkers of England are. They are
stimulated, of course, and the exhilaration is carried to excess
sometimes. It is not true to say there is no drunkenness in wine-growing
countries, but the best informed men, who had the most abundant
opportunities of learning the facts in the case, assured me that
_intemperance_ is not common; that it is very rare among the working
people of Spain. This is not to be used as an argument in favor of wine
raising and wine drinking in America. It would indeed be better for the
health of the drinking men to drink pure wine than bad whiskey, or the
vile compounds that are sold as wine in our country. But if wine were as
cheap in the United States as in Spain, there would be just as much
intemperance in the United States as now. The climate and the strife of
such a country as ours furnish causes for the use of stimulating drinks
that do not exist in Italy or Spain; and philanthropists who discuss and
legislate on the subject of temperance, without regard to the physical
circumstances of a people, are in the same case with the traveller who
reckoned his bill without his host. It is well to multiply and fortify
wholesome laws to restrain men from evil indulgence, and it is our duty
to ply all possible moral agencies to reform and save our fellow-men;
but our duty does not end with legislating and preaching. There are
social burdens to be raised from the poor by the voluntary action of the
rich, and by the application of the gospel principle of brotherhood,
which will so ameliorate the condition of the lowly that they will not
be tempted as now, by the pressure of weariness, care, and woe, to fly
to the intoxicating cup for help to bear their load, or to forget that
it is on them. But this disgression is getting dry, if it is on
drinking.
A beautiful trait of character and a lovely custom of the Spanish
peasantry appear in their love for parents. They yield to them
_obedience_, respect, veneration, and love, after they are aged, and the
children are men and women grown. The married children delight to have
their parents to direct and govern them as in childhood, and these
children even quarrel among themselves to get and keep possession of
their aged parents. This trait of character is said to mark a slow
country, where the past, the ancient, is held in honor; while progress
has no such reverence for old age. Would to God that we had a little
more Spain in young America, if it is Spanish to honor one’s father and
mother.
[Illustration: IN THE ALAMEDA, AT MALAGA.]