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ROMANTIC SPAIN:
A Record of Personal Experiences.
BY
JOHN AUGUSTUS O'SHEA,
AUTHOR OF
"LEAVES FROM THE LIFE or A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,"
"AN IRON-BOUND CITY," ETC.
"Oh, lovely Spain! renowned, romantic land!"
CHILDE HAROLD.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
WARD AND DOWNEY,
12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1887.
[_All Rights Reserved._]
TO
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT, ESQ.,
IN TOKEN OF ESTEEM FOR
HIS BOLD AND TRUTHFUL CHARACTER,
AND OF
GLADNESS THAT WE HAVE SO MANY KINDRED SYMPATHIES,
This Book is Enscribed
BY THE WRITER.
PREFACE.
This simple recital of personal haps and mishaps in perturbed Spain from
the abdication of Amadeus to the entry of Don Carlos, puts forward no
claim to the didactic or dogmatic. Its chief aim is to amuse. Of course,
if I succeed in conveying knowledge and dispelling illusions--in Tasso's
words, if I administer a pill under a coating of jam--I shall be
cock-a-hoop with delight. But I warn the reader I am not an unprejudiced
witness. I am passionately fond of Spain and her people. Although years
have elapsed since the events dealt with occurred, I fancy the narrative
will not be hackneyed, for in Spain public life repeats itself with a
fidelity which is never monotonous. I do not pretend to cast the
horoscope of the poor little monarch who is in the nurse's arms, but
Heaven guard him! 'Twere better for him that he had been born in a
Highland shieling.
Should there be much individualism in these pages, it is intentional,
and to be ascribed to the instance of friends. They said, "Bother
history; give us plenty of your own experiences." It is to be hoped they
have not led me astray by their well-meant advice.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Which, being non-essential, treats partly of Spain,
but principally of the Writer 1-23
CHAPTER II.
The Old-Fashioned Invocation--"Them 'ere Spanish
Kings!"--Candidates for a Throne--_En Voyage_--Bordeaux
and the Back-ache--An Unmannerly
Alsatian--The Patriot gets a Roland for his Oliver--Small
Change for a Hot Bath--Plan for Universal
Coinage--Daughters of Israel--The Jews Diagnosed--Across
the Border--The Writer is Saluted "Caballero"--Bugaboo
Santa Cruz--Over a Brasero 24-42
CHAPTER III.
A Make-Believe Spain--The Mountain Convoy--A
Tough Road to Travel--Spanish Superiority in
Blasphemy--Short Essay on Oaths--The Basque
Peasants--Carlism under a Cloak--How Guerilla-Fighting
is Conducted--A Hyperborean Landscape--A
Mysterious Grandee--An Adventurous Frenchman--The
Shebeen on the Summit--Armed Alsasua--Base
Coin 43-60
CHAPTER IV.
Madrid--The Fonda and its Porter--The Puerta del
Sol--Postal Irregularities--Tribute to the Madrileños--The
Barber's Pronunciamiento--Anecdotes of King
Amadeus--Checkmating the Grand Dames--Queen
Isabella--The Embarrassed Mr. Layard of Nineveh--The
Great Powers Hesitate--America Goes Ahead--General
Sickles--Mahomet and the Mountain--Republicanism
among the Troops--A Peculiar Pennsylvanian
Dentist--Castelar under Torture--The
Writer meets one of his Sept--Politicians by Trade--Honour
among Insurgents--Alonso the Reckless 61-91
CHAPTER V.
A Late Capital--The Gambling Mania--A French
Rendezvous--The Duke de Fitzpepper--The Morality
of Passing Bad Money--Spanish Compliments--Men
in Pickle--A Licentious Ballet--Federal Manners--Prim's
Artifice--Nouvilas Goes North--A Carlist
Proclamation--Don Alfonso--Midnight Oil--Castelar's
Circular 92-112
CHAPTER VI.
Warning to Ladies--The Hotel Parliament--An Anglo-Spanish
Mentor--The Evil Genii of the Monarchy--The
Curses of Spain--Government and Religion
Affairs of Climate--The Carlists, Norwegians, and
English, all Republicans!--Notions on Heredity--The
Five Spanish Parties--The Army the Lever of
Power--The Student-Cæsar--Order _versus_ Republic--The
Chained Colours--Dorregaray's Appeal to the
Soldiers--Influence of the Church--Wanted: a
Benevolent Despot 113-131
CHAPTER VII.
The Carnival--About Kissing Feet--Mummers and
Masquers--The Paseo de Recoletos--The Writer is
taken for Cluseret--Incongruity in Costume--Shrove
Tuesday--Panic on the Prado--A Fancy Ball--The
"Entierro de la Sardina"--Lenten Amusements--A
Spanish Mystery--"Pasion y Muerte de Jesus"--Of
the Stage Stagey--Critical Remarks 132-160
CHAPTER VIII.
Another Chat with Mentor--A Startling Solution of
the Spanish Question--The Penalties of Popularity--The
Republic another Saturn--The New Civil
Governor--The Government Bill--Outside the Palace
of the Congress--Providential Rain--Wild Rumours--Federal
Threats--The Five Civil Guards--Inside
the Chamber--The Great Debate--The Two Reports--Compromise--Minor
Speechmakers--A Pickwickian
Contention--The Division--Victory for the
Ministry--The Five Civil Guards Trot to Stables 161-182
CHAPTER IX.
The Inventions of Don Fulano de Tal--Stopping a
Train--"A Ver Fine Blaggar"--The Legend of Santa
Cruz--Dodging a Warrant--Outlawed--Chased by
Gendarmes--A Jack Sheppard Escape--The Cura
becomes Cabecilla--Sleeping with an Eye Open--Exploits
and Atrocities--Dilettante Carlists in
London--The Combat of Monreal--Ibarreta's Relics--A
Tale for the Marines--The Carlists Looking-up 183-200
CHAPTER X.
Barbarism of Tauromachy--A Surreptitious Ticket--The
Novillos--Islington _not_ Madrid--Apology for
Cock-Fighting--Maudlin Humanity--The Espada a
Popular Idol--In the Bull-Ring--A Precious "Ster-oh"--The
Trumpets Speak--The Procession--Play of
the Quadrille--The Defiance--"Bravo, Cucharra!"--"Bravo,
Toro!"--The Blemish of the Sport--An
Indignant English Lassie 201-224
CHAPTER XI.
The Shamrock of Erin and Olive of Spain--Hispano-Hibernian
Regiments--The Spanish Soldier--An
Unpopular Hidalgo--Flaw in the Harness--The
Organization of the Army--The Guardia Civil--The
Cavalry, Engineers, and Infantry--General Cordova--The
Disorganization of the Army--Mutiny in
Pampeluna--Officers Out of Work--Turbulent Barcelona--Irresolute
Contreras--Pistolet Discharges
Himself--The Madrid Garrison 225-248
CHAPTER XII.
Luring the Reader into a Stony Desert--A Duel on the
Carpet--Disappointment of the Special Correspondents--The
People Amuses Itself--How the Ballot
Works--A Historic Sitting of the Congress--Castelar's
Great Oration--The Glory of Spain--About
Negro Manumission--Distrust of "Uncle Sam"--Return
of Figueras--The Permanent Committee--A
Love-Feast of Politicians--The Writer Orders
Wings 249-265
CHAPTER XIII.
The Writer Turns Churlish and Quits Madrid--Sleep
under Difficulties--A Bad Dream--Santa Cruz again--Off
St. Helena!--Dissertation on Stomach Matters--A
Hint to British Railway Directors--"Odds, Hilts
and Blades"--A Delicate Little Gentleman is Curious--The
"Tierra Deleitosa"--That Butcher again 266-281
CHAPTER XIV.
Delectable Seville--Don Juan Scapegrace--The Women
in Black--In the Triana Suburb--The City of the
Seven Sleepers--Guide-Book Boredom--Romance
and Reality--The Prosaic Manchester Man--King
Ferdinand Puzzling the Judges--Mortification by
Proxy--Some Notable Treasures--Papers and Politics--The
Porcelain Factory--"The Lazy Andalusiennes"--About
Cigars--The Gipsy Dance 282-311
ROMANTIC SPAIN.
CHAPTER I.
Which, being non-essential, treats partly of Spain, but principally
of the Writer.
The sun was shining with a Spanish lustre--a lustre as of glowing
sarcasm--seeing that on that very day a Fire-Worshipper, Dadabhai
Naoroji, was over-shadowed in his attempt to become a Member of
Parliament for Holborn. The sun, I repeat, was shining with a Spanish
lustre while the inquisition was being held. The tribunal was in the
open air, under the mid plane-tree in Camberwell Green, the trimmest
public garden in London. Conscience was the inquisitor, and the charge I
had brought against myself was that of harbouring a vagrom spirit. I
should have been born in a gipsy caravan or under a Bedaween's tent.
Nature intended me to have become a traveller, a showman, or a
knight-errant; and had Nature been properly seconded, I should have been
doing something Burnabyish, Barnumesque, or Quixotic this afternoon,
instead of sitting down on a bench between a tremulous old man in
almshouse livery and a small boy fanning himself with a cap. Yes; I fear
I must plead guilty. I am possessed by a demon of unrest; my soul chafes
at inaction, calls aloud for excitement. Had I the ordering of my own
fortune I should spread the white wings of a yacht to woo the faint wind
(but it may be blowing freshly off the Foreland), or should vault on the
back of a neighing barb with bushy mane and tail. But I am Ixion-lashed
to the wheel of duty, leg-hampered by the log of necessity.
What is a gentle-born vagabond to do?
The law will not permit him to pink with his sword-stick the first smug
fellow he meets on the side-path, self-respect debars him from
highway-robbery which can be perpetrated without fear of the law, and it
is idle to expect a revolution in this humdrum country within any
reasonable period. A General Election which is going on, with its paltry
show of coloured strips of calico, its printed appeals to the gullible,
its occasional bits of ribbon and bursts of cheering, its egotisms, its
stupidities, its self-seekings, its shabby intrigues and simulated fire,
its dull, dreary, drivelling floods of witless substance in
ungrammatical form--that, surely, is no satisfying substitute for the
tumult of real political strife.
Motion is the sovereign remedy for the vagabond's disease, and lo!
through the leafy barrier of the pollarded limes bordering the Green,
jingle the bells of the tram-car with its trotting team of three
abreast. Three mules, which bring my thoughts to Spain, and to a letter
I have had from my publishers, satirically asking how soon they might
expect the last pages of a promised book on the land of the Dons, the
first line of which is not yet committed to paper. I must think over
that book as I jog along the grooves of the street rails, and survey the
prospect from the roof. How do those mules on the flanks manage to avoid
knocking their hoofs against the metal-ruts, and tripping themselves
up? What a stand-and-deliver air the conductor has as he presents his
snip-snap apparatus, like the brutal key of the primitive dentist, and
viciously punches an orifice in your ticket! For these conductors, as
for letter-carriers, I have a profound sympathy; they are over-worked
and under-paid; and yet they enjoy motion in abundance. But there is a
poetry of motion, as when charging squadrons skim the plain, or a
graceful girl with dainty ankles trips across the beeswaxed floor; and
there is a prose of motion, as of a policeman plodding over his beat, or
the Sisyphus-toil of the treadmill. I ask myself, Will a tram-conductor
ever write a poem? Hardly, I think; and yet, why not? Was not Edward
Capern, who achieved some smooth verses, a letter-carrier?
New Cross, our terminus so far. Over the way is another tram, which will
take us to Greenwich for the outlay of another twopence. Shortly it will
be one continuous avenue of pretentious masonry, from the Thames at
Blackfriars to the Thames by the naval palace, instead of the former
pleasant drive through Surrey fields. With what a fever they are
building, terrace upon terrace, street upon street, interminable rows of
villas in line or semi-detached! The patches of verdure, so refreshing
to the jaded city eye, are diminishing in size and lessening in number.
I like Greenwich; but they should never have removed the veterans of the
ocean from it. Dear to the soul of youth, hankering for the strange and
the stirring, were their three-cornered hats, their wooden stumps, their
withered monkey-jaws puffed with quids, and their hoarse, squall-tearing
voices. What a consuming thirst they had, and with what heroic industry
they did tell lies! Peter of Russia was right: the sovereigns of
England, the sea-rulers, should hold court in Greenwich. The Park with
its fallow-deer is regal; the Painted Hall is eloquent with historic
memories; the initial meridian is an imposing address; and then the
Thames--but here, we are at it. A steamer awaits, and will carry us to
the heart of London for a groat.
How dingy, dirty, despicable most of those steamers are! with their
low-roofed, grimy cabins; their irritating hawkers of hat-strings and
small beer; their stale stock of mawkish refections; their job-lot
orchestras of wheeze and pipe and scrape and tootle; their smell of
bilge and oil, sweat and cheap cigars, overtopped at holiday-times by
the sulphurous oath or the rank obscenity of some reeling passenger. And
yet how skilfully they thread their way through the crowded Pool; how
readily they answer the wheel; with what ease they slow or quicken their
run, and dart hither and thither; and with what nicety they are brought
alongside the floating wharf! I wonder do the skippers of these boats
move their hands in their dreams. Is the finger-sign for "Back her,"
that they use at home when they wish to replenish their pipes?
Collisions there may be, explosions there have been; but the career of
the mariner who plies between Chelsea Pier and the port of Woolwich must
be singularly free from such vicissitudes as shipwreck or failure of
provisions; he is seldom caught in a tornado, or banged into by a
privateer; he rarely knocks up against an iceberg, or gets a glimpse of
the Flying Dutchman; sharks he may not study, except, perhaps, in the
Westminster Aquarium, and when he dies he is trenched in commonplace
clay. I cannot picture such a mariner to myself as having the spirit to
ejaculate, "Shiver my timbers!"
The sight of a vessel from Seville laden with fruit and wine recalls me
to that letter from the publishers and the book anent Spain. Not a word
of it written yet. _They_ will be shivering _my_ timbers if I have it
not ready in season. But I am not of those, like Anthony Trollope, who
can sit down to their desks and turn out so many pages of copy at a
stretch mechanically, much as a tinglary with its rotating handle grinds
out a series of tunes. I cannot write unless I am in the mood, and that,
I find, depends on the state of health and the absence of mental worry.
The brain with some people refuses to become a piece of machinery. Of
motion is often born inspiration--Hermes, god of oratory, is represented
with _petasus_ and _talaria_--and I am enjoying motion.
"Ease her--stop her!" Blackfriars Bridge, and here I quit the steamer's
deck for the tram that will take me back to the place whence I came,
and so enable me to have made a diversified circular tour by land and
water for the expenditure of tenpence. Who would waste his substance on
coach-men and high-steppers; who would envy Sir Thomas Brassey his
lordly pleasure-craft, when this round of travel, with its buoyant sense
of independence at the end, can be accomplished for tenpence? And now I
shall hie me to a bar I wot of, and with the two pence that remain of my
splendid shilling, I shall cheer the inner man with a clear, cool,
mantling glass of foam-crowned bitter beer.
The beer ought to be good in Camberwell, for here Mrs. Thrale lived of
yore, and the ponderous lexicographer took his walks, and mused on the
vanity of human wishes. We have breweries still, and we have groves,
even groves of Academus, where one may laugh; for are they not sacred to
the shades of the two Hoods and Jeff Prowse, the "Nicholas" of _Fun_, as
to Nick Woods, the Napier-recorder of Inkermann, and to associations
with William Black, Henry Bessemer, and John Ruskin, master of art,
which is something more, and more significant, than that _Magister
Artium_ which persons doubtful of their gifts or station ostentatiously
affix to their names? And in our groves we have such variety of
arborescent prizes as no other district of London can boast, extending
to the arbutus or strawberry-tree, and the liriodendron or tulip-tree.
The liriodendron has been planted in Palace Yard, in the hope that the
breath of wholesomeness, genial to its native America, shall permeate
the badly-ventilated atmosphere of the adjacent House of Commons. I love
trees as if I were suckled by a hamadryad. May he who cuts them down to
build whereon they stood taste the bitterness of Acheron!
And Camberwell Green, which I dearly affect, is it not replete with
every modern convenience, as those ambitious amateurs who write the
auction-bills are wont to phrase it? There is a bank where you may cash
a cheque; two public-houses where you may spend great part of it
fuddling yourself; a police-station where you may sleep the fuddle off;
a pillar-box where a letter may be posted summoning a bail to your aid;
a drinking-fountain where you may slake your thirst when you come out
penitent from the police-office; a Turkish-bath, with a
crescent-and-star daubed piece of bunting over it, where you may knead
your frame into sobriety; a hairdresser's where you may make yourself
presentable; a stationer's where my friend Morris will lavishly dose you
with the tonic of moral apothegm; and, right opposite, a horse-trough
where you may give yourself the ducking you deserve.
Inside the tavern, where I sought the beer, I met a financier, a shrewd
fellow of a gross habit of body and a dry wit. He is accountant to a
firm of book-makers, and can hold his own with the tongue; he married
into the family of a late eminent prizefighter, and, with the
connection, seems to have acquired the talent of holding his own with
the fist. I like Wat much, and have obtained various scraps of desultory
information from him which are useful.
Imprimis, that a penny ticket on a river-steamer on a Sunday constitutes
a man as _bonâ fide_ a traveller as Henry M. Stanley, and endows him
with the privilege of getting liquid comfort within prohibited hours.
Item, that the cigars on the outside of a bundle, and therefore indented
with the tape, are generally the best.
Item, that if there is hide or pelt on a carcase before a butcher's
stall, you may take for granted it is a British carcase. Foreign meat
has to be skinned to avoid the risk of importation of cattle-disease.
And, ultimately, that if you are about to drown yourself in the Thames,
and are anxious to avert identification, the best spot to throw yourself
off is in the neighbourhood of a ship at moorings, as then you are
likely to be drawn under her and kept in the chains for months.
Some readers who are unaware that there were no gentlemen with
coat-armour in the College of Apostles, may object that in presenting
them to Wat I am introducing them to low society; but I can assure them
that I have seen a very respectable Duke hail-fellow-well-met with a
jockey, and my friend Wat has a far fuller education than the primest
of jockeys. He is apt and accurate in quotations from English
literature; and if you venture to make Greeks "meet" Greeks in his
presence, or talk of fresh "fields" and pastures new, or attribute the
tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb to Holy Writ, he will lay you
ten to one in sovereigns you are wrong, and win your money. He is also a
champion orthographist, and will back himself to spell English words
against any man in the British Empire for £500, bar words technical.
"Ah," he said, "my noble! is it true you are going on a lecturing-tour
next winter?"
"If God but spare me health and lung-power I am," was my reply.
"And wherefore, may I ask? Can you not do better at the desk?"
"The desk is monotonous; besides, I yearn for change, and I may be able
to freshen up my ideas, and set down some notes in my tables. 'Twill
improve intellectual and physical health."
"It will, of course," agreed Wat. "For instance, it will be perfectly
delightful journeying to Inverness, say, in the depth of December."
"As it so happens, I am booked for Inverness on a date in that month."
Wat stared at me. "Do you know," he said, "'tis a far cry to Loch Awe,
and Inverness is at the other side of Loch Awe? Thither and back from
where we stand is eleven hundred and ninety miles."
I was surprised; I had not entered into these details; but I held my
peace.
"Have you got many engagements?"
"Yes; the first was from Dollar, which I accept as a good omen; and,
curiously enough, 'tis not in the United States."
"No," said Wat; "'tis between Edinburgh and Stirling. What fee do they
tender you there?"
I told him.
"Ahem!" he continued, fondling his chin as he spoke. "If you don't
cumber yourself with luggage--a courier-bag will do--and if you bus it
to King's Cross, and stop at a temperance hotel in 'Auld Reekie,' and
give servants no tips, and condescend to all invitations, with a wise
economy, I take it, you won't drop more than five-and-twenty shillings
on that transaction."
"How! What do you mean? You surely are not serious?"
"Why, the railway return fare to Edinburgh alone is
five-pun-nine-and-six; and that will burn a hole in your fee."
"Perhaps," I ventured, not to look foolish, "I may have means of getting
to Edinburgh for nothing."
"Ah!" said Wat, with a sigh and a sorrowful sententiousness, "if you
think you can try on that, well and good; but I'm getting so precious
fat that I can no longer hide myself under a seat!"
The barman, who had overheard the dialogue, here burst into an ill-bred
fit of laughter. That attendant had some appreciation of humour; but Wat
did the correct thing, nevertheless, in rebuking him for his untimely
hilarity. The barman should have waited until he had retired to his own
room.
This lecturing, as I explained to the financier, is rather a hazardous
experiment after a man has passed his fortieth year. It is like learning
to act--even more arduous than that, for you have no prompter, and must
be qualified to think upon your legs. Interruptions must not check the
flow of your eloquence; indifference must not chill your enthusiasm. You
must be suave, alert, sonorous, and roll forth a discourse got off by
rote as if it were the offspring of the moment's inspiration. The
combustion of thought must appear to be a spontaneous combustion. Once
your tale is set a-going, there must be no pause, no hesitancy; the
electric current must be maintained to strong and constant power, or
your audience sinks into a freezing dulness of courteous attention,
which wishes, but fears, to yawn.
"Yes," said Wat, "the steam must be kept up. But if a Derby dog strays
on the course--I mean if a bullock blunders on the track, what then?"
"That is the difficulty. It is vexatious if a man dozes off and
endeavours to balance himself on the tip of his nose on the floor, when
you are in the high ecstasy of a rhetorical period."
"I know," said Wat. "When you are what you call piling up the agony."
"Or when a deaf dowager is seized with a fancy to sternutate as you are
waxing pathetic."
"Sternutate. That's a good word," remarked Wat admiringly. "I swear I
could spell that. By-the-bye, how are you getting on with that book on
Spain?"
_Ecce iterum Crispinus._
"Good-afternoon I am just on my way home to write it."
* * * * *
The title I shall leave to the finish. Something catching is sure to
suggest itself. The dedication I pencilled off months ago. Let that
stand.
The subject, I think, is good. Spain is comparatively unknown. John Bull
on his travels will not open to it. The British tourist in the Peninsula
too often carries with him his native sense of superiority and his
constitutional tendency to spleen. He turns up his nose at what he
cannot, or will not, understand. If the beef is tough, he does not
consider that it ought to be, most of the animals from whose ribs it
came having done honest work as beasts of burden before they were
driven to the slaughter-house. If the Val de Peñas is rasping to his
palate, he ignores that the taste for wine, as for olives and Dublin
stout and Glenlivat, is acquired. If the tobacco is coarse and weedy, he
forgets that it is cheap, and that he can roll his cigarette and smoke
it between the courses. But why does he not console himself for the
absent by what is present--the ripe golden sun, the luscious fruits, the
picturesque costumes, the high-bred dignity of the humblest beggar, the
weird Æolian melody of sudden trills of song, the flashing eyes,
mantilla-shaded, which speak romances in three volumes in every glance?
The truth is, your Briton abroad, I mean the average one--not men like
Mr. Gladstone in Sicily, or Captain Burton everywhere, Queen's
Messengers and Special Correspondents, travelling Fellows of Oxford and
pilgrims of art--your Briton of the tourist type is less inclined to
adapt himself to another sphere than to try and assimilate that other to
his own.
This tourist goes to Spain; he hurries from end to end of the Peninsula,
his guide-book in his hand and his opera-glass across his shoulder; he
pays a flying visit to the Escurial, and pronounces it a gloomy crib;
drops in on Seville, sees it, and does not marvel; mayhap he wanders as
far as Granada, and finds it a dreary "sell;" and then he returns
homeward, hot and tired and disappointed, and is eloquent on the
rapacity of innkeepers, the profusion of counterfeit coin, the
discomforts and unpunctuality of locomotion, the shocking
uncleanliness--but, however, "you know, we got on better than the
Joneses; we saw more sights and covered more country in fewer days." And
this peripatetic postures for the rest of his life as an authority on
Spain! The only point, perhaps, on which his judgment is to be accepted
is one which he might have learned in London, namely, that Price's
circus is not quite so good as Sanger's in Westminster or Hengler's off
Oxford Street. Out upon the poor fool! _He_ know Spain! Why, that is
more than I could dare to say, and I have had experience of it under
Monarchy and Republic, in peace and in war; have mixed with Carlists in
the field, and Intransigentes in the fortress; have traversed it from
Irun to Gibraltar, from Santander to Malaga. He who has not been
admitted into the intimacy of domestic life in Spain, who has not
listened to habaneras by the camp-fire, joined in the jota on the
village sward, shared in thorough sympathy in the sports of the arena
and in the rites of religion, dipped into the peasant's olla podrida,
nay, even watched the flushed gamblers over their cards, with the
eager-eyed baratero standing by--he does not know Spain. All this have I
done, and more; and yet I am but on the threshold of acquaintance with
that great and beautiful home of paradox, that land of valour and
courtesy, of fidelity and magnanimity, of piety and patriotism; and, in
a lesser degree, of the vices which are opposed to these good qualities.
No country of Europe so near to us is so little known. Yet in none is
the soil fertilized by so much British blood. But this was in the
bygone; and the yearly increasing swell of journeying-against-time
tourists has not swept in tidal wave over the Peninsula. Even Spanish
plays--and Spain can boast of one of the richest springs of dramatic
literature in Europe--are comparatively sacred from the desecrating
touch of the ruck of contemporary English stage adulterators.
Spain is not known; and yet it is not for the lack of word-painters to
make it familiar in pen-and-ink pictures. There is Ford, most learned
and graphic of guides, as full of irresistible prejudice as he is of
impulsive affection. There is Borrow, that robust, quaint, and
captivating, if sometimes over-fanciful, cicerone, albeit his errand to
Spain was as indiscreet in purpose as it was bootless in result. There
is Sala, of memory richly stored--whom I freely salute as past-master in
his craft--most charming, observant, and illustrative of roving
journalists. Ford, Borrow, Sala, all know Spain and "things Spanish" by
personal experience; but it is plain that too many of the latter-day
critics of Spain and the Spaniards are of the class who are ready to
write social novels on Chinese life with no more knowledge of the
Flowery Land than is to be obtained under the dome of the Reading-room
of the British Museum. The pity of it is that this second-hand evidence
is too often taken on trust, while the truthful records of eye-witnesses
are shoved into a dusty corner of the cupboard. It is so nice to be
patted on the head and rubbed down with the grain, to be reminded that
we are what we always thought ourselves to be--the perfect, the
registered A 1 people of the universe, the people who set the pattern,
the people who are righteous, moral, honest, tolerant, charitable, and
modest; who wage no unjust wars; who have no Divorce Court scandals; who
know not bank frauds; who never persecuted Highlanders, or Jews, or
Irishmen; who permit no misappropriations of money left to the poor; who
make no brag over small victories against badly-armed savages. But stay,
this is taking me to Africa, not Spain; and Africa does not begin at the
other side of the Pyrenees, the epigram of Dumas to the contrary
notwithstanding. My great object is to coax the English reader to be
reasonable, and not to take the dimensions of the round world by the
parochial yard-measure, nor to gauge the Coliseum by the standard of
Clapham.
However, I shall not complete this work unless I make a start. _Dimidium
facti_--but these odds and ends of Latin, which give to style an
eighteen-penny polish of erudition and prove nothing, you can pick at
will from "Swain's Collection of Easy Sentences." If I wait till I am in
the mood, my suspense may be as long as that of the rustic on the bank
of the stream. Perhaps Samuel Johnson, LL.D., was near the mark when he
said that the author that thinks himself weather-bound will find, with a
little help from hellebore, that he is only idle or exhausted.
And now a paragraph to elucidate why I have dedicated this book to a
gentleman with whom I never exchanged a word. Apart from the bright and
solid facts that he wards the weak, and has the pluck to change his
opinions when he feels himself in the wrong, there are in his case two
reasons all-sufficient to secure his counterfeit presentment a niche in
my album, and himself a nook in my heart--he hath killed a bull in the
arena, and he is husband of Byron's grand-daughter; and Byron was a
poet--yea, a poet, I re-affirm, the hysterics to the contrary of sixteen
screaming _laudatores Veneris_ in non-lucid intervals counting for
naught.
* * * * *
I have lost faith in Wat. In a moment of misplaced confidence I laid a
wager on him at a spelling competition. He put one _n_ in innuendo, and
the _i_ after the _ll_s in paillasse. If he had only gone to the root of
the matter! I offered such long odds, too--a frayed copy of the "Iliad"
to a gilt and morocco-bound set of the "Newgate Calendar."