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.
Constantine, the porter at the Fonda de Paris, asked me one forenoon
would I like to take a ticket for a bull-fight. He had an excellent one
(excellent batch, he meant) to dispose of "in the shade." I stared at
him indignantly, nodded my head in the same vein, but winked as I passed
through the hall and sprang up the stairs. An English clergyman and his
daughter, who had expressed an abhorrence for tauromachy in my presence,
had overheard Constantino's temptation, and hence my behaviour.
"Tauromachy!" the dear old minister argued. "What can you expect, sir,
from a people who have to buckle two languages in double harness to find
a name for their brutal practice? 'Tis illegitimate, sir, like the
derivative. _Taurus_ is Latin, [Greek: machê] is Greek; the compound is
barbaric."
I bowed, for Emmeline was seemly, with a delicate elegance, and she
looked up with a pleased and almost triumphant look, as much as to say,
Papa is not one of your common persons, but a mighty learned dignitary
indeed.
That was why Constantine waited his opportunity to slip the ticket into
my hands in a corridor, explaining that a seat in the shade was a
privilege not to be despised, as the sun at the other side flung a glare
on the spectator that dazzled his view; besides, it was broiling and
headachy to sit for hours in its rays.
"I knew you would go the first chance you had," said Constantine; "I
read it in your eyes as you gloated over the pictures of the sport in
the hall. They make a magnificent fan, or you could hang them up on the
wall in your house in England; I can let you have a lot a bargain. I
was sure of it when you stopped opposite the placard of the corrida
outside, and shook yourself with joy."
Constantine was a good judge of human nature. I would as soon think of
visiting Madrid and not seeing a bull-fight, as of visiting
Constantinople and not hunting after the dancing dervishes; Kandy, and
not gazing on the Perra Harra procession; London in the season, and not
going to the Military Tournament.
But, as I afterwards learned, the weather was still too cold for the
genuine game; this might be regarded as a rehearsal, but was patronized
by the connoisseurs, as there were openings for criticism on the style
of novices, and estimates as to who had in them the stuff of coming men.
The bull wants the ardent heats of midsummer to fire him for the combat.
The true season begins with a late Easter-tide, when the kings of the
herd, fresh from the meadows, have arrogant blood careering in their
veins, and are supple in the limbs. To stimulate them now, the dogs or
the banderillas de fuego, both alien to true tauromachy, would have to
be called in. This is but the heyday of the novillos, the unripe
beasts, with india-rubber or wooden balls blunting their half-developed
horns, who are sent into the arena to be at the mercy of youths
ambitious to become chulos. The novillos prance and frisk and toss their
adversaries; it is a frolic and no more. Months afterwards I saw a band
of blind mendicants armed with long sticks descend into the ring at
Murcia, and succeed, some of them, in keeping off the novillos. As well
as giving youngsters the favour of familiarizing themselves with the
capa, used to irritate the bull, this practice puts the animal himself
into good wind, and teaches him what he has to expect when he is
admitted into the pit of the amphitheatre for the final tussle. Your
common bull is not apt for these duels; he must be a bull of race,
haughty and high-spirited, before he is welcomed as a gladiator
_moriturus_. There are stock-breeders in Castile and Andalusia renowned
for the superb stamp of their cattle; and of these, not the least
renowned is a noble count who bears the name and is a descendant of
Christopher Columbus. But the immature tomfoolery has no more
resemblance to the stern, actual diversion than a donkey-race has to the
Derby. The description in "Childe Harold" is spirited, but has been
pared down to accommodate itself to the exigencies of rhyme. Byron when
he wrote it must have had a spasm of squeamishness. But that must have
been a gorgeous function at the marriage of Isabella, when a public
square was converted into an amphitheatre, Toro was monarch for days
consecutive, and the bonniest cavaliers of Spain, clad in jackets
glimmering with gems, entered the lists against him.
In England, where patronizing leading-articles are indited about those
semi-civilized Spaniards, whenever a toreador is injured in the exercise
of his profession, nothing would seem to be really known about the
sport, and yet there is a self-sufficient assumption among persons
called "well-informed" that they know all about it. Speaking once with a
colleague of the press at Madrid, the representative of a very great
English paper, I was told almost the only instructions he had received
on leaving London were not to write anything of bull-fighting, or
"hackneyed rubbish of that sort." Yet no nearer approach to
bull-fighting has ever been witnessed in England than a silly simulacrum
at the Agricultural Hall. The first calf that was enlarged from the
make-believe toril on that occasion quietly proceeded to nibble a scrap
of paper on the tan. The toreadores were real toreadores, but the bulls
were not of the fiery breed of Andalusia. If they had been, the agents
of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have
thought twice before venturing into the same enclosure with them to bar
the entertainment on the score of cruelty. Still, the enterprising
public caterer who had brought over the quadrille of bull-fighters was
wise in his generation. Had the legitimate article been given, there was
enough foretokening of patronage on the opening night to prove it would
have been a great success.
I call bull-fighting a glorious pastime. In my mental vision I can mark
the rising gorge of some splenetic Briton of the philanthropic school as
he reads this phrase, "glorious pastime," wipes his glasses and reads it
again. How am I wrong? It is savage, bloodthirsty, and debasing, he
will say. Therein I join issue with him, though I may bring a censorious
pile of cant crumbling and clattering about my ears. Cock-fighting was
once popular in these islands, and that not so long ago. I have often
played truant from school, and challenged a thrashing, to drain the high
pleasures of a well-contested main. The late Admiral Rous and the late
Lord Derby were admirers of the sport, and if I am not mistaken the
rules governing a London pit sometimes patronized by royalty had a place
in the earlier editions of Hoyle. The best apology for cock-fighting I
ever heard was made by an eccentric uncle of mine, who asked his censor,
"Why did God put the fighting drop into the game-cock's veins but that
he might fight when he got the chance?"
There is cruelty, peradventure, in attaching long steel spurs, keen as
bradawls, to the cocks' legs, as there is in supplying men-at-arms with
swords and rifles instead of letting them wage war against one another
with teeth and feet and fists--the weapons of nature. Chanticleer of the
martial breed should be put into the ring with his natural spurs.
Well, in Spain he is, for the sport flourishes there still; and one of
my recollections of my last day in Madrid is having sacrificed a meal to
be present at the Circo de Gallos, the recognised building where combats
of the kind are carried on in a well-filled amphitheatre, with roped
platform in the centre, and seats in tiers around. The roadway in front
was lined with equipages, and the curled darlings of the Madrilene
aristocracy stepped in to witness the tournament and bet on the result;
but I own the gentler sex I never met there. There are rules to regulate
the conduct of the matches posted conspicuously on the walls; there are
scales to weigh the combatants, lemons to clean their spurs, a regular
staff of heelers, time-keepers, and umpires; the fixtures are given in
the newspapers in the same column as the theatrical programme, and the
guardians of public order are always in attendance. On the same
principle bull-fighting is conducted, and the same argument holds good
in favour of its retention.
This babble of cruelty is veriest wind-bag humanity, and, logically, has
not a leg to stand upon. To confront the king of the herd in the arena
is bolder and braver than to course the hare at Altcar, or shoot pigeons
at Hurlingham, or make a battue of pheasants in a Norfolk
preserve--sports to which our patricians are disposed, sports which are
chronicled in the fashionable organs with apparent approval. There is
more risk to those who share in a bull-fight than in knocking ponies
about on the polo-ground at Preston, sawing their mouths and breaking
their shins, or in worrying the fox over the pastures of Leicestershire.
As for that cold-blooded, cowardly, treacherous recreation of the
contemplative man, flinging bait to a harmless defenceless fish, and
luring him to a painful end, it is a piece of deliberate barbarism not
to be mentioned in the same breath with bull-fighting. And yet Mr. John
Bright, who has the reputation of being a gentleman of chivalrous temper
and pacific instincts, is said to be passionately fond of this
recreation. Observe to what the reasoning of those who frantically
protest against the national pastime of Spain reduces itself. So far, I
wish it to be understood that I am arguing with the intent of
establishing a _reductio ad absurdum_. If coursing, hunting, shooting,
and fishing are justifiable--and I hold that they are--then on the like
grounds are cock-fighting and bull-fighting justifiable. The beasts on
the earth, the birds of the air, and the fishes in the sea, are all
created for man's use and benefit. To kill them is no crime, if the
killing be not attended with the infliction of wanton pain. The destiny
of the minor order of creation is to minister to the appetites or
necessities of the lord of creation; and pleasurable excitement is a
necessity. The objections to the position here taken up are untenable,
except by maudlin and maundering humanitarians, who think more of the
life of a pet poodle than of the life of their fellow-man, and by that
lost section of mild lunatics, the vegetarians.
Having said so much in defence of bull-fighting, I may be permitted, in
entering into details of the diversion, to anticipate experiences and
knowledge which did not come to me until later on. The further my
acquaintance with the ring extended, the more convinced I became that
tauromachy will last as long as Spain lasts. It has blemishes, like
other recreations. To my thinking, the chief is that Toro goes into the
sanded arena foredoomed to die. No matter how pluckily he fights, no
matter what play he shows, the cachetero awaits him. Then there is
torture, but an unavoidable torture, in the mode in which horses are
killed. I well remember what an acclimatized aficionado, M. de Coutuly,
of the Paris _Temps_, said to me in a discussion on the point:
"These horses are under capital sentence when they are helped to the
grace of a historic death in the amphitheatre; they are rescued _en
route_ to the knacker's-yard; but, bah! it is useless to try to convince
men with English prejudices. With you, the horse is more valuable than
the man."
Thorough garrons these horses are in old Spain; but in the South
American countries, colonized from Spain, I am told they bring spirited
barbs into the ring, who can bite and kick, and take their own part
generally, and who sometimes clear the bull at a bound, as he advances
to the attack.
If tauromachy will last in Spain as long as Spain lasts, so likewise
will those who practise the art he held in honour. No names are guarded
in fonder reverence there to-day than those of Montes, Pepete, and
Pepe-Hillo; and when Frascuelo was wounded, his residence was besieged
by sympathizing inquirers. The bulletins of his health were read as
anxiously as if they were issued from a royal palace. Bouquets, pastry,
and billets-doux were laid in tribute on the mat of his bedchamber, and
the sweetest and proudest dames of the sweet and proud patrician houses
of Castile--houses with sangre azul unsuspicious in their veins, and
thirteen grandees in their pedigree--sent to inquire after the condition
of the famous espada. Tom Sayers was never more idolized in England than
Frascuelo is in Spain. And so, in like manner, are his compeers,
Lagartijo, and the rest. This liking for them is pushed to excess, much
as the cult for heroes of the prize-ring was with us in a past
generation. Once I was roused from a nap by Liberato, a faithful
body-man, shuffling his feet to the sprightly movements of a bolero. His
eyes twinkled like laughing fire, his gitano-tinted cheeks had a
tawny-purple grape-flush. He was under a high-pressure of exhilaration,
and instinctively sought to relieve himself by dancing.
"Liberato?"
"Caballero."
"What devil possesses thee? Hast got a tress of thy ama's hair, or
fallen upon a treasure-box of Boabdil?"
"Señor, I am proud as a hidalgo this day. You know Frascuelo?"
"Si, si."
"I have seen him; I have heard him speak."
"Dios mio! If it be not a poor jest on thy part, thou'rt a happy man."
"No jest, señor; and hearken!" approaching and lowering his voice: "he
sat at the same table with me, and," this impressively and
confidentially, "he shook hands with me as we parted!"
"Caramba! Let me shake that hand."
Laugh at this anecdote, but did not a New York hack-driver make a small
fortune by letting out for osculatory purposes the hand that helped
Jenny Lind from her carriage? Have not strawberries touched by the lips
of Lydia Thompson fetched a guinea each at a dramatic _fête_, and
photographs of Sara Bernhardt, signed with her sign-manual, run up to an
alarming figure at the Albert Hall? Have I not myself been privy to the
offer by a British matron of sums incredible for the straw through which
the Prince of Wales had sucked a sherry-cobbler at the Paris Exhibition
of 1867?
"Ster-oh!" ejaculated the negro waiter with open mouth. "Why, bress you,
dat's no use, we trowed it away; but, as yer a nice ole lady, heah's a
dozen for nuffin!"
The spectacle in the Plaza de Toros, the spacious unroofed area
surrounded by stone benches rising one above another, away to the
sheltered balconies up high at the back, is one of the most enlivening
that imagination can conceive on the afternoon of a corrida, when male
and female humanity, all jubilant bustle and expectancy, make a
prismatic girdle around. Fans move with an incessant tremulous flutter;
there is a continuous susurrus of voices, broken by occasional hoarse
bursts of laughter at some mishap, or hoarse roars of welcome as some
favourite enters; the regal sun discharges his fierce messages of light
from his throne of blue, and the costumes of every colour, wavering with
the pulsations of the throng, are an active kaleidoscope, most vivid and
variegated. We are in our places. We have stepped up the Alcalá at the
heels of the picquet of armed militia charged with the maintenance of
order. We have threaded our way through the rough maze of passages to
our palco, peeping at the stable where the sorry horses are kept, at the
room where the toreadores dress themselves, and at the little oratory
where the matador prays before he stalks into the palestra. We are in
our places, and everybody is in his place; the Governor of the city in
his box of state yonder. While the music races over the assemblage in
glad alternation of rush and ripple, let us look below. There is a
strong wooden barrier some six feet high around the arena, and at
knee-height, on the inner side of this barrier, there is a berme to help
the pursued chulo to a footing as he vaults over into the surrounding
lane formed by this interior and an exterior barrier. This lane is
guarded by policemen, and is so narrow that a bull has not room to turn
in it; for bulls sometimes bound over the inner barrier. When that
occurs, and I have seen it occur not seldom, they are driven round until
they reach one of the gates opening into the ring. The trumpets and
tymbals speak warning; a profound silence falls upon the crowd for an
instant, and then from a side passage enters the cavalcade we have
awaited--enters to a stately martial march. First, the mounted alguazil
in his ancient garb, plumed, cloaked, funereal; then the chulos, lithe,
young, graceful; then the picadores on their garrons, Mexican-looking in
their saddles, with tall pummel and crupper and shovel-shaped stirrups,
wide-leafed sombreros, their short jackets tagged all over, their yellow
breeches and their high boots lead-lined; then the banderilleros, and
then the matador, the chieftain of the troop. The alguazil beseeches the
key of the toril from the Governor, receives it, turns it in the lock;
and as the bull with dazed vision enters into the sunshine at one gate,
he disappears at an amble through another.
The bull! What a noble specimen of his race!--broad-browed,
clean-horned, and clean-limbed; high courage in his bloodshot orbs, his
dilated nostril, and his lashing tail! On the right and left the
quadrille arrange themselves, the picadores, each with a spike at the
end of his long shaft, and a kerchief bandaging one eye of his horse;
the chulos, pretty fellows in turban, loose embroidered jackets, ruffled
shirts, kneebreeches of coquettish hue and texture, silken hose and
buckled shoes, standing, with their cloaks, nearer to the centre of the
ring. All these toreadores are men of symmetry and power, all wear
chignons in nets, and are close-shaven, except as to side-whiskers of
the brief "mutton-chop" order, and all bear themselves as if they were
proud of their vocation. The bull waits. The chulos give challenge. They
rush upon him, shaking their gaudy little cloaks, and as he charges they
scamper to the sides, while one takes up the running from another. In
short, they tease him as much for the sake of tiring him out as of
testing his disposition. But by-and-by one chulo ingeniously leads the
charging bull towards a horse. Toro rushes head-foremost. The picador
is unequal to keep him off with his spike; the horse is gored in the
belly and overthrown, the rider falling under. The chulos cluster to the
rescue, with their fluttering cloaks, and draw the bull away confused.
The picador is extricated; the horse is taken out, and in a few moments
after re-enters, his entrails packed inside and stomach sewn up, and is
once more offered to the maddened brute, always on his blind side. We
shall hurry over this episode of the tournament; I do not like it, nor
do you. But here is something really fine. The banderilleros enter, with
barbed shafts decked with ribbons, poised in each hand, and make a
feinting advance on the bull, and as he runs to meet them they deftly
hurl their shafts and elude him by a demi-volte. The act of doing this
well is to plant one banderilla on each side of the bull's neck, close
by the streaming favours that mark the herd from which he is
furnished--the colours of his stable, so to speak--to plant them evenly
and at equal distances from his crest, and when this is skilfully
accomplished there are frantic yells of praise, and caps and cigars are
showered into the arena. When the banderillero is awkward, they rain on
him with potatoes. These banderilleros incur hazard. I have seen one so
keenly chased by the bull that he was pinned against the barriers by the
bull's horns as he was in the act of vaulting over. Pinned, but not in
the flesh; the branching horns stuck in the wood at either side, just
above the calf of one leg, and imprisoned him until he had to be sawed
out.
This is but the prologue; now for the play. Toro by this time is in a
white rage; there is foam at his chaps, his steaming sides are laced
with blood. Cucharra of Puerto Santa Maria is the matador. Majestically
he strides towards the Governor's box, stoops in obeisance, and in a
loud voice makes proclamation: "Brindo por Puerto Santa Maria, por toda
su compañia, por el vulgo de Madrid; voy á matar ese bicho ó el bicho me
mata á mi;" an address which may thus be freely rendered: "I pledge
myself to Puerto Santa Maria and all its society, and to the people of
Madrid; and now I am ready to kill this animal, if the animal cannot
kill me." He removes his turban, and, with a graceful jerk with his
right hand from behind his back over his left shoulder, flings it into
the Governor's box, as a gage of his boasted prowess. He takes his
straight keen-tempered sword and his cloak of offensive scarlet, and
advances towards the bull. Now is the supreme trial, now is the time
when men let their lighted cigarettes drop from their mouths and clench
their teeth; now is the time when women close their fans and draw long
breaths. Cucharra faces Toro at a yard's distance. They regard each
other. Cucharra hides his sword under his cloak, and presents it to the
bull. Toro lowers his head, shuts his eyes, and charges, but the
toreador gracefully slips aside and saves his life by a turn of the
heel. Three times he repeats the feat of this risksome pirouette; but
woe to him if he is an instant too late in his movements, or if the soil
is treacherous. The fourth time, as the bull lowers his head, Cucharra
lifts himself on his toes, and with one sure swift blow plunges the
blade, almost to the hilt, into the spine of his antagonist. The bull
stands; there is a shout of "Bravo!" the bull still stands, ten seconds,
twenty, thirty; there is a howl of disappointment; but Cucharra gazes
contemptuously around; he knows he has done his work well, and, my
faith, he has. Toro quivers and drops, and Cucharra plants a foot on the
neck of his prostrate enemy. The bull has died of internal hæmorrhage;
not a drop of blood has distilled from his mouth. Bravo, Cucharra!
This death at the first thrust--death without drip of the crimson fluid
from the mouth--is the artistic death. When the sword pierces at the
wrong spot, is displaced by the shaking of the bull, and sent flying,
gore-wet, through the air, it is awkward workmanship.
But Toro showed "mucho fuego" before he was so neatly pierced in the
medulla. Bravo, Toro! And now the cachetero stoops over him, and, with
one dig of his sharp knife in the neck, makes assurance doubly sure. The
team of mules trot in, and trot out again with the dead champion at
their heels; and the urchins outside are dancing on his carcase as the
drums and tymbals give prelude to the entrance of a second champion
into the enthusiastic circle.
The slimy pools in the arena are promptly strewn with sand, and the
fresh bull is ushered into the lists, either against the same quadrille,
or against another espada with his special troop of assistants. Some of
the brutes are self-possessed, as that "proud and stately steer" Harpado
of Xarama, who was matched with Ganzul the Moor.
"Dark is his hide on either side, but the blood within doth boil,
And the dun hide glows, as if on fire, as he paws to the turmoil,
His eyes are jet, and they are set in crystal rings of snow;
But now they stare with one red glare of brass upon the foe."
All in vain, Toro. Thy fate is sealed. Useless to prance round with
defiance, to bellow with unsatisfied wrath, to churn the sand with
furious hoof and flash hither and thither the flaming arrows of thy
glance. Thou art foredoomed, and wilt fall as surely after brave
struggle as thy mate, less eager for the strife, who has to be pricked
up to anger, and drops at last bewildered amid the derision of the
crowd. That is where I find fault with the sport. Toro who shows good
fight should get his respite, like the Roman gladiator who pleased the
multitude.
Still, is his fate to be deplored? Confess, is it not rather to be
envied? He gives up his vital principle in the rapture of battle; he
feels no wound but the grievous one to the combatant that he can beat
down no more foes; he yields breath with a bold front; there is threat
in his agony as he sinks, still with challenge in his port, amid the
applause of admiring thousands. There is something of martyr-heroism in
this ending. It is grander, nobler, happier than to fall by the
butcher's plebeian mallet in the slaughter-house, or to succumb to the
slow miseries of rinderpest. Whoso denies it will downface me next that
it is fitter for the warrior to die of podagra in a four-post bed than
to perish on the field with harness on his back--that dropsy at St.
Helena was more to be coveted than a bullet at Waterloo!
Tauromachy, I repeat, will last as long as Spain lasts. It will have its
school and its dialect, its canons of skill expatiated upon in
elaborate treatises; its honoured exponents; its impassioned amateurs
and its munificent patrons; its historiographers and poets. In my
devotedness to it I have sacrificed the favour of a comely English
maiden, for Emmeline, who has seen through my hypocrisy in the hall,
averts the light of her countenance as we sit down to dinner. I am sorry
for it, for I had inclinings towards that lady, she was so attentive to
her father, and she had confided to me with such a pretty frankness that
she sighed for the days when Mohammad-al-Hamar was throned in Granada.
* * * * *
NOTE BY THE WRITER'S DAUGHTER.--The conceit of you. Emmeline, I think,
was quite right to cut you, after your brutishness. No doubt you think
the glorification of bull-butchery a piece of fine writing, and so
original, you know. I'm up to the games of you authors; but if I were
the printers I would not print one single line of it. I should just like
to put a pen in the bull's hand and read _his_ description of the
fight.