"Angels o'er the palm trees flying,
Touch their waving fronds to rest.
Bid them give no wind replying.
Jesus sleeps on Mary's breast.
Blessed angels, hold the peeping
Branches still as altar-place,
For the Holy Child is sleeping
Close beneath His Mother's face."
--LOPE DE VEGA.
Spanish love for childhood, and the precocity and winsomeness of
Spanish children, impressed me from my first hour in the Peninsula.
"There is no road so level as to be without rough places," and the
initial days of my Madrid residence, after my artist comrade had gone
back to Paris and the spring salons, might have been a trifle lonely
save for baby society. I was living in a delightful Spanish household,
but the very excess of courtesy reminded me continually that I was a
Yankee and a heretic. As time passed, friendship ripened, and it is
to-day no empty form of words when I am assured that I have "my house
in Madrid." But at the outset I felt myself not only an American
alien, but an Andalusian exile. The "only Court" is such a prosaic
contrast to Seville that my impulse was to betake myself with books
to the great park of the Buen Retiro, the magnificent gift of Olivares
to his royal master, and let the Madrid world, at least the adult
portion of it, go by. For while the larger Madrilenos were busy with
their own plays of politics, bull-fights, and flirtation, the little
ones had happy afternoons in that historic park of many a tragedy,
where convents, palaces, and fortifications have all made way for the
children's romping ground. Resting on a rustic seat in the leafy
shade, with the rich, thrilling notes of the nightingale answering the
bell call of the cuckoo from the deeper groves beyond, I could watch
these budding Spaniards to heart's content.
It was well to observe them from a distance, however, for their young
voices were of the shrillest. Among the boys, an energetic few were
developing muscle by tag and leap-frog; more were flying kites,
cracking whips, twirling slings, and brandishing the terrors of pewter
swords; while at every turn, beside some flashing fountain or beneath
some spreading oak, I would come upon a group of urchins playing _al
toro_ with the cheap, gaudy capes of red and yellow manufactured for
the children's sport. The girls were skipping rope, rolling hoop,
teaching one another the steps of endless dances, and whispering
momentous secrets in statue-guarded grottos, or thickets of flowering
shrubs, or whatsoever safe, mysterious nook their fluttering search
could find.
Here was a school out for its daily airing, a pretty procession of
rainbow-clad little damsels, marshalled by the black-veiled figures of
graceful nuns, and pacing with all decorum down a crowded avenue; but
the moment the troop turned into some sequestered by-path, how it
would break into a shimmering confusion of butterflies, darting
hither and thither in those jewel-green lights and sea-green shadows,
the nuns casting their dignity to the winds and scampering with the
swiftest! Wandering after I would come, perhaps, upon an open space
where the smaller boys were gathered, delicate little lads riding
horse-headed sticks, digging with mimic spades, and tossing big, soft,
red and yellow balls, while mothers and nurses sat about in circle on
the stone benches, calling out sharp-toned cautions to their
respective charges.
And everywhere in the park were toddling babies, clasping dolls,
tugging at gay balloons, dragging wooden donkeys on wheels, and
tumbling over live puppies. They were pale, engaging, persistent
little creatures, with a true Spanish inability to learn from
experience. I saw one aristocratic cherub, white as snow from
feathered cap to ribboned shoes, take ten successive slappings because
he muddied his hands. The angry nurse would make a snatch for the
naughty fingers, roughly beat off the dirt, and cuff the culprit
soundly. His proud little mouth would tremble; he would wink hard and
fast, but there was not a tear to be seen, not a cry to be heard, and
no sooner had her peasant clutch released him than back went the baby
hands, grubbing deep into the mire. A gorgeous civil guard finally
distracted her attention, and the last view I had of the child showed
him blissfully squatted in the very middle of a puddle, splashing with
arms and legs.
White is almost the universal wear of the prattling age in the Buen
Retiro, although now and then some lily fairy would flit by with
saffron sash and harmonious saffron stockings, or costume similarly
touched by pink or blue. The Scotch plaids, too, were in favor as
sashes, and at rare intervals I encountered a tot sensibly attired in
stout plaid frock. But the white of this childish multitude was
thickly flecked with mourning suits, complete to bits of black gloves
and even to jet studs in the collars. Among the sad sights of the
Retiro was an epileptic boy, led and half supported between two
sweet-faced, youthful ladies, both in widow's crepe, who screened him
with caresses as his fit took him and he foamed and screamed in
piteous helplessness. This pathetic trio, ever seeking seclusion, was
ever followed by a retinue of idlers, who, for all their intrusive
staring, were silent and sympathetic.
The nursemaids formed not the least attractive feature of the
kaleidoscopic picture. Most wore white caps, fastened with gilded pins
or knots of rose or russet; but the nurses counted the best, from the
mountain province of Santander, were distinguished by bright-colored
handkerchiefs twisted about the head. Here, as in the _Elysees_,
baby-wagons are seldom seen. The nurses carry in arms the black-eyed
infants, who bite away at their coral necklaces quite like little
Yankees.
But Spanish traits soon declare themselves. In the centre of the park
is an artificial pond, where lads in their first teens, too old for
play, lean languidly over the iron railings, and, while they throw
crumbs to the flock of forlorn-looking ducks or watch the dip of the
red oar-blades that impel the pleasure boats, brag of their amorous
adventures and exchange the scandal of the _Prado_. Sometimes their
love chat is of sweeter tenor, for many of these schoolboys have
already spoken their betrothal vows, which the Church will not let
them lightly break. Spaniards often marry under twenty-one, and even a
recent wedding in Madrid, where neither bride nor bridegroom had
reached the fifteenth year, was hardly thought amiss, in view of the
fact that there was parental money to maintain them.
And why had the stately city of Valladolid been under a reign of
terror for half the week just past, with shutters up, doors barred,
and women and children kept at home for safety, while bands of young
men swayed in bloody struggle through her famous squares and streets,
but because a cadet and a student must needs lose heart to the same
maid? Cupid, not Santiago, is the patron saint of Spain. And Cupid,
for all his mischief, has some very winning ways. Our boyish
sentimentalists of the Buen Retiro, for instance, easily fall into
song, and the native melodies, always with something wild and Oriental
in their beat, ring across the little lake into the woods beyond till
the birds take up the challenge and every tree grows vocal.
One afternoon, on my way to the park, I bought from a roadside vender
a handful of small, gaudily bound children's books, and had no sooner
found what I fondly supposed was a sequestered seat than a tumult of
little folks surrounded me, coaxing to hear the stories. These tales,
so taken at random, may throw a little light on the literature of
Spanish nurseries. There was the life of the Madonna, which we passed
over, as the children said they had read it in school and knew it,
every word, already. So we turned to the astonishing career of the
great soldier, Kill-Bullet, who could easily stop a cannon-ball
against his palm, and to an account of that far-off land where it
rained gold in such profusion that nobody would work, until finally
all the people, weary of a wealth which induced no tailor to stitch
and no shoemaker to cobble, no baker to bake and no dairy-maid to
churn, rose by common consent and shovelled the gold into the river.
We read of hot-tempered little Ambrose, who left the gate of his
garden open, so that a hen cackled in and began to scratch under a
rose bush, whereupon the angry boy chased her furiously all over the
garden-beds until his summer's work was trampled into ruin, and his
papa came and explained to him how disastrous a thing is wrath. There
was a companion moral tale for little girls, telling how Inez used to
make faces until her mamma told her that she would grow up with a
twisted mouth and nobody would marry her, whereat did little Inez
promptly reform her manners. One favorite volume, with a cover which
displayed a wild-whiskered old ogre in a fiery skullcap gloating over
a platterful of very pink baby, told how good little Violet saved her
bad sisters, Rose and Daisy, from his dreadful gullet, by aid of an
ugly monkey, whom her promised kiss transformed into a fairy prince. I
was glad to find, in that country where so little is done to train
children in the love of animals, the ancient tale of the four
musicians, the donkey, the dog, the cat, and the cock, who escaped in
their old age from the death that threatened them at the hands of
ungrateful masters and, by a free exercise of their musical talents,
captured the house of a robber-band, putting its inmates to confusion
and flight. Many of the stories, indeed, would have been recognized by
young Americans, but the proportion of saint-lore was larger than that
of fairy-lore, and, now and then, some familiar property had suffered
a Spanish change, as the invisible cap which had become an invisible
cape of the sort used for playing bull-fight.
[Illustration: THE PAGEANT OF GETHSEMANE]
The nursery rhymes, too, so far as I chanced upon them, were of the
universal type with Spanish variations. A Castilian mother plays
Peek-a-boo with her baby quite as an English mother does, except that
the syllables are _Cu? Tras!_ The father's foot trots the child to a
Catholic market.
"Trot, little donkey! Donkey, trot!
We must buy honey to please the pet.
If San Francisco has it not,
We'll go to San Benet."
Baby's toes are counted as the eternal five little pigs, and also
thus, with a preliminary tickling of the rosy sole:--
"Here passed a little dove. This one caught it. This one killed it.
This one put it on to roast. This one took it off again. And this
teeny-teeny-teeny scamp ate it all up!"
Spanish patty-cakes are followed by a Spanish grace.
"Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!
The sweetest cakes are for dear mama.
Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!
The hardest pats are for poor papa,
"Bread, O God! Bread, dear God,
For this little child to-day!
Because he's such a baby
He cannot pay his way."
The Spanish nursery seems richer in rhymes than ours. Nurse bends
Baby's left hand into a rose-leaf purse, for example, and gives it
little taps with one finger after another of Baby's right hand,
singing:--
"A penny for Baby's purse
From papa, mama, and nurse.
A penny, a penny to pay!
Let no thief steal it away!"
And then the tiny fist is doubled tight.
When the child, again, is first dressed in short clothes, he is
propped up in a corner and coaxed to take his first step with the
rhyme:--
"One little step, Baby-boy mine!
Come, Little Man, step up!
And thou shalt have a taste of wine
From Godfather's silver cup."
This rhyming fashion the little ones take with them out of babyhood
into their later childhood. The urchin admonishes his whistle:--
"Whistle, whistle, Margarita,
And you'll get a crust of bread,
But if you do not whistle
I'll cut off your little head."
The little girl learns the scales in process of rocking her doll to
sleep:--
Don't pin-prick my poor old dolly, _Do_
Respect my domestic matters. _Re_
Methinks she grows melancholy, _Mi_
Fast as her sawdust scatters. _Fa_
Sole rose of your mama's posy, _Sol_
Laugh at your mama, so! _La_
Seal up your eyes all cozy. _Si_
_La Sol Fa Mi Re Do._
With Spanish children, as with ours, Christmas Eve, or _Noche Buena_,
is a season of gleeful excitement. They do not hang up stockings for
Santa Claus, but they put out their shoes on the balcony for the Kings
of the East, riding high on camel-back, to fill with sweets and
playthings. Considerate children, too, put out a handful of straw for
the tired beasts who have journeyed so far over the Milky Way. On some
balconies the morning sun beholds rocking-horses and rocking-donkeys,
make-believe theatres and bull-rings, with toy images of soldiers,
bulls and Holy Families; but if the child has been naughty and
displeased the Magi, his poor little shoes will stand empty and
ashamed.
The dramatic instinct, so strong in Spaniards, is strikingly
manifested in the children's games. These little people are devoted to
the theatre, too, and may be seen in force at the matinees in the
Apolo, Lara, and Zarzuela. Afternoon performances are given only on
Sundays and the other Catholic _fiestas_, which last, numerous enough,
are well within reach of the Puritan conscience. At these matinees
more than half the seats in the house are occupied by juvenile
ticket-holders, from rows of vociferous urchins in the galleries, to
round-eyed babies cooing over their nurses' shoulders. If the play is
an extravaganza, abounding in magic and misadventure, the rapture of
the childish audience is at its height.
The close attention with which mere three-year-olds follow the action
is astonishing. "_Bonito!_" lisping voices cry after each fantastic
ballet, and wee white hands twinkle up and down in time with the merry
music. When the clown divests himself, one by one, of a score of
waistcoats, or successively pulls thirty or forty smiling dairy-maids
out of a churn, little arithmeticians all over the house call out the
count and dispute his numbers with him. When the dragon spits his
shower of sparks, when chairs sidle away from beneath the unfortunates
who would sit down or suddenly rise with them toward the ceiling, when
signboards whirl, and dinners frisk up chimney, cigars puff out into
tall hats, and umbrellas fire off bullets, the hubbub of wonder and
delight drowns the voices of the actors.
The house is never still for one single instant. Babies cry wearily,
nurses murmur soothingly, mystified innocents pipe out questions,
papas rebuke and explain, exasperated old bachelors hiss for silence,
saucy boys hiss back for fun--all together the Madrid matinee affords
a far better opportunity to study child life than to hear the comedy
upon the boards.
The boy king of Spain is, of course, a fascinating figure to his child
subjects. We were told at San Sebastian, where the Queen Regent has a
summer palace, that on those red-letter days when the king takes a sea
dip, children come running from far and near to see him step into the
surf, with two stalwart soldiers gripping the royal little fists. And
no sooner has the Court returned to the sumptuous, anxious palace of
Madrid, than the boy bathers of San Sebastian delight themselves in
playing king, mincing down the beach under the pompous military escort
that they take turns in furnishing one another.
In Madrid, too, the sightseeing crowds that gather before the royal
palace or at the doors of the _Iglesia del Buen Suceso_, where the
Queen Regent, with her "august children," sometimes attends the
_Salve_ on Saturday afternoons, are thickly peppered with little
folks, eager to "see the king." They are often disappointed, for the
precious life is jealously guarded, especially while the Carlist cloud
still broods above the throne. During my stay in Madrid, a man with a
revolver under his coat was arrested on suspicion in the vestibule of
the theatre known as _La Comedia_, where the queen was passing the
evening. Sceptical Madrid shrugged its shoulders and said: "Stuff and
nonsense! When the Ministers want the queen to sign a paper that isn't
to her liking, they make a great show of devotion and pounce down on
some poor devil as an anarchist, to frighten her into being meek and
grateful." And, in fact, the prisoner was almost immediately released
for lack of any incriminating evidence. For weeks after, nevertheless,
the royal movements were more difficult to forecast, and on the daily
drives the kinglet was often missing from the family group.
But, undiscouraged, every afternoon the children would fringe the
palace side of the _Plaza de Oriente_, hoping to see the royal
carriage go or come with their young sovereign, whose portrait, a
wistful, boyish face above a broad lace collar, is printed in one of
their school reading books over the inscription, "To the Head of the
State honor and obedience are due." Expectant youngsters, in the
all-enveloping black pinafores that remind the eye of Paris, with book
satchels made of gay carpeting over the shoulder, would shake out
their smudgy handkerchiefs, often stamped with the likenesses of
famous _toreros_, and help themselves to one another's hats in
readiness to salute; but the elegant landau, preceded by an escort of
two horsemen, dashes by so swiftly that their long waiting would be
rewarded only by the briefest glimpse of bowing bonnets and of a
small gloved hand touching the military cap that shades a childish
face.
It is a pale and sober little face as I have seen it, but Madrilenos
resent this impression and insist that his youthful Majesty is "sturdy
enough," and as merry as need be. They say that the buoyancy which he
inherits from his father is crossed by strange fits of brooding, due
to his mother's blood, but that he is, in the main, a merry-hearted
child. Although he has masters for his studies now, his affection
still clings to his Austrian governess, whom, none the less, he dearly
loves to tease. When she is honored by an invitation to drive with the
Queen Regent, for example, Alphonsito hastens to hide her hat and then
joins most solicitously in her fluttered search, until her suspicion
darts upon him, and his prank breaks down in peals of laughter. Madrid
was especially sensitive about him last year, for he, Alfonso XIII,
godson of Pope Leo XIII, was thirteen years of age--an iteration of
the unlucky omen that really ought to be satisfied with the loss of
the Spanish colonies. His mother, in honor of his birthday, May
seventeenth, distributed five thousand dollars among orphan asylums
and other charities, and held a grand reception in the Hall of the
Ambassadors, where the slight lad in cadet uniform, enthroned beside
the Queen Regent between the two great lions of gilded bronze,
received the congratulations of a long procession of bowing ministers,
admirals, captain generals, prelates, and those haughty grandees of
Spain whose ancient privilege it is to wear their hats in the royal
presence; but the shrinkage of his realm since his last birthday must
have been uppermost in the mind of even the young lord of the
festival. _Pobrecito!_ one wonders what thoughts go on behind those
serious brows of his, when, for instance, he looks down from his
palace windows at the daily ceremony of guard-mounting in the
courtyard. It is such a gallant sight; the martial music is so
stirring; the cavalry in blue and silver sit their white steeds so
proudly, with the sun glistening on their drawn swords and the wind
tossing their long, white, horsehair plumes, that all these tales of
defeat and loss must puzzle the sore boy heart and cast confusing
shadows down the path before him.
Little as the Spaniards love the Queen Regent, to whom they cannot
pardon her two cardinal offences of being a "foreigner" and of
disliking the bull-fight, they have a certain affection for Alfonso
XIII, "the only child born a king since Christ." Indeed, Spain seems
to have been always sympathetic toward childhood in palaces. Enter
this wonderful _Armeria_ of Madrid, where those plumed and armored
kings, on richly caparisoned chargers, whom we have come to know in
the paintings of the _Museo del Prado_, seem to have leapt from the
canvases to greet us here in still more lifelike guise, albeit not
over graciously, with horse reined back and mighty lance at poise. Any
fine morning they may all come clattering out into the _Plaza de
Armas_--and where will the United States be then? Here stands a
majestic row of them--Philip II, in a resplendent suit of gold-inlaid
plate-armor; Maximilian, whose visor gives him the fierce hooked beak
of an eagle; Sebastian of Portugal, with nymphs embossed in cunning
work on his rich breastplate; and Charles V, three times over, in
varieties of imperial magnificence.
[Illustration: "JESUS OF THE PASSION"]
But opposite these stern warriors is a hollow square of boy princes,
and of noble _ninos_ whose visors hide their identities in long
oblivion. The armor of these childish figures is daintily wrought,
with tender touches of ruffs and cuffs, scallops and flutings and
rosettes. Often only the upper half of the body is incased in steel,
the slender legs playing the dandy in puffed trousers of striped
velvet--scarlet, green, and buff--silk hose, and satin slippers.
Little Philip III proudly displays a diminutive round shield, with a
relief of battle scenes in gold. The plate armor of little Philip IV
is stamped with lions and castles, eagles and spears. And his little
son, Don Baltasar Carlos, bestrides a spirited pony and wears at the
back of his helmet a tuft of garnet feathers.
The _Prado_ galleries abound in royal children. This same _infante_,
Don Baltasar, is seen here in the foreground of a lonely landscape,
with desolate blue hills beyond and driving clouds above. But all the
more bright and winsome glows the form of the six-year-old horseman,
the gold-fringed, pink sash that crosses his breast streaming out far
behind with the speed of his fearless gallop. Supreme among the
_Prado_ children, of course, is the little daughter of Philip IV, the
central figure of the world-renowned _Las Meninas_. All in vain does
her charming maid of honor kneel to her with the golden cup; all in
vain does the dwarf tease the drowsy dog. The solemn puss, undiverted,
will not stir from her pose nor alter the set of her small features
until the artist, standing half disdainfully before his easel, gives
the word. She has waited for it now hard upon two hundred and fifty
years, but the centuries beat in vain against that inflexible bit of
propriety.
Even the royal burial vaults beneath the grim Escorial have in their
chill grandeur of marble halls an especial Panteon for babies,
princely innocents whose lives are reckoned in months more often than
in years. Gold and blue and red brighten their great white sepulchre,
and above the altar smiles the Christ Child, with the graven words,
"Suffer the children to come unto me." But for Alfonso XIII a sombre
sarcophagus waits in the haughtiest and gloomiest of all the Panteons,
where only kings, and queens who were mothers of kings, may lie.
It is not royal childhood alone that is dear to this strange,
romantic, monstrously inconsistent heart of Spain. The cruelty of
Spaniards to horses and donkeys sickens even the roughest Englishman,
yet almost every voice softens in speaking to a child, and during my
six months in Spanish cities I saw nothing of that street brutality
toward the little ones which forces itself upon daily notice in
Liverpool and London. Spanish children are too often ill-cared for,
but despite the abuses of ignorant motherhood and fatherhood, such
vivid, vivacious, bewitching little people as they are! Enter a
Spanish schoolroom and see how vehemently the small brown hands are
wagged in air, how the black eyes dance and the dimples play, what a
stir and bustle, what a young exuberance of energy! They race to the
blackboards like colts out at pasture. They laugh at everything, these
sons of "the grave Spaniard," and even the teacher will duck his head
behind the desk for a half-hidden ecstasy over some dunce's blunder or
some rogue's detected trick.
But their high spirits never make them unmindful of those courtesies
of life in which they have been so carefully trained. There is an
old-fashioned exaggeration about their set phrases of politeness. Just
as the casual caller kisses the lady's feet, in words, and she
reciprocates by a verbal kissing of his hand, so the school children
respond to the roll call with a glib: "Your servant, sir." Ask a
well-bred boy his name, and he rattles back, "Jesus Herrera y
La-Chica, at the service of God and yourself." They learn these
amenities of speech with their first lispings. I was much taken aback
one day in Seville by a child of eighteen months. Not in the least
expecting this infant, whose rosy face was bashfully snuggled into his
young aunt's neck, to understand, I said to her, "What a fine little
fellow!" Whereupon Master Roly-poly suddenly sat up straight on her
arm, ducked his head in my direction, and gravely enunciated, "_Es
favor que Usted me hace_"--"It is a compliment you pay me." I could
hardly recover from the shock in time to make the stereotyped
rejoinder, "_No es favor, es justicia_"--"No compliment, but the
truth." To this Don Chubbykins sweetly returned, "_Mil gracias_"--"A
thousand thanks," and I closed this uncanny dialogue with the due
response, "_No las merece_"--"It does not merit them."
Servants, neighbors, passers-by, beggars, all prompt the children in
these shibboleths of good manners, adorning the precept with example.
"Would you like to go with us to the picture gallery this afternoon?"
I once asked a laddie of artistic tastes at a boarding-house table.
"_Si, senora_," he replied, whereupon several of the boarders, greatly
scandalized, hastened to remind him, but in the gentlest of tones, of
the essential addition, "_con mucho gusto_" to which we were bound to
reply, "The pleasure will be ours." The girls, even more than the
boys, are bred in these formal fashions of intercourse. Every morning
they ask if you have rested well, and express grief or gratification,
according to your response. In Mrs. Gulick's school, mere midgets of
six and eight, returning from class, will not close the doors of their
rooms if you are in sight, though perhaps seated at a reading table in
the farther end of the corridor, lest they should appear inhospitable.
On our return from Italica, a thirsty child of seven, heated to
exhaustion with the sun and fun of that Andalusian picnic, refused to
touch the anise-seed water which some good Samaritan had handed up to
the dusty carriage, until the glass had been offered to every one
else, driver included, leaving, in the sequel, little enough for her.
On our midnight return from the _Feria_, this same _nina_ of gentle
memory, staggering and half crying with sleepiness, would nevertheless
not precede any of her elders in entering the home door. "After you,"
she sobbed, with hardly voice enough to add, "And may you all rest
well!" "The same to you," chorussed the adults, trooping by, and her
faint murmur followed, "Many thanks."
"Shall I give you this fan when I go away," I asked her once, "or
would you rather have it now to take to the party?" She wanted it then
and there, but what she answered was, "I shall be best pleased to take
it when you like best to give it."
You must beware of saying to a little Spanish maid, "What a beautiful
rosebud in your hair!" Instantly the hand is busy with the pins. "It
is at your disposal." You hastily protest, "A thousand thanks, but no,
no, no! It is very well placed where it is." Off comes the flower,
notwithstanding, and is fastened into your belt. For when the elder
sister has insisted on giving you (until the next ball) those dancing
slippers which you so rashly admired, and the sister's _novio_ went
home the night before without his cloak, because you had approved its
colors (although he sent his man around for it before breakfast), what
can the children do but follow suit? Even their form of "Now I Lay Me"
is touched with their quaint politeness:--
"Jesus, Joseph, Mary,
Your little servant keep,
While, with your kind permission,
I lay me down to sleep."
The precocity of Spanish children is a recognized fact. An educational
expert, a Frenchman who holds a chair in an English university,
assured us that beyond a doubt Spanish children, for the first dozen
years of life, develop more rapidly than any other children of Europe.
Yet, although these clever little Spaniards are so punctiliously
taught to put the pleasure of others before their own, they are
treated with universal indulgence. Soldiers lining the curbstones on
occasion of a royal progress will let the children press in beside
them and cling to their valorous legs, until the military array seems
variegated with a Kindergarten. My farewell glimpse of Toledo, on
Corpus Christi Day, makes a pretty picture in memory. The red-robed
cardinal, who had come to the station to take his train, was fairly
stormed by all the children within sight, clamoring for his blessing.
In vain the attendant priests tried to scatter the throng, and ladies
of high degree, planting their chairs in a circle about the prelate,
acted as a laughing body-guard. It was all of no avail. The little
people danced up and down with eagerness, dodged under arms, and
slipped between elbows. They knelt upon the cardinal's very feet,
rapturously kissing his red-gloved hand and clasping to their
pinafores and blouses the sacred trinkets he distributed. And he,
patting the bobbing black pates, wherever he could get a chance,
smiled on the little ones and forbade them not.
The affection lavished on children in the household circle is often
poetic and passionate. I observed one day a brusque young fellow of
twenty-four, whom we had thought rather a hard, catch-penny sort of
person, suddenly gather a four-year-old nephew to his heart and cover
the dimpled face with kisses, while the look in his own black eyes was
the look of a St. Anthony. I stood once in a crowded cathedral and
lost all sense of the service in contemplation of an ugly manikin,
with coarse features and receding forehead, who held a frail baby boy
tight against his breast. This was a blue-eyed, fair-haired wean, with
a serious, far-away expression, and from time to time, attracted by
the gilt of the ceiling, he raised a tiny pink fore-finger and pointed
upward, while the father's animal face, never turned away from the
child, became transfigured with love and worship. He took the baby
out, when it had fallen asleep upon his shoulder, and it was good to
see that dense throng open and make a lane for him, every man, however
brutal or frivolous his aspect, being careful not to jostle the
drooping, golden head.
But Spanish children, so caressed and so adored, are nevertheless
modest in their bearing, and fall shyly back before a stranger. I
remember a beaming grandfather displaying to us two blushing little
men, bidding them open their eyes wide that we might contrast colors,
turn back to back that we might measure heights, and in various ways
put their small selves on show, all which they did in mute obedience,
but at the word of release flew together, flung their arms about each
other's necks, rolled under the nearest table, and curled up into the
least possible bunch of bashful agony.
The pictures, frescos, and carvings of Spanish churches often reflect
the looks of Spanish childhood. The Holy Family gives a wide range of
opportunity, especially in the ministering cherubs. There is a
crucifix in one of the twenty-two aisle chapels of Toledo cathedral,
where three broken-hearted mites of angels, just three crying babies,
are piteously striving to draw out the nails from the Sufferer's hands
and feet. Many of the saint-groups admit of child figures, too, as the
St. Christopher, which almost invariably appears as a colossal nave
painting, "the Goliath of frescos."
It would be strange, indeed, if children were not beloved in the
country of Murillo. Spain has let the most of his beggar-boy pictures
go to foreign collections, but she has cherished his Holy Families and
cherub-peopled Annunciations. Such ecstatic rogues as those Andalusian
cherubs are! Their restless ringlets catch azure shadows from the
Virgin's mantle; they perch tiptoe on the edges of her crescent moon;
they hold up a mirror to her glory and peep over the frame to see
themselves; they pelt St. Francis with roses; they play bo-beep from
behind the fleecy folds of cloud; they try all manner of aerial
gymnastics. But a charm transcending even theirs dwells in those baby
Christs that almost spring from the Madonna's arms to ours, in those
boy Christs that touch all boyhood with divinity. The son of the
Jewish carpenter, happy in his father's workshop with bird and dog;
the shepherd lad whose earnest eyes look toward his waiting flock;
the lovely playmates, radiant with innocent beauty, who bend together
above the water of life--from these alone might Catholic Spain have
learned the sacredness of childhood. But Spain first showed Murillo
the vision that he rendered back to her.