IV

I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it

was so Italian, so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with

a generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape

bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a

balustrade of marble, with fat _putti,_ or marble boys, on the corners,

who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied

with looking like so many thousands of _putti_ in Italy. They looked

like Italian _putti_ with a difference, the difference that passes

between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble.

They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough

in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which

Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of _putti._ Yet they

were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in

pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in

the hours of _siesta._ If they had been in wood Spanish art would have

known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering

an acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been

there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.

I do not know if they had been there long enough to have witnessed

the murder of Cromwell’s ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite

gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land where

they were in exile from England. That must have been sometime about the

middle of the century after Philip II., bigot as he was, could not bear

the more masterful bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his

court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the

capital forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court

to Valladolid and making that the capital _en titre_ when he liked.

However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, returned with his

court to Madrid and it has ever since remained the capital, and has

come, with many natural disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my

pleasure I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a luxurious

indulgence of the love of beauty, and like a preference of Venice in

Italy when there was Rome to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes

you think of Rome as I have said, and if it had a better climate it

would make you think of Rome still more. Notoriously, however, it has

not a good climate and we had not come at the right season to get the

best of the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the rains do

not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before November, and now

they began early in October. The day would open fair, with only a few

little white clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other’s

experience we knew it would rain before the day closed; only a morning

absolutely clear could warrant the hope of a day fair till sunset.

Shortly after noon the little white clouds would drift together and be

joined by others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops would

begin to fall. By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and

the rain would be of a cold which it kept through the night.

This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank,

riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they drive only

on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even more persistently

than we did, for with that love of the fashionable world for which I am

always blaming myself I sometimes took a cab and fared desperately forth

in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of them, and

that once I saw a closed carriage weltering along the drive between the

trees and the trams that border it, with the coachman and footman snugly

sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a

great deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it

helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive in the

Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del Prado; that

is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the very poor and

perhaps unfashionable people.

V

[Illustration: 12 THE BULL-RING, MADRID]

It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most

distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the

dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare

with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more

determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed

ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of

civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any

circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was

a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the

time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go

and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then,

when the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the

arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we

would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.

This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of

piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we

prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday

afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on

Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing

concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising

that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could

not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the

arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together

in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see

a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away

before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at

Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. At Cordova we learned

that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of

usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the

very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up

from their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and

the _aficionados,_ who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest

of Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more

bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights,

till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we

would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even

more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville

is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty

arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision.

By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had

been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the

last _espada_ dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last

bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other _toreros,_

the _banderilleros_ with their darts and the picadors with their

disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena. Such

is the force of a high resolve in strangers bent upon a lesson of

civilization to a barbarous people when disappointed of their purpose.

But we learned too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting

in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the

cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they somehow pull

themselves together and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet

in the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the

bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the

fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers

in the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said,

but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who

has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so

to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast; and when

it comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the ring, or the

_espada_ despatching the bull, or the bull tossing a _landerillero_

in the air she puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish

king, who has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems

so eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at all,

sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest at these

supreme moments.

I do not know whether or not it was because we had failed with the

bull-feast that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in

Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some

of those modern plays which I had read so many of, and which I had

translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the

flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was

“Un Drama Nueva,” by Estebanez, which between us we called “Yorick’s

Love” and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during

the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it

fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do

it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric

Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I

thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that

it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its

characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by

making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this

and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the

enthusiastic Barrett used to say, “with a shout,” though to please him I

had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it

was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick

(whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more

interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to

be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it

gained Barrett much money and me some little.

I was always proud of this success, and I boasted of it to the

bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in finding me some still

moderner plays after quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your

Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction;

but perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller

because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my

demand whether he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw,

and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front

and coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he

entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had

succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than

the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get

me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple earnest when our

glowing concierge gave me the books next day, and I perceived that

the proposed supplement had really been paid for them on my account.

I should not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had proved

better reading than they did on experiment. Some of them were from the

Catalan, and all of them dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain;

but they did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me

more hopeful in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or

fifteen years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied

from Ibsen.

They might have had their effect in the theater, but the rainy weather

had not only spoiled my sole chance of the bull-feast; the effect of it

in a stubborn cold forbade me the night air and kept me from testing

any of the new dramas on the stage, which is always giving new dramas in

Madrid. The stage, or rather the theater, is said to be truly a passion

with the Madrilenos, who go every night to see the whole or the part of

a play and do not mind seeing the same play constantly, as if it were

opera. They may not care to see the play so much as to be seen at it;

that happens in every country; but no doubt the plays have a charm which

did not impart itself from the printed page. The companies are reported

very good: but the reader must take this from me at second hand, as he

must take the general society fact. I only know that people ask you to

dinner at nine, and if they go to the theater afterward they cannot

well come away till toward one o’clock. It is after this hour that the

_tertulia,_ that peculiarly Spanish function, begins, but how long it

lasts or just what it is I do not know. I am able to report confidently,

however, that it is a species of _salon_ and that it is said to be

called a _tertulia_ because of the former habit in the guests, and no

doubt the hostess, of quoting the poet Tertullian. It is of various

constituents, according as it is a fashionable, a literary, or an

artistic _tertulia,_ or all three with an infusion of science. Oftenest,

I believe, it is a domestic affair and all degrees of cousinship resort

to it with brothers and sisters and uncles, who meet with the pleasant

Latin liking of frequent meetings among kindred. In some cases no doubt

it is a brilliant reunion where lively things are said; in others it

may be dull; in far the most cases it seems to be held late at night or

early in the morning.