XI

One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum,

promoted by the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us

in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby

Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a

portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there

was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the

Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person

looking his character and history: one of the most incredible parasites

who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more than

feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous people for

twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their annals,

the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the

king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic

single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that

he was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his

unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which you can only begin to

realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it

with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the

common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its

sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya’s which recall

in their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with

unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving

sentence before a tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the

execution of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of

fools’ caps inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are

turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.

I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted:

the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had

been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village.

That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village,

with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit

winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin’s history

of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that

fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the

way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are

so many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only

remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and

emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me. I

cannot at all remember whether it was before or after exploring this

history that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a volume of the

dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and

came down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope

de Vega were writing the plays. It was either my misfortune that I read

Lope and not Calderon, or that I do not recall reading Calderon at all,

and know him only by a charming little play of Madrid life given ten or

fifteen years ago by the pupils of the Dramatic Academy in New York. My

lasting ignorance of this master was not for want of knowing how great

he was, especially from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the

talk was of Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much pleasure

out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such of

his comedies as I found in that massive volume.

I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Calderon’s, in New

York, how much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until

one knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the

incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of course

the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas in only

adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque story is oftener

at home in the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to full

consciousness in the work of the modern masters it has resorted more

and more to Madrid. If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is

because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the

allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less;

and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I

were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year,

or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such an

event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid than I now

know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries and streets

and the like surfaces of civilization; but should be saying all sorts of

well-informed and surprising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is

I have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to a stranger, and if

it is not quite as they have looked to other strangers I do not insist

upon my own stranger’s impression. There is a great choice of good books

about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with anything

like finality.

I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street

scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in

Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to

the theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel,

against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable

background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her

shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class

man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind

to her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly using one hand for

emphasis. He seemed to be telling something rather than asserting

himself or accusing her; portraying a past fact or defining a situation;

and she waited immovably silent till he had finished. Then she began

and warmed to her work, but apparently without anger or prejudice. She

talked herself out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then

he left her and crossed to the other corner. She called after him as he

kept on down the street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again

and called after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once

more and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had been

two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained,

and remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of their

dispute.

We did not think there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let

loose, in Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to

that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities

that the children seemed like little men and women. “Yes,” he said, “the

Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they

never grow up.” It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught

at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism

of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many

bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far

the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to

say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more

than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid;

in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from

the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper’s

reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is

because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than

himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving

her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though

she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains

tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly

I failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried

to buy some modern plays. It seemed to me that I was vexing them in the

Oriental calm which they would have preferred to my money, or even my

interest in the new Spanish drama. But in a shop where fans were sold,

the shopman, taken in an unguarded moment, seemed really to enter into

the spirit of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected my

wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which was certainly going a

great way.