Passage to Cuba--A Canadian commissioner--Havana--The Moro--The city
and harbour--Cuban money--American visitors--The cathedral--Tomb of
Columbus--New friends--The late rebellion--Slave emancipation--Spain
and progress--A bull fight.
I had gone to the West Indies to see our own colonies, but I could not
leave those famous seas which were the scene of our ocean duels with the
Spaniards without a visit to the last of the great possessions of Philip
II. which remained to his successors. I ought not to say the last, for
Puerto Rico is Spanish also, but this small island is insignificant and
has no important memories connected with it. Puerto Rico I had no
leisure to look at and did not care about, and to see Cuba as it ought
to be seen required more time than I could afford; but Havana was so
interesting, both from its associations and its present condition, that
I could not be within reach of it and pass it by. The body of Columbus
lies there for one thing, unless a trick was played when the remains
which were said to be his were removed from St. Domingo, and I wished to
pay my orisons at his tomb. I wished also to see the race of men who
have shared the New World with the Anglo-Saxons, and have given a
language and a religion to half the American continent, in the oldest
and most celebrated of their Transatlantic cities.
Cuba also had an immediate and present interest. Before the American
civil war it was on the point of being absorbed into the United States.
The Spanish Cubans had afterwards a civil war of their own, of which
only confused accounts had reached us at home. We knew that it had
lasted ten years, but who had been the parties and what their objects
had been was very much a mystery. No sooner was it over than, without
reservation or compensation, the slaves had been emancipated. How a
country was prospering which had undergone such a succession of shocks,
and how the Spaniards were dealing with the trials which were bearing so
hard on our own islands, were inquiries worth making. But beyond these
it was the land of romance. Columbus and Las Casas, Cortez and Pizarro,
are the demigods and heroes of the New World. Their names will be
familiar to the end of time as the founders of a new era, and although
the modern Spaniards sink to the level of the modern Greeks, their
illustrious men will hold their place for ever in imagination and
memory.
Our own Antilles had, as I have said, in their terror of small-pox,
placed Jamaica under an interdict. The Spaniards at Cuba were more
generous or more careless. Havana is on the north side of the island,
facing towards Florida; thus, in going to it from Port Royal, we had to
round the westernmost cape, and had four days of sea before us. We slid
along the coast of Jamaica in smooth water, the air, while day lasted,
intensely hot, but the breeze after nightfall blowing cool from off the
mountains. We had a polite captain, polite officers, and agreeable
fellow-passengers, two or three Cubans among them, swarthy, dark-eyed,
thick-set men--_Americanos_; Spaniards with a difference--with whom I
cultivated a kind of intimacy. In a cabin it was reported that there
were again Spanish ladies on their way to the demonic gaieties at
Darien, but they did not show.
Among the rest of the party was a Canadian gentleman, a Mr. ----,
exceptionally well-informed and intelligent. Their American treaty
having been disallowed, the West Indies had proposed to negotiate a
similar one with the Canadian Dominion. The authorities at Ottawa had
sent Mr. M---- to see if anything could be done, and Mr. M---- was now
on his way home, not in the best of humours with our poor relations.
'The Jamaicans did not know what they wanted,' he said. 'They were
without spirit to help themselves; they cried out to others to help
them, and if all they asked could not be granted they clamoured as if
the whole world was combining to hurt them. There was not the least
occasion for these passionate appeals to the universe; they could not at
this moment perhaps "go ahead" as fast as some countries, but there was
no necessity to be always going ahead. They had a fine country, soil and
climate all that could be desired, they had all that was required for a
quiet and easy life, why could they not be contented and make the best
of things?' Unfortunate Jamaicans! The old mother at home acts like an
unnatural parent, and will neither help them nor let their Cousin
Jonathan help them. They turn for comfort to their big brother in the
north, and the big brother being himself robust and healthy, gives them
wholesome advice.
Adventures do occasionally happen at sea even in this age of steam
engines. Ships catch fire or run into each other, or go on rocks in
fogs, or are caught in hurricanes, and Nature can still assume her old
terrors if she pleases. Shelley describes a wreck on the coast of
Cornwall, and the treacherous waters of the ocean in the English
Channel, now wild in fury, now smiling
As on the morn When the exulting elements in scorn Satiated with
destroyed destruction lay Sleeping in beauty on their mangled prey,
As panthers sleep.
The wildest gale which ever blew on British shores was a mere summer
breeze compared to a West Indian tornado. Behind all that beauty there
lies the temper and caprice, not of a panther, but of a woman. But no
tornadoes fell in our way, nor anything else worth mentioning, not even
a buccaneer or a pirate. We saw the islands which these gentry haunted,
and the headlands made memorable by their desperate deeds, but they are
gone, even to the remembrance of them. What they were and what they did
lies buried away in book mausoleums like Egyptian mummies, all as clean
forgotten as if they had been honest men, they and all the wild scenes
which these green estuaries have witnessed.
Havana figures much in English naval history. Drake tried to take it and
failed; Penn and Venables failed. We stormed the forts in 1760, and held
them and held the city till the Seven Years' War was over. I had read
descriptions of the place, but they had given me no clear conception of
what it would be like, certainly none at all of what it was like.
Kingston is the best of our West Indian towns, and Kingston has not one
fine building in it. Havana is a city of palaces, a city of streets and
plazas, of colonnades, and towers, and churches and monasteries. We
English have built in those islands as if we were but passing visitors,
wanting only tenements to be occupied for a time. The Spaniards built as
they built in Castile; built with the same material, the white limestone
which they found in the New World as in the Old. The palaces of the
nobles in Havana, the residence of the governor, the convents, the
cathedral, are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid, as if by some
Aladdin's lamp a Castilian city had been taken up and set down again
unaltered on the shore of the Caribbean Sea. And they carried with them
their laws, their habits, their institutions and their creed, their
religious orders, their bishops, and their Inquisition. Even now in her
day of eclipse, when her genius is clouded by the modern spirit against
which she fought so long and so desperately, the sons of Spain still
build as they used to build, and the modern squares and market places,
the castles and fortresses, which have risen in and round the ancient
Havana, are constructed on the old massive model, and on the same lines.
However it may be with us, and whatever the eventual fate of Cuba, the
Spanish race has taken root there, and is visibly destined to remain.
They have poured their own people into it. In Cuba alone there are ten
times as many Spaniards as there are English and Scotch in all our West
Indies together, and Havana is ten times the size of the largest of our
West Indian cities. Refugees have flocked thither from the revolutions
in the Peninsula. The Canary Islands overflow into it. You know the
people from Teneriffe by their stature; they are the finest surviving
specimens of the old conquering breed. The political future is dark; the
government is unimaginably corrupt--so corrupt that change is
inevitable, though what change it would be idle to prophesy. The
Americans looked at the island which lay so temptingly near them, but
they were wise in their generation. They reflected that to introduce
into an Anglo-Saxon republic so insoluble an element as a million
Spanish Roman Catholics alien in blood and creed, with half a million
blacks to swell the dusky flood which runs too full among them already,
would be to invite an indigestion of serious consequence. A few years
since the Cubans born were on the eve of achieving their independence
like their brothers in Mexico and South America. Perhaps they will yet
succeed. Spanish, at any rate, they are to the bone and marrow, and
Spanish they will continue. The magnitude of Havana, and the fullness of
life which was going on there, entirely surprised me. I had thought of
Cuba as a decrepit state, bankrupt or finance-exhausted by civil wars,
and on the edge of social dissolution, and I found Havana at least a
grand imposing city--a city which might compare for beauty with any in
the world. The sanitary condition is as bad as negligence can make
it--so bad that a Spanish gentleman told me that if it were not for the
natural purity of the air they would have been all dead like flies long
ago. The tideless harbour is foul with the accumulations of three
hundred years. The administration is more good-for-nothing than in Spain
itself. If, in spite of this, Havana still sits like a queen upon the
waters, there are some qualities to be found among her people which
belonged to the countrymen and subjects of Ferdinand the Catholic.
The coast line from Cape Tubiron has none of the grand aspects of the
Antilles or Jamaica. Instead of mountains and forests you see a series
of undulating hills, cultivated with tolerable care, and sprinkled with
farmhouses. All the more imposing, therefore, from the absence of marked
natural forms, are the walls and towers of the great Moro, the fortress
which defends the entrance of the harbour. Ten miles off it was already
a striking object. As we ran nearer it rose above us stern, proud, and
defiant, upon a rock right above the water, with high frowning bastions,
the lighthouse at an angle of it, and the Spanish banner floating
proudly from a turret which overlooked the whole. The Moro as a
fortification is, I am told, indefensible against modern artillery,
presenting too much surface as a target; but it is all the grander to
look at. It is a fine specimen of the Vauban period, and is probably
equal to any demands which will be made upon it. The harbour is
something like Port Royal, a deep lagoon with a narrow entrance and a
long natural breakwater between the lagoon and the ocean; but what at
Port Royal is a sand-spit eight miles long, is at Havana a rocky
peninsula on which the city itself is built. The opening from the sea is
half a mile wide. On the city side there are low semicircular batteries
which sweep completely the approaches and the passage itself. The Moro
rises opposite at the extreme point of the entrance, and next to it,
farther in towards the harbour on the same side, on the crest and slopes
of a range of hills, stands the old Moro, the original castle which beat
off Drake and Oliver's sea-generals, and which was captured by the
English in the last century. The lines were probably weaker than they
are at present, and less adequately manned. A monument is erected there
to the officers and men who fell in the defence.
[Illustration: HAVANA, FROM THE QUARRIES]
The city as we steamed by looked singularly beautiful, with its domes
and steeples and marble palaces, and glimpses of long boulevards and
trees and handsome mansions and cool arcades. Inside we found ourselves
in a basin, perhaps of three miles diameter, full of shipping of all
sorts and nationalities. The water, which outside is pure as sapphire,
has become filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations. The tide,
which even at the springs has but a rise and fall of a couple of feet,
is totally ineffective to clear it, and as long as they have the Virgin
Mary to pray to, the pious Spaniards will not drive their sewage into
the ocean. The hot sun rays stream down into the thick black liquid.
Horrible smells are let loose from it when it is set in motion by screw
or paddle, and ships bring up at mooring buoys lest their anchors should
disturb the compost which lies at the bottom. Yet one forgot the
disagreeables in the novelty and striking character of the scene. A
hundred boats were plying to and fro among the various vessels, with
their white sails and white awnings. Flags of all countries were blowing
out at stern or from masthead; among them, of course, the stars and
stripes flying jauntily on some splendid schooner which stood there like
a cock upon a dunghill that might be his own if he chose to crow for it.
As soon as we had brought up we were boarded by the inevitable hotel
touters, custom-house officers, porters, and boatmen. Interpreters
offered their services in the confusion of languages. Gradually there
emerged out of the general noise two facts of importance. First, that I
ought to have had a passport, and if I had not brought one that I was
likely to be fined at the discretion of Spanish officials. Secondly,
that if I trusted to my own powers of self-defence, I should be the
victim of indefinite other extortions. Passport I had none--such things
are not required any longer in Spain, and it had not occurred to me that
they might still be in demand in a Spanish colony. As to being cheated,
no one could or would tell me what I was to pay for anything, for there
were American dollars, Spanish dollars, Mexican dollars, and Cuban
dollars, all different. And there were multiples of dollars in gold, and
single dollars in silver, and last and most important of all there was
the Cuban paper dollar, which was 230 per cent. below the Cuban gold
dollar. And in this last the smaller transactions of common life were
carried on, the practical part of it to a stranger being that when you
had to receive you received in paper, and when you had to pay you paid
in specie.
I escaped for the time the penalty which would have been inflicted on me
about the passport. I had a letter of introduction to the
Captain-General of the island, and the Captain-General--so the viceroy
is called--was so formidable a person that the officials did not venture
to meddle with me. For the rest I was told that as soon as I had chosen
my hotel, the agent, who was on board, would see me through all
obstructions, and would not allow me to be plundered by anyone but
himself. To this I had to submit. I named an hotel at random; a polite
gentleman in a few moments had a boat alongside for me; I had stept into
it when the fair damsels bound for Darien, who had been concealed all
this time in their cabin, slipped down the ladder and took their places
at my side, to the no small entertainment of the friends whom I had left
on board and who were watching us from the deck.
At the wharf I was able to shake off my companions, and I soon forgot
the misadventure, for I found myself in Old Castile once more, amidst
Spanish faces, Spanish voices, Spanish smells, and Spanish scenes. On
the very wharf itself was a church grim and stern, and so massive that
it would stand, barring earthquakes, for a thousand years. Church,
indeed, it was no longer; it had been turned into a custom-house. But
this was because it had been desecrated when we were in Havana by having
an English service performed in it. They had churches enough without it,
and they preferred to leave this one with a mark upon it of the anger of
the Almighty. Of churches, indeed, there was no lack; churches thick as
public-houses in a Welsh town. Church beyond church, palace beyond
palace, the narrow streets where neighbours on either side might shake
hands out of the upper stories, the deep colonnades, the private houses
with the windows grated towards the street, with glimpses through the
street door into the court and garden within, with its cloisters, its
palm trees, and its fountains; the massiveness of the stonework, the
curious old-fashioned bookstalls, the dirt, the smell, the carriages,
the swearing drivers, the black-robed priest gliding along the
footway--it was Toledo or Valladolid again with the sign manual on it of
Spain herself in friendly and familiar form. Every face that I saw was
Spanish. In Kingston or Port of Spain you meet fifty blacks for one
European; all the manual work is done by them. In Havana the proportion
is reversed, you hardly see a coloured man at all. Boatmen, porters,
cab-drivers or cart-drivers, every one of whom are negroes in our
islands, are there Spaniards, either Cuban born or emigrants from home.
A few black beggars there were--permitted, as objects of charity to
pious Catholics and as a sign of their inferiority of race. Of poverty
among the whites, real poverty that could be felt, I saw no sign at all.
After driving for about a mile we emerged out of the old town into a
large square and thence into a wide Alameda or boulevard with double
avenues of trees, statues, fountains, theatres, clubhouses, and all the
various equipments of modern luxuriousness and so-called civilised life.
Beyond the Alameda was another still larger square, one side of which
was a railway station and terminus. In a colonnade at right angles was
the hotel to which I had been recommended; spacious, handsome, in style
half Parisian half Spanish, like the Fondas in the Puerto del Sol at
Madrid.
Spanish was the language generally spoken; but there were interpreters
and waiters more or less accomplished in other tongues, especially in
English, of which they heard enough, for I found Havana to be the winter
resort of our American cousins, who go, generally, to Cuba, as we go to
the Riviera, to escape the ice and winds of the eastern and middle
States. This particular hotel was a favourite resort, and was full to
overflowing with them. It was large, with an interior quadrangular
garden, into which looked tiers of windows; and wings had been thrown
out with terraced roofs, suites of rooms opening out upon them; each
floor being provided with airy sitting rooms and music rooms. Here were
to be heard at least a hundred American voices discussing the
experiences and plans of their owners. The men lounged in the hall or at
the bar, or sat smoking on the rows of leather chairs under the
colonnade, or were under the hands of barbers or haircutters in an airy
open saloon devoted to these uses. When I retreated upstairs to collect
myself, a lady was making the corridors ring close by as she screamed at
a piano in the middle of an admiring and criticising crowd. Dear as the
Americans are to me, and welcome in most places as is the sound of those
same sweet voices, one had not come to Havana for this. It was necessary
to escape somewhere, and promptly, from the discord of noises which I
hoped might be due to some momentary accident. The mail company's agent,
Mr. R----, lived in the hotel. He kindly found me out, initiated me in
the mysteries of Cuban paper money, and giving me a tariff of the fares,
found me a cab, and sent me out to look about me.
My first object was the cathedral and the tomb of Columbus. In Catholic
cities in Europe churches stand always open; the passer-by can enter
when he pleases, fall on his knees and say his silent prayers to his
Master whom he sees on the altar. In Havana I discovered afterward that,
except at special hours, and those as few as might be, the doors were
kept locked and could only be opened by a golden key. It was carnival
time, however; there were functions going on of various kinds, and I
found the cathedral happily accessible. It was a vast building, little
ornamented, but the general forms severe and impressive, in the style of
the time of Philip II., when Gothic art had gone out in Spain and there
had come in the place of it the implacable sternness which expresses the
very genius of the Inquisition. A broad flight of stone steps led up to
the great door. The afternoon was extremely hot; the curtains were
thrown back to admit as much air as possible. There was some function
proceeding of a peculiar kind. I know not what it was; something
certainly in which the public had no interest, for there was not a
stranger present but myself. But the great cathedral officials were busy
at work, and liked to be at their ease. On the wall as you entered a box
invited contributions, as _limosna por el Santo Padre_. The service was
I know not what. In the middle of the nave stood twelve large chairs
arranged in a semicircle; on these chairs sat twelve canons, like a row
of mandarins, each with his little white patch like a silver dollar on
the crown of his black head. Five or six minor dignitaries, deacons,
precentors, or something of that sort, were droning out monotonous
recitations like the buzzing of so many humble-bees in the warm summer
air. The dean or provost sat in the central biggest chair of all. His
face was rosy, and he wiped it from time to time with a red
handkerchief; his chin was double or perhaps treble; he had evidently
dined, and would or might have slept but for a pile of snuff on his
chair arm, with continual refreshments from which he kept his faculties
alive. I sat patiently till it was over, and the twelve holy men rose
and went their way. I could then stroll about at leisure. The pictures
were of the usual paltry kind. On the chancel arch stood the royal arms
of Spain, as the lion and the unicorn used to stand in our parish
churches till the High Church clergy mistook them for Erastian wild
beasts. At the right side of the altar was the monument which I had come
in search of; a marble tablet fixed against the wall, and on it a poorly
executed figure in high relief, with a ruff about its neck and features
which might be meant for anyone and for no one in particular. Somewhere
near me there were lying I believed and could hope the mortal remains of
the discoverer of the New World. An inscription said so. There was
written:
O Restos y Imagen del grande Colon
Mil siglos durad guardados en la Urna
Y en remembranza de nuestra Nacion.
The court poet, or whoever wrote the lines, was as poor an artist in
verse as the sculptor in stone. The image of the grande Colon is
certainly not 'guarded in the urn,' since you see it on the wall before
your eyes. The urn, if urn there be, with the 'relics' in it, must be
under the floor. Columbus and his brother Diego were originally buried
to the right and left of the altar in the cathedral of St. Domingo. When
St. Domingo was abandoned, a commission was appointed to remove the body
of Christophe to Havana. They did remove _a_ body, but St. Domingo
insists that it was Diego that was taken away, that Christophe remains
where he was, and that if Spain wants him Spain must pay for him. I
followed the canons into the sacristy where they were unrobing. I did
not venture to address either of themselves, but I asked an acolyte if
he could throw any light upon the matter. He assured me that there
neither was nor could have been any mistake. They had the right body and
were in no doubt about it. In more pious ages disputes of this sort were
settled by an appeal to miracles. Rival pretenders for the possession of
the same bones came, however, at last to be able to produce authentic
proofs of miracles which had been worked at more than one of the
pretended shrines; so that it was concluded that saints' relics were
like the loaves and fishes, capable of multiplication without losing
their identity, and of having the property of being in several places at
the same moment. The same thing has been alleged of the Holy Coat of
Treves and of the wood of the true cross. Havana and St. Domingo may
perhaps eventually find a similar solution of their disagreement over
the resting place of Columbus.
I walked back to my hotel up a narrow shady street like a long arcade.
Here were the principal shops; several libraries among them, into which
I strayed to gossip and to look over the shelves. That so many persons
could get a living by bookselling implied a reading population, but the
books themselves did not indicate any present literary productiveness.
They were chiefly old, and from the Old World, and belonged probably to
persons who had been concerned in the late rebellion and whose property
had been confiscated. They were absurdly cheap; I bought a copy of
Guzman de Alfarache for a few pence.
I had brought letters of introduction to several distinguished people in
Havana; to one especially, Don G----, a member of a noble Peninsular
family, once an officer in the Spanish navy, now chairman of a railway
company and head of an important commercial house. His elder brother,
the Marques de ----, called on me on the evening of the day of my
arrival; a distinguished-looking man of forty or thereabouts, with
courteous high-bred manners, rapid, prompt, and incisive, with the air
of a soldier, which in early life he had been. He had travelled, spoke
various languages, and spoke to me in admirable English. Don G----, who
might be a year or two younger, came later and stayed an hour and a half
with me. Let me acknowledge here, and in as warm language as I can
express it, the obligations under which I stand to him, not for the
personal attentions only which he showed me during my stay in Havana,
but for giving me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with a real
specimen of Plato's superior men, who were now and then, so Plato said,
to be met with in foreign travel. It is to him that I owe any knowledge
which I brought away with me of the present state of Cuba. He had seen
much, thought much, read much. He was on a level with the latest phases
of philosophical and spiritual speculation, could talk of Darwin and
Spencer, of Schopenhauer, of Strauss, and of Renan, aware of what they
had done, aware of the inconvenient truths which they had forced into
light, but aware also that they had left the most important questions
pretty much where they found them. He had taken no part in the political
troubles of the late years in Cuba, but he had observed everything. No
one knew better the defects of the present system of government; no one
was less ready to rush into hasty schemes for violently mending it.
The ten years' rebellion, of which I had heard so much and knew so
little, he first made intelligible to me. Cuba had been governed as a
province of Spain, and Spain, like other mother countries, had thought
more of drawing a revenue out of it for herself than of the interests of
the colony. Spanish officials had been avaricious, and Spanish fiscal
policy oppressive and ruinous. The resources of the island in metals,
in minerals, in agriculture were as yet hardly scratched, yet every
attempt to develop them was paralysed by fresh taxation. The rebellion
had been an effort of the Cuban Spaniards, precisely analogous to the
revolt of our own North American colonies, to shake off the authority of
the court of Madrid and to make themselves independent. They had fought
desperately and had for several years been masters of half the island.
They had counted on help from the United States, and at one time they
seemed likely to get it. But the Americans could not see their way to
admitting Cuba into the Union, and without such a prospect did not care
to quarrel with Spain on their account. Finding that they were to be
left to themselves, the insurgents came to terms and Spanish authority
was re-established. Families had been divided, sons taking one side and
fathers the other, as in our English Wars of the Roses, perhaps for the
same reason, to save the family estates whichever side came out
victorious. The blacks had been indifferent, the rebellion having no
interest for them at all. They had remained by their masters, and they
had been rewarded after the peace by complete emancipation. There was
not a slave now in Cuba. No indemnity had been granted to their owners,
nor had any been asked for, and the business on the plantations had gone
on without interruption. Those who had been slaves continued to work at
the same locations, receiving wages instead of food and maintenance; all
were satisfied at the change, and this remarkable revolution had been
carried out with an ease and completeness which found no parallel in any
other slave-owning country.
In spite of rebellion, in spite of the breaking up and reconstruction of
the social system, in spite of the indifferent administration of
justice, in spite of taxation, and the inexplicable appropriation of the
revenue, Cuba was still moderately prosperous, and that it could
flourish at all after trials so severe was the best evidence of the
greatness of its natural wealth. The party of insurrection was
dissolved, and would revive again only under the unlikely contingency of
encouragement from the United States. There was a party, however, which
desired for Cuba a constitution like the Canadian--Home Rule and the
management of its own affairs--and as the black element was far
outnumbered and under control, such a constitution would not be
politically dangerous.
If the Spanish Government does not mend its ways, concessions of this
kind may eventually have to be made, though the improvement to be
expected from it is doubtful. Official corruption is engrained in the
character and habits of the Spanish people. Judges allowed their
decisions to be 'influenced' under Philip III. as much as to-day in the
colonies of Queen Christina; and when a fault is the habit of a people,
it survives political reforms and any number of turnings of the
kaleidoscope.
The encouraging feature is the success of emancipation. There is no
jealousy, no race animosity, no supercilious contempt of whites for
'niggers.' The Spaniards have inherited a tinge of colour themselves
from their African ancestors, and thus they are all friends together.
The liberated slave can acquire and own land if he wishes for it, but as
a rule he prefers to work for wages. These happy conditions arise in
part from the Spanish temperament, but chiefly from the numerical
preponderance of the white element, which, as in the United States, is
too secure to be uneasy. The black is not encouraged in insubordination
by a sense that he could win in a contest of strength, and the aspect of
things is far more promising for the future than in our own islands. The
Spaniards, however inferior we may think them to ourselves, have filled
their colonies with their own people and are reaping the reward of it.
We have so contrived that such English as had settled in the West Indies
on their own account are leaving them.
Spain, four centuries ago, was the greatest of European nations, the
first in art, or second only to Italy, the first in arms, the first in
the men whom she produced. She has been swept along in the current of
time. She fought against the stream of tendency, and the stream proved
too strong for her, great as she was. The modern spirit, which she
would not have when it came in the shape of the Reformation, has flowed
over her borders as revolution, not to her benefit, for she is unable to
assimilate the new ideas. The old Spain of the Inquisition is gone; the
Spain of to-day is divided between Liberalism and Catholic belief. She
is sick in the process of the change, and neither she nor her colonies
stand any longer in the front lines in the race of civilisation; yet the
print of her foot is stamped on the New World in characters which will
not be effaced, and may be found to be as enduring as our own.
The colony is perhaps in advance of the mother country. The Catholic
Church, Don G---- said, has little influence in Cuba; 'she has had no
rival,' he explained, 'and so has grown lazy.' I judged the same from my
own observations. The churches on Sundays were thinly attended, and men
smiled when I asked them about 'confession.' I inquired about famous
preachers. I was told that there was no preaching in Havana, famous or
otherwise. I might if I was lucky and chose to go there in the early
morning, hear a sermon in the church of the Jesuits; that was all. I
went; I heard my Jesuit, who was fluent, eloquent, and gesticulating,
but he was pouring out his passionate rhetoric to about fifty women with
scarcely a man amongst them. It was piteous to look at him. The Catholic
Church, whether it be for want of rivals, or merely from force of time,
has fallen from its high estate. It can burn no more heretics, for it
has lost the art to raise conviction to sufficient intensity. The power
to burn was the measure of the real belief, which people had in the
Church and its doctrines. The power has departed with the waning of
faith; and religion in Havana, as in Madrid, is but 'use and wont;' not
'belief' but opinion, and opinion which is half insincere. Nothing else
can take its place. The day is too late for Protestantism, which has
developed into wider forms, and in the matter of satisfied and complete
religious conviction Protestants are hardly better off than Catholics.
Don G---- had been much in Spain; he was acquainted with many of the
descendants of the old aristocracy, who lingered there in faded
grandeur. He had studied the history of his own country. He compared the
Spain and England of the sixteenth century with the Spain and England of
the present; and, like most of us, he knew where the yoke galled his own
neck. But economical and political prosperity is no exhaustive measure
of human progress. The Rome of Trajan was immeasurably more splendid
than the Rome of the Scipios; yet the progress had been downwards
nevertheless. If the object of our existence on this planet is the
development of character, if the culminating point in any nation's
history be that at which it produces its noblest and bravest men, facts
do not tend to assure us that the triumphant march of the last hundred
years is accomplishing much in that direction. I found myself arguing
with Don G---- that if Charles V. and Philip II. were to come back to
this world, and to see whither the movement had brought us of which they
had worked so hard to suppress the beginning, they would still say that
they had done right in trying to strangle it. The Reformation called
itself a protest against lies, and the advocates of it imagined that
when the lies, or what they called such, were cleared away, the pure
metal of Christianity would remain unsullied. The great men who fought
against the movement, Charles V. in his cabinet and Erasmus in his
closet, had seen that it could not rest there; that it was the cradle of
a revolution in which the whole spiritual and political organisation of
Europe would be flung into the crucible. Under that organisation human
nature had ascended to altitudes of chivalry, of self-sacrifice, which
it had never before reached. The sixteenth century was the blossoming
time of the Old World, and no such men had appeared since as then came
to the front, either in Spain or Italy, or Germany or France or England.
The actual leaders of the Reformation had been bred in the system which
they destroyed. Puritanism and Calvinism produced men of powerful
character, but they were limited and incapable of continuance; and now
the liberty which was demanded had become what the instinct of the great
Emperor had told him from the first must be the final shape of it, a
revolution which would tolerate no inequalities of culture or position,
which insisted that no man was better than another, which was to exalt
the low and bring down the high till all mankind should stand upon a
common level--a level, not of baseness or badness, but a level of
good-humoured, smart, vulgar and vulgarising mediocrity, with melodrama
for tragedy, farce for comedy, sounding speech for statesmanlike wisdom;
and for a creed, when our fathers thought that we had been made a little
lower than the angels, the more modest knowledge that we were only a
little higher than the apes. This was the aspect in which the world of
the nineteenth century would appear to Sir Thomas More or the Duke of
Alva. From the Grand Captain to Senor Castelar, from Lord Burghley to
Mr. Gladstone, from Leonardo da Vinci or Velasquez to Gustave Dore, from
Cervantes and Shakespeare to 'Pickwick' and the 'Innocents at Home;'
from the faith which built the cathedrals to evolution and the survival
of the fittest; from the carving and architecture of the Middle Ages to
the workmanship of the modern contractor; the change in the spiritual
department of things had been the same along the whole line. Charles V.
after seeing all that has been achieved, the railways, the steam
engines, the telegraphs, the Yankee and his United States, which are the
embodiment of the highest aspirations of the modern era, after attending
a session of the British Association itself, and seeing the bishops
holding out their hands to science which had done such great things for
them, might fairly claim that it was a doubtful point whether the change
had been really for the better.
It may be answered, and answered truly, that the old thing was dead. The
Catholic faith, where it was left standing and where it still stands,
produces now nothing higher, nothing better than the Protestant. Human
systems grow as trees grow. The seed shoots up, the trunk forms, the
branches spread; leaves and flowers and fruit come out year after year
as if they were able to renew themselves for ever. But that which has a
beginning has an end, that which has life must die when the vital force
is exhausted. The faith of More, as well as the faith of Ken or Wilson,
were elevating and ennobling as long as they were sincerely believed,
but the time came when they became clouded with uncertainty; and
confused, perplexed, and honestly anxious, humanity struggles on as well
as it can, all things considered, respectably enough, in its chrysalis
condition, the old wings gone, the new wings that are to be (if we are
ever to have another set) as yet imprisoned in their sheath.
The same Sunday morning when I went in search of my sermon, the hotel
was alive as bees at swarming time. There was to be a bull fight in
honour of the carnival, and such a bull fight as had never been seen in
Havana. Placards on the wall announced that a lady from Spain, Gloriana
they called her, was to meet and slay a bull in single combat, and
everyone must go and see the wonderful sight. I myself, having seen the
real thing in Madrid many years ago, felt no more curiosity, and that a
woman should be an actress in such a scene did not revive it. To those
who went the performance was a disappointment. The bull provided turned
out to be a calf of tender years. The spectators insisted that they
would have a mature beast of strength and ferocity, and Gloriana when
brought to the point declined the adventure.
There was a prettier scene in the evening. In the cool after nightfall
the beauty and fashion of Havana turns out to stroll in the illuminated
Alameda. As it was now a high festival the band was to play, and the
crowd was as dense as on Exhibition nights at South Kensington. The
music was equally good, and the women as graceful and well dressed. I
sat for an hour or two listening under the statue of poor Queen
Isabella. The image of her still stands where it was placed, though
revolution has long shaken her from her throne. All is forgotten now
except that she was once a Spanish sovereign, and time and distance have
deodorised her memory.