Gatherings From Spain

Although fatal accidents do not often occur (and we ourselves have never seen a man killed, yet we have beheld some hundred bulls despatched), such events are always possible. At Tudela, a bull having killed seventeen horses, a picador named Blanco, and a banderillero, then leapt over the barriers, where he gored to death a peasant, and wounded many others. The newspapers simply headed the statement, “Accidents have happened.” Pepe Illo, who had received thirty-eight wounds in the wars, died, like Nelson, the hero’s death. He was killed on the 11th of May, 1801. He had a presentiment of his death, but said that he must do his duty.

Every matador must be quick and decided. He must not let the bull run at the flag above two or three times; the moral tension of the multitudes is too strained to endure a longer suspense; they vent their impatience in jeers, noises, and endeavour by every possible manner to irritate him, and make him lose his temper, and perhaps life. Under such circumstances, Manuel Romero, who had murdered a man, was always saluted with cries of “A la Plaza de Cebada– to Tyburn.” The populace absolutely loathe those who show the smallest white feather, or do not brave death cheerfully.

THE MEDIA LUNA

There are many ways of killing the bull: the principal is when the matador receives him on his sword when charging; then the weapon, which is held still and never thrust forward, enters just between the left shoulder and the blade-bone; a firm hand, eye, and nerve, are essential, since in nothing is the real fancy so fastidious as in the exact nicety of the placing this death-wound. The bull very often is not killed at the first effort; if not true, the sword strikes a bone, and then it is ejected high in air by the rising neck. When the blow is true, death is instantaneous, and the bull, vomiting forth blood, drops at the feet of his conqueror. It is indeed the triumph of knowledge over brute force; all that was fire, fury, passion, and life, falls in an instant, still for ever. The gay team of mules now enter, glittering with flags, and tinkling with bells; the dead bull is carried off at a rapid gallop, which always delights the populace. The matador then wipes the hot blood from his sword, and bows to the spectators with admirable sang froid, who fling their hats into the arena, a compliment which he returns by throwing them back again (they are generally “shocking bad” ones); when Spain was rich, a golden, or at least a silver shower was rained down —ces beaux jours là sont passés; thanks to her kind neighbour. The poverty-stricken Spaniard, however, gives all he can, and lets the bullfighter dream the rest. As hats in Spain represent grandeeship, so these beavers, part and parcel of themselves, are given as symbols of their generous hearts and souls; and none but a huckster would go into minute details of value or condition.

When a bull will not run at the fatal flag, or prays for pardon, he is doomed to a dishonourable death, as no true Spaniard begs for his own life, or spares that of his foe, when in his power; now the media Luna is yelled for, and the call implies insult; the use is equivalent to shooting traitors in the back: this half moon is the precise Oriental ancient and cruel instrument of houghing cattle; moreover it is the exact old Iberian bident, or a sharp steel crescent placed on a long pole. The cowardly blow is given from behind; and when the poor beast is crippled by dividing the sinew of his leg, and crawls along in agony, an assistant pierces with a pointed dagger the spinal marrow, which is the usual method of slaughtering cattle in Spain by the butcher. To perform all these vile operations is considered beneath the dignity of the matador; some, however, will kill the bull by plunging the point of their sword in the vertebræ, as the danger gives dignity to the difficult feat.

CONCLUSION OF BULL-FIGHT

Such is a single bull-fight; each of which is repeated eight times with succeeding bulls, the excitement of the multitude rising with each indulgence; after a short collapse new desires are roused by fresh objects, the fierce sport is renewed, which night alone can extinguish; nay, often when royalty is present, a ninth bull is clamoured for, which is always graciously granted by the nominal monarch’s welcome sign, the pulling his royal ear; in truth here the mob is autocrat, and his majesty the many will take no denial; the bull-fight terminates when the day dies like a dolphin, and the curtain of heaven hung over the bloody show, is incarnadined and crimsoned; this glorious finish is seen in full perfection at Seville, where the plaza from being unfinished is open toward the cathedral, which furnishes a Moorish distance to the picturesque foreground. On particular occasions this side is decorated with flags. When the blazing sun setting on the red Giralda tower, lights up its fair proportions like a pillar of fire, the refreshing evening breeze springs up, and the flagging banners wave in triumph over the concluding spectacle; then when all is come to an end, as all things human must, the congregation depart, with rather less decorum than if quitting a church; all hasten to sacrifice the rest of the night to Bacchus and Venus, with a passing homage to the knife, should critics differ too hotly on the merits of some particular thrust of the bull-fight.

To conclude; the minds of men, like the House of Commons in 1802, are divided on the merits of the bull-fight; the Wilberforces assert (especially foreigners, who, notwithstanding, seldom fail to sanction the arena by their presence) that all the best feelings are blunted – that idleness, extravagance, cruelty, and ferocity are promoted at a vast expense of human and animal life by these pastimes; the Windhams contend that loyalty, courage, presence of mind, endurance of pain, and contempt of death, are inculcated – that, while the theatre is all illusion, the opera all effeminacy, these manly, national games are all truth, and in the words of a native eulogist “elevate the soul to those grandiose actions of valour and heroism which have long proved the Spaniards to be the best and bravest of all nations.”

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT

The efficacy of such sports for sustaining a martial spirit was disproved by the degeneracy of the Romans at the time when bloody spectacles were most in vogue; nor are bravery and humanity the characteristics of the bull-fighting Spaniards in the collective. We ourselves do not attribute their “merciless skivering and skewering,” their flogging and murdering women, to the bull-fight, the practical result of which has been overrated and misunderstood. Cruel it undoubtedly is, and perfectly congenial to the inherent, inveterate ferocity of Iberian character, but it is an effect rather than a cause – with doubtless some reciprocating action; and it may be questioned, whether the original bull-fight had not a greater tendency to humanise, than the Olympic games; certainly the Fiesta real of the feudal ages combined the associated ideas of religion and loyalty, while the chivalrous combat nurtured a nice sense of personal honour and a respectful gallantry to women, which were unknown to the polished Greeks or warlike Romans; and many of the finest features of Spanish character have degenerated since the discontinuance of the original fight, which was more bloody and fatal than the present one.

The Spaniards invariably bring forward our boxing-matches in self-justification, as if a tu quoque could be so; but it must always be remembered in our excuse that these are discountenanced by the good and respectable, and legally stigmatised as breaches of the peace; although disgraced by beastly drunkenness, brutal vulgarity, ruinous gambling and betting, from which the Spanish arena is exempt, as no bull yet has been backed to kill so many horses or not; our matches, however, are based on a spirit of fair play which forms no principle of the Punic politics, warfare, or bull-fighting of Spain. The Plaza there is patronised by church and state, to whom, in justice, the responsibility of evil consequences must be referred. The show is conducted with great ceremonial, combining many elements of poetry, the beautiful and sublime; insomuch that a Spanish author proudly says: “When the countless assembly is honoured by the presence of our august monarchs, the world is lost in admiration at the majestic spectacle afforded by the happiest people in the world, enjoying with rapture an exhibition peculiarly their own, and offering to their idolised sovereigns the due homage of the truest and most refined loyalty;” and it is impossible to deny the magnificent coup d’œil of the assembled thousands. Under such conflicting circumstances, we turn away our eyes during moments of painful detail which are lost in the poetical ferocity of the whole, for the interest of the tragedy of real death is undeniable, irresistible, and all absorbing.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT

The Spaniards seem almost unconscious of the cruelty of those details which are most offensive to a stranger. They are reconciled by habit, as we are to the bleeding butchers’ shops which disfigure our gay streets, and which if seen for the first time would be inexpressibly disgusting. The feeling of the chase, that remnant of the savage, rules in the arena, and mankind has never been nice or tender-hearted in regard to the sufferings of animals, when influenced by the destructive propensities. In England no sympathy is shown for game, – fish, flesh, or fowl; nor for vermin – stoats, kites, or poachers. The end of the sport is – death; the amusement is the playing, the fine run, as the prolongation of animal suffering is termed in the tender vocabulary of the Nimrods; the pang of mortal sufferance is not regulated by the size of the victim; the bull moreover is always put at once out of his misery, and never exposed to the thousand lingering deaths of the poor wounded hare; therefore we must not see a toro in Spanish eyes and wink at the fox in our own, nor

“Compound for vices we’re inclined toBy damning those we have no mind to.”

It is not clear that animal suffering on the whole predominates over animal happiness. The bull roams in ample pastures, through a youth and manhood free from toil, and when killed in the plaza only anticipates by a few months the certain fate of the imprisoned, over-laboured, mutilated ox.

In Spain, where capital is scanty, person and property insecure (evils not quite corrected since the late democratic reforms), no one would adventure on the speculation of breeding cattle on a large scale, where the return is so distant, without the certain demand and sale created by the amphitheatre; and as a small proportion only of the produce possess the requisite qualifications, the surplus and females go to the plough and market, and can be sold cheaper from the profit made on the bulls. Spanish political economists proved that many valuable animals were wasted in the arena – but their theories vanished before the fact, that the supply of cattle was rapidly diminished when bull-fights were suppressed. Similar results take place as regards the breed of horses, though in a minor degree; those, moreover, which are sold to the Plaza would never be bought by any one else. With respect to the loss of human life, in no land is a man worth so little as in Spain; and more English aldermen are killed indirectly by turtles, than Andalucian picadors directly by bulls; while, as to time, these exhibitions always take place on holidays, which even industrious Britons bouse away occasionally in pothouses, and idle Spaniards invariably smoke out in sunshiny dolce far niente. The attendance, again, of idle spectators prevents idleness in the numerous classes employed directly and indirectly in getting up and carrying out this expensive spectacle.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT

It is poor and illogical philosophy to judge of foreign customs by our own habits, prejudices, and conventional opinions; a cold, unprepared, calculating stranger comes without the freemasonry of early associations, and criticises minutiae which are lost on the natives in their enthusiasm and feeling for the whole. He is horrified by details to which the Spaniards have become as accustomed as hospital nurses, whose finer sympathetic emotions of pity are deadened by repetition.

A most difficult thing it is to change long-established usages and customs with which we are familiar from our early days, and which have come down to us connected with many fond remembrances. We are slow to suspect any evil or harm in such practices; we dislike to look the evidence of facts in the face, and shrink from a conclusion which would require the abandonment of a recreation, which we have long regarded as innocent, and in which we, as well as our parents before us, have not scrupled to indulge. Children, l’age sans pitié, do not speculate on cruelty, whether in bull-baiting or bird’s-nesting, and Spaniards are brought up to the bull-fight from their infancy, when they are too simple to speculate on abstract questions, but associate with the Plaza all their ideas of reward for good conduct, of finery and holiday; in a land where amusements are few – they catch the contagion of pleasure, and in their young bias of imitation approve of what is approved of by their parents. They return to their homes unchanged – playful, timid, or serious, as before; their kindly, social feelings are uninjured: and where is the filial or parental bond more affectionately cherished than in Spain – where are the noble courtesies of life, the kind, considerate, self-respecting demeanour so exemplified as in Spanish society?

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT

The successive feelings experienced by most foreigners are admiration, compassion, and weariness of the flesh. The first will be readily understood, as it will that the horses’ sufferings cannot be beheld by novices without compassion: “In troth it was more a pittie than a delight,” wrote the herald of Lord Nottingham. This feeling, however, regards the animals who are forced into wounds and death; the men scarcely excite much of it, since they willingly court the danger, and have therefore no right to complain. These heroes of low life are applauded, well paid, and their risk is more apparent than real; our British feelings of fair play make us side rather with the poor bull who is overmatched; we respect the gallantry of his unequal defence. Such must always be the effect produced on those not bred and brought up to such scenes. So Livy relates that, when the gladiatorial shows were first introduced by the Romans into Asia, the natives were more frightened than pleased, but by leading them on from sham-fights to real, they became as fond of them as the Romans. The predominant sensation experienced by ourselves was bore, the same thing over and over again, and too much of it. But that is the case with everything in Spain, where processions and professions are interminable. The younger Pliny, who was no amateur, complained of the eternal sameness of seeing what to have seen once, was enough; just as Dr. Johnson, when he witnessed a horse-race, observed that he had not met with such a proof of the paucity of human pleasures as in the popularity of such a spectacle. But the life of Spaniards is uniform, and their sensations, not being blunted by satiety, are intense. Their bull-fight to them is always new and exciting, since the more the toresque intellect is cultivated the greater the capacity for enjoyment; they see a thousand minute beauties in the character and conduct of the combatants, which escape the superficial unlearned glance of the uninitiated.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE BULL-FIGHT

Spanish ladies, against whom every puny scribbler shoots his petty barbed arrow, are relieved from the infliction of ennui, by the never-flagging, ever-sustained interest, in being admired. They have no abstract nor Pasiphaic predilections; they were taken to the bull-fight before they knew their alphabet, or what love was. Nor have we heard that it has ever rendered them particularly cruel, save and except some of the elderly and tougher lower-classed females. The younger and more tender scream and are dreadfully affected in all real moments of danger, in spite of their long familiarity. Their grand object, after all, is not to see the bull, but to let themselves and their dresses be seen. The better classes generally interpose their fans at the most painful incidents, and certainly show no want of sensibility. The lower orders of females, as a body, behave quite as respectably as those of other countries do at executions, or other dreadful scenes, where they crowd with their babies. The case with English ladies is far different. They have heard the bull-fight not praised from their childhood, but condemned; they see it for the first time when grown up; curiosity is perhaps their leading feature in sharing an amusement, of which they have an indistinct idea that pleasure will be mixed with pain. The first sight delights them; a flushed, excited cheek, betrays a feeling that they are almost ashamed to avow; but as the bloody tragedy proceeds, they get frightened, disgusted, and disappointed. Few are able to sit out more than one course, and fewer ever re-enter the amphitheatre —

“The heart that is soonest awake to the flowerIs always the first to be touched by the thorn.”

Probably a Spanish woman, if she could be placed in precisely the same condition, would not act very differently, and something of a similar test would be to bring her, for the first time, to an English boxing-match. Be this as it may, far from us and from our friends be that frigid philosophy, which would infer that their bright eyes, darting the shafts of Cupid, will glance one smile the less from witnessing these more merciful banderillas.

SPANISH AMUSEMENTS

CHAPTER XXIII

Spanish Theatre; Old and Modern Drama; Arrangement of Playhouses – The Henroost – The Fandango; National Dances – A Gipsy Ball – Italian Opera – National Songs and Guitars.

THE THEATRE

HAVING seen a bull-fight, the sight of Spain, those who only wish to pass time agreeably cannot be too quick in getting their passports viséd for Naples. A pleasant country life, according to our notions, in Spain, is a thing that is not; and the substitute is but a Bedouin Oriental makeshift existence, which, amusing enough for a spurt, will not do in the long run. Nor is life much better in the towns; those in the inland provinces have a convent-like, dead, old-fashioned look about them, which petrifies a lively person; nay even an artist when he has finished his sketches, is ready to commit suicide from sheer Bore, the genius of the locality. Madrid itself is but an unsocial, second-rate, inhospitable city; and when the traveller has seen the Museum, been to the play, and walked on the eternal roundabout Prado, the sooner he shakes the dust off his feet the better. The maritime seaports, as in the East, from being frequented by the foreigner, are a trifle more cosmopolitan, cheerful, and amusing; but generally speaking, public amusements are rare throughout this semi-Moro land. The calm contemplation of a cigar, and the dolce far niente of siestose quiet indolence with unexciting twaddle, suffice; while to some nations it is a pain to be out of pleasure, to the Spaniard it is a pleasure to be out of painful exertion: existence is happiness enough of itself; and as for occupation, all desire only to do to-day what they did yesterday and will do to-morrow, that is nothing. Thus life slips away in a dreamy, listless routine, the serious business of love-making excepted; leave me, leave me, to repose and tobacco. When however awake, the Alameda, or church-show, the bull-fight, and the rendezvous, are the chief relaxations. These will be best enjoyed in the Southern provinces, the land also of the song and dance, of bright suns and eyes, and not the largest female feet in the world.

The theatre, which forms elsewhere such an important item in passing the stranger’s evening, is at a low ebb in Spain, although, as everybody is idle, and man is not worn out by business and money-making all day, it might be supposed to be just the thing; but it is somewhat too expensive for the general poverty. Those again who for forty years have had real tragedies at home, lack that superabundance of felicity, which will pay for the luxury of fictitious grief abroad. In truth the drama in Spain was, like most other matters, the creature of an accident and of a period; patronised by the pleasure-loving Philip IV., it blossomed in the sunshine of his smile, languished when that was withdrawn, and was unable to resist the steady hostility of the clergy, who opposed this rival to their own religious spectacles and church melodramas, from which the opposition stage sprung. Nor are their primitive mediæval Mysteries yet obsolete, since we have beheld them acted in Spain at Easter time; then and there sacred subjects, grievously profaned to Protestant eyes, were gazed on by the pleased natives with too sincere and simple faith even to allow a suspicion of the gross absurdity; but everywhere in Spain, the spiritual has been materialised, and the divine degraded to the human in churches and out; the clergy attacked the stage, by denying burial to the actors when dead, who, when alive, were not allowed to call themselves “Don,” the cherished title of every Spaniard. Naturally, as no one of this self-respecting nation ever will pursue a despised profession if he can help it, few have chosen to make themselves vagabonds by Act of Parliament, nor has any Garrick or Siddons ever arisen among them to beat down prejudices by public and private virtues.

ANCIENT DRAMA

Even in this 19th century, confessors of families forbade the women and children’s even passing through the street where “a temple of Satan” was reared; mendicant monks placed themselves near the playhouse doors at night, to warn the headlong against the bottomless pit, just as our methodists on the day of the Derby distribute tracts at turnpikes against “sweeps” and racing. The monks at Cordova succeeded in 1823 in shutting up the theatre, because the nuns of an opposite convent observed the devil and his partners dancing fandangos on the roof. Although monks have in their turn been driven off the Spanish boards, the national drama has almost made its exit with them. The genuine old stage held up the mirror to Spanish nature, and exhibited real life and manners. Its object was rather to amuse than to instruct, and like literature, its sister exponent of existing nationality, it showed in action what the picaresque novels detailed in description. In both the haughty Hidalgo was the hero; cloaked and armed with long rapier and mustachios, he stalked on the scene, made love and fought as became an old Castilian whom Charles V. had rendered the terror and the model of Europe. Spain then, like a successful beauty, took a proud pleasure in looking at herself in the glass, but now that things are altered, she blushes at beholding a portrait of her grey hairs and wrinkles; her flag is tattered, her robes are torn, and she shrinks from the humiliation of truth. If she appears on the theatre at all, it is to revive long by-gone days – to raise the Cid, the great Captain, or Pizarro, from their graves; thus blinking the present, she forms hopes for a bright future by the revival and recollections of a glorious past. Accordingly plays representing modern Spanish life and things, are scouted by pit and boxes as vulgar and misplaced; nay, even Lope de Vega is now known merely by name; his comedies are banished from the boards to the shelves of book-cases, and those for the most part out of Spain. He has paid the certain penalty of his national localism, of his portraying men, as a Spanish variety, rather than a universal species. He has strutted his hour on the stage, is heard no more; while his contemporary, the bard of Avon, who drew mankind and human nature, the same in all times and places, lives in the human heart as immortal as the principle on which his influence is founded.

MODERN STAGE

In the old Spanish plays, the imaginary scenes were no less full of intrigue than were the real streets; then the point of honour was nice, women were immured in jealous hareems, and access to them, which is easier now, formed the difficulty of lovers. The curiosity of the spectators was kept on tenter-hooks, to see how the parties could get at each other, and out of the consequent scrapes. These imbroglios and labyrinths exactly suited a pays de l’imprévu, where things turn out, just as is the least likely to be calculated on. The progress of the drama of Spain was as full of action and energy, as that of France was of dull description and declamation. The Bourbon succession, which ruined the genuine bull-fight, destroyed the national drama also; a flood of unities, rules, stilted nonsense, and conventionalities poured over the astonished and affrighted Pyrenees: now the stage, like the arena, was condemned by critics, whose one-idead civilization could see but one class of excellence, and that only through a lorgnette ground in the Palais Royal. Calderon was pronounced to be as great a barbarian as Shakspere, and this by empty pretenders who did not understand one word of either; – and now again, at this second Bourbon irruption, France has become the model to that very nation from whom her Corneilles and Molières pilfered many a plume, which aided them to soar to dramatic fame. Spain is now reduced to the sad shift of borrowing from her pupil, those very arts which she herself once taught, and her best comedies and farces are but poor translations from Mons. Scribe and other scribes of the vaudeville. Her theatre, like everything else, has sunk into a pale copy of her dominant neighbour, and is devoid alike of originality, interest, and nationality.