Castilian Days

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Produced by Eric Eldred

CASTILIAN DAYS

BY JOHN HAY

Published November 1903

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

In this Holiday Edition of _Castilian Days_ it has been thought
advisable to omit a few chapters that appeared in the original edition.
These chapters were less descriptive than the rest of the book, and not
so rich in the picturesque material which the art of the illustrator
demands. Otherwise, the text is reprinted without change. The
illustrations are the fruit of a special visit which Mr. Pennell has
recently made to Castile for this purpose.

BOSTON, AUTUMN, 1903

CONTENTS

MADRID AL FRESCO

SPANISH LIVING AND DYING

INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE

TAUROMACHY

RED-LETTER DAYS

AN HOUR WITH THE PAINTERS

A CASTLE IN THE AIR

THE CITY OF THE VISIGOTHS

THE ESCORIAL

A MIRACLE PLAY

THE CRADLE AND THE GRAVE OF CERVANTES

MADRID AL FRESCO

Madrid is a capital with malice aforethought. Usually the seat of
government is established in some important town from the force of
circumstances. Some cities have an attraction too powerful for the court
to resist. There is no capital of England possible but London. Paris is
the heart of France. Rome is the predestined capital of Italy in spite
of the wandering flirtations its varying governments in different
centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can
imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,--the gemuthlich
Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and
consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial
court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward
into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent
barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen of
the cold-blooded handiwork of the capital builders. We shall think
nothing less of the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of its founder if we
admit he was human, and his wishing the seat of government nearer to
Mount Vernon than Mount Washington sufficiently proves this. But Madrid
more plainly than any other capital shows the traces of having been set
down and properly brought up by the strong hand of a paternal
government; and like children with whom the same regimen has been
followed, it presents in its maturity a curious mixture of lawlessness
and insipidity.

Its greatness was thrust upon it by Philip II. Some premonitory symptoms
of the dangerous honor that awaited it had been seen in preceding
reigns. Ferdinand and Isabella occasionally set up their pilgrim
tabernacle on the declivity that overhangs the Manzanares. Charles V.
found the thin, fine air comforting to his gouty articulations. But
Philip II. made it his court. It seems hard to conceive how a king who
had his choice of Lisbon, with its glorious harbor and unequalled
communications; Seville, with its delicious climate and natural beauty;
and Salamanca and Toledo, with their wealth of tradition, splendor of
architecture, and renown of learning, should have chosen this barren
mountain for his home, and the seat of his empire. But when we know this
monkish king we wonder no longer. He chose Madrid simply because it was
cheerless and bare and of ophthalmic ugliness. The royal kill-joy
delighted in having the dreariest capital on earth. After a while there
seemed to him too much life and humanity about Madrid, and he built the
Escorial, the grandest ideal of majesty and ennui that the world has
ever seen. This vast mass of granite has somehow acted as an anchor that
has held the capital fast moored at Madrid through all succeeding years.

It was a dreary and somewhat shabby court for many reigns. The great
kings who started the Austrian dynasty were too busy in their world
conquest to pay much attention to beautifying Madrid, and their weak
successors, sunk in ignoble pleasures, had not energy enough to indulge
the royal folly of building. When the Bourbons came down from France
there was a little flurry of construction under Philip V., but he never
finished his palace in the Plaza del Oriente, and was soon absorbed in
constructing his castle in cloud-land on the heights of La Granja. The
only real ruler the Bourbons ever gave to Spain was Charles III., and to
him Madrid owes all that it has of architecture and civic improvement.
Seconded by his able and liberal minister, Count Aranda, who was
educated abroad, and so free from the trammels of Spanish ignorance and
superstition, he rapidly changed the ignoble town into something like a
city. The greater portion of the public buildings date from this active
and beneficent reign. It was he who laid out the walks and promenades
which give to Madrid almost its only outward attraction. The Picture
Gallery, which is the shrine of all pilgrims of taste, was built by him
for a Museum of Natural Science. In nearly all that a stranger cares to
see, Madrid is not an older city than Boston.

There is consequently no glory of tradition here. There are no
cathedrals. There are no ruins. There is none of that mysterious and
haunting memory that peoples the air with spectres in quiet towns like
Ravenna and Nuremberg. And there is little of that vast movement of
humanity that possesses and bewilders you in San Francisco and New York.
Madrid is larger than Chicago; but Chicago is a great city and Madrid a
great village. The pulsations of life in the two places resemble each
other no more than the beating of Dexter's heart on the home-stretch is
like the rising and falling of an oozy tide in a marshy inlet.

There is nothing indigenous in Madrid. There is no marked local color.
It is a city of Castile, but not a Castilian city, like Toledo, which
girds its graceful waist with the golden Tagus, or like Segovia,
fastened to its rock in hopeless shipwreck.

But it is not for this reason destitute of an interest of its own. By
reason of its exceptional history and character it is the best point in
Spain to study Spanish life. It has no distinctive traits itself, but it
is a patchwork of all Spain. Every province of the Peninsula sends a
contingent to its population. The Gallicians hew its wood and draw its
water; the Asturian women nurse its babies at their deep bosoms, and
fill the promenades with their brilliant costumes; the Valentians carpet
its halls and quench its thirst with orgeat of chufas; in every street
you shall see the red bonnet and sandalled feet of the Catalan; in every
cafe, the shaven face and rat-tail chignon of the Majo of Andalusia. If
it have no character of its own, it is a mirror where all the faces of
the Peninsula may sometimes be seen. It is like the mockingbird of the
West, that has no song of its own, and yet makes the woods ring with
every note it has ever heard.

Though Madrid gives a picture in little of all Spain, it is not all
Spanish. It has a large foreign population. Not only its immediate
neighbors, the French, are here in great numbers,--conquering so far
their repugnance to emigration, and living as gayly as possible in the
midst of traditional hatred,--but there are also many Germans and
English in business here, and a few stray Yankees have pitched their
tents, to reinforce the teeth of the Dons, and to sell them ploughs and
sewing-machines. Its railroads have waked it up to a new life, and the
Revolution has set free the thought of its people to an extent which
would have been hardly credible a few years ago. Its streets swarm with
newsboys and strangers,--the agencies that are to bring its people into
the movement of the age.

It has a superb opera-house, which might as well be in Naples, for all
the national character it has; the court theatre, where not a word of
Cas-tilian is ever heard, nor a strain of Spanish music. Even
cosmopolite Paris has her grand opera sung in French, and easy-going
Vienna insists that Don Juan shall make love in German. The champagny
strains of Offenbach are heard in every town of Spain oftener than the
ballads of the country. In Madrid there are more _pilluelos_ who whistle
_Bu qui s'avance_ than the Hymn of Riego. The Cancan has taken its place
on the boards of every stage in the city, apparently to stay; and the
exquisite jota and cachucha are giving way to the bestialities of the
casino cadet. It is useless perhaps to fight against that hideous orgie
of vulgar Menads which in these late years has swept over all nations,
and stung the loose world into a tarantula dance from the Golden Horn to
the Golden Gate. It must have its day and go out; and when it has
passed, perhaps we may see that it was not so utterly causeless and
irrational as it seemed; but that, as a young American poet has
impressively said, "Paris was proclaiming to the world in it somewhat of
the pent-up fire and fury of her nature, the bitterness of her heart,
the fierceness of her protest against spiritual and political
repression. It is an execration in rhythm,--a dance of fiends, which
Paris has invented to express in license what she lacks in liberty."

This diluted European, rather than Spanish, spirit may be seen in most
of the amusements of the politer world of Madrid. They have classical
concerts in the circuses and popular music in the open air. The theatres
play translations of French plays, which are pretty good when they are
in prose, and pretty dismal when they are turned into verse, as is more
frequent, for the Spanish mind delights in the jingle of rhyme. The fine
old Spanish drama is vanishing day by day. The masterpieces of Lope and
Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk
almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of
the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
The original plays produced by the geniuses of the Spanish Academy, for
which they are crowned and sonneted and pensioned, are of the kind upon
which we are told that gods and men and columns look austerely.

This infection of foreign manners has completely gained and now controls
what is called the best society of Madrid. A soiree in this circle is
like an evening in the corresponding grade of position in Paris or
Petersburg or New York in all external characteristics. The toilets are
by Worth; the beauties are coiffed by the deft fingers of Parisian
tiring-women; the men wear the penitential garb of Poole; the music is
by Gounod and Verdi; Strauss inspires the rushing waltzes, and the
married people walk through the quadrilles to the measures of Blue Beard
and Fair Helen, so suggestive of conjugal rights and duties. As for the
suppers, the trail of the Neapolitan serpent is over them all. Honest
eating is a lost art among the effete denizens of the Old World.
Tantalizing ices, crisped shapes of baked nothing, arid sandwiches, and
the feeblest of sugary punch, are the only supports exhausted nature
receives for the shock of the cotillon. I remember the stern reply of a
friend of mine when I asked him to go with me to a brilliant
reception,--"No! Man liveth not by biscuit-glace alone!" His heart was
heavy for the steamed cherry-stones of Harvey and the stewed terrapin of
Augustin.

The speech of the gay world has almost ceased to be national. Every one
speaks French sufficiently for all social requirements. It is sometimes
to be doubted whether this constant use of a foreign language in
official and diplomatic circles is a cause or effect of paucity of
ideas. It is impossible for any one to use another tongue with the ease
and grace with which he could use his own. You know how tiresome the
most charming foreigners are when they speak English. A fetter-dance is
always more curious than graceful. Yet one who has nothing to say can
say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but
phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen
people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a
certain elegance in the hackneyed forms. I know of no other way of
accounting for the fact that clever people seem stupid and stupid people
clever when they speak French. This facile language thus becomes the
missionary of mental equality,--the principles of '89 applied to
conversation. All men are equal before the phrase-book.

But this is hypercritical and ungrateful. We do not go to balls to hear
sermons nor discuss the origin of matter. If the young grandees of Spain
are rather weaker in the parapet than is allowed in the nineteenth
century, if the old boys are more frivolous than is becoming to age, and
both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even
their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle
are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The
foreigner never forgets those piquant, _mutines_ faces of Andalusia and
those dreamy eyes of Malaga,--the black masses of Moorish hair and the
blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic
demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, but they were
knowing enough to trouble the soundest sleep. Their voices could
interpret the sublimest ideas of Mendelssohn. They knew sufficiently of
lines and colors to dress themselves charmingly at small cost, and their
little feet were well enough educated to bear them over the polished
floor of a ball-room as lightly as swallows' wings. The flirting of
their intelligent fans, the flashing of those quick smiles where eyes,
teeth, and lips all did their dazzling duty, and the satin twinkling of
those neat boots in the waltz, are harder to forget than things better
worth remembering.

Since the beginning of the Revolutionary regime there have been serious
schisms and heart-burnings in the gay world. The people of the old
situation assumed that the people of the new were rebels and traitors,
and stopped breaking bread with them. But in spite of this the palace
and the ministry of war were gay enough,--for Madrid is a city of
office-holders, and the White House is always easy to fill, even if two
thirds of the Senate is uncongenial. The principal fortress of the post
was the palace of the spirituelle and hospitable lady whose society name
is Duchess of Penaranda, but who is better known as the mother of the
Empress of the French. Her salon was the weekly rendezvous of the
irreconcilable adherents of the House of Bourbon, and the aristocratic
beauty that gathered there was too powerful a seduction even for the
young and hopeful partisans of the powers that be. There was nothing
exclusive about this elegant hospitality. Beauty and good manners have
always been a passport there. I have seen a proconsul of Prim talking
with a Carlist leader, and a fiery young democrat dancing with a
countess of Castile.

But there is another phase of society in Madrid which is altogether
pleasing,--far from the domain of politics or public affairs, where
there is no pretension or luxury or conspiracy,--the old-fashioned
Tertulias of Spain. There is nowhere a kindlier and more unaffected
sociableness. The leading families of each little circle have one
evening a week on which they remain at home. Nearly all their friends
come in on that evening. There is conversation and music and dancing.
The young girls gather together in little groups,--not confined under
the jealous guard of their mothers or chaperons,--and chatter of the
momentous events of the week--their dresses, their beaux, and their
books. Around these compact formations of loveliness skirmish light
bodies of the male enemy, but rarely effect a lodgment. A word or a
smile is momently thrown out to meet the advance; but the long,
desperate battle of flirtation, which so often takes place in America in
discreet corners and outlying boudoirs, is never seen in this
well-organized society. The mothers in Israel are ranged for the evening
around the walls in comfortable chairs, which they never leave; and the
colonels and generals and chiefs of administration, who form the bulk of
all Madrid gatherings, are gravely smoking in the library or playing
interminable games of tresillon, seasoned with temperate denunciations
of the follies of the time.

Nothing can be more engaging than the tone of perfect ease and cordial
courtesy which pervades these family festivals. It is here that the
Spanish character is seen in its most attractive light. Nearly everybody
knows French, but it is never spoken. The exquisite Castilian, softened
by its graceful diminutives into a rival of the Italian in tender
melody, is the only medium of conversation; it is rare that a stranger'
is seen, but if he is, he must learn Spanish or be a wet blanket
forever.

You will often meet, in persons of wealth and distinction, an easy
degenerate accent in Spanish, strangely at variance with their elegance
and culture. These are Creoles of the Antilles, and they form one of the
most valued and popular elements of society in the capital. There is a
gallantry and dash about the men, and an intelligence and independence
about the women, that distinguish them from their cousins of the
Peninsula. The American element has recently grown very prominent in the
political and social world. Admiral Topete is a Mexican. His wife is one
of the distinguished Cuban family of Arrieta. General Prim married a
Mexican heiress. The magnificent Duchess de la Torre, wife of the Regent
Serrano, is a Cuban born and bred.

In one particular Madrid is unique among capitals,--it has no suburbs.
It lies in a desolate table-land in the windy waste of New Castile; on
the north the snowy Guadarrama chills its breezes, and on every other
side the tawny landscape stretches away in dwarfish hills and shallow
ravines barren of shrub or tree, until distance fuses the vast steppes
into one drab plain, which melts in the hazy verge of the warm horizon.
There are no villages sprinkled in the environs to lure the Madrilenos
out of their walls for a holiday. Those delicious picnics that break
with such enchanting freshness and variety the steady course of life in
other capitals cannot here exist. No Parisian loves _la bonne ville_ so
much that he does not call those the happiest of days on which he
deserts her for a row at Asnieres, a donkey-ride at Enghien, or a
bird-like dinner in the vast chestnuts of Sceaux. "There is only one
Kaiserstadt," sings the loyal Kerl of Vienna, but he shakes the dust of
the Graben from his feet on holiday mornings, and makes his merry
pilgrimage to the lordly Schoen-brunn or the heartsome Dornbach, or the
wooded eyry of the Kahlenberg. What would white-bait be if not eaten at
Greenwich? What would life be in the great cities without the knowledge
that just outside, an hour away from the toil and dust and struggle of
this money-getting world, there are green fields, and whispering
forests, and verdurous nooks of breezy shadow by the side of brooks
where the white pebbles shine through the mottled stream,--where you
find great pied pan-sies under your hands, and catch the black beady
eyes of orioles watching you from the thickets, and through the lush
leafage over you see patches of sky flecked with thin clouds that sail
so lazily you cannot be sure if the blue or the white is moving?
Existence without these luxuries would be very much like life in Madrid.

Yet it is not so dismal as it might seem. The Grande Duchesse of
Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne, announces
just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut
aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you have when
you never imagined anything better! The bulk of the good people of
Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for their
sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the dusty
villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they give
fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They
shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations,
and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so
anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never
wished to travel,--some people who had been to France preferred Paris to
Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their
wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard
accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves
him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. _Vamonos al Prado!_
or, as Browning says,--

"Let's to the Prado and make the most of time."

The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than any
I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon them by
those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III. and Aranda. They knew
how important to the moral and physical health of the people a place of
recreation was. They reduced the hideous waste land on the east side of
the city to a breathing-space for future generations, turning the meadow
into a promenade and the hill into the Buen Retiro. The people growled
terribly at the time, as they did at nearly everything this prematurely
liberal government did for them. The wise king once wittily said: "My
people are like bad children that kick the shins of their nurse whenever
their faces are washed."

But they soon became reconciled to their Prado,--a name, by the way,
which runs through several idioms,--in Paris they had a Pre-aux-clercs,
the Clerks' Meadow, and the great park of Vienna is called the Prater.
It was originally the favorite scene of duels, and the cherished
trysting-place of lovers. But in modern times it is too popular for any
such selfish use.

The polite world takes its stately promenade in the winter afternoons in
the northern prolongation of the real Prado, called in the official
courtier style _Las delicias de Isabel Segunda,_ but in common speech
the Castilian Fountain, or _Castellana,_ to save time. So perfect is the
social discipline in these old countries that people who are not in
society never walk in this long promenade, which is open to all the
world. You shall see there, any pleasant day before the Carnival, the
aristocracy of the kingdom, the fast young hopes of the nobility, the
diplomatic body resident, and the flexible figures and graceful bearing
of the high-born ladies of Castile. Here they take the air as free from
snobbish competition as the good society of Olympus, while a hundred
paces farther south, just beyond the Mint, the world at large takes its
plebeian constitutional. How long, with a democratic system of
government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness
of blood cannot be conjectured. Its existence a year after the
Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena.

After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the
summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the
Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic.
The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening
party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San
Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a
carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying
the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is
music in the Retiro Garden,--not as in our feverish way beginning so
early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning
you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to
call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine
and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very
good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter
fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard _baton._

In all this vast crowd nobody is in a hurry. They have all night before
them. They stayed quietly at home in the stress of the noontide when the
sunbeams were falling in the glowing streets like javelins,--they
utilized some of the waste hours of the broiling afternoon in sleep, and
are fresh as daisies now. The women are not haunted by the thought of
lords and babies growling and wailing at home. Their lords are beside
them, the babies are sprawling in the clean gravel by their chairs. Late
in the small hours I have seen these family parties in the promenade,
the husband tranquilly smoking his hundredth cigarette, his _placens
uxor_ dozing in her chair, one baby asleep on the ground, and another
slumbering in her lap.

This Madrid climate is a gallant one, and kindlier to the women than the
men. The ladies are built on the old-fashioned generous plan. Like a
Southern table in the old times, the only fault is too abundant plenty.
They move along with a superb dignity of carriage that Banting would
like to banish from the world, their round white shoulders shining in
the starlight, their fine heads elegantly draped in the coquettish and
always graceful mantilla. But you would look in vain among the men of
Madrid for such fulness and liberality of structure. They are thin,
eager, sinewy in ap' pearance,--though it is the spareness of the Turk,
not of the American. It comes from tobacco and the Guadarrama winds.
This still, fine, subtle air that blows from the craggy peaks over the
treeless plateau seems to take all superfluous moisture out of the men
of Madrid. But it is, like Benedick's wit, "a most manly air, it will
not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of
the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after
all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants
of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman
says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet
only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined
principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits
indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax of
their luxury is a cool bed. Walking about the city at midnight, I have
seen the fountains all surrounded by luxurious vagabonds asleep or in
revery, dozens of them stretched along the rim of the basins, in the
spray of the splashing water, where the least start would plunge them
in. But the dreams of these Latin beggars are too peaceful to trouble
their slumber. They lie motionless, amid the roar of wheels and the
tramp of a thousand feet, their bed the sculptured marble, their
covering the deep, amethystine vault, warm and cherishing with its
breath of summer winds, bright with its trooping stars. The Providence
of the worthless watches and guards them!

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